The illusion of restoration and the making of the church party

Our conventional idea of the Restoration involves an illusion. Because monarchy was restored, we tend to suppose that Charles II's reign was a monolith of Anglican Royalist reaction, and that king and Cavalier were of one mind in reversing the Puritan tide. There are mythologies to bolster this illusion. In Whig and Dissenting memory it was an era of brutal repression of the Good Old Cause, a time of underground conspiracy and heroic suffering. Historians of radicalism tend to find, when looking beyond 1660, a story of defeat and dejection, when Israel was captive in Egypt. The Egyptian taskmasters are made to seem an undifferentiated combination of crown and church, court and gentry. Other voices confirm this impression. The paeans chanted by Anglican divines to the sanctity of kingship and to the holy union of crown and altar disguise from us the degree of scepticism that the monarchs themselves, Charles and James, felt towards the dogmas of Cavalier Anglicans. That the royal brothers leaned towards Catholicism is familiar enough. But the surprise is how often they leaned towards Puritans and Dissenters.

From the point of view of Anglican loyalists, Charles, from the outset, dangerously favoured the leaders of the old Parliamentarian cause. He pardoned, even employed, the ‘old leaven’, and sorely neglected his most loyal subjects: his privy council included his father's enemies. He affronted the church and gave succour to her schismatic enemies: he offered bishoprics to leading Puritans. The flood of patronage in 1660 to those broadly called the ‘Presbyterian’ party – those who had made war on Charles I but had discovered a passionate royalism once they had defeated him – rendered Cavaliers begrudging partners in institutions surprisingly ‘broad-bottomed’ in their make-up. Cavaliers joked bitterly that the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, the act of forgetting of past crimes against the crown, passed in 1660, meant indemnity for rebels and oblivion for loyalists. They compiled lists of indigent Cavaliers, whose estates had been ruined in their service to Charles I, but now with little sign of recompense.

Yet these resentments were as nothing to the rage provoked by some of the politics and personnel of the so-called Cabal years, between 1667 and 1673, half-Oliverian and half-papistical, a perverse regime that was to be re-enacted in tragedy by James II in 1687–8.