Playing the opportunist

In historical writing the Restoration era has been the poor relation of the Puritan one before it. It is true that we all have graphic images, many of them supplied by Samuel Pepys, of the years from the return of the monarchy in 1660: of the rakish court and the mistresses of the merry monarch; of the Restoration playhouses and the newly-founded Royal Society; of the disasters of the great plague and the fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch naval war. Yet until very recently there has been no equivalent to the scholarly foundations which were laid by Victorian narratives of the civil wars and the republic, and on which the successive controversies about the Puritan revolt, from the ‘gentry controversy’ of the 1950s onwards, have been erected.

For the Victorians, who admired Puritan earnestness and parliamentary progress, looked askance both at the immorality of the Restoration years and at the renewed assertions of the royal prerogative. Instead of moving forward towards the balanced constitution of the 18th century, they complained, the country had gone backwards to absolute or arbitrary rule, a deviation from historical logic that would require, in 1688, a second revolution, this time thankfully a successful one.

Contemporaries had a different perception. To them the deviation was the Puritan revolt itself, which had taken so unexpectedly radical and destructive a course. In restoring the institutions of Crown and Church, 1660 was a return to normality. Yet it was not, unless fleetingly, a return to harmony. Not only had the Puritan Revolution failed to solve the problems of 17th-century government that had caused it. It had added to them by the divisions and hatreds it bequeathed. The restored regime was caught between competing pressures: on one side for the suppression and punishment of Puritans and Roundheads; on the other for compromise and conciliation.