The Restoration

Charles II, Coronation portrait
by John Michael Wright, c. 1661.
Public domain

The Restoration of Charles II was both an event and a process. The King’s peaceful accession ... put an end to twenty years of internecine war. What were left were the intractable problems that had created the conflict and the bitter legacy it had engendered (Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed. Britain 1630-1714, 1996, p. 216).

Restoration England was a society that desperately wanted to be able to forget its past, but which forever remained haunted by it. (Tim Harris, Restoration. Charles II and his Kingdoms, 2005, p. 46). 

The story is a great deal more complicated than a simple narrative of the merry monarch presiding over the reopening of the theatres.

A decisive shift? 

The Restoration was an attempt to put the clock back. Charles II’s rule was dated from 1649 rather than 1660. An Act of August 1660 ordained that 29 May be kept as a perpetual anniversary of thanksgiving for his escape. Partly out of a feeling for  constitutional propriety, the Convention Parliament that had summoned the king to England did not impose any conditions on him. 

However, the clock was turned back to 1641 not 1640. The constitutional reforms of 1641 – the destruction of the prerogative courts, the abolition of the Crown’s feudal revenue, and prerogative taxes such as Ship Money – all stayed in place. But the issue of the militia, which had led directly to the Civil War, was settled in the king's favour. He retained ‘sole right of command’ over the militia, though day-to-day control was delegated to the lords lieutenant.

In some respects, the monarchy was strengthened as a result of the Interregnum. The shock and horror of Charles I’s execution drove some towards support for a strong authoritarian monarchy and religious intolerance. This was part of a Europe-wide trend. Others were less willing to abandon religious and parliamentary liberties. The Restoration was full of ambiguities, and the great constitutional and religious issues of the Civil War remained unsettled. 


The character of Charles II
Charles sailed to England on the Naseby (hastily re-christened The Royal Charles!) and landed at Dover - the town celebrated all night. On Tuesday 29 May he entered London. What type of man was he?

Restoration House, Rochester,
where Charles
spent his first night in England.
The model for Satis House in
Great Expectations

He had had a very chequered life. In 1644, at the age of fourteen, he had been appointed commander of the king’s western forces in the civil war and subsequently fled abroad. In February 1649 he had been proclaimed King of Scots and crowned in the following year. After his defeat at Worcester in 1651 he had set up his own court in exile, taking refuge in France, Germany and Holland.


According to Bishop Burnet: Charles had ‘a strange command of himself … the greatest art of concealing himself of any man alive, so that those about him cannot tell when he is ill or well pleased’. According to the Marquess of Halifax: ‘he lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them but he was not in love with them.’ (Quoted Smith, The Double Crown, 1998, 204)

His religious beliefs are enigmatic. He seems to have had sympathy with Catholicism and to have favoured a broad and comprehensive Church of England. His ecclesiastical instincts were towards conciliation and acceptance of diversity. His strongest political conviction was his belief in the royal prerogative.

The royal family

Charles brought back with him the surviving members of the royal family:

1. The Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, who visited England in October and was granted a generous pension of £60,000 to compensate her for the loss of her dowry. She was aged 51 and her political and religious views were unchanged. She paid two further visits to England but was not comfortable there and finally returned to her native France in 1665. She died in 1669.
2. Charles's aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the 'winter queen', returned in 1661 and died in February 1662
3. Her son Rupert was made a privy councillor. He spent a great deal of time dabbling in scientific experiments and introduced the art of mezzotint printing into England. He died in London in 1682.
4. James, Duke of York, the heir to the throne, was made lord high admiral and warden of the Cinque Ports
5. Henry Duke of Gloucester, Charles I's third son.
6. Mary Orincess of Orange, Charles I's eldest daughter, the Princess Royal.
7. Henrietta Anne, the youngest daughter. In March 1661 she was married to Philippe duc d’Orléans, the brother of Louis XIV. Her French title was Madame (the equivalent of 'Duchess of York').

In September smallpox killed the Duke of Gloucester and at Christmas the Princess of Orange died of the same illness.

A scandal

Shortly after the Restoration, the Duke of York confessed to his brother that he was precontracted to Anne Hyde, daughter of Edward Hyde his lord chancellor, whom he had met in 1656 when she was lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary of Orange. He had probably not expected to become a royal duke so quickly. The whole business was deeply embarrassing for Hyde who had known nothing about the liaison. James’s family were outraged, but the marriage was genuine and a second marriage ceremony took place on 3 September 1660. On 22 October 1660 Anne gave birth to a son, though James was not present and did not send his good wishes. (The child died of convulsions when he was seven months old; two daughters, Mary and Anne, were born in 1662 and 1665 respectively.)

For the full story, see Maureen Waller, Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart princesses who stole their father's throne (Sceptre, 2002).

Officers of State

Charles recognised political realities by including constitutional royalists - men such as Hyde who had always argued for a balanced constitution - and former parliamentarians within his (large) privy council. Members included:
(a) Edward Hyde (1609-74) (created Earl of Clarendon, 1661), lord chancellor.
(b) General George Monck (1608-70) (now Duke of Albemarle), captain-general of the Forces, lord lieutenant of Ireland.
(c) Edward Montagu (1625-72) (now Earl of Sandwich), lord chamberlain of the household, Samuel Pepys' cousin and patron
(d) Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-83) (created Lord Ashley; later Earl of Shaftesbury), chancellor of the exchequer (1661).
This pattern was repeated in the localities, where ex-Royalists found themselves reluctantly working alongside ex-parliamentarians.

