8.3 The Restoration and the Reign of Charles II

Charles II: portrait attributed to John Michael Wright, c. 1661

The Restoration

            The Restoration took place on the background of the reign of King Charles II, 1660 - 1685.  It was a period of popular reaction to and rejection of the Calvinist extremism of the Commonwealth.  With the return of the monarchy, the theaters reopened, Christmas was restored, and England seemed to breathe more freely.  Gone was the somber rigidity of the Puritan dictatorship:  "Merrie England" came back to life.

            Charles II fit perfectly the image of king wanted by most people.  He was handsome, witty, and seemingly politically intelligent.  He loved theater, dogs, horse racing, and being with beautiful women, Protestant and Catholic!  He encouraged and patronized scientific study, continued the mercantilist policies of the Commonwealth, and believed in religious toleration.  He wisely removed himself from politics and did not attempt to interfere with or antagonize Parliament.

            What was restored in 1660?  The most evident feature of the Restoration was, of course, the restoration of the monarchy in the Stuart line of succession.  There were conditions upon which the Crown was restored and these Charles accepted.  Charles issued a general amnesty for those who had committed treason against his father.  (Those of the Commonwealth's leadership who were identified as responsible for the death of Charles I were, however, tried, found guilty of "regicide” – killing a king – and executed. The body of Oliver Cromwell was dug up and hanged.)   Charles also confirmed all lands seized from royalists during the Civil War and Commonwealth as the property of those who held those lands in 1660.  Charles accepted the abolition of all forms of fiscal (financial) feudalism and of all forms of feudal land-holding.  Thus, feudalism, except in ceremonial form, was ended and the right to private property was confirmed.  The King accepted a generous annual income provided through special taxes for the operating expenses of the royal court and household.

            In spite of the vehemence of the parliamentary struggle with the monarchy, the Crown retained important prerogatives.  The monarch could summon, prorogue (temporarily adjourn), and dissolve Parliament at will.  The monarchy could veto acts of Parliament.  The Crown could suspend any act passed by Parliament.  The king could appoint his own advisors.  The monarch would be responsible for the conduct of foreign policy, the declaration of war, and the making of treaties.  The king would be commander-in-chief of the army and navy.

            The full Parliament was restored.  The House of Lords, abolished in 1649, was revived as it had existed before the Commonwealth.  The Lords would continue to be the hereditary nobility and the bishops of the Anglican Church.  Qualifications for voting and election to the House of Commons remained as they had been before the Civil War.  The MPs elected to the Commons in the late seventeenth century were primarily from the land-owning gentry class and were strong supporters of the Anglican Church.

            The powers of the Parliament were essentially those won in the mid-century struggle with the Crown.  Parliament would continue to legislate in constitutional cooperation with the Crown.  Parliament held the power to control (through its right to consent to taxes) government spending.  Parliament had the right to impeach, if necessary, the king's advisors.  MPs would have the right to freedom of speech and debate without fear of royal action being taken against them.  Through these powers and privileges, consequently, the Parliament would be able to exert considerable influence over and even limit the exercise of royal power.

            The Anglican Church was restored as the national Church of England with the monarch as its head, its episcopal hierarchy, and its doctrine and liturgy as stated in the Elizabethan Articles of Faith (1563).  The strongly Anglican Parliament, reacting to the religious extremism of the Commonwealth, passed a number of laws aimed against Catholics and Dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants, e.g., Calvinists).  The most important of these laws was the Test Act.

                The Test Act, passed in 1673, required that all persons holding any government office or military commission take an oath of allegiance to the Crown and partake of the Anglican communion in order to hold their office or commission.  Therefore, only Anglicans could be government officials or army officers.  When one remembers that extremist Calvinists had gotten command of the English army in the years of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Test Act is understandable.  As the King at the time was also showing sympathy for Catholics, the Test Act reinforced the Anglican supremacy.  No Catholic or good Calvinist would take the Anglican communion, thus assuring an Anglican monopoly of the government and army.  The Test Act would remain in effect until it was repealed in 1828.

            While the Test Act certainly discriminated against non-Anglicans, there was one law passed during the reign of Charles II that benefited all Englishmen.  This was the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. 

                One of the greatest concerns of MPs in the years prior to the Civil War had been the Crown's exercise of arbitrary arrest.  For example, when people refused to contribute to Charles I's forced loans, the king ordered their arrest and imprisonment.  Many believed such arrests were illegal under English constitutional law.  The Magna Carta of 1215 denied the king the power to arrest and imprison people without just cause or to hold them without trial by a jury of their peers.  To refuse to contribute to a loan was not in violation of the law nor just cause for arrest.  The Parliament had protested such arrests through the Five Knights' Case of 1627.    Nonetheless, the Crown had justified such arrests claiming that the king was sovereign in such matters.  When the legality of the Crown's actions was challenged in the courts, as in the Five Knights' Case, the courts (the judges being the king's appointees) usually upheld the Crown.

