1660–1837: The Shadow of a Golden Age

Abstract

Although 1660 is held out as one of the watershed years in the history of Great Britain, like many such history-book dates, it lacked both a defining moment and a precise cause. We can say that in 1660 the Revolution failed (or that the Civil War ceased). Or, we can argue that the idea of a Commonwealth sans monarch was something which the majority of the people — or the majority of the people whose views were knowable — did not really want; in that light, 1660 was the beginning of mending a largish rip in the fabric of the commonweal of the sceptered isle. (The best argument supporting this latter point, of course, is the survival of that monarchy through the nearly three and a half centuries from the Restoration to the current Golden Jubilee of the monarch whose Annus Horribilis — unlike those of her people — had nothing to do with Margaret Thatcher.) Or we can combine the two arguments and see 1660 as marking the end of or the recovery from an idea whose time, at least in England, had not yet come.