3 - Representing the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1680–5

Summary

One of the most important consequences of the public furore occasioned by revelations of a ‘popish plot’ to assassinate Charles II in 1678, the dissolution of the ‘long’ Cavalier Parliament in January 1679, the subsequent lapse of licensing the press, and a crisis over the succession that pitted some members of Parliament against the Court and its allies, was the explosive growth of popular printed literature. A great many texts invoked the national past as part of their arguments for, among other things, the undesirability of a Roman Catholic successor, the importance of Parliament as a bulwark against Stuart pretensions to divine-right monarchy, and even the comprehension of moderate Dissenters within the Church of England. The recent past in particular was invoked frequently in public discourse, partly because several events and trends during the so-called ‘exclusion crisis’ appeared eerily similar to what was remembered to have happened, prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1642. For example, attacks in Parliament on the king's (former) chief minister Sir Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, the recourse to mass petitions to encourage the king to recall Parliament from prorogation, and the increasingly strident adherence among some politicians to the policy of exclusion at seemingly all costs, came to be compared to the tactics of Charles I's Parliamentary critics in 1640–1. Similarly, a revolt in south-western Scotland led by militant Presbyterians in 1679 appeared to be an echo of the Bishops' Wars of 1639–40.