The French connection: luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II

The luxury of the court of Charles II is well-known and usually seen as reflecting the personal failings of the king or as a reaction to the Puritanism of the preceding regime. This chapter argues, rather, that Charles II adopted luxury as a mode of power modelled on his cousin, the powerful French king, Louis XIV. Portraiture of the French and English courts shows striking and largely unexplored links as, under the influence of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth and reigning mistress in the English court in the 1670s, French painter Henri Gascar executed portraits of Charles II, Portsmouth, and others closely drawn from compositions in the court of Louis XIV. Although court portraiture thus changed within England (showing links, rather, with continental models), a different kind of continuity can be seen when objections to luxury mark observers of the Restoration court, from former republicans to royalists.

‘The Sport of Bishop-Hunting’: Marvell and the neo-Laudians

This chapter examines the narratives and counter-narratives about the Civil War that developed after the Restoration. The most contested figure in these narratives was Archbishop William Laud, regarded by Thomas Hobbes and others as personally responsible for the outbreak of the conflict in the 1630s. Laud’s legacy – embraced by the so-called neo-Laudians at Oxford – was debated in a pamphlet exchange between two of the period’s major satirists: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Butler. Their disagreement was at its sharpest concerning a pre-Civil War controversy over licensing a sermon in favour of the Forced Loan by an absolutist cleric, Robert Sibthorp. Marvell’s version of events in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) proved influential in opposition Whig circles, eventually being taken up by the Earl of Shaftesbury and John Locke.

The view from the devil’s mountain: Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes, and the past, present and future of the Church of England

The lives, and political thought, of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes, were closely interwoven. In many ways opposed, their views on the relationship between Church and State have often been seen as less far apart, with Clarendon sharing Hobbes’s Erastianism and concerns about clerical assertiveness in the 1660s. But Clarendon’s writings on Church-State relations during the 1670s provide little evidence of concern about clerical involvement in politics, and demonstrate his vigorous adherence to a fairly conventional view among early seventeenth-century churchmen about the proper boundaries to royal interference in the Church; his worries about attempts to push further the implications of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs are evident in his writings against Hobbes, as are his even greater anxieties, exacerbated by the conversion of his daughter, the Duchess of York, about the dangers of Roman Catholic encroachment.

Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65

This chapter challenges conventional and critically resilient scholarly periodization of theatre in which 1660 is seen as inaugurating innovative theatre practice. It demonstrates that the reframing of the drama by William Davenant and Richard Flecknoe during the 1650s left a legacy to the Restoration, a legacy that in texts of the 1660s Davenant and Flecknoe attempted to obviate. Theatre historians have been subsequently reluctant to acknowledge continuities in dramatic practice and theatre production. This chapter argues that the influence of the drama of the 1650s was wide-ranging. Reformed aesthetics, the scenic stage, the female performer, political satire and the representation of love and honour in new world contexts, all aspects of the production of Commonwealth drama, are variously reconstituted in plays of the Restoration stage.

Introduction: From Republic to Restoration

FROM Republic to Restoration brings together the work of historians, literary scholars, cultural and music historians with a shared interest in the crossing of the common period boundary of 1660. While recent, more inclusive studies of the seventeenth century have dislodged 1660 as a rigid historiographical divide, relatively few critics have examined the continuum of Republic to Restoration, investigating the features of the Restoration in the context of the legacies, traumas and achievements of the Republic....

Restoration opera and the failure of patronage

Despite experiments in the 1650s, through-sung opera failed to gain a firm foothold in Restoration England. Explanations for this circumstance have focussed on English taste, the finances of London’s theatre companies, and the popularity of native ‘dramatick opera’. While these were obstacles to the progress of through-sung opera in England, they do not explain why Thomas Betterton and the United Company ventured a rumoured £4000 on the production of Dryden’s and Grabu’s Albion and Albanius (1685).The lack of royal patronage has been overlooked as a barrier to the development of opera in England. Charles II displayed an ambivalent attitude to through-sung opera (English or otherwise) throughout his reign. His reticence to provide direct financial support was the most significant factor in the failure of the art form to find an important place in English culture of the Restoration period.

Choosing a captain back for Egypt: Milton and the Restoration

Milton as a republican viewed the restoration of kingship in 1660 with dread. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, like the last two books of Paradise Lost, have a specific Restoration historical context, at a time of persecution of former commonwealthsmen and religious Dissenters. In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s protagonist struggles against despair, the feeling that he has been abandoned by God, while recognizing his own responsibility for the humiliating slavery into which he has been plunged. Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, published in a single volume in 1671, in their different ways both concern themselves with the problems and temptations facing those who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society. The two works explore alternative paths for ‘the spirits of just men long opprest’: in the one case, patience, suffering, bearing ‘tribulations, injuries, insults’ courageously, not expecting redress, and in the other, violent resistance, the slaughter of one’s enemies, in an ending of Milton’s tragedy which has often puzzled and disturbed readers.

‘Plots’ and dissent: the abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663

This chapter examines, in the significant contexts of contemporary plot mentalité and plot literature, a supposed plot to stage an armed rising on 12 October 1663, a rising in North-East England that would begin across the counties of Yorkshire, Durham and Westmorland, and erupt into a nationwide rebellion. It raises questions as to whether the 1663 plot was — as it has been frequently depicted — a dangerous threat to the government by some ‘desperate men’, supporters of the ‘good old cause’, who wanted to bring back the English Republic. Or, can it be seen as a mere folie du jour from a few scattered and disgruntled dissenters? Or was it, as some thought at the time, a conveniently manufactured and exaggerated affair designed for public consumption by a government who were scaremongering for their own reasons? In effect, the chapter asks just how serious was this plot and its potential Northern rebellion.

‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’:1 political prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis – the revision of a republican mode

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).

‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’: republicanism, exclusion, and the name of king in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus

After Titus Oates’s ‘popish forgeries’, which prompted a crisis in the succession, the production of Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was undoubtedly provocative. The play ostensibly celebrates the birth of a republic. This essay questions the conventional Whig reading of the play as one of republican heroism. As was the case with many anti-monarchical writings of the 1640s and 1650s, the play pivots on the distinction between ‘king’ and ‘tyrant’. But, in fact, Brutus expels the ‘name’ and retains the ‘thing’, the substance of kingship, investing his consulship with the power which was once Tarquin’s. Eventually he is seen as ‘more Tyrannical than any Tarquin’ (5.1.114). Nevertheless, the representation of Brutus apparently proved too subtle (or maybe too cryptic) an interpretation for contemporaries and the play was (safely) consigned to censure, lest it stir the bugbear of a new ‘Commonwealth without a king’.