1

The Nation Would Not Stand Long

Weaknesses of the Restoration Monarchy in England

I ever thought that the Methods us'd in King Charles's Reign, to introduce Popery and Slavery, were a thousand times better laid, and more natural to effectuate the Design, than those afterwards made use of by King James. The one was too bare fac'd, and obvious to every Bodies Reason; but the other was of a finer Texture, and not so easily discerned, though far more dangerous.1

The Restoration of monarchy in the spring of 1660, contemporaries and modern historians alike agree, was popular. Republicanism had had shallow roots in England, and, although Oliver Cromwell managed to hold things together reasonably well until his death in September 1658, it proved impossible to establish a credible regime following the fall of the Protectorate with the resignation of Oliver's son Richard in May 1659. First the Rump Parliament was recalled (May), next the republican army seized power (October), then the Rump was restored again (December), and by the end of the year England seemed to be drifting into anarchy. In the autumn and winter of 1659–60 there was considerable agitation out-of-doors – in the form of demonstrations, riots and petitions – against rule by the army and the Rump as people campaigned for a full and free parliament and a return to constitutional propriety. The English were finally put out of their misery by General Monck, commander of the forces in Scotland, who marched into England on 1 January and headed for London, where he forced the Rump to readmit the secluded members (February) and then vote for its own dissolution (March), thereby paving the way for the calling of the Convention (April) which everyone knew would call back the King. Yet in carrying out these actions Monck was as much responding to popular pressure as pursuing any clear agenda of his own; in that sense the Restoration happened because people wanted it to, and most were glad to see the final demise of the republic. When Charles II was solemnly proclaimed king in Boston, Lincolnshire, in the second week of May, the ‘yonge men’ of the town took down ‘the States armes’ and proceeded to drag them up and down the streets, first having the beadles whip them, before they in turn ‘pissed and sh[itted] on [them]’, ‘such was there malice to the States armes in that towne’; only then was the sordid debris thrown on to the bonfires which the locals had made ‘for joy’ at the recalling of the King.2 Charles's eventual return to England at the end of the month prompted enthusiastic rejoicing throughout the realm; the Kentish gentleman Sir Edward Dering recorded in his diary that he believed ‘there never was in any nation so much joy both inwardly felt and outwardly expresst, as was in this Kingdom from the day of His Majestie landing at Dover’ on 25 May ‘to his coming to London’ on the 29th.3 There were similar scenes throughout the three kingdoms. According to an account written by an Irish Jacobite of Old English stock in the early eighteenth century, there was ‘nothing now to be seen or heard but joys and jubilees throughout the British empire, for the royal physician [was] come to heal the three bleeding nations, and to give them the life of freeborn subjects’.4

Charles II had tried to cement his popularity by appearing to be all things to all men. Thus in a declaration issued from Breda in the Low Countries on 4 April 1660, just before his restoration, he had promised to heal the wounds which had been kept bleeding for so long by offering ‘a free and general Pardon’ to all supporters of the republic (save those who might subsequently be excepted by parliament) and ‘a Liberty to tender Consciences’.5 The trouble was, the royal physician was unable to effect a cure – a failure that was all too apparent by the late 1670s. In June 1677 the radical prophetess Anne Wentworth heard ‘a most dreadfull and terrible voyce’ warning that there would soon be ‘an overturning… in this Nation’, which would not ‘stand long as it is’.6 Over the next several months she received several revelations concerning the imminent day of judgement, which would affect not just England, but ‘all Europe’, including also Scotland and Ireland. Thus on 8 October 1678 she foretold how ‘In Scotland Judgments first there begun, / But upon England greater now will come,’ and how ‘Ireland surely will also deeply suffer then,’ as likewise Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, none of which would be able to gain ‘by all our loss’.7 Wentworth believed that God's wrath was about to fall upon these nations for their ungodliness, and that Jesus Christ would come to the rescue of the oppressed minority who were the true believers. To us she might seem like a crank; most of her contemporaries condemned her as ‘a Proud, Passionate, Revengeful, Discontented, and Mad Woman’.8 Yet in crucial respects she was to be proved correct, if not quite in the way she predicted. By 1677–8 the Restoration regime did appear to be slipping into crisis, and there were many who were coming to feel that the nation could not ‘stand long as it is’. There were to be great overturnings, not just in England, but also in Scotland and Ireland, over the next dozen or so years – ‘mighty Revolutions’, as contemporaries observed;9 yet, despite this, none of the great powers of Europe was to profit at England's expense.

The purpose of this and the next chapter is to explore how 1660 became 1677–8: that is, to investigate how it was that a regime that had seemed overwhelmingly popular at the time of the Restoration could seem on the verge of falling apart by the eve of the Exclusion Crisis. What, exactly, had gone wrong? The present chapter will focus on the problems facing the restored monarchy in England. Three main factors, it will be suggested, contributed to the weakness of the restored monarchy in England: a legacy of political and religious division, a lack of effective royal power, and a loss of prestige. The following chapter will deal with Scotland and Ireland, in order to highlight the different sorts of problem that the restored monarch faced in his other kingdoms, as well as the ways in which the difficulties bequeathed by Charles's multiple-kingdom inheritance created problems that were of a genuinely British nature.

THE POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR AND INTERREGNUM

Restoration England was a society that desperately wanted to be able to forget its past, but which forever remained haunted by it. Most will have an image of an England after 1660 reacting against the austerities of Puritan rule, presided over by a ‘merry monarch’ (albeit one leaning towards the debauched) determined never to go on his travels again but who at the same time was going to enjoy himself after his years in exile. Things that had been out of fashion or proscribed for so long were immediately brought back – such as Christmas, maypoles and the theatre (now with actual women playing the female parts). In short, people were allowed to have fun again – and more. Indeed, in this respect, the Restoration did not so much restore an old cultural world as usher in a new era whose hedonism far exceeded anything that had been seen before the outbreak of the Civil War. At the centre of this world was a libertine court – a society of Restoration rakes given more to drinking, gambling, swearing and whoring than to godliness – presided over by the King himself and his equally rakish brother, James, Duke of York.

The contemporary Whig historian Gilbert Burnet – one of William III's propaganda geniuses, who was to become Bishop of Salisbury after the Glorious Revolution but who had briefly served as a royal chaplain under Charles II – later wrote that ‘the ruin of [Charles's] reign, and of all his affairs, was occasioned chiefly by his delivering himself up at his first coming over to a mad range of pleasure.’ Nevertheless, Burnet was balanced enough to recognize that Charles possessed a number of positive attributes. It was true the King had ‘no sense of religion’ – although Charles ‘was no atheist’, Burnet wrote, ‘he could not think God would make a man miserable, only for taking a little pleasure out of the way.’ However, he ‘had a very good understanding’, and ‘knew well the state of affairs both at home and abroad’, while ‘his apprehension was quick, and his memory good’. He also ‘had a softness of temper that charmed all who came near him’, and ‘was affable and easy’.10 Charles II was clearly possessed of certain personality traits intelligence, quick-wittedness and flexibility – that his father had lacked; although Charles II may have been less fit than Charles I morally speaking, he was arguably more fit to be a king.11 Whatever the personal attributes of the man at the helm, however, he was always going to face difficulties because of the troubled legacy bequeathed by the experiences of the 1640s and 50s. Could a way be found of, if not forgetting the past, then at least living with it?

Politically, the Restoration was a self-conscious attempt to put the clock back. Charles II's rule was dated as having begun immediately upon the demise of his father in January 1649; for the legal record, 1660 became the twelfth year of the new king's reign. Likewise, the English Convention which recalled Charles II did not impose any conditions on the restored monarch; it simply sought to return to the position on the eve of the Civil War – the last time a valid constitutional framework could be said to have existed – and start all over again. Thus all innovations that had been introduced without the King's free consent were deemed null and void; constitutionally, it was as if the last nineteen years had never happened. However, this did mean that the reforming legislation passed during the early months of the Long Parliament back in 1641 remained on the books. This left the crown shorn of prerogative courts such as Star Chamber and High Commission, and also of the ability to raise extra-parliamentary levies (such as ship money) during times of emergency. The desire to return to constitutional propriety helps explains why, in the end, the Convention chose not to exact any concessions from Charles as the price of his restoration. Since it had not been called by the King, the Convention was not a legal parliament; any measures it passed might therefore be deemed null and void once the King was restored. By a similar logic, it had no power to undo the reforms of 1641. The working-out of the political and religious settlement, and any further reforms or additional legislation that might be needed, would have to wait until monarchy had been restored and a legal parliament had been brought into being. The Convention made a start once the royal assent had been received to a bill declaring it to be a full and legal parliament in June.12 Its most noteworthy achievement was the passage of a generous Act of Indemnity and Oblivion in August, offering pardon for crimes committed against the monarchy over the past two decades. The act exempted a mere thirty-three individuals from the pardon, of whom only a third were executed;13 this did enough to satisfy the nation's thirst for revenge without instigating the type of bloodbath that might have been counterproductive. One of the last acts of the Convention was to order the exhumation of the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw, so that they could be duly hanged and decapitated for their role in the regicide – a sentence which was carried out on 30 January 1661.14 The main task of sorting out the details of the Restoration settlement in Church and state, however, was left to the Cavalier Parliament, which sat from May 1661 – a proper parliament, called in constitutionally correct circumstances, that could choose to usher in a new beginning or to restore more of the past, depending upon what the King, Lords and Commons saw fit.15

