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De witt sayth that the King is little to be considered for he is not yett setled and … he hath no mony. make no doubt, but that his Majesty will … in a short time be considered in Europe as he ought to be … God be thanked England is England, and his Ma[jes]ty hath a Parliament who will not suffer him to want what is fitting for his honour and the defence of his subjects. RESTORATION AND STATEBUILDING Restoration was not an experience peculiar to seventeenth-century England. Such a process, not only of reconstruction but of memory and mourning, is necessary wherever a profound upheaval has occurred. Restoration of monarchy in England in 1660 was part of a much more complicated and long-lasting process. This had many contemporary parallels in central Europe in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. Peter Dickson was accordingly right to contextualise his study of The Financial Revolution in England within a general period of European ‘administrative and economic reconstruction’ following the ‘war clouds of the terrible middle decades of the seventeenth century’. As in England, continental reconstruction had a pre-history, stretching back to the period before 1648. While institutional in focus, this attempt by shattered contemporaneous societies to reconstruct the basis of their order, their peace and their moorings in time was far from simply an institutional matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I doubt not, but many men, have been contented to see the late troubles in England, out of an imitation of the Low Countries; supposing there needed no more to grow rich than to change, as they had done, the forme of their Government … And as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans. INTRODUCTION: RESTORING THE SENSE OF POSSIBILITY In the previous chapter we examined two sets of political fears. One was for the continuity, indeed survival, of parliaments. The other was for the efficacy, indeed survival, of royal power. Both existed across the century, and were central to every episode of the troubles. The first step towards explaining the troubles is to recover the contexts within which these fears may be understood. It is critically important that they were accompanied by religious concerns. Fears for the survival of aspects of the civil polity in England were intertwined with fears for the survival of protestantism and the church. The relationship between these, complicated in itself, was also deeply influenced by events in and outside the kingdom. Two broad contexts for these perceptions have already been identified. One was religious: the victories of the counter-reformation in Europe. The other was political: the military weakness of the Stuart crown. In the 1620s, as in the 1670s and 1680s, this combination had a devastating effect upon domestic political peace. The immediate result was that polarisation and conflict on the European continent became polarisation and conflict in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In either hand the hastning Angel caught Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd. They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat, Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes: Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; The World was all before them, where to chose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide; They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitarie way. INTRODUCTION Milton's image in Paradise Lost of ‘the subjected Plaine’ reflects the influence of Jean Bodin. In Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) Bodin had analysed the variety of European government in relation to three climatic zones (torrid, temperate and frigid). In addition, governments reflected topography, itself a determinant of climate. Thus mountainous, topographically turbulent Switzerland would never be amenable territory for monarchy. Similarly within Italy republicanism had flourished in the Tuscan hills; monarchy on the Lombard plain. Like other contemporary republican writing, Milton's reflected these theories, and Aristotle's anticipation of them. Thus it was natural that leaving the self-government of Paradise Adam and Eve should descend to the subjected Plaine. We may contrast this republican topography with that of Winstanley, the purpose of whose God was to make ‘crooked ways straight; and level mountains and valleys, and all unevenness, both in man's heart and in his actions’. This was the difference between the christian morality of equality and the classical commitment to virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I shall desire with Castruccio to be buried my face downwards, not to see or comply in the grave with the universal disorder. God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, ev'n to the reforming of Reformation itself. INTRODUCTION Between 1638 and 1651 there occurred the military culmination of the first phase of the troubles. In England this became a ‘Warre for Defence’ both of ‘Religion’ and of ‘Parliament’. We will not here be discussing its remarkable product: the English revolution. Our interest is in that destructive process, with both military and ideological dimensions, which forms its essential context. The troubles were an attempt to defend traditional institutions – monarchy, parliament and church – against ideological forces by which they were held to be imperilled. How, by 1649 in England, had they resulted in the destruction of those very institutions? The answer is that the resulting reformation process, once unleashed, could not be contained. At every stage its progress was military. When the successful defence of the reformation, in Scotland, gave way to further reformation and then radical reformation, England moved from rebellion through civil war to revolution. DEFENCE OF THE REFORMATION (THE SCOTS REBELLION) Armed defence of reformation in Britain began in Scotland. It is essential revisionist doctrine that Scots resistance to Caroline religious innovation was as sudden in 1637 as it was unexpected. Thereafter, only when a series of blunders by the king brought the Scots into English politics did they provide the mechanism for the destabilisation of that arena as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[W]e took this war in hand to assert the liberties of Europe and, to encourage us to carry it on, we have examples, ancient and modern, of nations that have resisted great monarchies, and who have worked out their freedom by patience, wisdom and courage. