Abstract
The Restoration of Charles II was an event of great moment and was proclaimed, expounded, celebrated and recorded in a profusion of pageantry and panegyric, tracts, sermons, pictures, diary entries and, later on, memoirs and histories. The array of responses to Charles’s return was effusive and apparently unanimous, although often clumsy or heavy-handed, and conveys a striking sense of surprise, wonder, and even shock. The king’s Restoration was a mystery verging on the miraculous, as many contemporaries saw it, and had come about with almost inexplicable suddenness and ease. Poets registered the wonder of the occasion abundantly and equally in prose writings religiosity combined with loyalism to confer a peculiarly exalted significance on the event, working to achieve for the political change a heightened, near-mythical status. To remove Charles’s Restoration from the shifting uncertainties of the immediate political situation required ingenuity and boldness and it is curious that what now might be regarded as a blatantly wishful way of seeing seems at the time to have been not merely convincing but inevitable and natural. Restoration panegyric was not the product of superficial time-serving alone. After twelve years of government upheaval, and after twelve months of particularly extreme instability, a fresh start which was also a return to stability was urgently desired.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury (Vol.I, Oxford, 1905), pp. 507–8.
The Complete Poems of Dr. Joseph Beaumont, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1880), II, 146.
Rachel Jevon, Exultationis Carmen (1660), p. 6.
The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven and London, 1968), p. 155.
John Collop, Itur Satyricum (1660), p. 4.
Carew Reynel, The Fortunate Change (1661), reprinted in Fugitive Tracts, second series, 1660–1700 (1875), sig. A2b
Henry Bold, Poems (1664), p. 208
Andrew Clark, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, described by Himself (4 vols, Oxford, 1891–95, I, 369
The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C.H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, 1894), I, 274, 356.
For a general discussion of this subject, Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge, 1970).
Richard Bulstrode, Memoirs and Reflections Upon the Reign and Government of King Charles the Ist and King Charles the IId (1721), p. 222.
The following paragraphs draw on Austin Woolrych’s account of the events leading to the Restoration, given in ‘Last Quests for a Settlement, 1657–1660’, The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, ed. G.E. Aylmer (1972), pp. 183–204, and the historical introduction to Milton, Complete Prose, VII, pp. 1–228
supplemented by Davies, pp. 70–363 and the recent account by J.R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658–1714 (1978), pp. 113–39.
Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (1961), pp. 117–18, 142–4.
For specific areas, Clements R. Markham, A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax (1870), pp. 380–3
J.D. Griffith Davies, Honest George Monck (1936), pp. 206–29
David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, 1960), pp. 254–85, 312
Lois G. Schwoerer, No Standing Armies: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore and London, 1974), pp. 69–71.
Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, ed. W. Dunn Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), XVI, 13. Reference is to book and paragraph.
The Letter-book of John Viscount Mordaunt, 1658–60, ed. Mary Coate (Camden third series, vol. LXIX, 1945), p. 31.
Marchamont Nedham, Interest will not Lie, or, a View of Englands True Interest (1659), p. 20
J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957), p. 156
Ailesbury reports his own and Bulstrode Whitlock’s bitterness at Ashley Cooper’s quiet reversal (‘being of a great discernment’) at this period. Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, written by Himself, ed. W.E. Buckley (2 vols, 1890), I, 19.
The Poems of John Collop, ed. Conrad Hilberry (Madison, 1962), pp. 8–13.
Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (2 vols, Oxford, 1926), I, 31
James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1969), p. 137
The Restoration, ed. Joan Thirsk (1976), p. 41
Sir William Davenant: The Shorter Poems, and Songs from the Plays and Masques, ed. A.M. Gibbs (Oxford, 1972), p. 391.
The Clarke Papers. Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, ed. C.H. Firth (vol. IV, 1901), p. 112.
Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (2 vols, 1691–2), II, 529.
Donald Nicholas, Mr. Secretary Nicholas (1593–1669): His Life and Letters (1955), pp. 294–5.
The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, vol. IV, 1655–69 (New Brunswick, 1956), p. 267.
Marchamont Nedham, A Short History of the English Rebellion (1661), p. [83], written in 1660.
Joan Thirsk, ‘The Restoration Land Settlement’, Journal of Modern History, XXVI (1954), 315–28;
H.J. Habakkuk, ‘Landowners and the Civil War’, Economic History Review, second series, XIII (1965), 130–51.
For example, Etherege’s She Would If She Could (1668)
Sedley’s The Mulberry-Garden (1668) and
Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (1671).
Copyright information
© 1984 Nicholas Jose
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jose, N. (1984). The State Chaos. In: Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06635-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06635-3_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-06637-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-06635-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)