The change of fortune hoped for by many at Oxford and elsewhere was to come with the return of the monarchy in May 1660. On the whole the reformation of images and other ‘innovations’ in the churches had already become less of an issue by the 1650s. This may have been because the legislative initiatives of 1641–4, and the action taken during that period, led to a more or less satisfactory purge. If isolated discrepancies remained the legislation was still in force and could be invoked to correct such situations – as at Alcester parish church, where the case of inappropriate decoration and a surviving rood loft came before a justice as late as 1657, or at Merton College, Oxford, where the removal of brass inscriptions from the chapel occurred in 1659. Another possible reason for the fading of active interest in iconoclasm may have been that the phenomenon was an oppositional one, one which required a counter-force to react against. With the war won and episcopacy abolished the symbolic meaning attached to iconoclastic gestures lost significance.

The Puritan iconoclasm of the 1640s was not, however, only a reactive force, but developed its own positive, forward-moving agenda. Whilst the resurgence of a large-scale iconoclastic movement was initially a response to a more tolerant approach to the use of images in churches, the iconoclasts were not content to dismantle the recent trappings of the Laudian church but used the opportunity to address the ‘neglect’ of previous reformers, and eventually to widen the range of objects targeted.