Although rejoicing at the return of the monarchy was widespread, it was not universal. In Lincolnshire, as most locals celebrated following the official proclaiming of Charles II in the second week of May, Mr Vincent, the minister of Cawthorpe and Covenham, tried to extinguish his neighbourhood bonfire, kicking the fire about with his feet and proclaiming, ‘Stay! The rogue is not yet come over.’16 In Herefordshire, Thomas Baskerville of Eardisley, a Commonwealth JP, took a list of the names of those who made bonfires on the news of the King's arrival in England and threatened them with punishment.17 On hearing of the King's return, Cuthbert Studholme of Carlisle decided to make haste for London, laying his hand on his sword and announcing before he left, ‘This is the sword shall run Charles Stuart through the heart blood.’ It was a threat the government took seriously enough to issue orders that Studholme should be immediately seized and allowed nowhere near the King.18 Local court records provide numerous examples of individuals accused of speaking out against the restoration of monarchy. On 22 May 1660 Edward and Alice Jones, a shoemaker and his wife from Westminster, acknowledged ‘it was the King's time now to raigne,’ but believed ‘it was upon sufferance for a little time, and it would be theirs agine before itt be long.’ Others from the greater London area – presumably former Cromwellian soldiers – threatened that, given the opportunity, they would run the King through with their rusty old weapons.19 In the north of England an indictment was pressed against Margaret Dixon of Newcastle upon Tyne for allegedly saying on 13 May 1660, ‘What! can they finde noe other man to bring in then a Scotsman. What! is there not some Englishman more fit to make a King then a Scott?’ She clearly did not have a very high opinion of Charles Stuart: ‘There is none that loves him but drunk whores and whoremongers,’ she averred. ‘I hope he will never come into England, for that hee will sett on fire the three kingdoms as his father before him has done. God's curse light on him. I hope to see his bones hanged at a horse tayle, and the dogs runn through his puddins.’ One Richard Abbott appeared before the northern assize circuit for saying on 20 May, ‘If I had but one batt in my belly, I would give it to keep the King out, for Cromwell ruled better than ever the King will.’ Puritan divine John Botts predicted in a sermon delivered at Darfield church in Yorkshire on 13 May that ‘the man… the Parliament were about to bring in, would bring in superstitution and Popery’ and urged his congregation to ‘feare the King of heaven and worship Him, and bee not so desirous of an earthly King, which will tend to the imbroileing of us againe in blood.’20 Similar sentiments can be detected in most parts of the country – from the south-east to the West Country, through the Midlands to the far north – though the survival of the relevant court records is too patchy to allow any systematic analysis.21

The government received numerous reports of alleged plots against the monarchy by disaffected radicals across the country in the early years of the Restoration. However, it is difficult to know how widespread popular disaffection was. Some of those accused of seditious activity were victims of malicious prosecution, while a number of the rumoured plots were no more than fabrications by unscrupulous paid informers trying to feed off the government's own insecurities in an attempt to make money. There were, of course, some genuine conspiracies, but they were hardly of a scale to cause serious trouble to the security of the new regime. Thus there was a small uprising of perhaps some fifty Fifth Monarchists in London in January 1661, and a somewhat larger, though equally ineffective, rising in Yorkshire in 1663. But most historians remain sceptical about the extent of the survival of republican sentiment after 1660.22

Two points need to be made, however. The first is that, although those who were never able to accept the return of monarchy probably never posed much of a real threat to the security of the restored regime, they did succeed in frightening the government. The Restoration monarchy lived in continual fear that erstwhile supporters or clients of the old republican or Cromwellian regimes might rise in arms against it, and was particularly worried about the possibility that discontented elements in England might combine with the disaffected in Scotland and Ireland to mount a more significant challenge. This conditioned the Restoration regime's attitude towards questions of security, and helps explain why there was a desire to have a reliable, professional army in all three kingdoms to prevent any possible rumblings, why the authorities were so concerned about the problem of dissent (since most of the radicals were dissenters), and why there was a tendency to take an unduly harsh approach to the suppression of crowd unrest if there was ever the slightest suspicion that republican elements might be involved.23 The second point is to warn against any desire to label critics of royal government according to a professed preference for a specific type of political arrangement in the state, such as a monarchy or a republic, and from that to assume that if fewer people seemed to be advocating a republic after 1660 then the platform of the so-called republicans of the 1650s must have been becoming less popular. Instead, we need to deconstruct what the political and religious opponents of the Stuart monarchy stood for, and recognize that they might endorse different political solutions, at different junctures, in order to achieve the same goals. In the context of the late 1640s and the 1650s, a settlement in which there was no hereditary monarch seemed to many radicals the best strategy to pursue – and it became a viable option after Colonel Pride's purge of the Long Parliament in December 1648. In the changed context of the Restoration, seeking the abolition of monarchy made little practical sense. Yet there were still many who continued to promote the cause of greater political, religious and economic liberty and justice, and who challenged the authority structures in both Church and state, even if they accommodated themselves to working within a monarchical framework. In other words, the champions of the ‘Good Old Cause’ might have come to favour a republic in the 1650s, whereas after 1660 support for a republic might have all but disappeared, but this should not lead us to conclude that support for the ‘Good Old Cause’ had necessarily all but disappeared.24

Even though the out-and-out republicans were a small minority, it should not be assumed that the desire to bring back the monarchy reflected the existence of a political consensus. There were some – mainly Presbyterians and old Puritans – who would have liked to have seen the monarchy reconstructed and stripped of many of its prerogatives, along the lines of the Treaty of Newport of 1648, which had proposed giving parliament control over the militia and the right of appointment to all offices of state. In this camp were influential Presbyterian peers such as the earls of Manchester, Bedford, Anglesey and Northampton, as well as commoners like Sir Gilbert Gerard, Sir Harbottle Grimston, Sir Denzil Holles and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (the future Earl of Shaftesbury). Then there were ultra-royalists – men like the Earl of Peterborough, Charles Berkeley and Henry Bennet (later Earl of Arlington) – who wanted to reinvest the crown with all the powers it had enjoyed in the 1630s, undoing the reforms of 1641. Proposals made in the early 1660s that Star Chamber should be revived came to nothing, though in 1664 the Triennial Act of 1641, which had compelled the king to call parliament every three years (and required the sheriffs to issue election writs if the king failed to do so) was repealed, and replaced by a measure which, while still stipulating that parliaments should be called at least once every three years, removed the machinery whereby this could be enforced. Tensions survived in the Restoration era, therefore, between those who believed that the authority of the crown should be limited and those who wanted to see it strengthened. Moreover, the nature of the relationship between the crown and parliament remained ambiguous as a result of differing interpretations as to what had actually happened when the monarchy was restored. To some it seemed obvious that the Convention had called back the King, with the implication that parliament, ultimately, was supreme. Anglican-royalists, however, tended to the view that the King had been restored by divine providence, and that the Convention had simply acknowledged Charles's rightful position as king, which he had technically been since the execution of his father on 30 January 1649.25 Indeed, an act of August 1660, ordaining that 29 May (Charles's birthday and day of restoration) be kept as ‘a Perpetual Anniversary Thanksgiving’, declared that it was ‘Almighty God’ who ‘by his all-swaying providence and power’ had brought about ‘his Majesty's late most wonderful, glorious, peaceable and joyful restoration’.26

The biggest source of contention was religion. The Restoration occurred in a climate of intense reaction against the sects, as reflected by many of the petitions of late 1659 and early 1660 against the army and the Rump, and also a number of crowd attacks on Baptist and Quaker meetings at this time.27 Yet, beyond the desire to be rid of the sects, there was consensus on little else. Anglicans wanted the restoration of the old Church of the bishops and the Prayer Book. Indeed, without waiting to see what the settlement in the Church would be, episcopalians began to revive the Book of Common Prayer service, even before the King's return, and Anglican ministers took repossession of the livings they felt had been illegally taken from them during the Interregnum. The lead may have been taken by the Anglican gentry and the clergy, but there is plenty of evidence of grass-roots Anglicanism, as people welcomed back their old ministers, pranced around maypoles as a way of taunting the Presbyterians and Independents, rejoiced as local communities burned copies of the Solemn League and Covenant in accordance with a parliamentary proclamation of May 1661, and even enthusiastically cheered their bishops when they ventured back into their dioceses.28 The Presbyterians, by contrast, although they recognized that the bishops would return, argued for limited episcopacy and some concessions to the Puritan reformist agenda, in the hope of comprehending as many as possible within the Church establishment. Indeed, some of the pettions against army rule of late 1659 seemed to intimate a Presbyterian reform agenda: that from the London apprentices of 15 November, for example, called for the restoration of the religion established by ‘our three last Princes, with some amendment in Discipline’.29 Yet, although the Presbyterians wanted comprehension, they did not, any more than the Anglicans, think it appropriate to tolerate those who worshipped outside the Church. Separatists, quite naturally, hoped at least to be allowed to worship freely, according to the dictates of their conscience. They thus put their faith in the promise which Charles had made in his declaration from Breda of April 1660 to grant ‘a Liberty to tender Consciences’.

