2 - Restoration Scotland

Summary

The restoration of Charles II as King of Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales on 29 May 1660 presented an occasion for universal celebration and rejoicing throughout Scotland. According to the minister of the Tolbooth Church in Edinburgh, James Kirkton, no ‘accident in the world altered the disposition of a people more’ than the arrival of news proclaiming the monarch’s return to power. Witnessing the popular reaction at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, the diarist, John Nicoll, recorded how the ‘haill bellis in Edinburgh and Cannongait did reing, the drumes did beatt, trumpettis soundit’, while ‘the spoutes of the Croce rynnand all that tyme with abundance of clareyt wyne’. After nightfall, the festivities continued with bonfires throughout the city streets and fireworks launched from the Castle ramparts. A London barber, Thomas Rugg, heard oral accounts of events in Edinburgh, confirming that the Mercat Cross had been covered ‘with arteficual vines loaden with grapes, both good clarit wines plentifully springing out from all its chanels’, with a statue of Bacchus bestride a hogshead. A sumptuous banquet had also been served to over a hundred ‘persons of eminensey’, after which was observed ‘the dances of our magistrates and citizans about the bonfiers’.

Public and private jubilation reverberated throughout the country. As one Dundee minister, Andrew Auchinleck, confessed in October 1660, ‘the joy and rejoycing of my heart upon the account of his royall Majesties returne and re-establishment is such as I cannot expresse’. Despite having suffered eighteen months’ imprisonment for his royalist sympathies during the civil wars, Auchinleck was now, aged sixty-seven, celebrating not only Charles II’s return to power, but also the subsequent and safe arrival of his twenty-seventh child, fittingly named Charles. Writing to John Maitland, earl of Lauderdale, Auchinleck observed how ‘trees, flowers and herbes sprout and spring and floorish in the summer’ and from ‘the radiant beames flowing from his Majesty even at this distance’, he felt ‘like the eagle who by casting her bill reneweth her age’. Were he one day able to pay court to Charles II in person ‘and have my lips perfumed with a kisse of his royall hand’, Auchinleck concluded that ‘I shall be in some measure like a Moses comming [sic] doune from the mount’.