Establishing what we mean by the phrase “political culture” seems more than usually problematic for the England of the later 1660s. In that time of confusion, the failure of a unitary body politic to survive the shocks of civil war and revolution became ever more apparent. Mounting ecclesiastical trench-warfare between resentful Anglicans and non-conformists of varying degrees of remorse ran parallel to a sequence of military and political disasters, with the Dutch in the Medway in 1667 and the Earl of Clarendon in flight. A resurgent aristocratic culture flourished amid theatrical grandeur, while a burgeoning market-place testified to the emergence of what is often called a middle class. Over all hung the apocalypticism of plague and fire. Such developments, we may assume, had their own internal energies – energies that sometimes seem so autonomous that it is easier to talk of a series of local or sectional cultures than a shared political culture.

Yet however diverse those developments and energies, they overlapped temporally. They must therefore have inflected one another, and have left traces of their encounters and transactions. It is the assumption of this chapter that only a broad reading across the textual register of a moment allows us to recognize such traces and inflexions, and thus to reconstitute what can plausibly be termed a political culture – however partisan and fragmented that culture may sometimes seem.