The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  A period of very unsatisfactory chaos followed: the army leaders could agree on nothing except to bring back the Rump, the Independent MPs left in the Commons after Pride’s Purge, who had been expelled by Cromwell in 1653. They considered the most recent Cromwellian Parliament to be yes-men and not radical enough. When it became evident that the government in London was losing control, there was a Presbyterian rising in Cheshire which was suppressed by one of the army generals, John Lambert. On his return to London Lambert expelled the Rump again, but on Boxing Day the growing confusion throughout England forced the army to recall the Rump once more.

  These events were observed from Scotland with increasing impatience by General Monck, where he was part of the occupying army. A professional soldier who had fought for the royal cause until his capture in 1644, Monck had come to the conclusion that a monarchy with its powers severely curtailed was what the country needed if order was to be restored. A famously silent man, he gave little indication of his intentions as he began to march on London as the beginning of January 1660. But something of his ideas began to leak out. Increasing numbers of people joined his army as it came south, including many disenchanted Presbyterians and Parliamentary leaders of the First Civil War such as Sir Thomas Fairfax. Once in London Monck announced that he wished to summon a free Parliament. He insisted that the Rump recall the Presbyterian MPs who had been removed at Pride’s Purge. This gave the Presbyterians a majority over the Rump, and they voted that the Long Parliament first summoned in 1640 must finally end.

  Monck, who had been made commander-in-chief of the army, having refused the office of protector, had been in communication with Prince Charles Stuart in exile in Holland. On Monck’s advice Charles issued a proclamation of his future intentions on 4 April. Known as the Declaration of Breda it promised a general pardon to those who had acted against the crown, stated that Parliament would decide all issues of importance and announced that Charles wished to allow ‘liberty to tender consciences’ in matters of religion as long as they did not disturb the kingdom. Meanwhile the free Parliament–known as a Convention because no royal person had summoned it–of Lords and Commons was called, to which were returned a great many royalists and Presbyterians. The Convention, having voted in favour of the motion that the government of England ought to be by king, Lords and Commons, invited Prince Charles Stuart to return as king.

  On 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, the dark and charming Prince of Wales arrived in London to be crowned King Charles II.

  Charles II (1660–1685)

  The return of the handsome Prince of Wales was greeted with frank rejoicing after the misery into which the Commonwealth had degenerated. It was expressed in the cheering crowds that waited for his arrival and lined his entire route from Dover to London. Nevertheless as his ship–called the Naseby after the great Parliamentary victory, now tactfully renamed the Royal Charles–crossed the sea, Prince Charles told Samuel Pepys the diarist, who was one of the officials accompanying the royal family’s return, that he could not rid his mind of his last time in England, when he had been a wanted man with a price on his head. How unlike this return in triumph! As he neared London Charles said, with the sardonic humour which exile had encouraged, that it must be entirely his fault that he had stayed away so long–he had yet to meet anyone ‘who did not protest that he had ever wished for his return’.

  And indeed since the settlement made at the Restoration dissolved all the acts of the republican government, and Charles II’s reign was said to date from the death of his father in 1649, it was as if the Interregnum had never been. Nevertheless, whatever the political compromises, the new king was a very human being who was hardly going to forget the treatment his family had endured. Beneath Charles’s affable manner there was a steely resolve never, as he put it, ‘to go on his travels again’. He would adopt whatever means he could to accomplish that for himself and his relations.

  Despite the celebrations, the tensions between the Presbyterians who had brought back the king and the royalists themselves were unresolved. Indeed they coloured the rest of the reign, for the forces represented by the Parliamentary rebels did not vanish with the Restoration. The Puritan Revolution might have gone too far, but the Civil War had been an expression of an uncontainable feeling. The new monarchy was immeasurably enhanced by Charles’s personal popularity–he had not, however, restored himself. Those who had brought him back, the great lords, the MPs, the merchants, the lawyers, had fought that war for Parliamentary rights and were never going to allow a return to the times of Charles I. When they found out that beneath his airy charm the new king believed just as much in royal power as his father and grandfather had, a new struggle began between king and Parliament. It was spearheaded by the former Cromwellian politician Anthony Ashley Cooper, created Lord Ashley in 1661 and later Earl of Shaftesbury, whose followers became known as the Whigs.

  At first, however, Charles II’s autocratic instincts were constrained by his precarious position and by his former adviser in exile, the lawyer Edward Hyde. The father-in-law of Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, who had married his daughter Anne, Hyde was now raised to the peerage as the Earl of Clarendon and became lord chancellor. Edward Hyde had been one of the leaders of the opposition in Charles I’s time; as a result the Restoration monarchy began life shorn of the worst excesses of that reign. Most of the acts of the Long Parliament before the war which Charles I had agreed to remained on the statute book, while the instruments of Stuart despotism–the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North–remained in the dustbin of history. Ship money and any taxes raised without Parliament’s consent continued to be illegal, and the Triennial Act stipulating that Parliament must convene every three years was reinstated. All the ancient feudal levies to the king were finally abolished and Charles was granted £1,200,000 a year for the rest of his life.