            The Habeas Corpus Act was intended to protect an individual from illegal arrest and imprisonment.  According to the law, anyone who had been arrested and felt that the arrest was illegal had the right to obtain a writ (court order) of habeas corpus requiring the arresting authorities to take that individual before a judge.  The judge would decide whether the prisoner should be charged with a crime (and held for trial) or released.  Thus it was that in England no one could be arrested on the king's order without having committed an offense identified by law as a crime.  Once again the power of the Crown had been limited by act of Parliament based on legal precedent (Magna Carta).  This most valued civil liberty became part of the American legal heritage through the colonial experience.  Habeas corpus is guaranteed U.S. citizens in Section 9 of Article I of the United States Constitution.

The Reign of Charles II Following the Restoration

            Charles continued the mercantilist economic policies of the Commonwealth.  New colonies were founded in the Americas (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the Carolinas - named from the Latin, Carolus - “Charles”).  Through Charles' marriage to Princess Catherine (Braganza) of Portugal, England acquired the former Portuguese port of Bombay in India.  The East India Company, chartered in 1657 as a joint-stock company for the development of trade with India, was authorized to expand its operations in India.  (Within a century the East India Company would dominate the Indian economy and its managers would virtually control the major Indian states.)   Mercantilist tariff laws were extended to protect English farmers from the import of Scottish and Irish livestock and foodstuffs.  Commercial legislation continued to protect English trade from Dutch competition and led to a second Anglo-Dutch War.

            The second Anglo-Dutch War (1665 - 1667), like the first ten years earlier, was caused by English economic interests.  Anxious to increase English colonial commerce at the expense of the Dutch, Charles' government authorized English seizure of the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam (in the New Netherlands) in 1664.  In the following war, the Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames estuary and destroyed the English naval yards outside of London.  Sixteen English warships were either destroyed or captured in this humiliating defeat.  In 1667 both sides, anxious to end the war, negotiated a settlement.  England ceded its colony in Surinam (on the Guyana coast of South America) to the Dutch.  The Netherlands ceded the New Netherlands to England.  New Amsterdam and the New Netherlands were renamed for Charles' brother, the Duke of York.  Thus it was that New York became an English colony.

            The mid-1660s were not fortunate times for England.  Beginning in 1664 a devastating plague swept through London.  The King and his government relocated in Oxford as the disease ravaged the population.  Some 70,000 Londoners died before the plague abated in early 1666.  In the summer of that year the Dutch fleet attacked the naval yards on the Thames.  In early September 1666, a catastrophic fire destroyed two-thirds of the capital.  Over 200,000 homes were destroyed, as were London's financial center and St. Paul's Cathedral.  The political center of the city, Westminster, was spared the flames.  Both Charles and his unpopular brother Prince James, the Duke of York, joined the thousands of volunteers who vainly fought the fire.  The king provided thousands of pounds worth of relief for the victims of both disasters.  New regulations established fire and building codes that gradually turned London from a city of wood to a city of brick.  The noted architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a new St. Paul's. (This magnificent domed church is today one of London's most famous landmarks.)

            In the late 1660s it was becoming increasingly clear that the greatest threat to the peace of Europe was France.  Under the vigorous rule of King Louis XIV, France was undertaking an expansionist foreign policy aimed at breaking the Hapsburg encirclement of its territory.   Louis' objective was to expand France to the Rhine River, and this policy threatened the security of both the Spanish and Dutch Netherlands.  As a century earlier, England would not tolerate the dominance of a major power over the Low Countries.  In 1668 England joined the Netherlands and Sweden in an alliance against France which was already at war with Spain.  Louis was compelled to withdraw his armies from the Spanish Netherlands and make peace.

            Louis realized the value of English neutrality as he pursued his foreign policy objectives, and entered into secret negotiations with Charles.  Because of the hospitality shown Charles while he was in exile in France during the years of the Commonwealth, Charles was receptive to Louis' overtures.  Charles also very much admired and envied the absolutism of the French crown and had been attracted to Catholicism when in France.

            In 1670 Charles and Louis agreed to the secret Treaty of Dover.  Through this agreement, which only became known to the English public after Charles' death, Charles agreed to join Louis in a war to partition the Netherlands and to proclaim himself a Catholic when, if ever, the time was right to do so.  Charles would receive from France a yearly pension of £200,000.  Charles' ministers knew only of the treaty's provision relating to the Netherlands and nothing of the other two provisions.  The Treaty of Dover represented Charles at his selfish worst.

             In 1672 France and England went to war with the Netherlands.  This third Anglo-Dutch War would last until 1674.  As this Dutch war was motivated by French interests not shared by England, it was not a popular war and Parliament was not supportive.  Charles had issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the laws against Catholics, and his brother, Prince James, had married a Catholic princess (Mary of Modena) from Italy.  These measures caused a wave of popular indignation to sweep through the nation, and caused Charles to back off from the French alliance.  In 1674 England made a separate peace with the Netherlands (through which James' daughter, Mary, was married to William III of Orange, the Dutch stadholder) and withdrew from the war.

