In Our Time - The Restoration

Episode Date: February 15, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Restoration. On 29th May 1660, on his thirtieth birthday, Charles II rode into London on horseback and was restored to the thrones of England and Wales, of Scotland and of Ireland. A ‘golden age’ descended on a people that had been ravaged by civil war, religious division, Cromwellian tyranny and puritanical laws: suddenly the theatres were re-opened, Christmas was celebrated once again, all Orange-sellers were beautiful and peace and prosperity reigned across the land. Or at least that’s one version of the Restoration story. But despite the architecture of Wren, the literature of Dryden, and the philosophy of Hobbes, can an era that is suffused in Plague and in Fire, and culminates in something called The Glorious Revolution, ever really have had it so good?With Dr Mark Goldie, lecturer in History, Churchill College, University of Cambridge; Richard Ollard author of The Image of the King: Charles I and Charles II; Dr Clare Jackson, lecturer and Director of Studies in History, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, on the 29th of May 1660, on his 30th birthday, Charles II rode into London and was restored to the thrones of England and Wales, of Scotland and Ireland.

It was claimed that a golden age descended on a people ravaged by civil war, War, religious division, Cromwellian tyranny, and Puritanical laws. Theaters were reopened. Christmas, which had been cancelled, was celebrated once again. All orange cellars were beautiful, and peace and prosperity reigned across the land. That's one version of the restoration story. But despite the architecture of Wren, the literature of Dryden, a canon era that begins in plague and in fire continues with no little persecution and culminates in the glorious revolution

ever really have had it so good. We relish the joyous diaries of Peeps, what of the dark diary of his contemporary Roger Morris. With me, to separate the good times from the bad times and the restoration, and to assess its place in our history, is Richard Ollard, author of many historical books on the Stuart period, including the image of the king, Mark Goldie, a lecturer in history at Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Claire Jackson, Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Can I start with you, Richard Ollard? After the execution of Charles I, and then in the Civil War,

War of the 1640s, the execution of Charles I First, the protectorate or tyranny of Cromwell, whichever way you look at it. Charles II comes back, as we said, on horseback, into London it was almost like a royal progress rather than an invasion. What was restored briefly? We called it the restoration.

What was restored? Well, there was a good deal of argument about that at the time. I think that the chief political architect of the restoration, Charles' first minister at the time, Sarranton, what he thought was restored and what he hoped was restored was the situation more or less after the

beginning of the long parliament when the monarchy's clause had been paired because Clarendon had been a supporter of PIM in the long parliament and he had voted for the bringing down of the prerogative courts, our chamber and all those kind of things which are regarded as the instruments of Stuart Tilney. What Clarendon wanted restored was as he saw it, the old Elizabethan constitution of the king in parliament, that kind of thing. There were a lot of other people who thought, goodness me, this is a chance to get our own back on those

confounded periodons. And, of course, if you've had your house burnt, your possessions destroyed and so on, and you feel pretty bitter. And this is, of course, one of the things about a civil war why it's so much worse than most other types of war because it's your neighbours who've done these frightful things.

to you, not some undone foreigner. So for some of his restoration, for others, it was revenge? Oh, I think certainly. Some of it was. What is remarkable, was how little revenge was taken. I mean, after all, of the regicides, people who'd signed the king's death warrant. I think there were 31 of them

still alive. And only 11 were executed. But if you go by the frightful standards of our century, that's pretty good, pretty humane going, I think. So that Clarendon, who is his

The advisor wanted it go back to the king in Parliament, the days of good Queen Bess in a way. Mark Goldie, what would you think was restored? Well, there's a sense in which that was a fantastically successful restoration because what came back are institutions that are still with us. We got back a monarchy, a hereditary monarchy, we got back a hereditary house of lords, we got back an established Church of England. And it is a quite remarkable fact, of course, about English history, that today we have those institutions still.

So there's a good case for saying that the civil war, though we think of it, as a great uprising, a great revolution, in fact was an incredible failure because in 1660, all the old institutions were put back and have stayed with us. Now, I think something I'd want to take up with you later on

is the difference between the early and the later restoration. You've said, Richard, that the revenge was slight in 1660, I think there was an awful lot of papering over the cracks. Your point on this, Claire Jackson. Well, I think it's important to remember that Charles II was king, not only of England and Wales, but also, again, of Ireland and Scotland. So when he was restored to power, so too was the system of multiple monarchy that had existed before.