The Court

From the start Charles made the court once more the setting for the rituals of sacred kingship. He immediately restored the ceremony of touching for the 'king’s evil', and touched 90,000 people for scrofula in the course of his reign. He did not see this as conflicting with his patronage of the Royal Society (founded 1660). (After 1714 British monarchs no longer touched for scrofula, but Louis XVI touched for it after his coronation in 1775, laying hands on 2,400 sufferers.)

Charles II touching for the king's evil
The Wellcome Library, London

In a further effort to underline the antiquity of the Stuart dynasty he re-established Windsor Castle as one of the principal seats of the court, embarking on the first large-scale remodelling of the royal apartments since the reign of Henry VIII. The result was a series of baroque rooms of state that outshone everything in the increasingly dilapidated Whitehall palace. 

The old palace of Whitehall
destroyed by fire 1698.
Public domain

The Restoration settlement

The Restoration took place in stages. It involved negotiation and compromise among a number of groups and interests. The Convention Parliament drew up the first settlement, dealing with large and obvious problems. 

Finance: It was essential to constitutional harmony that crown and parliament agreed on a working financial arrangement. But this did not happen. The Convention gave a grant for paying the arrears of the navy, but this was short of what was needed. The Convention calculated that, in compensation for the loss of feudal revenues such as wardship, the crown needed a settled income of £1.2 million (a figure drawn out of a hat?) but it never provided it. In November the Convention decided to grant the Commonwealth liquor excise to Charles for life. The duty was raised on beer, cider, mead and strong waters, and also on coffee, tea and chocolate per liquid gallon, as sold in the coffee houses. It was estimated that this would bring Charles an income of c. £400,000 pa and customs duties a similar sum, but this still left the crown short of money. The economic recession of the 1660s did not help crown finances.

There was no long-term strategy behind the financial settlement. MPs did not understand the complexities of public finances and underestimated the needs of the crown. Charles and his ministers were unwilling to court unpopularity by demanding high taxes, following the unprecedentedly high taxation of the Cromwellian era. The result was that when the Convention broke up, the crown was in debt.

Indemnity and revenge: The Convention sensibly resisted the demands of the extreme Cavaliers and in August it approved an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion which pardoned all but those named individuals who had been closely connected with the execution of Charles I. In January the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton were exhumed and hung up at Tyburn.

Twenty-nine individuals were sentenced to execution by hanging, drawing and quartering – in all, ten suffered this horrible sentence in October 1660. Pepys, who witnessed Thomas Harrison's execution, described it as ‘a bloody week’. 

The Convention also worked out a settlement of confiscated estates and forced sales of land that attempted (unsuccessfully) to alienate as few interests as possible. The royalists were disillusioned. Those (about 5000 in number) who had sold their estates to enable them to pay fines did not receive their land back, and the king did nothing to help them. They felt bitter and humiliated determined to wreck any plans for a comprehensive Church.

Religion was an intractable problem. The Church of England was to be restored, but what kind of Church? In the Declaration of Breda, Charles had promised ‘liberty for tender consciences’. Some non-Anglicans  argued for a wide, comprehensive national Church that would also accommodate moderate Presbyterians. These Presbyterians were well aware that in 1650 Charles had taken the Covenant.

But Charles was battling against an intolerant Anglican reaction, and a comprehensive Church was never a viable possibility. 

The British dimension

Many of the problems that best the Restoration were related to the difficulties in managing the multiple kingdom inheritance of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. 

The temporary political union of England and Scotland brought about by Cromwell in the 1650s was dissolved at the Restoration. The two countries again had separate legal systems, administrative and ecclesiastical structures. English and Scots regarded each other as foreigners. 

On 14 May 1660 Charles II was proclaimed in Edinburgh as King of Great Britain and Ireland, and the predominant mood was one of jubilation. Once again England and Scotland were only bound together by the fact that the same monarch happened to wear both crowns. But Charles was not grateful for Scotland’s support for the Stewarts. He exacted revenge on the Presbyterians by imprisoning the leaders of the Cromwellian regime and ordering the execution of the marquess of Argyll in May 1661. A subservient parliament re-imposed episcopacy under the leadership of James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews. By the end of 1663 about 270 ministers, over one in four, had been deprived of their livings.

In Ireland the main issue was land. The Cromwellian conquest had resulted in a mass dispossession of Catholic landowners and land grants to soldiers. The Irish parliament that assembled in May 1661 included only one Catholic, and the following year it passed a strongly anti-Catholic Act of Settlement. Most soldiers and adventurers were required to surrender one third of the lands they had gained during the Interregnum to ‘innocent papists’, but this was quite insufficient to appease the Catholics, who retained only about 22 per cent of Irish land.

Religion lay at the heart of Ireland’s instability. 80 per cent of the population were still Catholic, while only 10 per cent were members of the established Church of Ireland. By the end of the 1660s Catholics enjoyed a large amount of de facto toleration, but this did not tackle the fundamental problem. The Restoration settlement settled nothing in Ireland.

Conclusion

The Restoration left most of the basic questions unanswered.

1. What was the exact balance of power between king and parliament? How was the Crown to be financed?
2. How would the restored Church of England deal with religious dissent?
3. Would the king be successful as a multiple monarch governing three kingdoms?