1 - The shape of the future

Summary

Everyone agrees that the Whigs possessed an impressive political organisation … Yet on the level of detailed information as to the operations of this organisation, the evidence remains scanty.

Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 172

Of course, this organisation did not appear on the surface. Attempting to preserve an impression of spontaneity the Whig press was intentionally vague.

J.R. Jones, The First Whigs (1961), p. 168

The Restoration crisis, from 1678 to 1683, was the second of seventeenthcentury England's three crises of popery and arbitrary government. It was therefore, from the perspective of the historian, linked to both its predecessor of 1638–42 and its successor of 1687–9. What follows is not an attempt to deny any historical links with the latter. Indeed seventeenthcentury England's ‘troubles’ cannot be understood without considering all three crises, and the relationship between them. What will be attempted in the following chapters is the recovery of the perspective on this crisis of contemporaries themselves. Contemporaries, obviously, could not predict the future. They did not hinge their political interpretations upon prophecy. But they could, and they did, remember the past. In the Restoration period they could not forget it. They could be, and to some extent they were, the prisoners of memory.

Historians, on the other hand, have been more interested in linking the crisis of 1678–83 with the shape of the future: the future exclusion of James from the throne; the future birth of parties.