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The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with
KingCharles II, it replaced Cromwell’s Commonwealth and its Puritan
ethos with an almost
powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed in France.
It replaced the power of the monarchy with the power of a parliamentary system –which was to
develop into the two parties, Whigs and Tories – with most of the executive power in the hands
of the Prime Minister. Both parties benefited from a system which encouraged social stability
rather than opposition.
Above all, in systems of thought, the Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-
taking intellectual values of the Renaissance. It relied on reason and on facts rather than on
speculation. So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new
kind of society. This society was Protestant (apart from the brief reign of the Catholic King
James II, 1685–88), middle class, and unthreatened by any repetition of the huge and traumatic
upheavals of the first part of the seventeenth century. It is symptomatic
that the overthrow of
James II in 1688 was called The ‘Glorious’ or ‘Bloodless’ Revolution. The ‘fever in the blood’
which the Renaissance had allowed was now to be contained, subject to reason, and kept under
control. With only the brief outburst of Jacobin revolutionary sentiment at the time of the
Romantic poets, this was to be the political context in the United Kingdom for two centuries or
more.
In this context, the concentration of society was on commerce, on respectability, and on
institutions. The ‘genius of the nation’ led to the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 – ‘for the
improving of Natural Knowledge’. The Royal Society represents the trend towards the
institutionalisation of scientific investigation and research in this period. The other highly
significant institution, one which was to have considerably more importance in the future, was
the Bank of England, founded in 1694.
The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by
Thomas
Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in1651.
Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than
Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which
the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man –
motivated by self-interest – is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a
strong controlling state, ‘an artificial man’, to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability
become the keynotes of British society after1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie
making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics. After the
upheavals
of the Commonwealth, there was a strong affirmation of religion and a return to
traditional beliefs. In such a context, Milton’s Paradise Lost (completed in 1667) was read not as
a Renaissance text about free will and freedom, but as a commentary on God’s supremacy, ‘to
justify the ways of God to men’. It was read in order to confirm an image of God as the period
demanded God should be. Questioning of religious values was not part of the age; once
Protestant supremacy had been established after 1688, religious dissent was stifled. Paradise Lost
took on the authority of a quasi-religious text – an imaginative representation of the beliefs
contained in the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, from which
these extracts are taken:
It is a fact of human need to make God in its own image; and it was half-jokingly said, in the
nineteenth century, that God must have been an Englishman. If this was so, the image began to
be created in the late seventeenth century. Paradise Lost and John Bunyan’s allegorical The
Pilgrim’s Progress were two fundamental texts for the times.
The growth of a city-based middle-class economic mentality during the early and middle
years of the eighteenth century parallels the developments which came to be known as the
Industrial Revolution and the Agrarian Revolution. At the same time, several trends can be seen
in literary production:
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• the rise of the novel as a popular if
critically unprestigious genre;
• the growth of journalism and magazines, with a corresponding growth in professional
authorship;
• a noticeable increase in literary criticism, leading to the establishment of what was critically
acceptable and what was not;
• a decline in the reputation of contemporary drama, while the theatre attracted increasing
support;
• a reaction to Augustan neoclassicism in poetry, with moves towards the funereal mode, or the
rediscovery of simpler values;
• towards the
end of the eighteenth century, an attraction for the fantastic, the exotic and the
primitive.
This reflects the turmoil of an age which, in the thirty or so years after the Restoration,
was trying to put behind it the shadow of revolution. Cromwell’s Commonwealth had
destabilised everything and shaken the nation to its roots. The next revolution, when the Catholic
King James II was replaced by the Protestant House of Orange, was quickly called the ‘Glorious’
or ‘Bloodless’ Revolution. (In Ireland, this Protestant takeover continues
to cause bloodshed
more than three centuries later.) James II’s grandson, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie – the
Catholic ‘Young Pretender’ to the British throne – led the second of two unsuccessful rebellions
against the new Hanoverian dynasty, in 1715 and 1745. The decisive Battle of Culloden, in 1746,
finally ended the Stuart line’s claims to the throne.
Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first
the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted
order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so that revolution would not damage its own
hardwon security and growing prosperity. Eighteenth-century writing is full of pride in England
as the land of liberty (far ahead of France, the great rival, in political maturity), and saw a
corresponding growth in national self-confidence accompanying the expansion of empire.
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