In the end, the Anglican vision won out. A narrow and intolerant episcopalian Church was re-established, backed up by a severe penal code – known to history, somewhat misleadingly, as the Clarendon Code, after Charles's leading minister of the period 1660–67, the first Earl of Clarendon - designed to guarantee an Anglican monopoly of office-holding, worship and education. The first measure came in December 1661, when parliament passed a Corporation Act stipulating that all municipal office-holders take the Anglican sacrament and renounce the Presbyterian Covenant. This was followed in May 1662 by the Act of Uniformity, which required all clergymen and teachers (from the masters and fellows of Oxbridge colleges down to village schoolmasters and private instructors and tutors) to conform to the liturgy of the Church of England, as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, and to renounce the Presbyterian Covenant, setting a deadline for compliance of 24 August (St Bartholomew's Day). Nearly 1,000 ministers – roughly 10 per cent of the clergy – found themselves unable to comply and were forced to give up their livings, among them many Presbyterians and moderate Puritans who would have preferred to remain part of the national Church. Separatist religious meetings were outlawed first by the Quaker Act of 1662, followed two years later by a somewhat broader Conventicle Act, which was to last for three years after the end of the parliamentary session in which it was passed and which provided for a series of escalating fines for any who attended nonconformist religious meetings – £5 (or three months' imprisonment) for the first offence, £10 (or six months’ imprisonment) for the second, and £100 (or transportation) for the third. A second Conventicle Act, passed in 1670, reduced the fines for those who merely attended nonconformist conventicles (to 5 shillings for the first offence, 10 shillings thereafter), but laid down stiff penalties (£20 for the first offence, £40 thereafter) for those who preached at nonconformist meetings or allowed such meetings to be held in their houses. To stop ejected ministers from continuing to serve their old flocks or else establishing new congregations in major population centres, the Five Mile Act of 1665 forbade them from residing within 5 miles of their old parish or any corporate town.30

In addition to the new legislation, the pre-Civil War laws against recusants and separatists remained on the statute book. Most of these had been aimed against Roman Catholics, but there was also scope for their employment against Protestant nonconformists. The most hated of such measures was an act of 1593 (35 Elizabeth) stipulating that those convicted of not coming to church or of holding separatist religious meetings had either to conform within three months or abjure the realm, forfeiting their lands and goods to the crown, with failure to abjure being a capital offence.31 As concerns grew about the threat of popery in the 1670s, parliament decided to introduce a religious test for office to protect the political establishment from subversion by Catholics, though in the process it imposed further disabilities on Protestant dissenters as well. Thus the Test Act of 1673 required all office-holders under the crown to take the Anglican sacrament and make a declaration against transubstantiation. A further Test Act of 1678 disabled all Roman Catholics from sitting in either house of parliament, although the King's brother and heir to the throne, the Duke of York, was excluded from its provisions.32

The Restoration settlement in the Church, it has been argued, was a victory for the Anglican squirearchy that dominated the Cavalier Parliament elected in 1661.33 Yet, although there was considerable agreement in this parliament concerning the need for harsh measures against separatists, legislation aimed at moderate dissenters proved more controversial and was passed only after close divisions.34 The divide that emerged in Restoration politics, in other words, was not a simple one between Anglicans and dissenters, but depended upon where one stood on the issue of dissent. Some Anglicans were sympathetic to the plight of dissenters, and favoured a relaxation of the penal laws against fellow Protestants; others were fiercely intolerant, and believed in the need for a strict enforcement of all laws against all forms of religious nonconformity. Nor was the dividing line between these two types absolute; attitudes towards dissent shifted over time, according to political contingency – normally dependent upon whether the greatest threat to the Established Church at any given time was perceived as coming from Catholics or from Protestant nonconformists. Such considerations explain why it is so difficult to calculate the size of the dissenting interest in Restoration England. Out-and-out separatists may well have been a small minority, as the Compton Census of 1676 alleged. When we include those who identified with the dissenters or sympathized with their plight – because they were old Puritans themselves, were partial conformists or occasional nonconformists, had nonconformist relatives or friends (or even business associates) or had come to believe (in a given political context) that the persecution of dissenters was undesirable – then the proportion becomes much larger.35 The important point to understand is that the relative size of this group was never stable. Indeed, mobilizing the population at large either to be in sympathy with or to feel hostile towards the dissenters was to become one of the major political and ideological battlegrounds of the Restoration era, as will become apparent later in this book.

The argument for intolerance, furthermore, was political, not religious. Protestants did not believe in persecuting people for their religious opinions; that was a popish principle. Nonconformist conventicles were hunted down because they were regarded as nests of sedition – places where ‘Seditious Sectaries and other disloyall Persons’ met ‘under pretence of tender Consciences’ to ‘contrive Insurrections’, as the 1670 Conventicle Act put it.36 The reality, however, was that most English nonconformists were not political subversives. The biggest group by far, the Presbyterians, had opposed the regicide and actively welcomed the restoration of monarchy, and most Independents, Baptists and Quakers were prepared to make their peace with the restored monarchy and merely wanted to be allowed the liberty of conscience they had been promised in Charles's Declaration of Breda. The trouble was, pursuing a policy of religious intolerance out of a fear of political subversives ran the risk of making the potentially loyal disloyal and creating the very problem that such a policy was designed to prevent.

A major problem facing Charles II in England, therefore, was that he had to rule over a divided people. Even in 1660 there was no true consensus beyond the desire to bring back the monarchy, and handling the legacy of political and religious tensions bequeathed by the Civil War would have been no easy task for any government. Things were made worse by the fact that the particular settlement reached in the Church was something that Charles himself did not want. Although personally he had little time for the Presbyterians, whom he held responsible for the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 and hence ultimately for the death of his father, he would have preferred a more eirenic solution, so as not to unnecessarily alienate significant sections of the population right from the start. Instead, he got trapped into a partisan settlement – one that seemed to make him king not of all his subjects but only of those who conformed to the re-established Church. The issue of dissent was to prove a major source of political discord throughout his reign. The problem was that the King was in a no-win situation: a strict enforcement of the penal laws ran the risk of alienating substantial sections of the population (not just the non-conformists themselves, who might, it was feared, be pushed into rebellion, but also moderate Anglicans who felt that the measures against dissent were unduly harsh), while any moves to help the dissenters would provoke the opposition of the Anglican hardliners, whose support no restoration monarch could afford to lose.

CONSTRAINTS ON ROYAL POWER

Let us now move to a consideration of the nature and extent of royal power in Restoration England. Many contemporaries criticized Charles for his pretensions to absolutism, or for governing in an arbitrary way. One MP suspected as early as 1663 that there was an intention ‘to change the constitution of the government of this kingdom and to reduce us to the model of France [where] they have lost all their liberties, and [are] governed by an arbitrary and military power.’37 In 1675 the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had recently fallen from grace and moved into opposition, complained of a long-standing design to make the government ‘absolute and Arbitrary’ and to establish rule by a standing army, while in 1677 Andrew Marvell produced his famous Account of the Growth of Popery, bemoaning what he saw as a drift towards popery and arbitrary government under Charles II.38 In theory, the powers of the restored monarch appear to have been considerable. In reality, however, there remained severe constraints on what he could do in practice, especially during the 1660s and '70s, which left Charles II vulnerable to the criticisms of the competing political and religious interests identified above, and made it difficult for him to assert his own will in government and to pursue policies he saw as in the best interests of the monarchy in England.

Before proceeding, we need to say something about what contemporaries understood by the words ‘arbitrary’ and ‘absolute’.39 Both terms possessed a variety of resonances, from the neutral to the derogatory. An ‘arbitrary’ power was one that was unbounded by law. Most seventeenth-century legal theorists believed that there was some degree of arbitrary or discretionary power vested in the monarch, by dint of his prerogative, normally to be used only in emergencies. Thus Sir Philip Warwick, writing in 1678, spoke of ‘the usefulness and unavoidableness of arbitrary prerogative’ to deal with cases ‘that cannot be foreseen, or that come seldom, and clothed with divers circumstances, or fall under no certain rule, or are of great import or danger, and can stay for no formal council’. Such a power was arbitrary because it was not ‘limited under strict forms or process of Law’. But it would be ‘a piece of ignorance’, he continued, ‘to think, because a decision is arbitrary, therefore it is unjust’. The whole point of the king having an ‘arbitrary prerogative’ was so that he could promote justice or else preserve the interests of the state without causing injustice. ‘No arbitrary power, or decision, or reason of state’, Warwick insisted, ‘must want justice, for the standing laws, and the arbitrary determinations of Soveraignty must both be reasonable and just.’40 However, if the king repeatedly showed little respect for the rule of law or flouted existing constitutional conventions, this was arbitrary government, and no better than tyranny.

To say that the king was ‘absolute’, by contrast, meant that he was accountable to no human power. He was ab legibus solutus – exempt from the laws. This did not mean he could ignore the laws at will; he was supposed to rule according to law, and would be held accountable by God if he did not. But he could not be resisted by his subjects if he failed to observe the law, and he could not be tried in a court of law. The king was in that sense the supreme power within the state; he was sovereign. ‘Absolute’ also carried the meaning of ‘complete’: an absolute ruler had complete power, in the sense that he did not share it with anyone else. He did not share sovereignty with parliament, for example. Many people could champion the Restoration monarchy as absolute and mean it positively, without any negative connotations; they certainly did not believe that an absolute monarch should rule arbitrarily. Hence Warwick could acknowledge that the king was absolute and possessed certain arbitrary powers, but remain adamant that he was ‘not an arbitrary Monarch’.41 Marchamont Needham, writing propaganda for the royal administration in the mid-1670s in an attempt to discredit the position of Shaftesbury and his adherents, insisted that divine-right absolute monarchy did not exclude all limitations by human laws or mean that the king was under no obligation to his people. ‘A Father hath a Divine Right to Rule his Son, and a Master his Servant,’ Needham explained, ‘else the Scripture had never made Divine Injunctions, investing them with Rights of absolute power over them; and yet the same Scripture also signifies… there are Obligations also upon the Father and Master, to the Son and Servant.’ It was ‘such a Personal, absolute Divine Right’, Needham asserted, ‘that the Kings of England have claimed and exercised over their Subjects, as that in all times… the Laws have generally run in course, for preservation of all the Rights and Liberties of the People, as well as those of the Crown’.42

Yet the dividing line between absolute and arbitrary was becoming blurred, especially in the minds of those people – such as Shaftesbury and the other members of the ‘country’ opposition of the mid-1670s – who did not believe that the king was absolute. If the king could not be held accountable, then not only was his power absolute but he could rule in an arbitrary way. Moreover, the meaning of ‘absolute’ as ‘complete’ carried with it the connotation that an absolute sovereign had total control over the government and could rule his kingdom according to his own whim. Thus in April 1678 the French ambassador, Paul Barillon, wrote to Louis XIV expressing his view that it was not in the interest of France ‘that a King of England should be absolute master, and be able to dispose according to his will of all the power of the nation’. Revealingly, Barillon recognized there were different degrees of absoluteness; a week later he wrote to Louis saying that he did not believe Charles II cared much ‘for being more absolute than he is’.43