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE With the recovery of its international context the complexity of the ‘glorious revolution’ and its consequences is increasingly remarked upon. There is something revealing, in this respect, about the domination of recent publication on this subject by collections of essays. As the introduction to one has remarked, ‘no new narrative’ has yet emerged. This complexity follows not only from the internationality of these circumstances but from the resulting relationship between continuity and change. Between 1688 and 1714 the fortunes of the United Provinces, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Habsburg monarchy and Spain were more than ever dependent upon the outcome of the military struggle between them. Like the Thirty Years War in its time this committed resources on a scale unprecedented in European history. The result was to transform not only this European relationship but the internal political and economic landscape of England. This latter transformation was so rapid and spectacular that the word ‘revolution’ is now back in fashion to describe it. Indeed it has been argued that, ‘revisionism’ having cut all other seventeenth-century revolutions down to size, ‘the financial revolution’ survives pre-eminent. By comparison, the revolutionary status of the events of 1688–9 themselves has become unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because King Charles II was called home by the Convention, and nothing settled, you found the consequence. Charles II was a young man, in the strength of his youth, and, you know, how much Money was given him, and what became of it? In the great joy of the King's Return, the Parliament overshot themselves so much, and to redress a few Grievances they got so much Money, that they could live without you. INTRODUCTION In chapter 9 we examined the third visitation of the troubles. It was the European context that furnished, in the Dutch invasion, the most important means for the successful confrontation of popery and arbitrary government. By driving out the king, creating an interregnum and presiding militarily over the subsequent constitutional settlement, the invading army exercised considerable control over the final outcome. It was the English historical context, however, that furnished not only the local persons and beliefs but also the experience and constitutional instruments necessary to deliver this outcome quickly and peacefully. For these purposes the most important were the government of the city of London; the unprecedented contrivance of the Assembly of Commoners which met at St James' from 24 December; and the Convention, of both Lords and Commoners, which met from 22 January 1689. It is the purpose of this chapter to understand the third and decisive phase of restoration in the same contexts. The principal European instrument of restoration was, once again, the Dutch invasion. Initially this deepened the troubles, in the sense that it completed the collapse of governmental authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why am I forc'd, like Heav'n, against my mind, To make examples of another kind? Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw? Oh curs'd Effects of necessary Law! … Th'Almighty nodding gave consent; And Peals of Thunder shook the Firmament … Once more the God-like David was Restor'd, And willing Nations knew their Lawfull Lord. INTRODUCTION By 1679 the first phase of restoration had collapsed. This was a consequence of the suspicion, followed by the revelation, that the king had been auctioning the state's religion and government to a foreign power. Although the church and parliaments remained in existence they appeared to be in danger. Although the monarchy remained in existence it was the monarch himself who appeared to be placing it in peril. Over the next few years the consequences of this collapse included the end of peace (leading to civil war through the courts); the end of unity (leading to ideological polarisation); and the return not only of the troubles but of revolution. All of this served as a reminder of the initial superficiality of the restoration process itself. The resulting reliving of the troubles, and revolution, had its context in the relationship between present events and public memory. The same context furnished the immediate outcome of the crisis in what Roger North called ‘a second Restauration’. The second phase of restoration was accordingly, like its predecessor, a reaction. As such it repeated, with emphasis, most of the essential features of its predecessor. It was to be correspondingly short-lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

