1 - The Restoration Regime and Historical Reconstructions of the Civil War and Interregnum

Summary

In the years immediately following the restoration of the monarchy, the English had a paradoxical relationship to their nation's recent history. On the one hand, they were supposed to forget about it. The Convention Parliament had passed an Act of Oblivion within a few months of the king's return. This legislation commanded people not to remember publicly the civil wars. On the other hand, personal memories of what were referred to as the ‘late broken times’ were lodged firmly within most people's minds. This was recognised openly, as in the preface to a short book called History of the Commons Warre, published in 1662. Joshua Coniers noted gloomily that the recent past lingered in the present ‘like a Skeleton’. He went on to assert that ‘the felicity of memory consists not in the bare reminding us of miseries past, but as it points and directs our sense to a greater complacency and content in the happiness we repossess’. Civil war history was meaningful unless it reminded readers to be happy about the Restoration.

The paradoxical and complex nature of the early Restoration period makes it a fruitful area for examining the relationship between historical writing and the politics of remembering and forgetting the conflicted past. Publishing histories about the civil wars and Interregnum certainly did not advance an agenda of forgetting, but the regime and the political nation neither desired nor attempted to prohibit all acts of remembering the conflicted past.