After King Charles I lost the first stage of the English Civil war, the victors had a difficult time deciding what to do
next.  The majority of the House of Commons, the dominant partner on the Parliamentary side, wanted a quick and conservative settlement, with a strong state church and no social changes of significance.  The army, where independent religious sentiment was strong, revolted against what they saw as a sell-out.  After fighting a second Civil War against the conservatives,
they purged the Commons, leaving only the more radically inclined MPs to form a Rump Parliament.  The Rump then tried Charles I for treason and executed him.  Afterwards both monarchy and the House of Lords was abolished.  Left in control were the Rump itself and its New Model Army, which had taken the initiative away from its supposed master.  The dominant
personality was Oliver Cromwell, who both sat in the House and held a high command in the New Model.

The question facing the revolutionaries in 1649 was, what next?  Should there be an even more thorough reform of the state?  Now that most of the ancient constitution had been dismantled, how was power to be wielded, perpetuated, and legitimized?  And what about religion?

 The Army and the Rump and the various influential religious thinkers shared no set of principles.  The country at large was even less unified.  The Rump Parliament itself had little support, not surprising when you remember that it represented only a small minority of the victorious party.  The general neutralism that had obtained at the beginning of the war was even stronger
now.

The government of the Commonwealth (an English translation of Res Publica or republic) of England faced immediate external
challenges.  The son of Charles I  had been proclaimed king in Scotland, and might be able  to win over some of the Irish (in revolt since 1641) to his side and invade England from two directions.   The Thirty Years' War had ended in 1648, leaving the major powers freer to think about England.  Either France or Spain might consider restoring the Stuart dynasty if they got the right terms.

 The external threats at least gave the army -- and Cromwell -- something to do.   The first target was Ireland.  Cromwell took a major expedition to that extraordinarily divided country and successfully crushed all opposition.   Fear of
Popish Ireland and the support it might lend to the Revolution's enemies, added to self-righteous imperialism and the chance for individual profit led to a ferocious attempt at a "final solution."   The inhabitants of the country were displaced, dispossessed and in some places massacred outright to clear the way for secure English exploitation.

Scotland, too,  was incorporated by force into the Commonwealth.  The Revolution had united, for the very first time, all the British Isles under a single government.  The Scottish war was soon followed by a sea-war with another Protestant power, Holland, which England also won and also profited from.

This activity took some of the pressure off the uneasy relations between Army and Parliament.  But the basic questions still required settlement.

A key issue was one of tithes.  The church of England still depended on the medieval method of a local tax on land to support its local congregations.  As in medieval times, tithes were considered to be a form of property, which could be owned by the government, corporate bodies, or individuals.  If the local squire, for instance, controlled the tithes of his parish, he controlled
the appointment of the clergyman and the clergyman's salary.  Another feature of the tithes is that they were based on uneven and outdated assessments.  In many areas they were simply insufficient to support a clergyman; in many others, they were low enough to be unattractive to any well-educated and well-trained man.  This made it unlikely that such parishes would ever attract a godly preaching minister to teach the reformed faith as it should be taught.

Reform was desperately needed, and desperately resisted.  For to the people who owned tithes, people who included many MPs and the people who elected them, a tithe was a piece of property like any other.  They had fought the king because they feared, among other things, that unrestrained he would take their property away from them.  They were no more willing for Parliament to take their property.  For them property was liberty.  So the Rump, that most radical wing of the parliamentary class, was unable to come up with a plan for reforming tithes.   And it was pretty reluctant to take on other big
questions of reform.

The army quickly became impatient with the Rump.  That the Rump should dissolve itself and call for new elections was the obvious solution for the impatient, but no one could agree on how a new Parliament should be elected.  If a free election was called, conservative and royalist elements would probably win many seats and toss out the ruling party.  They might end up missing their own heads.  But how should elections then be held?

When no method could be agreed on, Cromwell and the army acted again.  On April 20, 1653, he dismissed the Rump with the famous words:  "You are no parliament; I say you are no parliament; I will put an end to your sitting."  The next day someone pinned to the door of the assembly room a sign that said "This House to lett now Unfurnished."

To replace the Rump, no elections were held at all.  Instead, Cromwell and the Army grandees, in consultation with ministers and other people they trusted, nominated 140 godly men to do what ordinary politicians had proved unable to do.

At the time and ever since this Nominated Assembly has been ridiculed as "Barebone's Parliament," called that after one of its members, a London leatherworker and preacher named Praise-God Barebone (or actually, Barbon).  It has been portrayed as a bunch of wooly-brained fanatics who debated constitutional theory instead of doing something practical.

In fact it seems that this Nominated Assembly was neither more nor less practical than all the other parliaments of the time.  It, too, stuck, on the complicated and key question of what should be done about tithes.  After half a year, Cromwell got impatient and in December of 1653 he dismissed them, too.  Once again, the country was disappointed of a real settlement.

It was now perfectly clear that Oliver Cromwell, with the army's support, was the sole source of authority in the country.  In the remaining five years of his life, Cromwell was dictator or king of England in everything but name.  Indeed, the thought he should become king and replace the Stuart dynasty with one of his own had crossed many people's minds since Charles I was
executed.  A new monarch might supply the stability and legitimacy that people were longing for.

Cromwell never took the crown, but after closing down the Nominated Assembly he ceased to look for a reforming settlement,
and took upon himself the role that it appeared God had thrust on him:  peacekeeper and ruler of England, who alone could guarantee internal peace.  He became increasingly conservative, purging old radical friends, reconciling with royalists and Presbyterians.  The Parliaments he called as Lord Protector restored the House of Lords under a different name (though
the old lords refused to sit in it) and strengthened Cromwell's dictatorial -- or monarchical -- powers.  There was even a clampdown on religious and press liberty.

