Taking up the crown in 1660 after years of exile, King Charles II passes the “Act of Free and Generall Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion” in order “to bury all Seeds of future Discords and remembrance of the former as well in His owne Breast as in the Breasts of His Subjects one towards another.” The Act also calls for a fine against anyone who uses “words of reproach any way tending to revive the memory of the late Differences or the occasions thereof,” though famously only one prosecution occurs under the Act. Within literary criticism, the advertised oblivion once seemed absolute, with the years of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate treated as a lacuna, in which authors like John Milton, who ought to have been writing poetry, turn their left hands to prose. Over the last twenty-five years, scholars have been uncovering the vibrant literary culture of the war years and, as importantly, showing the continuity between the literature of those years and of the Restoration.

The manuscript evidence demonstrates that the record of changing political allegiances forms a central part of these interconnections. Well into the eighteenth century, manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books juxtapose poems of seemingly incompatible viewpoints, such as panegyrics written by the same poet to Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II in turn.