New Order

Abstract

In the long term the Restoration settlement marked an important stage in the stabilisation of readjustments that had been occurring in English society for a half-century or more. Alterations principally in power and property distribution had been accelerated and clarified as a result of the civil wars. But continuous change — progress — was not welcomed as a fact of life. Despite or even because of the upheavals of the civil wars, residual conservatism was a strong element in mid-seventeenth-century England. Deep-seated monarchism was only one aspect of a surviving habit of order, patriarchal and religious, in both private and public life. The need to stabilise and fix whatever changes had occurred, while a natural enough impulse, also expressed this tendency towards order. The chaos of 1659–60, then, was the — conveniently mystifying? — intensification and temporary end of a transitional process which had begun much earlier. The solvencies of 1659–60 at once promoted and checked change in such a way that, at last, the king could be brought in as the token of a moderately rearranged society.