You cannot but remember with what universal joy did all parties amongst us, even as one man, receive the King at his return … But behold! how soon our growing hopes were blasted, and all hands at work to hinder any settlement either in Church or State. INTRODUCTION The subject of this chapter is the first phase of restoration, from its establishment to near unravelling. This analysis falls naturally into three phases. The first (1660–7) is the period of reconstruction ending with the fall of Clarendon. During the second (1667–73) the most important minister was Arlington, but the guiding spirit was the king. The result was a series of reversals of policy, particularly in foreign affairs and religion. These laid the basis for the descent, from 1670, from the first phase of restoration to the second full-scale crisis of popery and arbitrary government. The third period (1673–8) spans that descent, from the parliamentary confrontation of royal policy (1672–3) to the crisis that followed. A crisis followed because in fact in this period royal policies did not change. Those policies were considered an attack upon the fundamentals of the restored state: protestantism and parliaments. They were considered thus by members of the Cavalier Parliament, whose prescription for restoration had always differed from that of the king. Between 1662 and 1667 parliament had triumphed. What the king attempted to recover, between 1667 and 1673, was an aspect of his own original agenda for peace and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And when the Protestants of the Low-Countries were so grievously oppressed by the power of Spain … why should they not make use of all the means that God had put into their hands for their deliverance? … by resisting they laid the foundation of a most glorious and happy Commonwealth, that hath been, since its first beginning, the strongest pillar of the Protestant Cause now in the world. INTRODUCTION Throughout the restoration period, as earlier, the struggles against religious and political oppression were intertwined. The period 1662–72 was dominated by the imposition of, and then struggle against, the parliamentary religious settlement. This culminated in what Gary de Krey and others have called ‘the first restoration crisis’ 1667–73. Its precursor was the crisis of 1667 giving rise to a new phase of politics which culminated in an attempt by the king himself to unhinge the religious settlement. The accompanying debate took its force from these practical issues. At the same time it had a polemical focus in Samuel Parker's defence of the religious settlement (Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity (1669)) which played a role comparable to that of Filmer in the later crisis. Radical opposition to the restoration settlement before 1667 necessarily took a more muted form. The persistence of domestic plotting and seditious utterance in this period has been documented by Richard Greaves. This was accompanied by the activities of a republican community in exile, particularly during the Anglo-Dutch war (1665–7). THE EXILES 1662–7 The most important remains from the assault upon restoration from exile are Ludlow's Voyce from the Watchtower and Sidney's Court Maxims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots. [Y]our word Divinity darkens knowledge; you talk of a body of Divinity, and of Anatomyzing Divinity: O fine language! But when it comes to triall, it is but a husk without the kernall … the cloud without rain. INTRODUCTION: THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION The English revolution was the most spectacular product of the troubles. English radicalism came to question customary religious, social, legal, economic and political arrangements. It was the terrifying outcome of the troubles that successful struggle against one form of innovation unleashed another. What was for Thomas Edwards the death of reformation, or for William Prynne the death of political liberty, was for the radicals their substantial, rather than simply formal, achievement. In this respect revolution was the inverse of statebuilding. Both entailed innovation and both were the products of war. One difference between them hinged upon the distinction between reformative and radical innovation. Another concerned their relationship to institutions: English radicalism took as its starting point the absence of those institutions which it was the business of statebuilding to perfect. Finally, therefore, one was a reaction against the other. In the pages to follow we will be studying a reaction against Laudian formality in the shape of radical anti-formalism. We will find a reaction against counter-reformation monarchical statebuilding in the shape of no monarchy at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[W]here is that liberty so much pretended, so dearly purchased? There was never yet any prisons or sufferings that I was in, but … for the bringing multitudes more out of prison. INTRODUCTION: THE LEVELLERS It is only having examined the positive aspirations of civil war radicalism that we may understand what it was a struggle against. The insistence upon a living christianity of substance, rather than form, was an attempt to realise the government of God, and through it the reality of social community. This entailed the struggle against outward bondage. Effective submission to God required liberty from the carnal oppression of man. William Walwyn explained: ‘If ever men shall kindly be brought to be of one mind … it must be by liberty of discourse, and liberty of writing; we must not pretend to more infallible certenty than other men.’ This struggle demanded liberty from religious, clerical, political, economic, legal and social oppression. It was this which first drove radicalism into the political arena, and developed civil war radical political theory. Even here its focus was religious and pragmatic. Leveller pragmatism was expressed in its fundamental identity as a petitioning movement. The primacy of the religious dimension was identified by Thomas Edwards (‘In one word … liberty of conscience, and liberty of preaching’) and Richard Baxter (‘Liberty of Conscience … was the Common Interest in which they did unite’). It was this which became the revolution's most important domestic practical achievement. From it, however, developed a demand for liberty from oppression of every kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prorogue or Dissolve them before anything be finished, and thus Parliaments will be made useless, and this being done, it will not be long before they become burdensome, and then away with them for good and all. INTRODUCTION: THE UNRAVELLING The struggle for protestantism and parliaments between 1678 and 1683 took place in many arenas. These included the court (where ministerial rivalries were important), the Houses of Lords and Commons, parliamentary elections, the judiciary, the press, relationships with European ambassadors, the government of the city of London, and its streets and coffee houses. It also therefore took place on several levels. Those which were most visible or have received most attention were not necessarily the most important in determining its outcome. This upheaval exhibited both a severity and a complexity which have only recently begun to be understood: He that would give a Punctual and Particular Account of all the Narratives, Discourses, Tryals, Executions, Speeches, Votes, Accusations, Examinations, Commitments, Tumultuous Elections, Petitions, Ryots, Libels, and Seditious Attempts of all Sorts, during the said time, must write a History more Voluminous than Fox or Hollinshead. This is because it involved an unravelling of the restoration settlement. From the outset this left contemporaries not only confronting dangerous problems in the present, but staring back into the abyss of the troubles as memory. It was this fact which eventually ended the crisis. But it did not do so before the question informing restoration had again been put: would the country be governed by a parliamentary dictatorship or a monarchy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[He] provoked these nations to the last degree … not only by invading our civil liberties, but likewise by endeavouring to change the established religion for another … yet notwithstanding all his mismanagement, Britain stood in need of a foreign force to save it. INTRODUCTION: THREE PROCESSES The loyalist reaction that ended the crisis of 1678–83 is the subject of chapter 19. The principal force informing this too was the progress of public memory. The result was, on the face of it at least, that by 1685 the domestic struggle against royal popery and arbitrary government had disappeared. The first elections of the new reign produced the most loyalist parliament of the century. Thus the return of the troubles only three years later was extraordinary. By the second half of 1688 England faced all its familiar features: a collapse of confidence in and obedience to the government; anti-catholic rioting and ‘tumults’, particularly in London; a collapse in the enforcement of religious uniformity and of censorship, resulting in the most substantial effusion of printed argument since 1678–83. Jonathan Israel has suggested that, ‘far from banishing ideology and philosophizing from the scene, the English revolution of 1688–9 was arguably the most intensely ideological … of all major episodes in English history’. In fact it was simply a continuation of that ideological process called the troubles. This was only one of the remarkable occurrences of 1688–9. The second was the dramatic intervention within that context of a foreign invasion. As in 1640 this supplied the military challenge that delivered a helpless king to his enraged English subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I know … it is said that I intend the subversion of the religion and government, that I intend to govern by an army and by arbitrary power, to lay aside Parliaments … But … thos that say it the most … are … such as would subvert the government themselves and bring it to a commonwealth again. All our misfortune arises from the late times. When the King came home, his ministers knew nothing of the Laws of England, but foreign Government. INTRODUCTION The continuation of the troubles into the restoration period requires us to address two subjects. One is the continuation, or reappearance, beyond 1660 of the circumstances and fears by which they were sustained. The other is the initial failure of the restoration process to end them. This second matter is the subject of chapters 16–17. In relation to the first, two contexts will be identified. That in space, again, was the European situation. That in time was restoration memory. These were links to the troubles over which restoration governments had little power. Thus it was that only eighteen years after the return of the monarchy Charles II found himself facing a crisis universally considered similar to that which had destroyed his father. The claim that the troubles did return, and that we must consequently see the period 1660–89 as one of continuing instability, has recently received significant attention. Restoration used to be taken as a given. Subsequent crises and the thought associated with them were considered to be superficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[S]uch is the aptness of Christian Preachers to raise Seditions, that oft-times … terrible Changes … have been occasioned … in our times in Scotland and England … And therefore Protestant Kings … who own themselves Head of the Church … did for their greater safety … prohibit all publick Extemporary Sermons and Prayers … This Charles the First