At first glance, the powers of the restored monarch appear to have been fairly extensive. The return to the position of 1641 meant that the king was re-established as the chief executive, with control over the appointment of all officers of state and the right to determine all questions of policy (both foreign and domestic). The king could not tax or enact legislation without parliament, but he had the power of veto over parliamentary legislation, and he alone determined when to call, prorogue or dismiss parliament. He was also supreme governor of the Church, by dint of the powers vested in him by the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy of 1559. Additional legislation enacted by parliament in the early years of the Restoration sought to shore up the powers of the monarchy even further. Two Militia Acts, of 1661 and 1662, gave the king sole command of all armed forces within the country.44 The Corporation Act and the Act of Uniformity reinforced the doctrine of non-resistance by requiring that municipal office-holders, clergy and teachers take an oath declaring it was ‘not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever to take arms against the King’.45

The government also made efforts to restrict both public involvement in and discussion of politics. An Act against Tumultuous Petitioning of 1661, which blamed such activity for ‘the late unhappy wars, confusions and calamities in this nation’, made it illegal to solicit the hands or consent of persons ‘above the number of twenty or more to any petition’ to the king or parliament ‘for alteration of matters established by law in Church or State’, unless the petition had first been approved and ordered by three or more JPs from the area, or the greater part of the grand jury, or, in the case of London, by the Lord Mayor, aldermen and common council. The act also stipulated that no more than ten people were allowed to present a petition.46 The Licensing Act of 1662 made it illegal to print anything heretical, seditious or schismatical, or any doctrine or opinion contrary to the Christian faith or the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, and required all books to be licensed by the Stationers’ Company of London, by one of the archbishops or the bishop of London, or by one of the chancellors or vice-chancellors of the universities.47

It was possible, within this legal framework, to take a very exalted view of monarchy. Many Anglican divines, in their sermons, preached up the divine-right nature of monarchy, insisting that kings were ‘God's vice-gerents’ and thus ‘accountable to none but God’.48 Most royalist writers vehemently condemned the theory of coordination, or mixed monarchy – the notion that the king was but a coordinate power who shared his sovereignty with the Lords and Commons. As the Lord Chief Baron Sir Orlando Bridgeman put it, at the trial of the regicides in October 1660, the king was ‘not only Caput Populi, the head of the people; but Caput Republicae, the head of the Commonwealth, The Three Estates’. ‘All must know,’ Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Hyde concurred, ‘that the king is above the two houses.’49

However, the Restoration monarchy was nowhere near as strong as such rhetorical flourishes were intended to imply. A major cause of weakness was lack of money. The crown suffered from an inadequate system of finance. In 1660 the Convention had worked out a seemingly generous financial settlement whereby the crown was to receive £1.2 million per year in the form of receipts from customs and excise; this was double what Charles I's ordinary revenues had been in the late 1620s and early 1630s. But the Convention had miscalculated; the yield fell short by almost a third, and an additional tax on fire hearths imposed in 1662 made up only half the difference. It proved impossible for the crown to make ends meet, while wars with the Dutch of 1664–7 and 1672–4, coupled with Charles II keeping larger military and naval establishments than his father, pushed the monarchy further and further into debt. Indeed, in January 1672, when Lord Ashley (the future Earl of Shaftesbury) was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the government had to order a Stop of the Exchequer, unilaterally cancelling payment to government creditors in order to release funds for the third Anglo-Dutch War. Shortage of funds left the crown dependent upon parliament for grants of extraordinary supply. Although parliamentary sessions remained irregular, Charles II found himself having to meet with parliament virtually every year between 1660 and 1681 (the exceptions being 1671 and 1676). Moreover, unlike their early Stuart counterparts, Restoration parliaments were not coy about using the power of the purse to bring pressure on the crown to change its policies. On a number of occasions in the 1660s and 1670s parliament either threatened to or actually did withhold supply to try to force a change in royal policy.50

To free himself from dependence upon parliament, Charles II would have to make the crown financially independent; this was something he was not able to do until after 1681. The only other option was to try to control or manage parliament in such a way as to ensure its compliance with the crown's interests. This was difficult for a number of reasons. The legacy of ideological division bequeathed by the upheavals of the 1640s and '50s meant that contests at parliamentary elections became more frequent (replacing the older system whereby the local elite had reached a consensus over who should be ‘selected’),51 and the large electorates of the shire constituencies and the open boroughs’ electorates were not easily susceptible to management from above. This is why Charles, having been presented with the return of a predominantly Cavalier-Anglican parliament in 1661, decided to keep it in existence for so long (it was eventually dissolved in January 1679), even though the large numbers of by-elections needed to replace MPs who had either died or been promoted to the upper house meant that it was becoming a body increasingly less sympathetic to the crown as time went on. In the mid- the King's then chief minister, the Earl of Danby, tried to build up a loyal following in the Commons by doling out pensions and offices to potential supporters or those he wanted to buy off. Although Danby was heavily criticized by opposition peers and members for subverting the independence of parliament, the element of bribery should not be exaggerated. In days when MPs were unpaid, gifts or offices were regarded as fair compensation for past services rendered; they would not necessarily buy someone's support in the future. Danby was successful in building up a court interest or ‘party’ in the Commons because he pursued policies – a defence of the Church, the eradication of dissent, an aggressive stance against France – that were supported by the Cavalier-Anglican gentry who dominated the Cavalier Parliament.

Charles found it easier to control the House of Lords than he did the Commons. The bishops were restored to the upper house by an act of 1661;52 there were twenty-six of them when all the seats were filled, and they were all royal appointees. Furthermore, the crown could always seek to extend its interest among the lay lords through new creations; Charles II in fact created a total of sixty-four peers between 1649 and 1685 – more than either his father or his grandfather.53 Once appointed, however, the bishops enjoyed tenure for life, while it was virtually impossible to remove existing lay peers, short of a successful conviction for treason (though Catholic peers, as we have seen, were barred from sitting in the Lords by the Test Act of 1678). When the mood of the electorate led to the return of a Cavalier-Anglican House of Commons in 1661, the House of Lords still contained a number of Presbyterian peers, or peers with moderate Puritan sympathies, such as the earls of Devonshire, Manchester and Northumberland. Indeed, Charles promoted several former parliamentarians, and even erstwhile servants to the Protectorate, to the peerage as a reward for their services in helping to bring about the restoration of the monarchy – the most famous example being Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Earl of Shaftesbury from April 1672), who first took his seat in the Lords as Baron Ashley in May 1661. Although careful management meant that Charles could typically rely on support from the upper house, and even use it to suppress or modify legislation initiated in the Commons of which he disapproved, the Lords were never mere pawns, and at times could mount a significant challenge to the royal will.54

The Restoration, for most people – former parliamentarians and Cavalier Anglicans alike – meant not just the return of the King, but also the restoration of parliaments and the rule of law. As the first Earl of Clarendon put it in the Lords in May 1661, ‘We have our King again, and our Laws again, and Parliaments again.’55 It was, nevertheless, the king's law: the Commons proposed, but it was the king who enacted legislation. Moreover, the men who interpreted the law, the judges, were all royal appointees. One of the sources of conflict between Charles I and his Long Parliament had been over whether judges should hold their office at royal pleasure (durante bene placito) or at good behaviour (quamdiu se bene gesserint), which made their tenure more independent. Although at first Charles reverted to his father's practice of 1641 of appointing judges at good behaviour, from about 1668 onward he made appointments at royal pleasure, enabling him later to dismiss or suspend judges at will.56 The independence of juries from judicial interference, however, was established by Bushell's Case of 1671, which ruled that a judge's decision to imprison a jury for finding against the evidence in the prosecution of the Quaker William Penn in 1670 was illegal.57

The king, most agreed, possessed the power, under certain circumstances, to dispense individuals from the penalties of the law, if a greater injustice would follow if the law were strictly enforced. There were certain restrictions, however, on the scope of the dispensing power. The king could not dispense with a matter that was malum in se, that is, inherently wrong, and against the law of God or nature (such as murder); he could dispense only with something that was malum prohibitum, that is, which had been made criminal by statute. Even then, the king could not issue dispensations that aimed to destroy the intent or spirit of the original statute, or which would prejudice the interests or property of his subjects; for example, he could not dispense an individual from a law that allowed a third party to collect a fine by way of compensation.58

Whether the king could suspend the operation of a statute completely was another matter. Charles and some of his advisers appear to have believed that the royal supremacy, as confirmed by the act of 1559, implied a royal power to suspend penal statutes ‘in matters ecclesiastical’, though this was something Charles never managed to get recognized.59 His attempt in December 1662 to issue a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the operation of the penal laws against nonconformists and Catholics provoked a storm of opposition when parliament reassembled the following February, the Commons complaining that it was ‘a thing altogether without precedent’ and ‘inconsistent with the methods and proceedings of the laws of England’, and he was forced to back down.60 The same thing happened when he issued a second Declaration of Indulgence in March 1672 When parliament reconvened in February 1673 it withheld supply until Charles agreed to withdraw the Indulgence.

