Chapter VII
The Restoration
The year 1660 marked a decisive turning point in English history, bringing to an end two decades of civil war, regicide, and a republican experiment, culminating in the Restoration of Charles II to the throne. The return of monarchy was widely greeted with relief rather than triumphalism, reflecting a society exhausted by religious radicalism, military rule, and political instability. Charles II was restored not as an absolutist ruler seeking revenge or innovation, but as a pragmatic monarch who envisaged his reign as one of healing, balance, and continuity. His primary aim was to re-establish the authority and dignity of the crown while avoiding the ideological rigidity and obduracy that had destroyed his father. Central to this vision was the restoration of the Church of England, the reassertion of traditional social hierarchies, and the careful management of religious division in a deeply fractured kingdom. The Restoration settlement of 1660 thus represented not a simple return to the past, but a negotiated attempt to stabilise the monarchy, the church, and the state after unprecedented upheaval.
Charles II, King of England
Charles the Second was crowned on St George’s day, 23rd of April, 1661. The coronation was a spectacle to behold. Like a modern coronation, it was an early start, and as the day progressed, people saw the gleaming horses with their plumes of red and white feathers, their saddles richly embroidered with pearls and gold. The new king, arriving by barge along the river Thames, was dressed in gold down to his golden sandals, surrounded by his bishops and nobles. The benches of Westminster Abbey were covered with scarlet cloth. Bishops drew a parallel between Charles and Christ, both having sought to build Kingdoms after sojourns in the wilderness. Everything contributed to the overall impression of magnificence. He was anointed in holy oil and invested with royal robes. All one could hear was “God save the King.” The final moment came when the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the crown on the King’s head, shouting among the nobility to serve the King. This was all done under the watchful eyes of the visiting ambassadors who discovered that England was, after all, not the barbaric place that they had imagined but emerging behind its own Iron Curtain of Republicanism. This was followed by a lavish dinner at Westminster Hall, the very hall in which twelve years earlier the King’s father had been tried for his life.
This is a far cry from the Coronation held in Scotland almost a decade ago, when he suffered a humiliating experience with imposition before being allowed to receive the crown of Scotland. Charles II’s coronation was unlike any other Stuart coronation: it was not a celebration of royal power, but a humbling, conditional ceremony shaped by Covenanter dominance and deep religious distrust. Charles signed both the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), both of which committed him to defend Presbyterian church government in Scotland, oppose popery, prelacy and superstition.
The coronation ceremony in England cost the Chancellor £30,000 today’s equivalent: £10 million, give or take a pound or two. The gifts from foreign kings and queens showered on the king, however, more than made up for it. For instance, the delegation that arrived from Protestant Netherlands made a gift of 600,000 gilders, today’s equivalent of £40 million, give or take a guilder or two, at a time when an average monthly income was around twenty-five guilders. The House of Orange also returned twenty-eight Italian Renaissance paintings that Charles I had owned, which the Commonwealth sold. The gifts from Spain and France were described as “intolerably exorbitant”. The Venetians, as a gift, chose two Gondolas, each with its own Gondolier, and later moored them on the Thames at Hampton Court.
There were plenty of circulating rumours that Charles, once restored, would be a vengeful monarch, a Machiavellian in nature, with tyrannical policies to be unleashed on those who wronged him and wronged his father. In response, in April 1660, Charles issued a strategically worded ‘Declaration of Breda’ (Netherlands), where the exiled court was stationed at the time, committing himself to settling his subjects’ rights through a ‘free Parliament’, extending a free and general pardon to everyone except those not to be excepted by Parliament. He furthermore extended freedom of religion and freedom of religious consciousness. By such a declaration, he delegated responsibility to Parliament to deal with sensitive matters that could lead to difficult decision-making and put Parliament out of step with public opinion.
Charles II’s reign was declared to have started on 30 January 1649- the day of Charles I's execution. The interregnum was thrown into the heap of amnesia, deleting the eleven years of the Republic of England from all public records. The first act of parliament was an act of reconciliation, pardoning all involved in the wars and any crimes, except 33 named regicides.
