In the final episode of our English Civil War series, we discuss the Restoration. After Cromwell died, there was chaos that could have erupted in yet another round of war. Instead, though, the return of Charles II to the throne of England occurred without bloodshed, which only intensified the excitement over his return.
With the exception of most New England colonies, to, colonists were overjoyed to see the return of the king. With the Restoration, they could hope to reverse the hated Navigation Act, reclaim some of their autonomy, and once again enjoy the benefits of free trade.
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The Restoration
In summer of 1660, news reached the colonies that Charles II had returned to England and been crowned king. Today, we’re going to look at the story of how that happened, and how the news was received in the colonies.
Introduction
By the time it happened, the return of the king had widespread support in England and most of its colonies. I mean think of everything we’ve discussed over the past few months, and indeed years. And the person holding everything together, Oliver Cromwell, had died in September 1658.
There were people who were devastated by this, but not that many. The public at large was pretty burned out on the whole Cromwell, Commonwealth thing by the time it happened. John Evelyn wrote that at his funeral “there were none that cried but doggs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went.”
Of course that was an exaggeration, but it illustrates the point. And to further drive it home, the list of people who did actually mourn was full of people like John Milton, and former New Englander William Bradshaw, who walked beside him in the funeral procession. Hugh Peters gave the sermon at the funeral, and you get the idea.
Cromwell had, for better or for worse, to his credit or his discredit, held together a country which increasingly resented his leadership. Taxes were eleven times higher than they’d been under Charles I, soldiers still hadn’t been paid, people who wanted a monarchy were dissatisfied, as were those who wanted a republic. And, the Army was full of people who didn’t think reforms had gone far enough. Then you had the laws which interfered with everyday life and English traditions like morris dancing, sports, maypoles, Christmas, theater, and just the relentless lack of comfortable stability. In the best of times, rebellion and transportation lurked around the corner, and in the worst of times they happened so violently that the outbreak of another war seemed imminent.
Since the dissolution of the Rump, there’d been attempts to form new Parliaments, but even with severely restrictive candidate and voting requirements, those ended up being dissolved by Cromwell after coming into conflict with him. The exception was the Second Protectorate Parliament, which increased Cromwell’s power via the Humble Petition and Advice, giving him control of an “Upper House” in the Parliament and offering him the crown. Then, the next Parliament was dismissed after conflicting with Cromwell, too. And with each issue, more people supported the return of the king.
At this point, I don’t even know that you can call it the Royalist cause, because it had come to include people like General Fairfax who weren’t just Willoughby-style Presbyterian Parliamentarians, but active Independents who had helped with the Army’s ascent to power. It was more the “enough is enough” cause. The “please just make it stop” cause. The “it can’t be worse than this” cause.
Internationally, Commonwealth England was a success, but internally it was a country of disaffected people held together by the intelligence and forcefulness of one man, who was now dead.
And he’d been replaced by his 32 year old son, Richard. And Richard was, like so many leaders we’ve discussed, in many ways including Charles I, a nice guy, with his own set of skills, but a man who was too meek and mild to serve as an effective leader in the best of times. He had no real ambition, called his position a burden, and would have preferred to live a comfortable life far away from the spotlight. “It might have pleased God,” he said. “And the nation, too, to have chosen out a person more fit and able for this work than I am.”
And that weakness was, as it always is, an invitation for everyone with a cause, a grudge, or just personal ambition to scramble for more power. In this case, they formed three major groups, the ones who wanted Parliament to have power, the ones who wanted the Army to have power, and the ones who wanted the King to return. Civil War part 4? Possibly.
Pretty soon, Richard had a new Parliament, but one which had been elected without strict voting or candidacy requirements, the reasons for which I won’t detail here, but the result of which was that this Parliament was full of all sorts of people who were furious about the way things had been going, including plenty of Royalists, as well as angry republicans and former or disaffected Parliamentarians, like Arthur Haselrigge and Henry Vane. And John Fox And Thomas Fairfax. And the Earl of Warwick’s successor, as Warwick had died the year before. And the list goes on.
And then, the Army presented a petition asking to be removed from all Parliamentary or Governmental command and oversight. They’d been meeting in secret at the house of one of their leaders, Charles Fleetwood, and now they wanted him to be in full command of everything Army-related, with no input from anyone else regarding what the Army did, or who led it. Richard refused this request.
The problem is, as we’ve said before, it didn’t exactly matter who had legitimacy, because the army had the guns. And, the army wasn’t exactly shy about this. When the army had seized Charles I from Parliamentary custody, and Charles had asked to see the commission of the man doing so, that man had responded “This is my commission,” and pointed to the soldiers behind him. During Pride’s Purge, when an MP asked by what power Pride was acting, he had responded “by the power of the sword.” And now, Richard came face to face with the same power and commission.