  Pudgy, faithful and now over fifty, which was twenty years older than most of the king’s circle, Clarendon was old-fashioned and pompous, but he had been in exile with the royal family for years, sharing their greatest tribulations, and Charles listened to him. They shared a desire to make the new monarchy secure by settling it on the widest foundations, an objective endangered most conspicuously by the monarchy’s natural supporters, the Anglican Cavaliers. Though the first measure of the Restoration Convention was the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which covered everything done during the Civil War, once the Convention had given way to the overwhelmingly Cavalier Parliament the act was to some extent ignored. Thirteen expendable former members of the Commonwealth government were executed. Cromwell’s corpse and those of two other regicides, his son-in-law Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, were dug up and hanged. The Cavaliers were also determined to scupper the king’s efforts to include the Puritans within a broad new Church of England.

  The Anglican Cavaliers loathed the Independents and Presbyterians who had ruled England during the Commonwealth. They might not be able to take their revenge on the chief men of the Commonwealth, many of whom now held important positions at the court of Charles II, but they could take their revenge on their co-religionists. They were convinced that all Baptists, Presbyterians and Independents were instinctive republicans, that given half a chance their meeting places would once again be seedbeds of revolution, as they had been before the Civil War. The Cavaliers’ one aim was to cut the ground from under the Puritans’ feet so that they should not be allowed to get a hold anywhere in England, whether it was in the corporations (or boroughs) which returned members of Parliament or among the clergy.

  Charles II’s attempt to achieve a new Church settlement informed by the Puritan leaders, whose views were canvassed for the 1662 prayer book, foundered on a disastrous combination of Anglican obduracy and the Puritans’ refusal to compromise over bishops. Instead, a series of acts unfairly known as the Clarendon Code brought back the High Anglicanism of Laud as the official national religion, to be enforced in every branch of the English sta
te structure. The Corporation Act of December 1661 required all town officials to swear to renounce the Covenant, take the Anglican Communion and obey the king. Bishops were restored to the Church and to the House of Lords. The Fourth Act of Uniformity in 1662 ordered all clergymen who refused to use the prayer book, who had not been ordained by a bishop and who would not renounce the Covenant to lose their livings. At this, a phenomenal 2,000 clergymen resigned from the Church of England.

  Previously, under the Commonwealth the different Puritan sects–the Independents, Baptists, Presbyterians and two new ones that sprang up in the 1650s, the Quakers (so called because they quaked at the spirit within them) and Socinians (who became known as Unitarians)–had regarded themselves as members of the Church of England. No longer. From the Clarendon Code dates the tradition of Dissent, or Nonconformity as it became known in the nineteenth century. With the departure of its most fervent ministers, much of the vigour and strength of religious feeling went outside the Church of England, accounting for its decline in the eighteenth century. The Methodism of John Wesley would be needed to revive its spiritual passion.

  Just as the forces that had provoked the Civil War were still present in Charles II’s government, albeit in diluted form, the more powerful ideas of Puritanism did not disappear, they simply went underground. The Clarendon Code had the effect of dividing England into two nations, one official, the other unofficial. Unable to participate in public life for the next 150 years and educated at their own high-minded academies, the Dissenters developed a mental independence that gave them a healthy lack of respect for the powers that be. The Puritanism which still existed within the Dissenters became an underground spring that infused the national life in the most curious and vital way. In the Nonconformist consciences it continued to be a force for reform and social change.

  There was an initial flurry of prosecutions of Dissenters, as the Conventicle Act of 1664 prevented more than four people assembling to worship without the Anglican prayer book–the writer John Bunyan, who was minister of a flock of Baptists in Bedfordshire, spent twelve years in prison, during which he wrote one of the masterpieces of English literature, Pilgrim’s Progress. But as time wore on the Clarendon Code was not always observed, as there were no church courts to ensure enforcement. In 1689 an Act of Toleration modified the laws, allowing Dissenters to worship in peace, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 which forbade all dissenting clergymen to come within five miles of a corporate town or their old living soon lapsed. Meanwhile energetic men prevented from becoming sheriffs, MPs, judges or even university students devoted themselves to practical activities like banking and manufacturing.

  Compared to the rest of Europe, England was extremely liberal, introducing religious tolerance a century before most European countries–in France Louis XIV would soon revoke the 1598 Edict of Nantes which permitted Protestant worship and political freedom. This tolerance owed a great deal to the gracious character of Charles II, who had originally wished to grant ‘liberty to tender consciences’. He had suffered too much at the hands of the religiously inclined (hence his celebrated quip, ‘Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman’) to like bigotry in any form. He even gave permission to the Quakers under William Penn, son of the Cromwellian admiral, to set up Pennsylvania in America as a proprietary colony so that they could worship unmolested. At their first meeting, this grave, good man would not remove his hat in Charles’s presence because he disapproved of kings. Thereupon Charles removed his own, saying it was the custom that one of them should be bare-headed.

