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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]

Hobbes indeed doth scurrilously deride Cicero, Plato and Aristotle, caeterosque Romanae & Graecae anarchiae fautores. But' tis strange that this anarchy … that can have no strength and regular action, should overthrow all the monarchies that came within their reach … I desire it may be considered whether it were an easy work to conquer Switzerland: Whether the Hollanders are of greater strength since the recovery of their liberty, or when they groaned under the yoke of Spain: And lastly, whether the entire conquest of Scotland and Ireland, the victories obtained against the Hollanders when they were in the height of their power, and the reputation to which England did rise in less than five years after 1648, be good marks of the instability, disorder and weakness of free nations? INTRODUCTION Much modern historical discussion of the English revolution has been governed by attempts to appropriate it. As revolutions are considered the harbingers of modernity, no revolutionary entrails have been inspected more fastidiously than the English. One consequence is the elision of a historical ‘other’ into an anticipation of ourselves. The other is sectarianisation: the intrusion of the modern need to categorise and subdivide. To this generalisation the historiography of English republicanism, despite its quality, is no exception. Over the last generation the concepts of republicanism in general, and classical republicanism in particular, have enjoyed a spectacular rise to prominence. Informing this has been a specific debate about ‘the ideological origins of the American revolution’. A recent article assures us that ‘a wide variety of pamphleteers in the 1650s understood that it was possible to be modern’. [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]

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]

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]