The precise legal situation is worth clarifying, since the royal pretence to a suspending power was to emerge as a major issue in the Revolution of 1688–9. Historians have typically argued that technically the king did possess the power to suspend ecclesiastical laws, under the terms of the royal supremacy. This was the view taken in 1673 by Shaftesbury, by now Charles's Lord Chancellor, who backed the Indulgence because he believed that the king's supremacy in ecclesiast ‘was of another nature then that he had in Civills, and had been exercised without exception’ by Charles I, James I and Queen Elizabeth.61 The Commons, however, concluded by a vote of 168 to 116 that the suspending power was illegal.62 Resolutions of the Commons, of course, do not make law; the House might be able to force the King to back down, but they could not denude him of a power which he legally possessed. Yet, in taking their stand against the suspending power, the Commons did not think they were declaring something to be illegal that had formerly been recognized as legal; rather, in forcing the King to withdraw his Indulgence they believed they were getting him to acknowledge that this was a power which no king had ever legally enjoyed. On 14 February 1673 the Commons petitioned the King, informing him that ‘Penal Statutes in Matters Ecclesiasticall’ could not be suspended but by act of parliament. When Charles angrily replied that this suspending power in ecclesiastical matters had never been questioned ‘in the Reigns of any of His Ancestors’, they quickly sought to disabuse him of this notion. No such power had ever been claimed by his predecessors, they insisted, ‘and if it should be admitted, might tend to the Interruption of the free Course of the Laws, and altering the Legislative Power, which hath allwayes been acknowledged to lodge in Your Majesty and the Two Houses of Parliament’. Charles at last gave way, withdrew his Indulgence, and promised ‘that what hath been done… concerning the Suspension of Penal Laws’ would ‘not for the future be drawn into Consequence or Example’. 63

Another major limitation on the power of the crown concerned its ability to police its subjects effectively and to protect itself against the possible threat of subversion at home. Although the Militia Acts had restored crown control over all armed forces within the kingdom, these acts dealt primarily with the militia, an amateur body of part-timers which when put to the test often proved to be far from an effective fighting force. Parliament tended to the view that if the militia could be reformed – kept better supplied with weapons, and with its members better trained – this would be adequate for domestic security; the Civil War and republican experiments had, besides, engendered a deep-seated antipathy towards standing armies among most English people. Charles II, however, as newly restored monarch of a kingdom that over the previous two decades had not shown itself the greatest friend of monarchy, saw the need to have well-trained, professional troops at his disposal. There was no technical reason at law why the king should not keep his own standing forces, if he could afford to pay for them. If he could not, however, he would need to get parliament to vote taxes to support them. Furthermore, the Petition of Right of 1628 had established that both the quartering of troops on private householders and the imposition of martial law in time of peace were illegal. In practice, these proved quite significant constraints. In 1660 the Convention voted a considerable sum for the disbanding of the Cromwellian army; however, it gave nothing specifically to pay for anything to put in that army's place. Charles managed to keep a force of about 3,000 to 4,000, paid out of his ordinary revenue, who were referred to as ‘guards’ rather than by the more opprobrious term ‘army’. This was tiny: the Interregnum military establishment had peaked at 60,000, while by 1675 Louis XIV in France had an army of about 100,000. Whenever Charles sought to expand his armed forces, as he did in 1666 (in anticipation of a Dutch invasion), in 1672 (on the outbreak of the third Anglo-Dutch War) and again in 1678 (supposedly in readiness for war with France), suspicions immediately arose that he intended to rule through a standing army. Moreover, it proved impossible to house all of the expanded forces in garrisons, and so soldiers came to be quartered not just in public houses, but also on private householders, in violation of the Petition of Right. Parliament naturally proved reluctant to approve taxes to support such additional forces, unless they were needed for war. On 7 February 1674 the Commons resolved ‘That the continuing of any Standing Forces in this nation other than the Militia, is a great Grievance and vexation to the people’, and petitioned the King to disband all those troops raised since January 1663.64 Parliament was to push again for the disbandment of the standing army in 1678 – 9.65

The King's guards were sometimes used to perform basic policing functions. In 1663 the royal horse guards were sent to disperse conventiclers in York, while in 1670 the life guards were used to break up various nonconformist meetings in London in the aftermath of the passage of the second Conventicle Act.66 The government was particularly worried about the threat of possible disorder in the capital – now a large, sprawling metropolis of some half a million people. On the eve of the Civil War, in early 1642, crowd unrest had forced Charles I to abandon London, whose streets he could no longer police, and Charles II was determined not to succumb to the same problem. When thousands of (mainly young) people, armed with iron bars, pole-axes and other weapons, rioted against bawdy houses in the London area in Easter week of 1668, chanting ‘Reformation and reducement’ and threatening to pull down Whitehall if the King did not give them liberty of conscience, the government (fearing the riots had been instigated by former Cromwellian soldiers) immediately dispatched the life guards to restore order.67 The problem with relying on parish constables, or even the local militia, was that they often did not have the requisite muscle to deal with larger-scale disturbances – and, besides, they had the infuriating habit of taking the rioters' side when their grievances seemed just. When thousands of weavers rioted in London in August 1675, to protest against the use of mechanized looms, the local peace-keeping forces simply refused to act. In the end, troops under the command of the Duke of Monmouth had to be called upon to suppress the riots.68

What happened in 1675 highlights another major structural weakness of the restored monarchy, namely the limitations to the effective coercive power of the state. Seventeenth-century England did not possess a professional civil service or police force, and for the implementation of government policy and the enforcement of law and order the crown was heavily dependent upon the cooperation of unpaid, part-time officials in the localities: from the Lord Lieutenants and their deputies who ran the local militias, the JPs and magistrates of the counties and boroughs who presided over the quarter sessions, down to the humble parish constables, beadles and nightwatchmen who were responsible for basic police work. Appointments to the lieutenancy and to the magisterial bench were in the gift of the crown, and undesirable types could be removed and replaced by men deemed more trustworthy. Thus the restored Lord Lieutenants appointed in 1660 were chosen for their known loyalty to the crown, the vast majority being staunch Anglican-royalists; their deputies, admittedly, came from a slightly more mixed political background – but only slightly.69 The county JPs were a more varied group, however. A systematic purge of the magisterial bench in 1660 sought to restore control of the counties to their ‘natural leaders’ – namely the greater gentry – though in the interests of rapprochement a significant number of parliamentarians and former Cromwellians were retained alongside the Anglican-royalists who were brought in, and not all of these could be totally relied upon to carry out the crown's will. There was a series of minor purges in the 1670s aimed at ousting some of the politically less reliable types – that of 1670, for example, was carried out with an eye to remove those reluctant to enforce the second Conventicle Act – but it was not until 1680 that the crown attempted another systematic reconstruction.70 It was more difficult to control the corporations, which enjoyed considerable rights of self-government protected by royal charter. A commission set up to enforce the Corporation Act in 1662–3 led to the expulsion from town governments of those who would not take the Anglican sacrament, renounce the Covenant, or swear the oaths of allegiance and supremacy (acknowledging the reigning monarch as supreme in both spirituals and temporals, and promising to bear allegiance to the King and his heirs and successors); yet the purge failed to remove all who sympathized with dissent, while others who technically failed to qualify themselves under the terms of the Corporation Act nevertheless managed to intrude themselves back into office thanks to a combination of connivance and a loose interpretation of the law. As a result, by the 1670s many corporations were to become hotbeds of partisan strife, often opposing intolerant Anglican zealots against those who saw little need to enforce the penal laws against Protestant nonconformists.71 With town and even county magistrates not always trustworthy, it is hardly surprising that the humble parish constable might sometimes drag his feet when asked to enforce laws of which he disapproved. In particular, complaints were frequently made about the reluctance of constables to enforce the laws against nonconformist conventicles. Indeed, the government itself recognized this as a problem: hence its introducing a scheme of financial incentives to informers under the terms of the 1670 Conventicle Act – informers were to receive one-third of the fine that resulted from a successful prosecution – in an attempt to remedy this.

THE LOSS OF PRESTIGE

Failing institutional innovation, the only way to make the central government more powerful was to secure the support and cooperation of these unpaid brokers of central authority in the localities.72 Purging local government of those suspected of disaffection and trying to compel local officials to perform their duties were part of the solution, but the crown also needed to ensure that those men it did have in place were convinced of the merits of government policy if it wanted them to carry it out. In short, the central government had to sell itself to the people. The king had to convince his subjects that it was in their best interests to see his policies enforced, but this also meant that, to a degree at least, the king had to pursue policies that his subjects wanted him to pursue. In short, he needed both to persuade and to satisfy. He could hope to do this successfully only if he could control the media through which royal policy came to be represented.

The traditional way in which monarchs had tried to sell themselves to their subjects was through an appropriate display of pomp and ceremony. On the eve of the Restoration, the Duke of Newcastle had advised Charles that he should show himself ‘Gloryously’ to his people, ‘Like a God’, since then the people would pray for him ‘with trembling Feare, and Love, as they did to Queen Elizabeth’, for ‘nothing Keepes upp a King’, Newcastle continued, ‘more than seremoney, and order, which makes Distance, and this bringes respecte and Duty.’73 Charles appeared keen to follow Newcastle's advice. He did his best to tap into the popular enthusiasm for the return of monarchy in the spring of 1660 and promote an appropriate image of royal splendour and majesty. Hence the drawn-out nature of his triumphant return to his kingdom in May 1660, from his first landing at Dover on the 25th to his eventual entry into his capital on his birthday on the 29th.74 Later that year the Convention established Restoration Day as an annual day of thanksgiving, and in the early years of the reign 29 May became the occasion for bonfire celebrations in a number of communities throughout the land. On 29 May 1661, for example, there were reportedly ‘many thousand Bonfires in London, Westminster, and places adjacent (and proportionately all over the kingdom)’, where crowds burned copies of the Solemn League and Covenant and, at some locations, images of Oliver Cromwell.75 Charles II's coronation, in the spring of 1661, was an elaborate and meticulously planned three-day celebration, designed to revive the cult of monarchy after over a decade of republican government: there was a royal progress from the Tower to Whitehall on 22 April, the coronation itself on the 23rd (St George's Day), and a fireworks display the day after, and according to one contemporary ‘the sumptuousness of it’ exceeded ‘the glory of what hath passed of the like kind in France’.76 Charles also revived the practice of touching for the King's Evil – the royal touch supposedly being enough by itself to effect a cure for scrofula – in order to confirm the legitimacy of his rule in the eyes of his people. From April 1669, when records become complete, until the end of 1684, Charles touched a total of 28,983 persons, or an average of some 1,800 per year.77

