Abstract
Looking back after a half-century, Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, could write of the Restoration that ‘the king enjoyed a peaceful number of years, and his subjects most happy under his benign government’. He lamented Charles’s passing ‘not only for the public good of our then happy country, we living then in a golden age, but likewise for myself in particular’.1 Ailesbury, who was five-years-old when the king returned, naturally added nostalgia for his own youth to his glowing account of the 1660s and 1670s. Nonetheless his reminiscence shows that the Restoration could be seen as a golden time to someone who had grown up in it. Ailesbury is one (among many) for whom the Restoration lived in memory as those who had promoted it would have wished. His recollection suggests something of the lasting success of those who, in their praises and in print, had built up such a positive impression of the new regime. It was impossible, however, to separate the regime and the ensuing period from the event which set it all in train. Charles’s Restoration was so momentous that it contributed largely to defining the political issues, the social attitudes and even the art of what is still loosely called ‘the Restoration’, for a quarter of a century or more. Coming to terms with the king’s return in 1660 was a central feature of any concern with contemporary society and for writers in the early 1660s giving voice to this focal event was an important task.
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Notes
J. Walker, ‘The Censorship of the Press During the Reign of Charles II’, History, new series, XXXV (1950), 219–38
Roger L’Estrange, Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (1663), p. 8; DNB entry ‘L’Estrange’.
Howard, Poems on Several Occasions (1696), p. 9.
Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1949), p. 31.
Jane Lang, Rebuilding St. Paul’s after the Great Fire of London (1956), pp. 6–10.
In Sir Robert Howard’s The Great Favourite (1668) ‘the Chief Building’ (the king) needed ‘Reparation’ (Five New Plays, 1692, p. 209)
see also the broadsheet Rebuilding the City (1669) in which the nation’s ancient virtues are seen to need rebuilding; also POAS, I, 20–156, 266–83
Cf. Erwin Panofsky’s comment, that the Renaissance regarded the classical past ‘as a totality cut off from the present’, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Paladin edition, 1970), p. 113.
Rare Prologues and Epilogues, 1642–1700, ed. A.N. Wiley (1940), pp. 8–12 the text here is from
The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. T.H. Banks (New Haven, 1928), pp. 94–5
and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford, 1966), pp. 67–74.
For example, John Ogilby, The Relation of His Majesty’s Entertainment (1661), p. 10
The Political Works of James I, ed. C.H. McIlwain (New York, 1965), p. 333.
The Works of John Dryden, vol. I, Poems 1649–1680, ed. E.N. Hooker and H.T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956), pp. 232–3.
[Richard Overton,] A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), reprinted in
Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–1647, ed. William Haller (3 vols, New York, 1934), III, 363.
Quentin Skinner, ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, The Historical Journal, VIII (1965), 151–78, esp. p. 165.
for a general discussion of this topos, Larry Carver, ‘The Restoration Poets and Their Father King’, HLQ 40 (1977), 333–51.
The Letters of John Dryden, collected and edited by Charles E. Ward (Duke University Press, 1942), p. 9.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1954), p. 142.
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© 1984 Nicholas Jose
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Jose, N. (1984). Ideas of Restoration I : The Panegyric Task. In: Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06635-3_3
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