The Restoration began in one great crisis about parliamentary government and Protestantism, and it concluded in another. In 1659–60, most Reformed Protestants had come to agree with their Anglican counterparts that the restoration of monarchy was the best means to secure parliament and the Protestant establishment. But by 1679–82, many of those same Reformed Protestants had come to agree with their onetime sectarian adversaries that the episcopal leadership of the church and the prospect of a Catholic successor endangered both Protestantism and parliament again. The greatest beneficiary of the first crisis, Charles II survived the crisis of 1679–82 through a combination of good luck and good wit.

Recent scholars have followed contemporaries and Whig historians in dwelling upon the importance of London to the crisis that overtook the kingdom in 1679. But the traditional account of the crisis has been pulled apart as historians have engaged in an extensive process of demythologizing directed at the conventions of Whig historiography. Scholarly fragmentation has replaced the comfortable consensus that prevailed into the 1980s. Almost every feature of the Whig interpretation of the “Exclusion Crisis” has been challenged by one historian or another.

Tim Harris has demonstrated the fallacy of the whiggish assumption that ordinary people in London naturally identified with opposition to the Court: instead, according to him, the variety of perspectives that flourished amongst the menu peuple inclined them to both sides of the divide between Charles II and his critics.

When I started this study I intended to produce a short second book that I thought could be quickly researched and written. That was almost twenty years ago. The Restoration then seemed to be a fairly straightforward and relatively neglected field of English history. But since the early 1980s the period has attracted many creative and intellectually ambitious historians, while the old field of Tudor and Stuart English history has been transformed by a variety of revisionist approaches to Early Modern Britain.

London and the Restoration is my response to the new historical writing about the Restoration and to the transformation of the broader historical field. It could not have been written without engaging, both personally and professionally, with many other scholars at every stage of their professional work and with a few no longer living. I have disagreed about important questions with some of them, but I can think of no one with whom I have disagreed from whom I have not also learned a great deal. If I acknowledge only a few scholars, colleagues, and friends by name here, I hope that others will find my engagement with their work reflected in what follows. Henry Horwitz and Lois Schwoerer each took an interest in my work at an early stage; and they have, in their different ways, contributed to my understanding of the Restoration. They have provided countless recommendations and evaluations of my scholarship over the years, and I am deeply grateful to each of them.

LONDON AND THE CRISIS OF 1659–1660

When Charles II processed through the city of London on 29 May 1660, upon his return to England, the occasion marked more than a personal triumph for a king who had suffered a decade of political frustration after the execution of his father and the abolition of monarchy. Charles's return to the kingdom after years of exile and hardship was also a political and emotional catharsis for a city that had contributed more than any other locality to the collapse of Stuart monarchy in the 1640s. Charles's route was crowded and lined by the civic militia and by thousands of citizens drawn up in their guilds. The streets were hung with tapestries, pennants, banners, and spring flowers; and wine was said to be flowing in every conduit and fountain. The king's appearance was greeted by “such shouting as the oldest man alive never heard”; and this celebratory din was increased by the ringing of church bells and by the many trumpets and drums in the royal procession. Charles required four hours to pass through the city and Westminster to Whitehall, and popular rejoicing continued for another three days and nights.

The new king was well aware of the ironies of this frenzied London reception. Surely this could not have been the same city in which, less than a generation earlier, puritan crowds had competed with the parliamentary leadership in driving “reformation and liberty” at the expense of episcopacy and monarchy.

THE ALIENATION OF THE CITY

The disposal of Richard Cromwell and his parliament by the leaders of the New Model Army in April 1659 was the most significant turning-point in the English Revolution since 1649. As Protector, Richard had been supported in parliament and in the localities by broad and somewhat ambiguous coalitions of pragmatists, Presbyterians, and “royalists.” He had been the hope of all those who saw in the Cromwellian church and in the last Protectorate parliament the best prospects for stable government and an enduring parochial establishment. But now the entire post-1653 Cromwellian endeavor to achieve political and religious reconciliation had been destroyed. The nation's affairs had fallen again into the hands of those who had purged the Long Parliament in 1648, who had abrogated the Solemn League and Covenant, who had killed the last king, and who had ever since (in the minds of their critics) threatened national ministry.

The hostility of most London citizens and their leaders to the revived republican regime would prevent a successful resettlement of the nation and instead contribute to a rapidly enlarging national crisis. The Commonwealth's inability to control its capital was at the heart of its failure. The opposition movement that developed in the Corporation of London and that inspired opposition elsewhere sprang from an unexpected and ambiguous convergence of two broad groups dedicated to the pre-1649 constitution in church and state, Reformed Protestants and Anglican loyalists.

PARTY AND THE SUCCESSION, 1679–1680

The polarization of opinion, September–October 1679

The nearly two-year period between the prorogation of the 1679 parliament and the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, in March 1681, saw two general elections, two sessions, and a renewal of Charles II's determination to maintain both his independence from parliament and a strict hereditary succession. It also saw a progressive polarization of public opinion, as the issues of the succession and of the church were debated in the press, in the streets, at the polls, and in parliament. In London, this period also included two controversial shrieval elections, one of which drove both the civic opposition and civic loyalists toward new forms of political organization. Historians have understandably focused their attention in these months upon the parliamentary confrontations between Charles and his adversaries. But the two sessions actually occupied less than twelve weeks in the autumn and winter of 1680–81 and another week in March 1681. The politics of the period were shaped less by the meeting of parliaments than by waiting for parliaments.

The dissolution of the 1679 parliament in July prompted little outward complaint from the civic opposition, probably because Charles also issued writs for the election of a new body, the meeting of which was announced for October 1679. But no session would actually occur between May 1679 and October 1680, as Charles repeatedly put off meeting with his newly elected parliament.

In June 1683, about a year after the commencement of the London shrieval election of 1682, subjects throughout the kingdom were startled by the government's disclosure of a “horrid conspiracy” of the “fanaticks” to assassinate the king and his brother and to mount an insurrection. After years of loyalist charges about Whig disloyalty, the news concerning this Whig plot was an immediate and lasting sensation that dominated the prints and public conversation for months. Tory writers like Sir Roger L'Estrange and Thomas Sprat were quick to argue that the Rye House Plot, as historians would dub the affair, was a natural conclusion to Whig opposition in parliament and the city. The fanatics had at last been detected in their efforts to return the nation to the circumstances of 1649 or 1659. The fact that most of those apprehended, tried, or executed for their part in plotting were London dissenters or national figures, like Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, who had kept company with leading civic Whigs, did not escape loyalist notice.

The government's propaganda campaign and its successful plot prosecutions of Russell, Sidney, and many lesser figures enabled it, at last, to gain the upper hand against its opponents. Few were prepared to continue to oppose Charles II, his Catholic successor, or the church leadership, when opposition talk or behavior invited questions about loyalty or provoked suspicions about plotting. The treason trials that began in 1683 permitted a resolution of the Restoration Crisis on uncompromising loyalist terms.