What's New About the Restoration?

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Harris

When I first began my researches into later Stuart history as a graduate student back in 1980, the Restoration was a relatively underdeveloped field of inquiry. Although there were a number of scholars producing excellent work in this area, there was not the same depth of scholarship as characterized study of the first half of the seventeenth century: wide gaps in our knowledge existed, and for some of the most crucial episodes of the period we were dependent upon a limited range of studies and dated works. The best general entrée into the period was still David Ogg's classic two-volumeEngland in the Reign of Charles II, first published in 1934! A suitable modern textbook did not emerge until 1978, with the publication of J. R. Jones'sCounty and Court: England 1658–1714, a book that had neither Ogg's range nor lively analytical style. For our understanding of why the monarchy was restored we were reliant upon a study that had come out in 1955, which was supplemented only in 1980 by Austin Woolrych's book-length “Historical Introduction” to volume seven of the Yale edition of theComplete Prose Works of John Milton. On the Exclusion Crisis we had J. R. Jones'sThe First Whigs, which had appeared in 1961, although for the first Tories we still needed to use Sir Keith Feiling's 1924History of the Tory Party. For the Glorious Revolution we had a book written by a man who tragically died (at a young age) before he could complete the work, and another self-consciously thought-provoking work designed to raise questions and suggest future avenues of research—both excellent studies in their own right, but hardly the plethora of monographs that we possessed for the mid-century revolution.

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. G. Horwitz

Within the last decade, the history of the often obscure efforts made to reach some modus vivendi between the Established Church and the Protestant Nonconformists after 1662 has attracted renewed scholarly attention.1 Recent works have stressed that during the generation dividing the Stuart Restoration from the “Glorious” Revolution, proposals for both comprehension and toleration were repeatedly mooted—sometimes in combination, and at other times in opposition to one another. But it was a scheme of limited toleration which was enacted by the “Convention” Parliament of 1689, while plans for comprehension were shelved by the Houses. Thereafter, as the late Dean of Winchester put it, “Comprehension…faded out of the realm of practical politics with the Non-juror schism and the consequent inaction of Convocation in 1689.”2


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-481
Author(s):  
Thomas Roebuck

Abstract Drawing on the evidence of correspondence and draft papers preserved primarily in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, this essay gives a detailed account of the genesis and editing of one of seventeenth-century British antiquarianism’s foremost works: the revised version of William Camden’s Britannia, published in 1695. It pays particular attention to Edmund Gibson’s role as editor of the project and demonstrates the diversity of kinds of antiquarian scholarship to be found within the book (showing that William Camden offered a wide-ranging model for antiquarian practice). The article then situates the Britannia within the context of the religio-political divisions provoked by the Glorious Revolution, showing how Edmund Gibson attempted to navigate those divisions. It concludes by assessing the 1695 Britannia’s place within the history of antiquarian scholarship.


Author(s):  
Georges Dicker

This chapter is a brief biography of John Locke. It summarizes how his fortunes waxed and waned under the regimes of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, King Charles II, King James II, and the “Glorious Revolution,” and it touches on his education at Westminster School and Christ College and on his ties to the Earl of Shaftesbury and to Lady Masham. The chapter also provides a brief history of Locke’s publishing career, including the Essay and political works such as the First Treatise of Government (a critique of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings) and the Second Treatise of Government (an outline of the bases for democracy and an influence on the U.S. Constitution).


Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.


1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
Dennis A. Rubini

William of Orange tried to be as absolute as possible. Inroads upon the power of the executive were fiercely resisted: indeed, William succeeded in keeping even the judiciary in a precarious state of independence. To maintain the prerogative and gain the needed supplies from parliament, he relied upon a mixed whig-tory ministry to direct court efforts. Following the Glorious Revolution, the whigs had divided into two principle groups. One faction led by Robert Harley and Paul Foley became the standard-bearers of the broadly based Country party, maintained the “old whig” traditions, did not seek office during William's reign, tried to hold the line on supply, and led the drive to limit the prerogative. The “junto,” “court,” or “new” whigs, on the other hand, were led by ministers who, while in opposition during the Exclusion crisis, held court office, aggressively sought greater offices, and wished to replace monarchy with oligarchy. They soon joined tory courtiers in opposing many of the Country party attempts to place additional restrictions upon the executive. To defend the prerogative and gain passage for bills of supply, William also developed techniques employed by Charles II. By expanding the concept and power of the Court party, he sought to bring together the executive and legislative branches of government through a large cadre of crown office-holders (placemen) who sat, voted, and directed the votes of others on behalf of the government when matters of importance arose in the Commons. So too, William claimed the right to dissolve parliament and call new elections not on a fixed date, as was to become the American practice, but at the time deemed most propitious over first a three-year and then (after 1716) a seven year period.


2001 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 351-390
Author(s):  
C S Knighton ◽  
Timothy Wilson

In January 1678 John Knight, the Serjeant Surgeon of Charles II, sent to Samuel Pepys a ‘Discourse containing the History of the Cross of St. George, and its becoming the Sole Distinction = Flag, Badge or Cognizance of England, by Sea and Land’. Knight argued that St George's cross should become the dominant feature in English flags and supported his argument with a history of the cross.A manuscript copy of this discourse, with Knight's original drawings, survives in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and is published here. A brief biography of Knight is presented and an account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century controversies about St George. The latter was an issue which caused acrimony between Royalists and Puritans. An Appendix reconstructs Knight's library, principally consisting of books concerning heraldry, topography and history.


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