2 - The shadow of the past

Summary

This was the Preludium to the late Rebellion; loud Clamours against Popery and Arbitrary Government …

I believe, it has hardly ever been known, that any one Humor in one and the same country, has come twice upon the Stage by the same Methods … within the space of Forty Years …

It would be somewhat strange, and without all example in story, that a nation should be twice ruined, twice undone, by the self-same ways and means.

INTRODUCTION

The achilles heel of the Restoration lay in the double-edged nature of that past experience itself. It could be drawn upon for constructive, and for destructive purposes. And both past and present hinged upon a seventeenthcentury (European) situation which was not entirely under contemporary English control.

The first crisis of popery and arbitrary government, under Charles I, had led the nation into an unspeakable series of disasters. The civil wars and their aftermath had brought with them, by 1659, ‘the experience of defeat’ for almost everybody involved. Worst of all, they had resulted in a worse ‘popery’ (religious sectarianism) and a more overwhelming arbitrary government (military rule) than anything contemporaries had imagined possible from the government. The consequent political consensus which restored the monarchy in 1660 was both negative and conditional (though no less deeply felt for that). Approval for monarchy as an institution was not conditional, but approval of this particular version of it – the restored Stuart regime – certainly was, as 1688–9 would show.