So just as the Cromwellian Republican vision was jettisoned, if you like, in 1660s, so too was the imperial vision of uniting Britain. So the only link really associating England, Scotland and Ireland was really the person of Charles II. So when one thinks about putting things back the way they were, if you take somewhere like Scotland, the decision was taken to restore what had been the case in 1633, not as in England, where the monarchy was restored back to its 1641 status.

But in Scotland, any legislation that had been passed between 1633 and 1660 was rescinded in a, if you like, legislative attempt to imagine away the entire Civil War period. Now, it wasn't so clear perhaps that the political aspirations and the religious freedoms that people had come to enjoy during the 1640s and 1650s could be as easily erased from the public memory as easily as they could be from the statute books. I mean, as a crass anachronism, I mean, it would be like a current administration today trying to revoke all legislation passed since the early 1970s and not expecting tensions to erupt.

One of these extraordinary things, Richard Hollande, if you look at it, Charles II came with just a few hundred men. Cornwell had named his son as his successor, and it was. was this republic he had was a ferocious, it was a ferocious army. He came with a few hundred men and town after town fell to him and it was a royal progress rather than an invasion. Was that a superficial welcome or was that a profound welcome? Can you give us some idea of what seems to be the welcome that he wrote? All the evidence is that it was an overwhelming welcome because these other people they'd all fail.

You see, Tumbledown Dick as Cromwell's son was known as. I mean he had, as monk, who was the military organization, of the restoration, said he'd betrayed himself. I mean, he'd thrown in the sponge, pretty well, straight away. And what had happened then had been various attempts to set up different forms of government, which lasted a few weeks. And this is one of the reasons why people were so frightfully enthusiastic for the restoration, because they thought, thank goodness, we're getting back to something stable,

something we'd know, have some idea what's going on next month. Whereas if you're changing governments, you've no idea what's going to be happening in two or three weeks time. It's very disturbing if you just get on the ordinary business of earning your living and educating your children and that kind of thing. Is there a sense in which, I'm just asking, is there a sense in which people were rather regretted, were they rather ashamed of,

rather felt guilty about executing a king, executing Charles I, and they were making it up to his son? Oh, the execution of Charles I first was manifestly very unpopular. It was carried through by a small army junta. And I think they had very good reasons for doing it. The main reason being that Charles first was simply a man you couldn't do business with, that you could never trust anything he said, and that he would agree to all kinds of things.

And then you'd find letters that he was writing to somebody else, making it perfectly plain that he would string you up as soon as he could. Well, this doesn't exactly encourage trust in the persons you're negotiating with. They'd seem to them the only thing to do was to eliminate him. But he was very unpopular in the country. country. It was very unpopular. I was just thought of the most horrifying thing. See, next executing God, executing the king, who is his vice-gerent in a lot of people's thinking, it was the most frightful thing. And it was it was different from a mere assassination, which was quite a common

thing in the monarchies of Europe. Can I just take up a, continue, sorry, to continue with this point of establishing the restoration before we move on. Just one or two more questions, Mark Goldie. The Declaration of Breeder was a sort of restoration manifesto. This is what Charles II was going to do. And it would heal and settle deep divisions in society. Do you think that he carried that through, attempted to carry that through? Did that have an influence? Was that part of the welcome that Richard Ollard has described he received? Well, I think Charles was very skillful at making promises all round. Are we talking Charles II? Charles II, I'm sorry, yes. And one of the reasons why he was indeed very popular at the beginning

of his reign was that I think people imagined many kinds of restoration. In many senses, the restoration was an open book yet to be written. So there are many people who come on side with Charles II who in fact had fought his father and had been horrified at what

had happened, the Pandora's box they'd opened up in the 1640s. They'd been horrified, as you say, by the execution of Charles I. So lots of people come on side in 1660. And the Declaration of Breeder is a very skillful document issued by Charles II just before he left Holland for England,

offering especially a general indemnity so that no one, except the regicides, no one would suffer for the political crimes that they'd committed in the previous 20 years. And he made an offer of what seemed like religious toleration, and he wasn't able to deliver on that. Well, let's move to religious toleration, because religion was very much the centre

of the whole enterprise of, state and of living at that time in a way, which is quite difficult for us to re-imagined, but there it was, to put it to the simplest. How far did that tolerance go? Was it really, did he really introduce tolerance? Well, I think, as Mark was saying, there was a genuine desire to bring everyone on side. And I think if we just stay with the figure of Charles II for a moment, left to his own devices, there are a lot of tolerationist issues and successes that he probably could have had.