             In 1673 Parliament compelled the king to withdraw his declaration permitting Catholics religious freedom.  To assure that no Catholic would ever hold office in government or the military, Parliament passed the Test Act (described above).  With the passage of the Test Act, Charles' brother, Prince James, the Duke of York, resigned his commission as Lord High Admiral of the navy and publicly declared himself a Roman Catholic.  James' Catholicism would become an issue of great national concern.  As Charles and Queen Catherine had no children,[1] James was heir to the crown. 

            The unpopular marriage of Prince James to Mary of Modena (mentioned above) was alarming to many but not to all.  James had been a widower.  His first wife, Anne Hyde, had been an Anglican and there were two daughters, Mary and Anne, of that marriage.  Both daughters had been raised as Anglicans.  Thus it was that James himself had two Protestant heirs who themselves would most likely be married to Protestants.  In 1674, as we have seen, Princess Mary was married to William of Orange.  With the exception of James, the monarchy would continue to be Protestant.  That was, of course, only if there were no male children of his marriage with Mary of Modena.  The future of the English succession would divide the political nation.

            The issue of royal succession would divide the English political nation into opposing factions that would be the ancestors of modern political parties.  Both groups were derisively labeled by their opponents, but the labels "Tory" and "Whig" would become permanent.

             The Tories were largely members of the gentry and lesser nobility.  They were generally the wealthy landowners and were intensely Anglican.  They favored continued strong legislation preserving the Anglican spiritual supremacy and Anglican monopoly of political office and military command.  Thus, they were opposed to any relaxation of laws against Protestant Dissenters and Catholics.  They felt the Crown should retain strong executive power.  Above all, the Tories believed in legitimate hereditary succession to the crown.  In the name of legitimate succession, they were willing to tolerate James' assuming the monarchy as long as his heirs were Protestant.   (They were ridiculed by their parliamentary opponents with the label "Tory," a term identifying a Scottish horse thief.)

            The Whigs were members of the greater aristocracy and the wealthy business class (especially the merchant and financial interests of London).  They were intensely anti-Catholic but favored relaxing the laws against Protestant Dissenters.  They tended to favor a monarchy with weak executive powers and believed in the legislative supremacy of Parliament.  They viewed themselves as champions of Parliament's constitutional powers to protect the rights of Englishmen from the arbitrary power of kings. 

             Above all, the Whigs were opposed to a Catholic assuming the crown.  Under no condition would they accept the succession of Prince James.  (The Whigs were so labeled by their Tory opponents.  A "Whig" was an Irish bandit.)

             The last years of Charles' reign saw religion and royal succession as the major political issues affecting the nation.  In 1678 popular feelings were aroused when one Titus Oates claimed knowledge of a Catholic plot to assassinate the king and enable James' succession.  Oates testified that Tory MPs were involved in the plot and several leading Tories were arrested.  Some Tories were tried and executed as a wave of anti-Catholic terror swept through England.  This "Popish Plot" was later proved non-existent, but it did discredit the Tory faction. (Oates was later convicted of perjury and imprisoned.  He was pardoned and released during the reign of William and Mary.) 

            When in 1681 the Whigs introduced in the Commons a bill to exclude Prince James from the succession, Charles dissolved the Parliament.  He would spend the last four years of his reign ruling without Parliament, being careful to govern within his financial means.  Charles worried that James might so antagonize the nation that the prince would be forced into exile, but continued to champion his brother's right to succeed him.  In 1683 a conspiracy involving Whig MPs known as the Rye House Plot planned to overthrow both Charles and James and make the  Duke of Monmouth king.  The plot was thwarted and its leaders were arrested. 

            In February 1685, Charles fell ill.  His doctors, using the primitive medical science of the times, virtually killed him while trying to cure him. The king asked his brother to bring him a Catholic priest.  On his deathbed Charles II converted to Catholicism and was administered the sacrament of last rites.  On apologizing for taking so long to die, the "Merry Monarch" of the Restoration died.  The Roman Catholic James succeeded to the throne as King James II.  England was about to experience the Glorious Revolution.

Sources for the Restoration

Blitzer, Charles. Age of Kings. New York: Time-Life Books, 1967.

Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.

Fraser, Anatonia. Royal Charles: Charles II and The Restoration. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution. New York: Norton, 1961.

Knapton, Ernest. Europe 1450 – 1815. New York: Scribners, 1958.

Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe. New York: Norton, 1996.

Palmer, Robert R et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Smith, Lacey Baldwin. This Realm of England. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1971.

Trevelyan, George Macauley. England Under the Stuarts. London: Putnam, 1916.

Tucker, Albert. A History of English Civilization. New York: Harper, 1972.

[1] Charles and Catherine were unable to have children. Her several pregnancies ended in miscarriage.  Charles, however, was notorious for his many mistresses and already had a son, James Scott, through a relationship from before his marriage.  Although illegitimate, James was given the title Duke of Monmouth, and would challenge for the crown on Charles’ death in 1685.   Parliament, worried about the succession, urged Charles to divorce Catherine and remarry but he refused.  He loved Catherine and she, despite his distractions, loved him. 

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Image of Charles II is from the Wikipedia article on King Charles.