United Kingdom

The Convention declared the restoration of the king and the lords, disbanded the army, established a fixed income for the king by maintaining the parliamentary innovation of the excise tax, and returned to the crown and the bishops their confiscated estates. But it made no headway on a religious settlement. Despite Charles’s promise of a limited toleration and his desire to accept Presbyterians into the Anglican fold as detailed in the Worcester House Declaration (1660), enthusiasts from both left and right wrecked every compromise.

Charles II, detail of a painting by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1675; in the collection of the Duke of Grafton.Courtesy of the Duke of Grafton and the Royal Academy of Arts

It was left to the Cavalier Parliament (1661–79) to make the hard choices and to demonstrate that one of the changes that had survived the revolution was the independence of Parliament. Despite Charles’s desire to treat his father’s adversaries leniently and to find a broad church settlement, the Cavalier Parliament sought to establish a rigid Anglican orthodoxy. It began the alliance between squire and parson that was to dominate English local society for centuries. The bishops were returned to Parliament, a new prayer book was authorized, and repressive acts were passed to compel conformity. The imposition of oaths of allegiance and nonresistance to the crown and an oath recognizing the king’s supremacy in the church upon all members of local government in the Corporation Act (1661) and then upon the clergy in the Act of Uniformity (1662) led to a massive purge of officeholders. Town governors were put out of their places, and nearly one-fifth of all clergymen were deprived of their livings. Authority in the localities was now firmly in the hands of the gentry. The Conventicle Act (1664) barred Nonconformists (Dissenters) from holding separate church services, and the Five Mile Act (1665) prohibited dispossessed ministers from even visiting their former congregations.

This program of repressive religious legislation was the first of many missed opportunities to remove the underlying causes of political discontent. Though religious Dissenters were not a large percentage of the population, their treatment raised the spectre of permanently divided local communities and of potentially arbitrary government. This legislation (the Clarendon Code) is inappropriately associated with the name of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, for he, as well as the king, realized the dangers of religious repression and attempted to soften its effects. Indeed, in central government the king relied upon men of diverse political backgrounds and religious beliefs. Clarendon, who had lived with the king in exile, was his chief political adviser, and Charles’s brother James, duke of York (later James II), was his closest confidant and was entrusted with the vital post of lord admiral. Monck, who had made the restoration possible, was raised to duke of Albemarle and continued to hold military authority over the small standing army that, for the first time in English history, the king maintained.

War and government

Charles II could not undo the effects of the revolution, but they were not all negative. The Commonwealth had had to fight for its survival, and in the process England had become a potent military power. Wars against France and Spain had expanded English colonial dominions. Dunkirk and Jamaica were seized, Barbados was colonized, and the North American colonies flourished. Colonial trade was an important source of royal revenue, and Charles II continued Cromwell’s policy of restricting trade to English ships and imposing duties on imports and exports. The Navigation Acts (1660 and 1663) were directed against the Dutch, still the most powerful commercial force in Europe. The Cromwellian Navigation Act (1651) had resulted in the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54), and Charles’s policy had the same effect. In military terms the Dutch Wars (1665–67; 1672–74) were a standoff, but in economic terms they were an English triumph (see Anglo-Dutch Wars). The American colonies were consolidated by the capture of New York, and the policy of the Navigation Acts was effectively established. Colonial trade and English shipping mushroomed.