The Restoration: āAs to things of State - the King settled and loved of allā
The Compromise Settlement of Charles II
King Charles II by John Michael Wright. Source: Wikipedia
FOR MANY former supporters of the Parliamentary cause, the Restoration must have been hard to take. For all the warm words of the Declaration of Breda, it must have felt to those that had followed John Pym, Arthur Heselrige, Oliver Cromwell and John Lambert, and especially the comrades of John Lilburne, that their own world had been turned upside down. For the Restoration, in so many ways, was precisely that. Not only was Charles II settled on his throne which in truth, by 1660, all but the most ardent republicans believed was the only way out of the constitutional impasse the Commonwealth had found itself in, but the House of Lords was re-established; the Church of England, including a hierarchy of bishops was reintroduced; the New Model Army was abolished and even the Divine Right of Kings was reinstated. It must have seemed to the advocates of the Good Old Cause that all those years of tumult, death and revolution were for naught: the Monarchy and all its works was back with a vengeance.
And of course, there was indeed vengeance. As described last time, the regicides that were still alive were pursued mercilessly by the new government, even the dead not being safe from the Kingās wrath. In addition, the so-called āCavalier Parliamentā consisting of triumphal Royalist MPs, presided in many respects over a victorās peace. The disestablishment of the New Model Army was, after the executions of the regicides, the most visible sign of a restored monarchy. The Army had been the instrument of Charles Iās defeat and the constant protector of the Commonwealth, and it had also been a major political player that forcibly dissolved Parliament after Parliament. To see this formidable military force that had destroyed the Royalist armies, crushed the Scots and ended the Irish Rebellion, simply disappear was no clearer sign that not only was the Parliamentary cause dead, but that the gravest threat to the Stuart regime was also no more - and without a shot being fired. The successor regiments that later became the Coldstream Guards and the Royal Horse Guards, comprised the core of a 7,000 man militia, loyal solely to the monarch - a situation that Charles I had long craved. These regiments would become the basis of the standing British Army, whose oath of loyalty remains to the monarch - an echo of the settlement of Englandās civil wars.
Charlesā religious settlement was, on the face of it, a restoration of the Anglican Church in its prewar form. Episcopalianism was back, including in Scotland, supported by a new Book of Common Prayer. Bishops were also readmitted to a restored House of Lords, where they sit still. Despite Charlesā Breda promises of religious toleration, the Solemn League and Covenant was repealed, and the cause which had spurred the Scots into rebellion and war against the Kingās government in the late 1630s was effectively suppressed. Although Charles himself was personally quite tolerant of different religious persuasions, including notoriously, Roman Catholicism, his Parliament was not. The confident Cavaliers remembered how hard the Presbyterians had tried to enforce their version of Protestantism on the three kingdoms; how the rule of the Major-Generals had tried to squeeze all joy out of Christian worship and, recalled with horror, the republicanism and threat to land ownership that millennial sects, sheltering within the ranks of the Levellers, had tried to introduce. A number of anti- Puritan bills were passed, most notably the Corporation Act of 1661 (which excluded non-Anglicans from public office) and the Five Mile Act of 1665 (which banned non-Anglican ministers from their former livings). These Acts effectively excluded Presbyterians and other low church groups from participating in the new political or religious establishment. This led ultimately to these disenfranchised faithful into forming their own churches. They called themselves Nonconformists and Dissenters, eventually formalising themselves into the various strands of Methodism. Within these churches the spirit of anti-Royalist and Anglican sentiment remained, leading ultimately to eighteenth century radicalism and part of the impulse that fuelled the desire for independence within Britainās American colonies.
Scotland was freed of military occupation and its Parliament restored, but government garrison troops remained and Scotland never recovered the independent swagger it had enjoyed earlier in the century when it was able to interfere in the affairs of England and influence the outcomes of the civil wars with easy confidence. With its government impoverished and subservient, its independent military strength non-existent, its religion subordinated and the fault line between Highland and Lowland populations exacerbated by the civil wars, Scotland was a shadow of its prewar self. The days of routine Scottish invasions of England were over forever. In less than fifty years, Scotlandās mercantile class, faced with bankruptcy following catastrophic economic decisions and ill-advised colonial adventures, would petition the English Parliament and Crown for an Act of Union, granted in 1707, which would make the United Kingdom a political, as well as a monarchical, reality.
In Ireland, Charlesā government was focused on ensuring rebellion did not recur and made great efforts to rehabilitate, and reconcile with, the landowning Old English aristocracy and breaking its religious solidarity with the Old Irish rural workers and peasants that had driven so much of the rebellionās early success. Charlesā own pro-Catholic sympathies helped this process, but he also did little to restrain Scottish Protestant settlement in the north and west, thus sowing the seeds of a sectarian conflict that would get ever more vicious over the next three hundred years.
But the Restoration was not absolute and Charles did not intend it to be, whatever the attitudes of the Cavalier Parliament. Charles had not spent half his life prior to his return on the run in order to simply repeat the mistakes of his father. Although not the constitutional monarch envisaged by George Monck, Charles nonetheless attempted to rule in partnership with Parliament. For Charles, his Divine Right to rule was a device to secure his legitimacy, not a principle by which a king should govern. There were several political factors that caused Charles to eventually dissolve the Cavalier Parliament in 1679, but new elections were held immediately. Unlike his father, Charles was never tempted by Personal Rule and was rarely in dispute with his Parliaments, unlike his predecessor governments. Parliamentary rule was solidified under Charlesā settlement in a way unimaginable in the years leading up to the civil wars.
Similarly, for all the anti-Puritanism of his regime, there was no systematic persecution of dissenters and no legal requirement for his subjects to adopt the new Prayer Book or the Anglican Communion. In Ireland, the ferocious oppression of Catholics and Irish self-determination was still in the future, and that would be driven principally by Protestant settlers, exacerbated significantly by the renewal of civil conflict in Ireland in the late 1680s. Charles was a cautious and astute man. His love affair with particularly, the English, population, had significantly dissipated by the end of his reign, but all his subjects, whatever their views of his government, were grateful to him for ensuring peace was maintained and that the conflicts that had led the inhabitants of the British Isles to fight and kill each other for years, were not reignited.
The immediate view of history, that lasted well into the nineteenth century, was that the British civil wars and the republican experiment were anomalies, best forgotten. The skill of the Stuart and Hanoverian regimes in suggesting the civil wars were no more than a family quarrel, quickly forgiven and forgotten, is the reason why there is no direct link between the proto-socialism of the Putney Debates and the the later Radicalism of the eighteenth century. Issues such as land reform and universal suffrage were effectively barred from public debate for 150 years.
Charlesā later reign did contain conflict and there was even a Radical attempt to kidnap the King at one point, but the most dangerous issue was that of the succession. A new political Parliamentary party, with a sneaking admiration for the Good Old Cause, called the Whigs, was formed determined to prevent the accession of Charlesā brother the openly Roman Catholic James, to the throne given the absence of a legitimate heir to Charles. A staunchly Royalist group which became known as the Tories formed to oppose the Whigs and support the Stuart succession. Thus the contours of future Parliamentary debate and factionalism began to take shape.
In February 1685, Charles died. There was, in the event, no challenge initially to James ascending the throne as King James II. However, the new monarch resembled his father in a haughty attitude and political ineptitude. The conflicts that drove civil wars would be reprised and, once again, absolute monarchy would be the loser.