Louis XIV of France
In true fashion for gaining acceptance, spreading rumours can cushion the storming of most preceding demands. This time, Louis XIV himself circulated rumours that he was assembling a French Army, demanding that Charles restore freedom of conscience for Catholics, as the King’s French mother requested, as well as rumours that Charles would marry the twelve-year-old Hortense Manzini, the Catholic niece of Louis’s chief minister. This was a time when the English welcomed the restoration not only of Charles as king, but also of the Stuart royal family, including the king’s mother, Henrietta Maria and his four siblings: his two brothers, York and Gloucester and his widowed sister, Mary of Orange, and younger sister, Henrietta Anne.
By coincidence, at this time, not a rumour but well known, that the daughter of the Duke of Clarendon, Charles’s Chancellor, Anne, was expecting the Duke of York’s child. Questions were asked about the paternity of the Child and whether the child was conceived before marriage. Naughty boy!
On 30 January 1661, being the twelfth anniversary of Charles I’s execution, the new king, by act of revenge, ordered that Oliver Cromwell’s elaborate vault in Westminster Abbey was to be opened, and his body exhumed, together with that of his son-in-law, fellow regicide Henry Ireton. The bodies were dragged to the public gallows at Tyburn (Marble Arch), hung there for six hours, cut down, and the heads severed from the bodies and thrown into a nearby pit. Cromwell, from then on being remembered as the English Devil. The same crowd then claimed Charles “as our rising sun, and that the rays of our sacred majesty shine throughout the world”.
Having secured the Crown and Monarchy, it was time for England to think of succession. Naturally, enough expecting to find a wife for Charles. For political convenience but in due time for real love, Charles turned to the Catholic Princess Catarina, Catherine of Braganza. The Portuguese princess, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, the man who eventually secured independence after overthrowing the 60-year rule of the Spanish Habsburgs. Catarina came with an eye-watering dowry. Two million escudos (around £300,000, which equals £70 million in today’s money, give or take an escudo or two. Portugal also included the territories of Tangier, Morocco, as well as Bombay, India, and trading rights with Brazil and the Portuguese East Indies. Charles, in the meantime, had acknowledged the likely unpopularity of a Catholic Princess, and indeed that would happen. Despite the true love she had for Charles, which lasted until his death, owing to her devotion to the Roman Catholic faith, she was never liked in England.
Alarm bells rang throughout Europe, but none more so than those in Spain. They were further alarmed that, despite having helped Charles during his exile, he was now refusing to restore to Spain the Cromwellian acquisitions of Dunkirk and Jamaica.
Charles, now King of England, since the debacle of the Battle of Worcester, spent ten years in exile either on the run or wandering across Europe seeking help to secure what he rightly believed to be his, the Monarchy of England, Scotland and Ireland. With cosmopolitan experience behind him, he is well-positioned to direct his own foreign policy. It turned out that Charles was not interested in territorial expansion, a reversal of hitherto imperial acquisitive tendencies. Dunkirk, the only remaining foothold England had in Europe, which the Protectorate had acquired from Spain, was sold to Louis XIV of France, his French cousin, for 5 million Livres, bargained down from the initial asking price of 12 million. This prompted outrage in Madrid over trading in what rightfully belongs to Spain. In England, it caused deep discontent, as many considered it a bad deal. Politically, the sale under French ownership increased the likelihood that England would become entangled in territorial disputes with Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic. With a Portuguese wife and now the sale of Dunkirk, fears were growing that Spain was likely to stir up trouble within the kingdom.
Back to back to these troublesome days, there was a growing concern about the Dutch Republic's continued willingness to shelter regicides wanted for trial. For now, the Dutch were divided between those supporting Republicanism and those resisting England's moves to support the monarchical Orangist on behalf of Charles’s nephew, William. There was careful manoeuvring over who would form alliances between France, Spain, and the Dutch, and whether any such alliances were friendly to England. It was therefore to England’s interest to dispatch ambassadors to negotiate alliances with all three.
Troubles with the Dutch
But what was more worrying was the increase in trade competition between England and the Dutch. The Republic of the Netherlands attacked English ports in India, Africa, and elsewhere in a rivalry between the Dutch and British East India companies. The English navy launched several attacks on the Dutch fleet in Africa, resulting in the seizure of several Dutch ships. In America, an English warship attacked Delaware Bay, and the Dutch governor agreed to surrender New Amsterdam. Charles handed the deed to his brother, the Duke of York, and the port was renamed New York.
