Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- 2 Taking contemporary belief seriously
- 3 The unreformed polity
- 4 Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
- 5 Counter-reformation England
- 6 Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
- 7 Restoration memory
- 8 Restoration crisis 1678–83
- 9 Invasion 1688–9
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
8 - Restoration crisis 1678–83
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- 2 Taking contemporary belief seriously
- 3 The unreformed polity
- 4 Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
- 5 Counter-reformation England
- 6 Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
- 7 Restoration memory
- 8 Restoration crisis 1678–83
- 9 Invasion 1688–9
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
Summary
Prorogue or Dissolve them before anything be finished, and thus Parliaments will be made useless, and this being done, it will not be long before they become burdensome, and then away with them for good and all.
Henry Booth, A Speech for the Sitting of Parliament (1680)INTRODUCTION: THE UNRAVELLING
The struggle for protestantism and parliaments between 1678 and 1683 took place in many arenas. These included the court (where ministerial rivalries were important), the Houses of Lords and Commons, parliamentary elections, the judiciary, the press, relationships with European ambassadors, the government of the city of London, and its streets and coffee houses. It also therefore took place on several levels. Those which were most visible or have received most attention were not necessarily the most important in determining its outcome.
This upheaval exhibited both a severity and a complexity which have only recently begun to be understood:
He that would give a Punctual and Particular Account of all the Narratives, Discourses, Tryals, Executions, Speeches, Votes, Accusations, Examinations, Commitments, Tumultuous Elections, Petitions, Ryots, Libels, and Seditious Attempts of all Sorts, during the said time, must write a History more Voluminous than Fox or Hollinshead.
This is because it involved an unravelling of the restoration settlement. From the outset this left contemporaries not only confronting dangerous problems in the present, but staring back into the abyss of the troubles as memory. It was this fact which eventually ended the crisis. But it did not do so before the question informing restoration had again been put: would the country be governed by a parliamentary dictatorship or a monarchy?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- England's TroublesSeventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, pp. 182 - 204Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000