But when Richard at the beginning mentioned desires for revenges, I mean, it was often the case that the English Parliament was perhaps more royalist than the royal himself in terms of establishing the sort of monarchy they wanted. So in terms of the religious settlement that was established, it was more narrow probably than the monarch's own desires. I mean, in England there was a very narrow Clarendon code. It later became a narrow code of Anglicanism and conformity that was established. In Scotland, the situation was again somewhat different in that Episcopalian.

against Charles' own wishes was restored on what was a predominantly Presbyterian population who were deeply suspicious of church involvement with the state, oh, state involvement with the church. Would it be too simple, to put it crudely, to say that you had the Anglican royalists in the middle there, and they felt assailed, they felt assailed and fearful of the Roman Catholics, and they wished to assail the non-conformists, and so it's coming both. Was that? No, I wouldn't say that.

I would have thought that the anti-Catholic mania of England in the 17th century is almost inconceivable. I mean, the kind of feelings about communists in America and the McCarthy era, the kind of things that come to mind. The Roman Catholics, there was never, in fact, any danger of them at all taking over until, of course, you arrived at the time of James 2, who was totally unfitted to be king and complete idiot, really. and attempted to enforce Roman Catholicism on a country which was bitterly, madly, anti-Catholic. Do you find that, Mark Gold, how do you assess the so-called

the toleration of King Charles II because he's thought of? He comes back with tolerance after this extremism of Cromwell. What do you think really happened? Well, I think as we mentioned a moment ago, there are two sides to this. The king himself has many desires for toleration,

You think, partly because he's either because he's indifferent or because he has a secret yearning for toleration for Catholics in particular. Or simply an indifference or simply wishing to keep people on side because he knows well that if you persecute, you lose supporters. But it's a very different story in terms of the Anglican royalists who do want to persecute. And I think it's there in the field of religion that we get to the dark side of the restoration. And... Could you tell us a bit about that? Things like the Hilton gang, which would be modified, for instance. Yes, yes, yes.

In the 1680s, and I think we have to talk about different parts of the restoration here. By the end of the rain, things are much tougher. So, you're talking 25 years. We are, we are. And from the late 70s, the early 80s, the early 80s, you get a very different picture in which the gloves are off. And many of the old scores begin to be settled. There's a visceral hatred of a lot of the old Puritans,

who they call fanatians. Now we're talking here about the whole non-conformist tradition that had grown up in the Civil War, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, who will be a great tradition of English descent and non-conformity. But they don't get their freedom until the end of the 17th century. And what you get in the whole restoration period, Charles II reign, is actually the last attempt in English history to force people to be of one religion. And by the 80s, it gets pretty vicious.

and the Hilton gang is a nice example, well, pretty ghastly example of it actually. John Hilton is a nasty piece of work. He's basically a criminal who leads a criminal gang in London in the early 1680s. Now the laws allow for informers. You get one third of the fine if you catch people. This was a standard part of the English legal system. You don't have a professional police force, so the laws encourage citizens to find criminals.

But by applying the idea of informers to religious issues, you simply license people to go and tell on Quaker meetings. His gang, many of them were women, went round the streets, pretending to convert to the Baptists or the Quakers, finding out these secret illegal meetings for worship, reporting them to the authorities. And this gang throughout the 80s, early 80s, had a monopoly on prosecution in London for non-conformity. ordinary artisans, ordinary traders in the streets of London are being fined, imprisoned because of their religious beliefs. And that, I think, is the seamy side by the end of it, Ray. In Scotland, I think the stakes become even higher.

I mean, I think the key thing to appreciate here is well about religious intolerance is that on the part of the authorities, there's an intrinsic link seen between religious non-conformity and political disloyalty. And this link was resented by a lot of dissenters who felt that there was no incompatibility with being lawy to the monarch, as well as dissenting in religion. But in Scotland, with a minority established church, the state embarked on what was an increasingly ruthless, increasingly systematic,

and by the end, almost desperate attempt, to try and get the majority of the population to conform. And it ushered in the period that's characteristically known as the killing times in Scotland, as increasingly bloody means were taken to adopt this. Thumbs screws on display in open court. Exactly. I mean, as Mark was saying, informing was part of the English legal process, well, so too was the use of judicial torture in both England and Scotland to secure confessions, not as part of the legal process in the middle of a trial, but well-known

