1660: Restoration and Revolution1

Abstract

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however much it may have owed to hatred of the Puritan Republic or to contingencies of events or to the political dexterity of leading actors, could not have been achieved peaceably without roots in public opinion and without the movement which gave voice to it: the campaign for a free parliament that swept through the nation in 1659-60. The movement produced the destruction of the Rump and the calling of the Convention, the assembly which recalled the king. It supplied a mechanism to overcome the otherwise insuperable animosity between the two leading parties opposed to the Republic, the royalists and the presbyterians. And it drew on impassioned sentiments about parliamentary liberties and electoral rights which had previously been used to anti-monarchical ends, but which in 1660 gave the return of the monarchy the authority of national sentiment.