At the same time, the Restoration regime did its best to ensure that it had control over the interpretation of political news. Thus the government had its own newspaper, the London Gazette, from 1666, and also engaged in a certain amount of pamphleteering – notably under Danby in the mid-1670s – to explain and justify its policies. In addition, it sought to silence critical voices by clamping down on illicit preaching, seditious publications, and collective agitation out-of-doors (in the form of petitions and demonstrations). However, it found it impossible to establish a monopoly over the interpretation of the news. Nonconformist preachers could not be silenced, and, although many no doubt simply ministered to their flocks peacefully, some undoubtedly did use their conventicles as opportunities to launch a critique of government policy and even to urge resistance in the face of oppression.78 Nor could ministers of the Established Church always be relied upon to adopt a position in support of the government. When Charles issued his 1672 Declaration of Indulgence – a measure designed to relieve Catholics as much as Protestant non-conformists – the bishops responded by instructing their clergy to preach against popery. Charles complained to his archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, that ‘this preaching on controversy’ was ‘done on purpose to inflame the people, to alienate them from him and his government’; Sheldon, after consultation with some of the clergy, was ready to stand firm and tell the King that it would be unprecedented for him to ‘forbid his clergy to preach in defence of a religion which they believed’ while the King himself ‘said he was of it’, though Charles, in the end, decided not to force the issue and backed down.79 The only way to prevent the clergy from broaching controversial topics and thereby possibly inflaming the people against the King and his government – the lesson appeared to be – was for the King not to pursue policies they would find controversial.

The Licensing Act did limit the output of the printed press. Whereas some 2,730 titles appeared in 1660 and 1,584 in 1661, by 1663 this figure had fallen to 1,035 and by 1666 to a mere 633 (though the Great Fire of London bore some responsibility here). There was then a small recovery, and output was hovering at around 1,000 to 1,200 titles per year by the 1670s. But it was not until 1679 – the year the Licensing Act lapsed, when there were 1,730 titles published – that the figure for 1661 was exceeded.80 Nevertheless, manuscript newsletters, pamphlets and political poetry circulated through the coffee houses, disseminating what were sometimes heavily critical views of Charles II, his court or royal policy.81 To meet this threat, on 29 December 1675 Charles took the dramatic step of issuing a proclamation ordering the closure of all coffee houses. Ten days later he announced that in future such establishments would be allowed to operate only under government licence, with all coffee-house owners being required to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and to take out bonds not to allow on their premises any scandalous papers or libels or to permit the uttering of any scandalous reports concerning the government or the ministers of state.82 The initiative appears to have been of limited practical effect.

A major reason for Charles's inability to persuade and satisfy was that the policies he pursued, or the things he did or accomplished, were hardly persuasive or satisfying. As a result, over the period 1660–78 the crown experienced a considerable loss of prestige. What, then, lent a monarchy prestige at this time? At the basic level, majesty was supposed to be majestic. More particularly, a king was expected to achieve glory for his nation (normally this would be achieved in foreign policy), to defend the true religion (which, in the English context, of course, was the Protestant faith), and to protect and promote the secular well-being of his subjects (that is, guarantee them what they regarded as their due at law, which by the later seventeenth century was coming to be defined in terms of the trilogy of life, liberty and property). In all these respects the Restoration regime proved a bitter disappointment.

Charles's foreign policy was most inglorious – by any standard – and certainly appeared disastrous compared to what had been achieved under Cromwell in the 1650s. The war of 1664–7 against the Dutch (and also, from 1666, the French) went humiliatingly badly: much of the English fleet was destroyed, and colonial possessions were lost, while in June 1667 came the ultimate disgrace when the Dutch fleet managed to sail up the Medway to Chatham and destroy four of the English navy's biggest vessels and capture the flagship, the Royal Charles. In the ensuing peace, England ceded Surinam, on the north-east coast of South America, to the Dutch, and had to acknowledge Dutch claims in West Africa and the East Indies. The fact that England managed to keep the New Netherlands (modern-day New York) – seized from the Dutch by the English government in August 1664 – hardly seemed much of a consolation at the time. England also had to give up Nova Scotia to the French – though England did regain possessions lost to the French in the West Indies.83

From the late 1660s, following Clarendon's fall from grace in 1667 and during the administration of the Cabal (1668–73) – so-called after the initial letters of the leading ministers of the time: Thomas Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale – Charles moved into an alliance with the French. At Dover in 1670 he made a private treaty with Louis XIV whereby he promised, in return for French subsidies, not only to join France in declaring war on the Dutch, but also to announce his own conversion to Catholicism. (Only Clifford and Arlington of the Cabal were privy to the secret treaty; a fake treaty had to be concluded for the benefit of the rest of his ministers and his English subjects, concealing the religious clause.) The ensuing Dutch War of 1672–4 achieved no positive gains for the English, though by its end – thanks in part to a highly successful propaganda campaign by the Dutch themselves – most people in England had come to believe that fighting the Protestant Dutch was against the national interest, and that the much greater threat was posed by Catholic France. Louis XIV's expansionist ambitions had become all too apparent during the late 1660s and early 1670s, and it was coming to be feared that he had pretensions to universal monarchy.84 By the mid-1670s, parliament was clamouring for a more aggressive stance to be taken against France. Indeed, Danby, Charles's chief minister from 1674, did his best to take England out of the French orbit, and by 1678 was on the verge of declaring war on France in alliance with the Dutch. Charles remained reluctant, and continued to take bribes from Louis XIV behind his first minister's back. Yet Charles was not the only one playing a duplicitous game; so too was Louis XIV, who kept a number of opposition MPs in his pay, so that he could put the screws on the English king whenever it proved to his advantage. England had become little more than a client of the French king. What was worse was that most people knew it.

The government had also fallen down on its duty to defend the true religion. Charles's own sympathies for Roman Catholicism had become readily apparent, not only as a result of his foreign-policy alliance with Catholic France, but also through his attempts to relieve the plight of Catholics through the use of the royal suspending power. There also seemed to be an alarming number of Catholics at court, and these were feared to have an undue influence on royal policy. During the early 1660s the most prominent Catholic at court was the erratic Earl of Bristol, part of the Queen Mother's circle, although he never gained the influence he craved. More worryingly, during the administration of the Cabal, a time when the government seemed bent on pursuing policies at home and abroad designed to promote the interest of Catholics (notably the Indulgence of 1672 and the war with France against the Dutch), one of the King's leading ministers (Clifford) was a Catholic and another (Arlington) was a Catholic-sympathizer.

Of equal concern, however, were the royal mistresses. As that most notorious of Restoration rakes, the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, put it with his typical indelicacy, Charles's ‘sceptre and his prick are of a length, / But she who plays with one may sway the other’.85 The problem was that those women who had most intimate access to the King's person were Catholics. Charles's leading mistress from 1660 to 1668 was the Catholic Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine (later the Duchess of Cleveland), five of whose children Charles acknowledged as his own. From about 1663 Charles also developed a passion for Frances Stuart, the daughter of a Scottish Catholic royalist, described by Charles's sister the Duchess of Orléans as ‘the prettiest girl in the world, and the best fitted to adorn any court’. Although it is unclear whether they ever actually became lovers, there was talk at one time of Charles divorcing his wife and marrying Frances, until she eloped in the spring of 1667 with the King's relative the Duke of Richmond.86 From the early 1670s the King's most influential mistress was the French Catholic Louise de Kéroualle (typically Anglicized as ‘Carwell’ by contemporaries), created Duchess of Portsmouth; she was actually ‘married’ to Charles in a mock ceremony in 1671, and was to bear him a son – Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Lennox – in July 1672.87 The orange-girl and actress Nell Gwyn, who became Charles's mistress in the late 1660s, was conspicuous for being ‘the Protestant whore’, as she herself famously quipped.88 All told, Charles had fourteen natural children by various mistresses during his lifetime.

Charles's sexual exploits became the subject of much scurrilous verse, which typically circulated in manuscript. Some of this, to be sure, was written by fellow rakes who were as much celebrating as condemning the activities they were describing. Some of it, however, carried a biting, critical edge, and all of it served to help degrade the monarchy in the public eye and to encourage the perception that the political failings of the regime were linked to the moral failings of the court. Rochester was partly rejoicing when he recalled how ‘the Isle of Britain’ was ‘long since famous grown / For breeding the best cunts in Christendom’, and perhaps even when he described Charles as ‘the sauciest one that e'er did swive, / The proudest, preremptoriest prick alive’. But he overstepped the mark when he referred to his ‘merry Monarch’ as someone ‘scandalous and poor’, who rolled ‘about from whore to whore’, and concluded with the lines ‘I hate all monarchs with the thrones they sit on, / From the hector of France to the cully of Britain’; this earned him a banishment from court for his pains.89 Many rhymesters pointed out how Charles's whoring was ruining the country. Charles's mistresses, after all, cost a lot of money: during the 1670s Cleveland and Portsmouth and their children were in receipt of permanent grants worth more than £45,000 per year.90 One anonymous rhymester had ‘Old Rowley the King’ saying, ‘The making my Bastards so great / And Dutchessing every Whore / The surplus and treasury cheat / Has made me so wonderfull poor.’91 Another asked, ‘Why art thou poore O King?’ and concluded, ‘… imbezzling C—t, / That wide mouth'd, greedy Monster that has don't.’92

England's foreign-policy disasters seemed naturally linked to the degeneracy of the court. One poet, writing about the Medway disaster, rhymed:

So our great prince, when the Dutch fleet arriv'd,

Saw his ships burn and, as they burn'd, he swiv'd.