Richard ordered an Army muster, while Fleetwood ordered one in a different location, and the Army totally ignored Richard and went to join Fleetwood. And then, when Richard ordered Parliament to disband, they totally ignored him, too. He’d completely lost control.
The press flooded England with pamphlets advocating for the return of the Rump Parliament, and the Army cut a deal with the remaining Rump members saying they’d restore the Rump for a year, in exchange for permanent indemnity for its soldiers as well as legal and religious reforms. They’d give Richard Cromwell a pension and send him on his merry way. After a year, the Rump would dissolve itself and make way for a newly elected Parliament. The Rump took them up on this, Richard was in no position to disagree, and he abdicated after eight months in office.
So now, the Third Protectorate Parliament was out of the way, Richard was a non-issue, and the Rump and the Army started bickering again.
And this was the moment when the Royalists decided to play their hand. They’d planned a large-scale Rebellion to take control of England’s major cities, and ultimately England itself. It was a moment of vulnerability, and therefore an opportunity. But it fizzled, just like the previous rebellions we’ve discussed. The coordination wasn’t there, people didn’t show up, and it just didn’t really work.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, though, the Rump and Army fully broke their alliance. The Rump asserted its authority over the Army by replacing Fleetwood with Haselrigge and declaring everything that had happened under Cromwell’s Protectorate to be null and void. They also said taxes couldn’t be collected without express Parliamentary authority, so if the Army were to take control of the government and oust Parliament, they wouldn’t have any legal way to collect taxes. Yeah, they might be able to go around collecting money by force, but that felt dystopian even by 1659 standards.
In response to the Rump’s actions, though, General John Lambert emerged as the head of the Army faction, and he yet again expelled the Rump, just like Cromwell had, with his support, in 1653. He put the Army in complete control of England.
It looked like England was gearing up for another round of civil war, but this time the attitude was different. Ordinary people refused to get even slightly involved. They were so burned out on everything that had happened that they ignored it, even in London, where it was happening around them. They went about their personal business and everyday lives like nothing was happening. Two decades before, there had been angry mobs ready for a fight. One decade before, there had been shock and lamentation at how things had gone. Now there was apathy.
At this point in time, there were very few people trying to reunite the Army and Rump factions because they polarized so fast that they had virtually nothing in common except an aversion to the return of a long-exiled king. One of those people, though, was Henry Vane. In our story, Vane has rarely set aside his dedication to republican principles for anything, so it’s kind of revealing that he did now. He emerged as one of the only people, and perhaps the only person, trusted by both factions enough to try to settle an agreement. He had fought hard against both in the past, but he knew that resolving their conflict was the only way the hope of an English republic might survive another day. He even expressed the idea that a government by the Army, not at all a democratic prospect, would have some benefits, like religious toleration, which was more than could be said of a return to monarchy.
The person who had the power to decide the outcome of the conflict before it went further was George Monck. Monck was the general who Cromwell had left in charge of Scotland. I’d incorrectly said he was Scottish before, but he was English. And he was a fairly interesting individual, in a very interesting position. He’d been a Royalist until King Charles had been defeated at Naseby. Then, he’d pledged his allegiance to Parliament and fought for them with such dedication in Ireland and Scotland that he was put in charge of Scotland and its army, to control on Cromwell’s behalf.
He had an army of 8,000 people, even after purging his army of everyone who supported Lambert’s actions. He demanded Parliament be reinstated as England’s only legal government, and when they refused, he marched that army south. Lambert rushed to meet him, and they stood off in Northern England in November and December 1659, but Lambert’s troops refused to fight, and Fairfax showed up to support Monck, symbolically stationed at Marston Moor, and Lambert’s fight was over. He surrendered and was put under house arrest. In London, Fleetwood declared that “God had spit in his face,” and gave the keys of Parliament to its speaker on December 24.
The Rump was restored yet again, but Monck didn’t turn around and go back to Scotland. Instead, without any real explanation, he continued marching toward London. And he reached the capital in early February.
There, he was greeted by a couple things. First, the press was calling for free and open elections. Second, in response to those calls, the Rump was asking him to restore public order by arresting its leading opponents and dismantling the city’s defenses, including removing all the gates, portcullises, posts and chains around the city.
