The challenge Charles I prepared to fling at his accusers on 22 January 1649 has conditioned the thinking of generations of historians. “No earthly power can justly call me, who am your king, in question as a delinquent,” he proclaimed. He reminded those who presumed to judge him that they had been “born his subjects and born subjects to those laws, which determined, ‘that the king can do no wrong,’” a maxim that “guards every English monarch, even the least deserving.” Indeed, there was no established legal process that could hold Charles personally accountable for his actions, even if, as charged, he meant to overthrow the rights and liberties of his people. The tenet the king can do no wrong shifted responsibility onto those who carried out royal orders. Proponents of royal supremacy had seen in that maxim proof that kings were not only legally unaccountable but actually above the law.

However, an equally venerable English maxim explained that although “the king was under no man, he was under God and the law; for the law maketh the king.” To modern historians the two maxims seem contradictory. And the dramatic failure of the law in Charles's case has induced scholars to doubt the efficacy of this second maxim, to accept Charles's interpretation of its counterpart—that the king could do no wrong—and to shrug off as fine-sounding but unrealistic the strategies early modern Englishmen relied on to control kings. Both maxims, the one Charles sheltered under and the one he rejected, were designed to control his behavior.

The seventh of the thirteen “ancient and indubitable” rights proclaimed in the English Declaration of Rights was neither ancient nor indubitable. It declared “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by Law.” The right of ordinary subjects to possess weapons is perhaps the most extraordinary and least understood of English liberties. It lies at the heart of the relationship between the individual and his fellows and between the individual and his government. Few governments have ever been prepared to make such a guarantee, and, until 1689, no English parliamentary body was either. Its elevation that year to the company of ancient and indubitable rights unmasked the deep-seated distrust between the governing classes and the crown. Together with the equally novel article that gave Parliament greater control over standing armies, this right was meant to place the sword in the hands of Protestant Englishmen and the power over it in the hands of Parliament.

The actual novelty of this right had eluded historians for a variety of reasons. First, its framers were taken at their word when they described it as ancient and indubitable. Indeed, Whig historians preferred to believe there had been a conservative revolution. Thomas Macaulay rejoiced that “not a single flower of the crown was touched. Not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgment of all the greatest lawyers … almost exactly the same after the Revolution as before it.

While the restoration of monarchy in 1660 has attracted considerable scholarly interest, historians have usually focused upon the events that led to the abrupt change in the fortunes of Charles II rather than the less dramatic tactics by which the restored king consolidated his power. Yet the challenges Charles faced at his return were formidable, his initial personal popularity surprisingly short-lived. Somehow the regime had to quiet political and religious dissension, satisfy sharply conflicting expectations, and retrieve the power of the sword from a republican army and a volatile and well-armed public. Existing studies of the restoration years fail to explain precisely how the royal government successfully negotiated these difficulties. This essay describes the methods by which order was maintained and control reasserted; how the peaceful disbandment of the republican army and the subsequent control of its veterans were achieved; a police establishment of unprecedented size and effectiveness organized; the foundation for a permanent army laid; and the capacity of English subjects to rebel effectively diminished. In sum, it exposes the policies used to reconstruct royal authority so swiftly and securely that a host of enemies and public disenchantment failed to dislodge it.

In the second year of the English civil war both king and parliament sought and received substantial military assistance from outside the kingdom: Charles concluded a truce with the Irish rebels and began the importation of troops from Ireland; parliament negotiated the introduction of an army from Scotland. Historians of the period are agreed that these parallel steps had quite opposite results. While the Scots army is invariably viewed as a ‘big factor in turning the scales against the king’, Charles's importation of Irish soldiers is regarded as having an insignificant impact on his military situation and a disastrous effect upon his popular standing. Parliament's alliance with the Scots has therefore been acclaimed necessary and prudent, Charles's acquisition of Irish help a terrible blunder. Samuel R. Gardiner, in his classic history of the English civil war, singled out the king's importation of Irish troops to England as the act which did most to weaken his authority.