So kind was he in our extremest need,

He would those flames extinguish with his seed.93

In c. 1673, at the time of the third Anglo-Dutch War, a mock advertisement which circulated for a public sale at the Royal Coffee House near Charing Cross proclaimed that the following items were for sale:

One whole peece of the Duchess of Cleveland's honesty… Two Ells of Nell Gwin's Virginity… Two whole peeces of new fashioned paradoxes, the one to suppress popery by the Suppression of the Protestant interest abroad, the other to maintain libertie by the raiseing of a standing Army at home… Two dozen of French wenches, the one half paid by his Majesty to keep him right to the Protestant religion, the other to incline him to the Catholicks.94

There was thus no underlying mirth when the republican poet and future Whig conspirator John Ayloffe bemoaned in c. 1674–5 how ‘A colony of French possess the court’ and Charles's ‘fair soul, transform'd by that French dame [i.e. Portsmouth], / Had lost all sense of honor, justice, fame’ so that the King sat ‘Besieg'd by whores, buffoons, and bastard chits’.95

The prominence of Catholics in high places and the pro-Catholic leanings of the court inevitably created the impression that popery was on the increase. In fact, it probably was not, but this did not stop parliament from introducing a series of measures during the 1660s and 1670s designed to check its growth, culminating in the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 aimed at excluding Catholics first from office and then from parliament.96 What made matters worse was that the heir to the throne was a Catholic. Despite all his swiving, Charles was unable to produce any legitimate offspring, since his wife, Catherine of Braganza, was barren. Thus the next in line remained his younger brother by three years, James, Duke of York, who sometime during the late 1660s or early 1670s became reconciled to Rome, his conversion finally being, publicly acknowledged following his non-compliance with the Test Act in 1673.97 In October of that year York married a young Catholic princess, Mary of Modena – a French client – his first wife, Anne Hyde, who had given him two Protestant daughters, having died two years earlier. The marriage not only seemed to tie the Stuart dynasty firmly to the French interest, but also raised the prospect of a never-ending succession of Catholic monarchs, should Mary be able to bear James a son.

Developments in 1673 placed the issue of the Catholic succession firmly on the political agenda. In midsummer, Charles told the French ambassador that he feared that when parliament next met it would introduce bills to send his brother into exile and exclude Catholics from the succession.98 In October 1673, when parliament convened for the first time after the Modena match, the Speaker found a wooden shoe in his chair, with ‘the arms of the king of France carved on one side and those of his Britannic Majesty on the other, with a crown and a crucifix’. Inside was a note with the words ‘of one of the two’.99 In early 1674 a group of opposition peers – spearheaded by Viscount Halifax and the earls of Salisbury and Carlisle, and backed all the way by Shaftesbury – tried to introduce legislation into parliament that would have provided for the education of the Duke of York's children as Protestants and prevented in future any king or prince of the blood from marrying a Catholic without parliamentary consent – with the penalty for non-compliance being exclusion from the succession. On this occasion, however, they backed down in face of stern opposition from the bishops, who would countenance no breach in the hereditary principle.100 The prospect of a Catholic successor nevertheless continued to be a destabilizing factor in politics. Indeed, it was in large part to deal with this threat that in 1677 Danby arranged the marriage between York's eldest daughter, Mary (at the time second in line to the throne, after her father), to her cousin the staunchly Protestant and anti-French Dutch stadtholder William of Orange (who himself was fourth in line, by dint of being the son of Charles II's sister Mary). Danby even came up with a scheme himself that year for imposing limitations on a popish successor; this would have given the bishops control over all ecclesiastical appointments in the event of a Catholic coming to the throne (in effect, temporarily undoing the royal supremacy in the Church), but it was abandoned in the face of opposition from those who distrusted the Anglican bishops as much as they did the Catholic heir.101

Particularly galling was the fact that, while the government seemed to be making little serious effort to meet the Catholic threat, peaceable Protestant dissenters continued to be harassed for worshipping outside the Church of England. The penal laws against nonconformists were not consistently put into execution throughout this period; enforcement came in waves, with the first half of the 1660s, the year following the passage of the 1670 Conventicle Act, the mid-1670s, and then the years of the Tory Reaction in the 1680s seeing the heaviest persecution. Yet, when the laws were being enforced, the suffering could be immense. Nonconformists faced heavy fines, often imprisonment, and even death. In Huntingdonshire, in 1670, some eighty Quakers were fined a total of £254 5s. for violations against the Conventicle Act; their inability to pay meant that they had their goods distrained to cover the amounts owed (and often more) – ‘Sheep, Cowes, Horses, Hoggs, Wool, Oatmeal, Carts, Pewter, Panns, and Potts, and other Goods’. One John Arthur had all his possessions taken away, leaving him with not ‘so much as a Dish, or Spoon, nor the Dung in his Yard’.102 These were arguably the luckier ones. Many were hauled off to prison in lieu of non-payment; there the cells could be so crowded after a round-up of conventiclers that there would be standing room only, with no space to lie down when someone needed to sleep. During one clampdown on Quakers in York, for example, the castle prison was so full that two of the Friends ‘were forced to Lay in a great Oven which stood in the Castle yard wall’.103 Persecution was thus a threat to both liberty and property. It could also be a threat to life. Indeed, under the provisions of the Act of 35 Elizabeth separatists could technically be sentenced to death. In fact no one did suffer the ultimate sanction during the Restoration, although there were some close calls. In 1664 twelve Baptists (two of them women) from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, were sentenced to death for refusing to conform or to abjure the realm, though when Charles learned of this he granted a reprieve. Likewise in 1682 a Quaker merchant from Bristol lay under sentence of death until William Penn used his influence at court to get the sentence quashed.104 Nevertheless, several thousand nonconformists did die for their beliefs. A rare few were victims of murderous anti-sectarian bigotry. Thus the ‘rude Company’ which disturbed the Quaker meeting at the Bull and Mouth in Aldersgate Street, London, in October 1662, actually killed two of the worshippers, though the law obviously did not sanction such violence and the murderers were arrested and sent to prison.105 The vast majority were the victims of incarceration at the hands of the state, the conditions in Restoration jails being so wretched that many never made it out alive. Others, though they did not forfeit their lives, nevertheless lost their livelihoods and thus the means of keeping body and soul together. One writer estimated that Quakers in Yorkshire suffered losses totalling some £2,381 os. 3d. under the Conventicle Act, although this was nothing ‘compared to the Loss of their Trades, many of them being Trades men, and Labouring Poor men, who have had their Looms, Leads, and Tenters taken away, which was the Upholders of their Families’, while ‘some poor Women had their Goods taken, who were hardly able to get Food and Necessaries.’106 The New England Puritan divine Cotton Mather claimed that ‘by a modest calculation’ the persecution resulted in ‘the untimely death of 3,000 Nonconformists, and the ruin of 60,000 families’ within a twenty-five-year period.107 quite rightly came to complain that they were suffering in their lives, liberties and estates.108

It was not just their personal liberty but also their political liberties that were in jeopardy. Particularly resented in this respect was the 1670 Conventicle Act, which, although it reduced some of the penalties proscribed by the 1664 act, allowed conventiclers to be convicted by two JPs acting summarily, thereby denying nonconformists the right to a trial by jury as guaranteed by Magna Carta. One pamphleteer alleged that the act was ‘directly against our Fundamental Laws, and our English Rights’ and was therefore ‘Illegal’.109 Rather than blame the King, who on a number of occasions showed himself sympathetic to liberty of conscience, nonconformists and their sympathizers tended to hold the high-Anglican interest in parliament, and especially the bishops, responsible for the intolerant attitude towards dissent. Increasingly, more moderate Anglicans began to doubt the wisdom of harassing Protestant dissenters when a more dangerous threat to the Protestant religion seemed to be posed by the international threat of popery.

In fact by the mid-1670s political liberty appeared under threat for a number of reasons and not just to dissenters, but also to many mainstream Anglicans. Charles had demonstrated an open preference for the French style of government, he had attempted to set up a standing army, and he had tried to suspend parliamentary statutes. During the mid-1670s Danby had threatened to subvert the independence of parliament through a system of pensions and bribery, and he seemed intent on introducing measures that would have made legitimate political opposition almost impossible. Thus when, in 1675, Danby tried to introduce a Test Bill into the Lords, which would have required all office-holders and members of both houses to make a declaration against resistance (either to the king or to those commissioned by him) and swear never to endeavour to alter the government in Church and state, Shaftesbury, Halifax and other opposition peers vehemently attacked the measure, insisting that there might well be occasions when it could be legitimate to resist those commissioned by the king and that the non-alteration oath was against ‘the very nature, being, and ends of Parliament’, which was to make alterations.110 In a pamphlet which appeared later that year, and rapdly became a best-seller, Shaftesbury charged the Danby administration with wanting to ‘declare the Government absolute and Arbitrary, and allow Monarchy, as well as Episcopacy to be Jure Divino, and not to be bounded or limited by humane Laws’, and represented this as part of a long-term design by ‘the High Episcopal Man, and the Old Cavalier’ dating back to the Restoration.111