Of course Cromwell alone was not responsible for the conservative trend.  Everyone found the status quo intolerable.  The status quo was military rule, with most members of the former political class disenfranchised for one reason or another.  His government, his parliaments were not what the Long Parliament had been in 1642 -- the expression of the political will of a nation resentful of arbitrary authority.  They were themselves arbitrary authorities.  They were not seen as arbitrary because
they were dominated by a tiny minority.  This was usual.  The problem was that the minority in charge could not command any respect, either from its old enemies or from its former allies and supporters.

There was no consensus on any important issue, except, gradually, a rejection of the army and the taxes that supported it.  It is no wonder, then, that Cromwell, like most everybody else, slipped back towards traditional forms of government and behavior.

When Cromwell died, the jig was up.  His third son, Richard Cromwell was drafted as a new Lord Protector, the second member of the dynasty.  But not being the hero of the Civil War, Richard could not make the government work, and he soon quit.  The army then recalled the Rump Parliament, but it proved as divided and unpopular as ever.  There was only one possible route left to normality and legitimate rule, and that was to call back the prince in exile.

General George Monck, the most capable of the later generals, instituted elections of a Convention using the old Parliamentary method, and the Convention invited Charles II to return basically without conditions.  But they knew what he stood for:  the old forms of  government, but more importantly a wide amnesty, a wide religious settlement, and no radical redistribution of property.

All this, and a promise to consult Parliament in all these matters, were in a declaration Charles II issued from Breda in Holland in April of 1660.  On the 29th of May, his thirtieth birthday, he entered London to a tulmutuous and joyous welcome.

Superficially the Restoration, as its common name implies, looks like a royalist victory, turning back the clock to the days before the war.  After all, the radical experiments of the Commonwealth period were ditched, and the House of Lords, the episcopacy, and the traditional methods of electing Parliament were all brought back -- though the Lords and the old franchise actually were restored before the king was.  The Commons gave up its executive powers.  Scotland regained its independence.  The
Commonwealth became the Interregnum, the period between kings where no legal acts of government had taken place.

Outside of politics the same thing seemed to apply.  A cavalier cultural reaction, after years of public godliness, swept all before it.  The theaters reopened to stage sex-comedies, and women wore make-up in the streets once more.

But there was far more compromise in the settlement than appears, or appeared, at first.  Despite the fact that old and young royalists dominated Charles II's first parliament, the Cavalier Parliament, former Commonwealthsmen did all right, by and large.  There was a great deal of legal leniency.  Only 57 men were declared ineligible for amnesty; of these only 30 were condemned to death, and only 13 actually executed.  Charles realized that he needed the help and support of former
enemies to make his regime work.  His own hard-core followers, according to Samuel Pepys, a keen observer, had been out of government so long that they could not supply "nine commissioners or one secretary fit for the business." 

Likewise there was no vast dispossession in England.  Royal and episcopal lands confiscated by Parliament were returned
to their former owners.  Likewise lands of private royalists that had been formally confiscated and resold were returned.  But any land that had been legally sold, even if it had been sold under political pressure or to raise money for the king's cause, that land remained with the new owner.  Many faithful royalists were thus left at least partially unsatisfied.  They
complained bitterly that the Indemnity and Oblivion Act provided "Indemnity for the king's enemies and Oblivion for his friends."

Even the king's friends acted differently than one might expect at first.  No more than the Long Parliament did the Cavalier Parliament want to give the king complete financial independence.  It required him, in fact, to give up his feudal fiscal rights in exchange for a quite inadequate yearly income.  For more money, enough to really run the government, Charles II would have to ask parliament.  The prerogative courts, law courts directly controlled by the king, such as the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, the chief ecclesiatical court, were not restored.  The king was stripped of much of the independence that his father had had; power remained with the class that had fought and deposed the old king.

The most reactionary part of the settlement was the ecclesiastical one.  Young royalists who had been educated by private chaplains of the Laudian party had their ideological revenge on the Presbyterians and dissenters.  The whole church,
minus the Court of High Commission, was restored as it was. The sects were not stamped out, or their members tried for
heresy, but all dissenters or non-conformists were laid under severe legal disabilities.  Membership in a narrowly-defined church of England became a requirement for holding office, attending university, or basically, getting ahead.   Most former presbyterians and independents among the political class found these disabilities to be too high a price to pay.  They joined the official church.

Yet the resulting Church of England was not quite the church that Charles I had fought and died for.  Without the Court of High Commission to regulate the clergy, it was not really under royal control, nor was it any longer a separate estate of society.  The real ruler of the restored church was the local lord or squire, whose property rights in his tithes had not been touched.
It was a lay-dominated church, dominated by precisely those men who owned everything else of importance.  It would be quite capable in the decades to come of resisting innovations from above as well as below.

The Restoration attempted, with some success, to settle, to stabilize, English society after a generation of conflict.  What success it gained resulted from its doubly conservative nature.  It rejected republicanism, godly dictatorship, and military rule, but also the royal despotism that Charles I had wished to impose.  It sanctified the local power of the local landowners in their own communities.  In a sense this was back to the Middle Ages; but it was also forward to the future.  For the power of the
English state had been increased in precisely those ways that would allow these men to encourage and profit from economic and colonial expansion.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.