Presbyterians were, I mean, the other flip side of the killing times is not only the people that the state, that were being murdered, the state people that were being murdered, but the pressure placed on prominent non-conformists to divulge information about conspiracies. And there were two main forms of torture used in Scotland, in a way that they weren't used to the same extent in England. The first was thumb screws, as you say, which is a sort of macabre form of nutcracker. You can see them in the National Museum of Scotland today, but tiny little stocks in which thumbs were placed and basically screws were tightened and the thumbs would break. At the same time, often as what was known as the boot, which was, I mean, it was described in

the 1670s as a sort of contraption that would surround a young sapling from rabbits. Well, the same sort of contraption was applied to the leg, two concentric circles. wedges were driven into those circles until eventually the shin split and the bones broke. And very prominent Presbyterians in Scotland, people like William Carstairs, who later became principal of Edinburgh University, was William of Orange's chaplain,

suffered that kind of torture. And after the restoration, when Presbyterianism was restored in Scotland, the Privy Council actually gave Carstairs the thumbikins, as they were known, the thumbscrews, which were a recent import from Moscow, as a momento of the intolerance. So we have this hysterical anti-Catholicism

and quite a serious persecution of 400 Quakers in jail, show trials and so on. Let's turn to the king himself now. There was a feeling that he did bring back golden days. It was a golden age. We know the great burst through of writers and so and so forth. And Samu peeps as of Charles, I do perceive the king as a man like other men,

which was a great compliment at time. John Evelyn says, a prince of many virtues and a great many imperfections, debonair, easy of access, not bloody or cruel. So what sort of man are we talking about? And what power did he have, Richard Ollard? Well, I think one of the things he had, I think he must have in one most unshye monarchs that we've ever had.

He was very easy in conversation. And, of course, he was wonderfully witty. I mean, it seems to me the best. The best repartee in the English language is that answer. He gave that verse, you know, here lies a great and famous king whose promise none relies on, who never said a foolish thing or ever did a wise one. And Charles replied, very true, for my words are my own and my acts of my ministers. Well, that's going to set and bash, isn't it?

It's off the cuff. It's very wonderful. And he was. He was a very witty and an entertaining man. He liked good conversation. I mean, look at the patronage he extended to unpopular people like Hobbes, whom the bishops were anxious to, as Aubrey points out, to have the good old gentleman condemned as a heretic.

And he was lively. Can you give us some idea of the power he had? It's quite a difficult question to answer very simply, because you could say that he had quite limited power. He doesn't have a large army like some of his continental neighbours. He does, on the other hand, hold constitutional trump cards, particularly over Parliament. And towards the end of his reign, he certainly uses those pretty freely dismissing Parliament, trying to manipulate when Parliament meets or how it's elected.

I think one of the really interesting things is the extraordinary cult of monarchy that you get in the restoration period, through the pulpit, through the endless preachings about obedience to monarchs, through the poetry and the parallels drawn with the biblical King David or Caesar Augustus of Rome. There are statues still of Charles II with the laurel wreaths of a Roman emperor. Charles, or rather one of his physician, knew a good thing when he saw one, because the power that kings had of touching for the king's evil, of curing the disease scrofula

was turned up to a great pitch under Charles de Sagan who touched more of his subjects in more ways than one. I'm sure you're getting into trouble, though. Any other monarch, but there was quite a... Throughout the country, ordinary parishioners would contribute money for very ordinary people to be sent up to London,

to be touched by the king. They'd be given a medallion which they'd always treasure, call the touchpiece. And this cult, tens of thousands of people were touched in this way. Just to talk about it from a different point of view. Clydeu, you've studied a lot of the Scottish corresponders of the period. Inexamined the papers of the Earl of Lauderdale,

or Charles II's right-hand man, and there's a great ham house French influence. We might get around to that. And so what impression do you have from studying those papers? Speaking of Lauderdale's influence on him, what sort of powers did he have, what sort of man comes out from there? It's very interesting.

I mean, I think there is this duality of perspective the whole way through the restoration. I mean, just speaking broadly for a moment, I mean, people are aware that they don't want to revisit the years of sort of regicide and religious success and republicanism. On the other hand, they're continually apprehensive about the future. Charles's failure to produce an air.

And a lot of that duality often comes through. I mean, if you take somebody like Lauderdale through the correspondence, I mean, at one side, this is, as Richard was saying, a monarch who doesn't take things too seriously. I mean, last summer I was reading an account from a courtier at Whitehall when the monster petition, as it was known, was delivered in January 1680 to Charles, petitioning him to call a parliament. So we're quite far through the restoration by this stage.

But this was a huge petition. I mean, the bits we have at the moment aren't complete, but I mean, about 16,000 people had put their names to a petition. And according to the courtier, when it was delivered, Charles accepted it, had problems holding on to it. And Lordedale turns to him and says, well, if nothing else, your majesty, at least the Palace of Whitehall won't need any toilet paper

for the foreseeable future. And both of them thought this was hysterically witty. But I mean, this was a petition that people had removed their signatures from at the last minute because they faced serious judicial comeback. So there is that side. On the other side, this is also a society that's characterized by paranoia about secrets, conspiracies, lies. So if you take the Lord...