In short, then, the honeymoon period for the Restoration monarchy did not last long. Things were already looking gloomy by the mid-to late 1660s, as the political and religious failings of the restored regime – the Medway disaster, the pro-Catholic leanings of the court, the persecution of Protestant nonconformists – led many of those who had initially rejoiced at the monarchy's return to realize that they had not got quite what they had hoped for. On top of this, a series of natural disasters began to make some wonder whether the Stuarts, who had seemingly been miraculously restored by God's providence, had already forfeited divine favour. In November 1663 the bubonic plague was reported in Great Yarmouth – introduced by ship from Holland – and in the following spring there were cases in London. The mass outbreak, however, occurred in London in 1665; by the end of the year perhaps as many as 100,000 of the city's inhabitants had died.112 The London-based nonconformist divine Thomas Vincent wrote of death riding ‘triumphantly on his pale Horse through our streets’, breaking ‘into every House almost, where any Inhabitants are to be found’; people were falling ‘as thick as leaves from the Trees in Autumn’, he observed, so that ‘we could hardly go forth, but we should meet many Coffins, and see diseased persons with soares and limping in the streets.’113 In September 1666 occurred the Great Fire of London, destroying most of the built-up area of the City proper and causing damage to property estimated at some £10 million. The fire started by accident in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane; the instinct, however, was to blame the catastrophe on the perceived enemies of the state. Thus there were rumours that the Fifth Monarchists or alternatively the Catholics had been responsible. Indeed, a French Catholic watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to having started the fire as part of a conspiracy hatched in Paris, and was hanged as a result, although he was almost certainly deranged.114 Preachers, however, were quick to see both the plague and the Fire as God's judgement upon the nation's sins, stretching from sabbathbreaking, swearing, drunkenness, fornication, adultery and pride through to persecution. The Anglican divine Richard Kingston, preaching about the plague, blamed the sin of uncharitableness for provoking God's wrath: ‘The Turk cannot hate a Christian with a more Vatinian hatred,’ he proclaimed, ‘then we persecute one another, though baptized into the same Faith, and equally Professors of the same Gospell’; we had affronted Christ's injunction which bid us ‘love one another’.115 Similarly the minister of St Lawrence Pountney, Robert Elborough, preaching on the Fire, alleged that ‘Times of oppression and cruelty’ were occasions when God was likely to be more severe in his judgements: ‘It's an hard thing for us to be hard-hearted’, he warned, ‘and God to be tender-hearted.’116 Yet, predictably, it was the Puritan divines who went furthest in their criticisms. Gilbert Burnet commented on how nonconformist ministers had taken over the pulpits left empty by Anglican clerics who had fled the plague and had begun ‘to preach openly… on the sins of the court, and on the ill usage that they themselves had met with’.117 Thomas Vincent, himself an ejected Presbyterian minister, produced a lengthy tract arguing that the plague and the Fire were visitations from God for the slighting of the Gospel; he not only bemoaned the rise of sectarianism and the lukewarm formalism of the Established Church, but also decried the Bartholomew Day ejections of 1662, the driving of God's ministers from the towns by the Five Mile Act of 1665, and the persecution of the godly.118

By the mid-1670s, with the threat of popery and arbitrary government seemingly confirmed by the King's Declaration of Indulgence, the Anglo-Dutch war fought in alliance with the French, the prospect of a popish successor, and the blatant attempts by the court to build up a standing army and subvert the independence of parliament, things appeared to have gone from bad to worse. Serious political and religious tensions had re-emerged in England, and voices calling for a return to a republic began to be heard. One poem of 1674, which circulated in the coffee houses, claimed that the miracle of the King's restoration had now become England's ‘curse and punishment’, and expressed the hope that the English would send Charles back to Breda and re-establish a commonwealth.119 In another poem from the same time, John Ayloffe pleaded for the erection of a Venetian-style republic: ‘To the serene Venetian state I'll go,’ he has Britannia proclaim, ‘From her sage mouth fam'd principles to know.’120 Significantly, the republican poetry of the mid-1670s evinced a marked anti-Scottish – in the sense of anti-Stewart – bias. Ayloffe refers to the present dynasty as ‘this stinking Scottish brood’ after Britannia bemoans how she has tried ‘too long in vain’ to divide ‘the Stuart from the tyrant’.121 poem from 1676 (possibly also by Ayloffe) alleged that tyranny would ‘be our case / Under all that shall reign of the false Scottish race’, and boldly proclaimed that the author was ‘for old Noll’ (i.e. Cromwell), for, ‘Though his government did a tyrant's resemble, / He made England great and its enemies tremble.’122 ‘The Isle was well reform'd, and gain'd renown,’ another rhymester asserted, ‘Whilst the brave Tudors wore th' Imperial Crown, / But since the race of Stewarts came / It has recoil'd to Popery and shame.’ He therefore concluded, ‘Let Cromwell's Ghost smile with Contempt to see / old England struggling under Slavery.’123

Perhaps more worrying than the disaffection of the radicals, however, was the growing alienation of moderate opinion in the nation at large. The government was losing its hold over the middle ground. Within parliament, a broad country coalition had begun to emerge, embracing Presbyterian politicians, disgruntled former courtiers and old Cavaliers, and a younger generation of political aspirants who were distrustful of Danby's political and religious agenda. Its members were united in their concerns about the security of the Protestant interest at home and abroad and the liberties of English people in the face of the government's foreign policy, attitude towards France, stance on dissent, and efforts to subvert the independence of parliament. Moreover, this opposition was beginning to organize, holding meetings in advance of and during parliamentary sessions to coordinate tactics and to plan the best ways to bring pressure to bear for a change of royal policy.124

The mid-1670s also saw a revival of popular political agitation out-of-doors, especially in the capital. For example, there were widespread anti-Catholic demonstrations in London on 5 November 1673, as crowds burned effigies of the pope and his cardinals to protest against the Duke of York's marriage and England's alliance with France; one observer counted 200 bonfires between Temple Bar and Aldgate alone.125 There was another pope-burning in Southwark on 26 November, the day that York's new bride arrived in England.126 To demonstrate their growing concern about the threat of popery, Londoners also revived the commemoration of Elizabeth's accession day, 17 November – associated in people's minds with the restoration of Protestantism to England following Mary I's attempted Counter-Reformation of 1553–8 – and there were pope-burnings on this day at Temple Bar in 1676 and 1677. There were also signs of growing links between the country opposition in parliament and discontented elements out-of-doors. Some of the pope-burnings may well have been organized at the Green Ribbon Club, a meeting place for country and, later, Whig politicians which was just up from Temple Bar in Chancery Lane, and seems to have been founded in about 1674.127 The enigmatic Duke of Buckingham, Shaftesbury's ally in the Lords, had connections with the London radical underground, including erstwhile Levellers such as John Wildman. It was at Buckingham's instigation that Francis Jenks, a London linen-draper, gave a sensational speech at the annual election of sheriffs in June 1676, during the long prorogation of the Cavalier Parliament between November 1675 and February 1677. Jenks warned of a threat to London from arsonists, impending economic ruin at the hands of the French, and a ‘danger to his majesty's person’ and the Protestant religion; he closed by calling upon the Lord Mayor to petition the crown for a new parliament, citing statutes from Edward III's reign which required annual parliaments.128 When, in February 1677, Shaftesbury and Buckingham pressed in the Lords that the Cavalier Parliament was ipso facto dissolved because it had been prorogued for more than one year, ‘a prodigious rabble’ of their supporters gathered outside the House, ready ‘to proclaim through the city with triumphant shouts and huzza, that the Parliament was dissolv'd’, should they have carried their point.129

CONCLUSION

There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of the enthusiasm with which people greeted the return of monarchy in 1660. Most welcomed the restoration of Charles II, firm in their belief that he would make their world a better place. Many – perhaps a large majority – did so from a conviction that monarchy was both the natural order and the best form of government, and that this was why things had never been right since the setting-up of a republic. Others may have done so out of desperation as things seemed to go from bad to worse following the fall of the Protectorate, believing that the return of the house of Stuart was the only viable alternative to the anarchy that threatened to grip the country by late 1659. There were, to be sure, some who never wanted monarchy back, but these were a minority (and a relatively small one at that). We should not downplay their significance, but we cannot explain why things began to go wrong for the Restoration monarchy simply in terms of the survival of an underground republican tradition in England after 1660.

Instead, this chapter has sought to emphasize various structural problems that bedevilled the Restoration regime. One was the legacy of political and religious division bequeathed by the Civil War. Charles II was popular on the eve of his return because he could appear to be all things to all people. Yet he could not actually be all things to all people, and the partisan nature of the Restoration settlement and the fact that there were many whose expectations of the Restoration came to be disappointed and who came to experience persecution as the price for having lost out go a long way towards explaining why disaffection soon re-emerged. A second problem was the practical restraints on royal power, which served to frustrate efforts to rebuild royal authority effectively after 1660. Charles's lack of fiscal independence made him vulnerable to criticism from parliament, while his lack of a professional police force or bureaucracy made him heavily reliant on the cooperation of unpaid agents of the executive (from the lofty Lord Lieutenants to the humble parish constables) to enforce the royal will in the localities. On top of all this were the problems created by the King's style of government and the policies he chose to pursue. The various efforts he made to try to confront the political weaknesses of the crown served only to make matters worse such as his experiments with religious indulgence, his efforts to manage parliament, his attempts to build up a standing army, and his decision to ally with the strongest power in Europe, Catholic France. Nor was he helped by his own personal weaknesses, such as his penchant for ladies of pleasure who happened to be Catholic, or by accidental contingencies which could hardly be laid at his door such as the plague and the Great Fire, and, most importantly, the barrenness of his queen, which left his younger brother (who for his own reasons had decided to convert to the Catholic faith) as next in line to the throne. By the mid-1670s, as a result, many English people had grown concerned about what they perceived to be a drift towards popery and arbitrary government manifested by a pro-French foreign policy; a desire to help Catholics at home; a Catholic heir; and various efforts to subvert cherished English liberties by issuing royal proclamations suspending certain laws, attempting to subvert the independence of parliament by bribing members with offices and pensions, and imposing an oath promising never to endeavour any alteration in Church or state. It was in this context that, in 1677, Andrew Marvell launched his scathing indictment of the record of Charles II's government, alleging that since the early years of the Restoration there had been a design carried on ‘to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery’ – pointing to the pro-Catholic leanings of the court, the attempt to draw England into the French orbit, the threat posed by political management to the independence of parliament, and the efforts to establish a standing army.130

Developments in England seemed bad enough. Yet people did not judge the Restoration monarchy solely by its record there. For Charles II was also king of Scotland and Ireland, and when developments in these two kingdoms were added to the equation the situation – to large numbers of British Protestants – seemed highly alarming indeed.