A second war against the Dutch was soon declared, destroying most of the Dutch ships, and around 5000 of their sailors lost their lives. In overall command of the British Navy was the Duke of York, who was to meet the Dutch fleet near the shores of Lowestoft. The English Parliament expressed a vote of thanks for the Duke of York’s bravery and expressed further financial subsidies to prolong the war. Successes in foreign policy led the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and other powers to seek an English Alliance.
What dampened the celebration was the severity of the plague that engulfed London in 1665. Nearly 100,000 dead were recorded in London in one year, forcing the Royal Court to relocate from Whitehall to Hampton Court, then on to Salisbury.
Much to the despair of Henrietta Maria, to dissuade her French nephew from declaring war on her son, Charles, King of England, Louis XIV of France finally declared war on England. He sided with the Dutch in an argument over the ‘ownership’ of the tiny Banda Islands, in modern Indonesia, England had claimed it under the Treaty of Westminster. The French, however, rubbished such a claim. The Dutch, still at war with England, had also allied with Denmark. England was effectively surrounded. Louis could attack the Isle of Wight; Frederick III of Denmark could attack the Orkneys and Shetland; and the Dutch fleet could blockade the Channel and the Thames—the result would be the conquest of the British Isles. England was down to the wire from being invaded.
The year 1666 was an annus horribilis for England. Despite being surrounded, however, England was not immediately defeated. The English fleet under Prince Rupert and George Monck fought the Dutch to a near-stalemate in the Four Days' Battle. The Dutch had caught England off guard, launched a surprise raid on English warships stationed in Chatham, Kent, burned several warships and embarrassingly towed away the flagship of the Royal Navy, HMS Royal Charles. England had reached its limits. As expected, surrounded by the three, military defeat was imminent before peace was established in 1667. Directly following the Plague, the Great Fire destroyed most of London, causing immense economic damage and crippling the ability to fund the war. The Peace Treaty of Breda confirmed the peace agreement. Immediately after this was signed, Louis XIV, a war monger by half, invaded the Spanish Netherlands using his wife's inheritance rights as a pretext. England, the Dutch, and Sweden formed the Grand Alliance, declaring war on France to stop its territorial ambitions.
A Bribe?
But Charles realised that he was running out of money. Parliament was no longer in favour of financing a war, and in seeking financial independence, he abandoned the Triple Alliance and made a secret deal with Louis XIV, mainly orchestrated by the English Duchess of Orleans, Henrietta Anne Stuart, who was the youngest sister of King Charles II of England, affectionately nicknamed "Minette" by him. The Secret Treaty of Dover (1670) saw England join France against the Dutch.
In keeping with his Catholic faith, Louis XIV pledged to pay Charles £1 million in advance and a yearly subsidy of £600,000 when Charles publicly declared his conversion to Catholicism. England was also promised three French Island colonies. In the event, English ships closed in and occupied the Dutch harbours, and with the 120,000 French troops virtually overrunning the Dutch, Louis ordered the entire Dutch Republic demolished. The decentralised Dutch Republic (led by Johan de Witt) failed to defend the country. Popular panic led to the lynching of Johan de Witt and his brother by an Orangist mob. William III, Charles's brother-in-law, was appointed stadtholder, restoring power to the House of Orange.
And, just for an extra treat, as I said, William III was the nephew of Charles II of England, as his mother, Mary, Princess Royal, was the sister of King Charles II. Beyond this familial bond, Charles II served as a guardian to the young William after Mary died in 1660 and later authorised the crucial 1677 marriage between William and Mary II, who was Charles II's niece. Easy to remember.
At about this time, England was in the throes of a succession crisis. The Duke of York, heir to the throne, had converted to Catholicism, so attention was turned to Charles’s likely Protestant successor. After several miscarriages, Catherine of Braganza, Charles’s wife, whose hopes of pregnancy were receding, decided that she would produce an heir. Pressure was mounting to divorce or annul the marriage. Charles never would take this possibility seriously, continuously side-stepping the issue despite having many illegitimate children from many mistresses. MPs were becoming nervous, and succession was increasingly serious. Moreover, fear was growing that Charles’s successor must never give a popish government any chance. Arrangements were being made with great haste for the marriage of the Duke of York’s oldest daughter, Mary, who remained a Protestant despite her father’s conversion, to marry William of Orange to put an end to this uncertainty.
The succession crisis that follows would set the pattern of Protestant England through the Act of Settlement and the Protestant United Kingdom by Act of Union.
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