Restoration and Revolution in Britain: A Political History of the Era of Charles II and the Glorious Revolution
by Gary S De Krey
Palgrave Macmillan, £21.99
Our abiding impression of the Restoration of King Charles II is of the Merry Monarch, his orange-selling actress mistress Nell Gwyn, lots of royal rumpy pumpy, lots of illegitimate children – the right royal bastards – who all ended up as the Duke or Duchess of Somewhereorother and a deliriously happy population of plebs utterly delighted to see the back of Oliver Cromwell and his dour, Puritanical Commonwealth. My, how they cheered to have a king back on the throne! And our abiding impression of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is of a bloodless, seamless and civilised way of settling the succession.
Except it wasn’t really like that. The English Civil War – or revolution – of 1642-46 was fought along the faultlines of class, religion and ideology right across this country. People rose up in defence of, among other things, Parliamentary democracy, and cut off the head of a devious and despotic little king, Charles I, who tried to rule as an absolute monarch.
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was the result not of victory on the battlefield or a sudden sea change in public opinion; an attempted royalist rising by Colonel George Booth in 1659 was quickly and easily suppressed. The monarchy was restored by the pragmatic calculations of a Presbyterian general, Black George Monck, who realised that the republic was disintegrating after the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. The fratricidal self-destruction of the various parties in the Rump Parliament, the Army and the Protectorate created a vacuum into which Monck stepped by marching south from Coldstream with 7,000 troops and arranging for the election of the Convention Parliament which invited Charles I’s son to return from the Netherlands at the head of a reformed, much modified and much-diminished monarchy.
In the Declaration of Breda, issued a month before he came back to England, Charles promised “liberty to tender consciences” but the reactionary reality of life under the Cavalier Parliament elected in 1661 – and not replaced until 1679 – was an Act of Uniformity and a series of punitive laws imposing restrictions on dissenters of all kinds, including moderate Presbyterians.
Charles II was not a very merry monarch. Anything that could go wrong did go wrong: think fire, plague and the disastrous Dutch wars. But his most pressing problem, at least towards the end of his reign, was his failure to produce, with his wife, a legitimate heir to the throne.
That made his brother James the heir apparent; but James was a Roman Catholic. Just before he died in 1685 Charles accepted his brother’s offer to be received back into the arms of the Mother Church, confessed (at least some of) his sins and was granted the Roman Catholic rite of absolution. Even James’ supporters in Parliament – the Tories – were worried about his absolutist tendencies while his opponents – the Whigs – feared he intended to restore Roman Catholicism to this country.
His three years on the throne were an unmitigated disaster. After the failure of the Protestant insurrection led by Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, the enthusiasm of Hanging Judge George Jeffreys for sending Monmouth’s followers to the gallows (or to slavery in the West Indies) alienated even those who had been initially supportive of the king.
His Declaration of Indulgence became a test of strength with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and a group of bishops who were tried and acquitted and, when released, celebrated up and down the land as guardians of the liberties of this country. Had James been smarter – like his brother – he would have realised that he was not expected to enforce penalties against Roman Catholics as long as he made no attempt to repeal them.
The final straw, though, was the birth on June 10 1688 of a Roman Catholic son and heir: James Francis Edward Stuart (who would become the Old Pretender). James’ attempts to make the country Catholic again, in thrall to France and Spain as well as to Rome, was something up with which the Protestant people of this country would not put.
Which was why Parliament promptly invited James’ eldest daughter Mary, a Protestant, and her husband William, Prince of Orange, to intervene in English affairs. As head of the Dutch Republic, he was the hero of Protestant resistance to the Catholic expansionism of Louis XIV on the continent.
William landed at Torbay on November 5 with an army of English and Scottish regiments as well as Dutch and German troops. James marched west to meet him but, as his forces melted away, opted for flight instead of fight and made an ignominious run for France, dumping the Great Seal in the River Thames on the way.
James had learned nothing from the fate of his father; he was a divine right absolutist who wanted to turn back the constitutional clock. By contrast, at the coronation of William and Mary on April 11 1689, a Declaration of Rights drawn up by the second Convention Parliament in 30 years was read which clarified – as a condition of its authority – the crown’s commitment to the reforms of the Long Parliament and the Protectorate.
There were to be free elections and annual parliaments; no extra-Parliamentary taxation; no resurrection of special ecclesiastical or civil courts; no royal power to suspend the law; no standing army and no Roman Catholics on the throne. Government in the reign of William and Mary had nothing in common with the Stuart monarchy of 1625 (when Charles I came to the throne) or 1660. It had everything to do with the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary democracy to come.
As Gary De Krey, Professor of History at St Olaf College in Minnesota, shows in this very readable book, the restoraton of Charles II papered over only temporarily the bitter political, religious, ideological and geographical faultlines of Britain; and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was neither a seamless nor a bloodless succession, particularly for Catholics in Scotland and Ireland. He concludes by saying that no monarch after 1689 “ever governed in the manner that Charles II and James II adopted in the 1680s. The revolution altered the balance of king-in-parliament in Parliament’s favour. In fact, the political assumptions about Parliament, Protestantism and the crown that Charles sought to suppress after the Oxford Parliament became the operating assumptions of the state after the Glorious Revolution despite Tory reservations about them.”
Keith Richmond