King of England had in part effected by taking away the Sabbath Days Afternoon's Sermons. Could thought be controlled as easily as speech, all governments would rule in safety, and none would be oppressive. CAROLINE STATEBUILDING One feature of pre-statebuilding England was the relationship between weak institutions and powerful ideas. Alongside weak monarchy, dysfunctional parliaments and a partially reformed church, we have observed the impact of religious and political beliefs animated by the Thirty Years War. This charging of politics with ideology was not simply a feature of the troubles. When statebuilding finally came to Britain it did so within this context. In its domestic context, the Caroline experiment from 1625 to 1640 was remarkable in two ways. The first was, after seventy years of neglect, its range and ambition. This may have reflected a sense of urgency rather than confidence. It certainly demonstrated the conviction that the time had come to abandon half measures for fundamental reform. A second feature was that it was directed towards the intellectual as much as practical obstacles to effective monarchical government in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Things that love night, Love not such nights as these: The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the darke And make them keep their Caves: since I was a man Such sheets of Fire, such bursts of horrid Thunder, Such groanes of roaring Winde, and Raine, I never Remember to have heard. Man's Nature cannot carry Th'affliction, nor the feare. INTRODUCTION: BEHIND THE VEIL OF RESTORATION To recover England's troubles it is necessary to re-enter an alien mental world. In this respect, as Robert Darnton reminds us: ‘the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry into an alien mentality.’ Our present distance from the perceptions and fears that underlay the troubles is more than simply the effect of the intervening three hundred years. It is politically created: the first and final imperative of restoration was forgetting. The signs of this are everywhere. They are visible, not least, in English incomprehension in the face of the attitudes sustaining the last theatre of the troubles. That Northern Ireland's conflict has its origins in the seventeenth century is well enough understood. What is less frequently pointed out is that in the seventeenth century those troubles were English. It is then that we find the perceptions and language of that anti-hero Ian Paisley (a protestant enclave under encirclement, ‘popery’ whooping around the outside) in the mouths of England's heroes: John Pym, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Prince of Orange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To learn the true causes, the rises and growths of our late Miseries … had I not gone so far back as I do, I had not reached the Fundamentals … finding those proceedings to have their rise in the year 1618. no man less belov'd, no man more generally condemn'd then was the King; from the time that it became his custom to break Parliaments at home, and either wilfully or weakly betray Protestants abroad … All men inveigh'd against him. INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION POLITICS In the foregoing chapters we have sought to understand two sets of political anxieties. These have close parallels to contemporary religious fears. These, too, were for the survival of an insufficiently reformed domestic institution within the context of a European situation fraught with danger. That the parallel was close is hardly surprising, since religion and politics were intertwined. Elizabethan counsellors managing the war against Spain made no distinction between defending the country's religion and the state. Later John Vicars wrote of a plot ‘for the … utter subverting of the fundamentall laws and principles on which the religion and government of the kingdom were firmly established’. Sir Walter Erle explained in 1629: ‘I dare boldly say, never was there … a more near conjunction between matter of Religion and matter of State in any Kingdom in the world than there is in this Kingdom at this day.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For of Meridians and Parallels Man hath weav'd out a net and this net throwne Upon the Heavens and now they are his owne. Loth to goe up the hill, or labour thus To goe to heaven we make heaven come to us. The Channel is no national boundary. INTRODUCTION How should one structure a large-scale analysis of the seventeenth-century English political experience? Should one do so? Such histories have long been out of fashion. To attempt one is necessarily to step outside one's area of expertise. This is the most complex, the most important and the most violent century of English history. It is equally the most formidable and savage historiographical terrain. Entire historians have disappeared, leaving only a rent garment and the colour of blood in the water to show us where they had been. One point from which to begin is the identification of those features by which our subject is distinguished, in time and place. In this respect it might be suggested that two things above all make seventeenth-century English history unique. The first is the length and depth of its experience of political instability. The second is its astonishing intellectual fertility. These two features were of course connected. It is this combination which distinguishes the seventeenth century within English history, and the experience of seventeenth-century England within Europe. This experience of instability I have called, following contemporary usage, England's troubles: ‘the late troubles’; ‘our lamentable troubles’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]