  The new king was immensely popular. He possessed a zest for enjoyment–he was nicknamed the Merry Monarch–which mirrored his subjects’ yearning for a return to normality after the stern Puritan experiment. He led the way in a riot of parties, dancing and dissipation, consorting with actresses who were mistresses and mistresses who became duchesses. Restoration comedy by writers like Vanbrugh express the spirit of the age: amoral and lascivious. Throughout England games, festivals, gaiety, maypoles and Christmas all returned, for Christmas under the Commonwealth had been a day of fasting to atone for past sins.

  Charles II made yacht racing into a national sport, pitting his skills as a yachtsman against his brother the Duke of York. He also made horse racing at Newmarket into a fashionable activity, which is why it is often called the sport of kings. He loved the company of jockeys and was frequently observed chatting to them. Wherever he went he was followed by the little dogs with plumed ears and tails, which have ever since been known as King Charles spaniels. The sentimental English were entranced by the king’s informality. Unlike his stately father, he was always accessible and friendly, generally being the first to wave when people recognized him walking in Windsor Great Park.

  England, with its play-acting traditions established so strongly for over a century, had keenly missed the theatre, shut down by the Puritans. Now the gregarious king was to be seen almost every night at playhouses such as the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and at the new Italian musical genre called the opera. An orange-seller and actress called Nell Gwynne became one of his favourite mistresses. In the new air of freedom women like Aphra Behn became playwrights, for the Puritans had stressed the role of women as submissive to their husbands. The country was swept by mockery of the Puritans in poems like Hudibras by Samuel Butler which concerned the adventures of a Presbyterian knight, and satirical comedies of the sophisticated new manners like William Wycherley’s The Country Wife.

  The poet John Dryden who had celebrated Charles II’s return in his poem Astraea Redux was appointed poet laureate. Music, which had also been discouraged under the Cromwellians, was renewed in churches all over England. The new court painter Sir Peter Lely captured the risqué flavour of the Restoration, in the revealing dresses of the heavy-lidded beauties like Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, and Louise Duchess of Portsmouth who presided over the court. Almost all of them bore bastard children by Charles II, who was happy to recognize them as his own since his wife Catherine of Braganza was unable to conceive. Almost all of the sons were created dukes, with the result that many English dukes today descend from what used to be called the wrong side of the blanket.

  Even before the Restoration, seventeenth-century England had seen a host of important new scientific discoveries thanks to the liberating effect on thought of the Renaissance and Reformation. Science, which had been dead since the classical Greeks, revived mightily and in countless ways invisibly touched and improved the nation’s life. Farming techniques copied from the Dutch reclaimed land in the fens and East Anglia. By the 1670s new methods improved yields so much that the English were for the first time able to export corn. Before the Civil War Charles I’s doctor William Harvey had demonstrated the circulation of the blood as well as how embryos develop in the womb. By the middle of the century it had become a tradition in London for men interested in experimental science to have meetings together in what was called the ‘invisible college’, and in 1662 the distinguished members of this ‘invisible college’ were incorporated into the Royal Society, helped by a grant from Charles II. The lively and intellectually curious new king had scientific interests throughout his life, himself performing experiments as a hobby–though he mocked the Royal Society members for seeming to do nothing but weigh air. In fact the weighing of air by Robert Boyle as a means of discovering the properties of gases and his invention of an air pump was the starting point for one of the transforming inventions of the modern world, the steam engine, developed by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen in 1712.

  Perhaps the most celebrated Fellow of the Royal Society was the extraordinary mathematics professor Isaac Newton, born in 1642. He revolutionized the laws of physical science, which had long rested on Aristotelian calculations, when he worked out the rules of gravity after observing an apple drop to the ground. Newton’s work held good for the next 200 years. As the poet Alexander Pope would wittily put it:

  Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.

  G
od said, Let Newton be! and all was Light!

  English architecture, which had seen no important new public buildings during the twenty years of the Interregnum, began to celebrate the lush forms of the baroque: Christopher Wren, another Fellow, soon to be famous for rebuilding St Paul’s, designed the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. Meanwhile a convivial and courteous public life began to flourish in the new coffee and chocolate houses of London and the greater provincial cities which contrasted favourably with the boisterous character of public houses and inns. Coffee, chocolate and tea were fashionable new imports into England that attested to the exponential growth in English trade from Africa to Malaysia.

  Rump and Protectorate innovations considered to be of value, such as the Navigation Act of 1651, were re-enacted by the Cavalier Parliament to give them greater legal force, but the Cromwellian Union of England, Scotland and Ireland was repealed and their abolished local Parliaments were reinstated. In Scotland, however, the Covenanter movement had been a national phenomenon which was far more universal than its Puritan equivalent in England. Not only did widespread local rebellions greet the return of bishops and the tightening of English control over the Kirk, but thousands of Covenanters who refused to worship other than after their own fashion were imprisoned or killed for their beliefs and their leader Argyll was executed.