Monck obeyed the Rump’s request. But then, he turned around and ordered the Rummp to dissolve itself and call for new, free elections. This left everyone extremely confused, but the people were overjoyed. The Army was overthrown, and the Rump was gone. They filled the city with bonfires, and on those bonfires they roasted rumps of beef in a show of contempt for the old Parliament. And they carried rumps through the city on sticks in a similar display.
The Rump tried one last way to salvage its cause, by trying to control the outcome of the next election. And rather than fight that fight, figuring out what was legal, what wasn’t, and delaying the election of a new Parliament until that was done, Monck did something completely unexpected. He simply reversed Pride’s Purge. The MPs who had been expelled by armed soldiers in 1649, were now escorted back into Parliament by armed soldiers in 1660. Most of them were dead at this point, but there were enough survivors to easily outnumber what was left of the Rump.
The newly restored Long Parliament nullified everything that had happened since Pride’s Purge, sent the leaders of Cromwell’s regime to the Tower, and then voted to dissolve itself. Quick, easy, elegant, almost poetic.
And with their self-dissolution, Monck was by default back in control of what would happen next, but people still had no idea of what he was up to. Even in April, almost two months after his entry, reports were that Monck was either in London to bring the king back, or to prevent his return.
Monck was secretly meeting with Royalist Sir John Greville, though, and through Greville, he was corresponding with Charles II. The meetings were so secret that Monck didn’t even want anything written down during them, so we can’t tell exactly what happened. Either Charles II proposed that Monck bring him back, or Monck proposed that he bring Charles II back. Regardless, though, the result of these meetings was that Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda. In that declaration, he made himself seem like the answer to everyone’s problems. Those who had supported Parliament could except a free pardon and amnesty, unless they’d voted for the execution of his father. They could also expect religious toleration for all peaceful Protestants, and Charles would give Parliament the power and authority to implement all of this. This of course would also mean that Parliament would take the blame for any failures or unpopular policies, because politics.
People were ecstatic, and a new, heavily Royalist Parliament was quickly elected. It sat on May 1, the declaration was read aloud, and enthusiastically accepted. A delegation went to meet Charles with money to help him move his court back to England, and one of the members of that delegation was Nicholas Crispe, the former Guinea Company leader. And, it was William Penn’s ship that brought the new king back to England, a service for which he was knighted. England’s government was declared to be, as it is today, “according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the government is an ought to be by King, Lords and Commons.” And by May 29, the king was back in London.
The entire month was full of celebrations. May Day saw the country covered in maypoles, and the few authorities who tried to saw them down were attacked and driven away. People drank the king’s health on their knees in the streets, and Charles’s trip from Dover to London was surrounded by ecstatic crowds, bells, trumpets, folk music, morris dancers. The streets were covered in flowers, houses hung with tapestries. Their unrestrained enthusiasm prompted the new king to remark that he should have come back sooner.
As the new king entered Whitehall Palace, he saw the site of his father’s execution and nearly cried. And then he walked around the childhood home he’d been forced to flee when he was 13 years old. He hardly stepped foot outside the palace for a year. He was 30 years old, and by contemporary descriptions, tall, gaunt and grey, with a somber look, even though he smiled.
And he carefully took control. He became known as a secretive king, who met with a group of six trusted advisors before he’d meet with his full privy council. He passed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which granted a pardon to all former Parliamentarians, except for the regicides and a handful of others.
And that act marks the end for some of the characters in our story. Hugh Peters hadn’t technically voted for the regicide, but he’d been so vocally in support of it that people have speculated both that it was originally his idea, and that he was the executioner whose identity has never been revealed. He was hanged, drawn and quartered along with 9 others. Some were already dead. Cromwell and Bradshaw were both posthumously executed, their bodies dug up and what was left of them hanged, drawn and quartered. Yet others were imprisoned without being executed, and others escaped. Of the ones that escaped, two went to New England, but we’ll talk about them another day. Archibald Campbell, the Marquess of Argyll, was also exempted in Scotland, when letters showed a close enough collaboration with Cromwell that he likely approved of the regicide.
And in addition to the regicides, John Lambert and Henry Vane were exempted from indemnity. Lambert was imprisoned for the rest of his life, but Vane was executed. He made it clear that he would not accept a return to monarchy. He wasn’t a regicide, because he wouldn’t support the government after Pride’s Purge. Instead of defending himself against the dubious charge of treason, he used his trial to defend his republican principles.
“Both my estate and my life are in such eminent peril; nay, more than my life, the concerns of thousands of lives are in it, not only of those who are in their graves already, but of all posterity in time to come. Had nothing been in it but the care to preserve my own life, I needed not have stayed in England, but might have taken my opportunity to withdraw myself into foreing parts, to provide for my own safety.” And concluding “I have also taken notice, in the little reading that I have had of history, how glorious the ery heathen have rendered their names to posterity in the contempt they have showed of death, when the laying down of their lives has appeared to be their duty, from the love which they have owed to their country.”