You make the point about masks being... Yes. I mean, we tend to think of the restoration as being... characterized by equivacy and dissimulation that you would see at the theatre through a masquerade or a comedy. But I mean, you only need to look at a correspondence of somebody like Lauderdale. I mean, sections are written in Invisible Ink, for example,

which was often lemon juice or milk, but was often also a more complicated chemical compound. One of Lauderdale's most frequent correspondence was Sir Robert Murray, who in addition to being a politician was also a very keen scientist and chemist, later became the first president of the Royal Society, who spent a long time in the laboratory,

trying to work out how to devise a more complex form of invisible ink. But he was always worried that Lauderdale wouldn't remember to read the politically sensitive sections of the letters that were written in Invisible Ink. I mean, they would be very banal letters about sort of today I went to the sea of play. So he devised his own system on top of this, whereby if he ever signed, if Mari ever signed his name with a Masonic pentacle, this would indicate he was playing the Mason. Therefore, Lordadale was to look for particular sections written in Invisible Inc. I mean, this causes enormous headaches for a historian, as you can imagine. The other problem for a historian as well as, I mean, there's a sense of the paranoia,

is that instead of best wishes at the end of most letters, there's always the line, burn this, I entreat you. So, in a way, the only way in which we have all this correspondence is just because the recipient, Lauderdale, was often very careless about burning letters. Can we just briefly talk about any de relevance the restoration might have, the legacy that it left us, Richard, what legacy do you see is leaving us the restoration? It's one of the great periods of English literature, unquestionably. You have Milton, no supporter of Charles II, writing what is arguably the greatest poem in the English language.

You have Clarendon writing, I think, on the most milderous history books set in the most interesting one that had yet been written. You have the book of Common Prair, which is still so highly controverted, which expresses, I mean, the use of language. I think isn't that one of T.S. Eliot's essays, which is almost impossible to find any bad prose written in the restoration period. It was a wonderful period for the use of language. Not only language, what about music, what about painting, Purcell, Lili, all these people. I'm not saying that Charles II was responsible for all this,

but it was a wonderfully rich period. Well, that's quite interesting. Do you give no special credit to him for it, Mark Goldie? He stands aside so much of the time, I think. He's very good at standing aside and letting things happen around him. And he's in the famous phrase, he didn't want to go on his travels again, and he was brilliantly successful at that. Even in the worst moments at the end of his reign, he did, after all,

rained for 25 years. I think one of the most revealing instances of that standing asses, side is when that fearful rogue Oates came up before the council. And he claimed that Don John had given instructions for a plot. He was then the governor of the Spanish, to be coordinated with people in England, and they were going to land troops, like that sort of so. And Charles II asked Oates to describe Don John. And Oates went ahead and described him.

There was absolutely no physical resemblance at all. Charles II, the Duke of York had played tennis with him and hunted with him, that kind of thing. They knew exactly what he looked like. But having discovered that Oates was a complete liar, Charles II did nothing, said nothing. He didn't reckon that he had enough power behind him to stop the media were in full cry

and that he hadn't, as Mark Goldie points out of any sort of military power behind him or anything of that kind. It was too prudential to run. risk his neck. I think in terms of the legacy as well that the restoration left, I think this was an age when people were labelled. I mean, although it was an age of dissimulation and equivocation, people were terribly keen to label people in loyal or disloyal. So something like the Popish plot in the exclusion crisis bequeathed somewhat anachronistically to say so, but I mean bequeathed the modern party system into Tories and Whigs and colours started being worn for

Tory party affiliations. And I mean, the real coffeehouse society. I mean, there were weak coffee houses like the Swan in Fish Street and the angel at the old exchange and Tory taverns like Sam's coffee house in Ludgate Street. A news was so important to get the right kind of information, this quest always to get the latest news from the continent and to rush to the coffee house and exchange that news and spread the gossip and spread the rumours. I mean the cafe society did begin really in the restoration in that sense. The labelling's a very nice point because one of the great legacies of the restoration is a two-culture society, which lasted really down to the 19th and 20th century between church and chapel, which very quickly became mapped

on to urban and rural, because many of these dissenters were based in the towns, in trade, in merchanting, and that got mapped in turn onto Whig and Tory. So you get a division of politics, of religion and of temperament in English society that runs, I think, all the way from the 1660s, Charles's reign, right through until the end of that kind of politics in the 19th century. Well, thank you very much, Clare Jackson, Mark Goldie, and Richard Allard, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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