Search results
councillors. 7 The Adventurers were informed that they would eventually get a meeting with Lambert, but only after he had assessed the claims of both the army and the army’s commissaries. 8 Now furious, the Adventurers decided to bypass the interim Council of State and to confront the council of army officers directly. Thomas Andrews and Stephen Estwick delivered a petition to the army officers on 20 May. 9 Estwick delivered a short speech demanding the restoration of parliament and new elections according to ‘the ancient fundamental laws of the nation’. 10 The
This volume challenges a traditional period divide of 1660, exploring continuities with the decades of civil war, the Republic and Restoration and shedding new light on religious, political and cultural conditions before and after the restoration of church and monarchy. The volume marks a significant development in transdisciplinary studies, including, as it does, chapters on political theory, religion, poetry, pamphlets, theatre, opera, portraiture, scientific experiment and philosophy. Chapters show how unresolved issues at national and local level, residual republicanism and religious dissent, were evident in many areas of Restoration life, and recorded in plots against the regime, memoirs, diaries, historical writing, pamphlets and poems. An active promotion of forgetting, the erasing of memories of the Republic and the reconstruction of the old order did not mend the political, religious and cultural divisions that had opened up during the civil wars. In examining such diverse genres as women’s writing, the prayer book, prophetic writings, the publications of the Royal Society, histories of the civil wars by Clarendon and Hobbes, the poetry and prose of Milton and Marvell, plays and opera, court portraiture and political cartoons the volume substantiates its central claim that the Restoration was conditioned by continuity and adaptation of linguistic and artistic discourses.
6 Witchcraft in the Restoration By comparison with the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, there were very few prosecutions and executions for witchcraft during the Restoration. But despite the decline in formal indictments and convictions, lively debate about witchcraft began again during the civil war and continued, and if anything intensified, during the Restoration. Witchcraft belief, at least at the level of educated debate, had become divorced from the issue of witchcraft persecution.1 Belief in the existence of witches as agents of the devil had
Charles II inherited the English colonies by right, and Restoration parliaments did little to direct or to lessen his powers over his American patrimony. The Navigation Act had limited impact on the crown’s colonial decisions, and proposals to annex Jamaica and New England to the crown by legislation came to nothing. 1 Thus, while the crown was forced to adapt to
The fall of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate threw the London presbyterians once again into turmoil. With the general fear of the Army and the sects prevalent throughout the nation, the London presbyterians re-entered the political stage in a manner not seen since 1648. Recent historians of the Restoration have noted, as Tim Harris comments, that ‘much of the pro-Restoration sentiment’ from late 1659 ‘was presbyterian in tone’. 1 This chapter explores the London presbyterians and the politics of the restoration of
23 Chapter 1 1660: restoration and revolution1 Blair Worden O n the face of it the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 is not hard to explain. An unforeseen and mostly unwanted civil war had had unforeseen and mostly unwanted consequences. The fracturing of the parliamentarian cause by the regicide; the inability of the regimes of the 1650s to root themselves in public feeling or establish coherent principles of government; their dependence on military rule and on the massive taxation that sustained the army and navy; the powers and intrusiveness of a swollen
, impairment and early death among the working classes was clear in the minds of medical practitioners and social reformers alike. Indeed, the ‘condition of the masses’ novels, as well as labour and sanitary reforms undertaken at this time, testify to the concern for the state of the working classes among the middle class more broadly. ‘Restoration for a time to industry and usefulness’  27 The physical state of productive labourers was a preoccupying concern of
Chapter 7 Mis-commemoration after the Restoration S peech and writing were not the only means by which British people articulated memories after the Restoration. Historians have shown that the mnemonic landscapes of the four kingdoms during the reigns of the later Stuarts were also characterised by a culture of annual commemoration. Together with the anniversaries of the Gunpowder Plot and the coronation of Elizabeth I on 5 and 17 November, people were called to remember the execution of Charles I on 30 January and the Restoration of his son on 29 May.1 These
5 Ideas of panegyric in early Restoration comedy Then to Westminster-hall where I heard how the Parliament had this day dissolved themselfs and did pass very cheerfully through the Hall and the Speaker without his Mace. The whole Hall was joyful thereat, as well as themselfs, and now they begin to talk loud of the king. Tonight I am told that yesterday, about 5 a-clock in the afternoon, one came with a ladder to the great Exchange and wiped with a brush the Inscripcion that was upon King Charles, and that there was a great bonefire made in the Exchange and
Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic Chapter 12 The Restoration episcopate and the interregnum: autobiography, suffering and professions of faith Sarah Ward Clavier1 R estoration bishops came in all flavours: Laudians, Calvinists and those who have apparently left so little indication of their religious views that they still remain a mystery to posterity. They ranged from authoritarian micromanagers to those who seemed barely interested in the business of their individual dioceses. On the whole, however, it is difficult to imagine the events of