Charles declared him too dangerous a man to let live, and he was beheaded, though not hanged, drawn and quartered. It’s kind of an interesting parallel, though, between Henry Vane and Hugh Peters. They’d been friends turned bitter enemies in 1630s Massachusetts, and both had returned to England, where they’d continued to bitterly oppose each other’s position even within the Parliamentary, Independent movement. And now, both were executed in the aftermath of the Restoration. End of an era.
When news of the Restoration reached America, though, the enthusiasm was even greater than it was in England. Barbados, Jamaica, Bermuda, Suriname, and even Plymouth and Rhode Island rushed to proclaim the new king. They lowered the Commonwealth standard, and replaced it with the Royal one.
Plymouth, more moderate than most New England colonies, had been uncomfortable with the course the Commonwealth had taken and was relieved, though perhaps with somewhat mixed feelings, to see a sense of normalcy return.
The Restoration was particularly good news for Rhode Island, because the Declaration of Breda confirmed not only religious toleration, but also the rights the Williams faction had been seeking within the colony. When Charles returned to the throne, he sent John Clarke to Rhode Island with a new commission, too, solidifying the colony’s future. The rest of New England, though, dragged their feet in a way that we’ll have to discuss in another episode, but what I’ll say here is that they refused to believe rumors of the Restoration until they were doubly and triply confirmed, and when that happened, Davenport wrote the following to Winthrop, Jr. “Our comfort is that the Lord reigneth, and his counsels shall stand. In rightly obeying his king, we shall become faithful to whatever powers He settles over us.”
In Barbados, governor Modyford greeted the Assembly with the news. “You have been summoned in his majesty’s name, the sweet sound whereof hath not for almost these ten years been heard on this island.” Ex-governor Searle considered moving to New England to be among independent Puritans during whatever was to come, but the island was overwhelmingly happy. Suriname rushed, with no opposition, to rearrange its government to conform to the new royal one.
In Bermuda, the news came with instructions from the company not to use the occasion as an excuse for “debaucheries and other enormities,” and in Bermuda’s defense we don’t have any record of the extent to which those weren’t heeded, so we can only imagine. They did adopt the Church of England immediately, though.
Maryland was more cautious than most colonies after everything that had happened, and its leadership delayed its announcement by a month, finally saying that the king didn’t need them to make him king, but they were happy to show obedience to him.
It was in Virginia, though, where celebrations were predictably most intense of all. In fact, if I had a time machine, this is one of the events I would visit, because I would want to see this in person.
By the time news of the Restoration reached Virginia, Berkeley had had time to arrive with a royal commission proclaiming him governor, and that meant that he was the man who proclaimed the new king. And then the colony went wild.
Whatever alcohol there was, people used it to drink healths to the king. Whatever could be used to fill the air with noise, they did it. This wasn’t the flowers and morris dancers of the English celebrations. Trumpets sounded, yes, but guns were shot off, repeatedly, and there was laughter, singing, dancing, hugging, kissing, tossing of hats. In the fields, on the roads, shouts of “the king! The KING!”
To people who had been injured in the wars, or who had otherwise distinguished themselves in the service of the king, the Assembly voted to give gifts. Tens of thousands of pounds of tobacco went to people who had risked and lost everything for the cause the colony held so dear. They then paid their preacher 500 pounds of tobacco for his Thanksgiving service, and the colony continued its spending to reward its heroes, including extravagant pay for burgesses over the next few years.
The celebration continued constantly for days, but of course, there were a handful who weren’t participating, Puritans like William Claiborne. And in York County, the triumphant Royalists paid a handful of men a few hundred pounds of tobacco to bring these men into town. So they went in their canoes, fetched Claiborne and his associates, and as they stood in front of the Cavaliers who were now in charge, they were apprised of the situation in York County.
These people had governed Virginia on behalf of the hated Cromwell, and one of them even had two cannons. The fact that they weren’t celebrating the king’s return meant … that they had the only remaining booze and gunpowder around, and those cannons sound really cool, and so the county would like to pay them a fair market price … oh, whatever. It’s a celebration. Double the fair market price, or triple … for all those things in order to keep the party going.
Claiborne and the others agreed. They would have been crazy not to, so a few thousand pounds of tobacco later, they had a barrel of gunpowder, another of liquor, a bunch of cider barrels, two cannons, and a solid few more days worth of partying.
“Long live Charles II, king of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia!”