The Restoration

Thomas Harrison, the first person found guilty of regicide during the Restoration

The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which became law on 29 August 1660, pardoned all past treason against the crown, but specifically excluded those involved in the trial and execution of Charles I. Thirty-one of the 59 commissioners (judges) who had signed the death warrant in 1649 were living. The regicides were hunted down; some escaped but most were found and put on trial. Three escaped to the American colonies. New Haven, Connecticut, secretly harboured Edward Whalley, William Goffe and John Dixwell, and after American independence named streets after them to honour them as forefathers of the American Revolution.[13]

In the ensuing trials, twelve were condemned to death. Fifth Monarchist Thomas Harrison, the first person found guilty of regicide, who had been the seventeenth of the 59 commissioners to sign the death warrant, was the first regicide to be hanged, drawn and quartered because he was considered by the new government still to represent a real threat to the re-established order. In October 1660, at Charing Cross or Tyburn, London, ten were publicly hanged, drawn and quartered: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, and Gregory Clement, who had signed the king's death warrant; the preacher Hugh Peters; Francis Hacker and Daniel Axtell, who commanded the guards at the king's trial and execution; and John Cooke, the solicitor who directed the prosecution. The 10 judges who were on the panel but did not sign the death warrant were also convicted.[14]

Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Judge Thomas Pride, and Judge John Bradshaw were posthumously attainted for high treason. Because Parliament is a court, the highest in the land, a bill of attainder is a legislative act declaring a person guilty of treason or felony, in contrast to the regular judicial process of trial and conviction. In January 1661, the corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were exhumed and hanged in chains at Tyburn.

In 1661 John Okey, one of the regicides who signed the death warrant of Charles I, was brought back from Holland along with Miles Corbet, friend and lawyer to Cromwell, and John Barkstead, former constable of the Tower of London. They were all imprisoned in the Tower. From there they were taken to Tyburn and hanged, drawn and quartered on 19 April 1662. A further 19 regicides were imprisoned for life.

John Lambert was not in London for the trial of Charles I. At the Restoration, he was found guilty of high treason and remained in custody in Guernsey for the rest of his life. Sir Henry Vane the Younger served on the Council of State during the Interregnum even though he refused to take the oath which expressed approbation (approval) of the King's execution. At the Restoration, after much debate in Parliament, he was exempted from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act. In 1662 he was tried for high treason, found guilty and beheaded on Tower Hill on 14 June 1662.

The Instrument of Government, The Protectorate's written constitutions, gave to the Lord Protector the King's power to grant titles of honour. Over 30 new knighthoods were granted under the Protectorate. These knighthoods passed into oblivion upon the Restoration of Charles II, however many were regranted by the restored King.

Of the eleven Protectorate baronetcies, two had been previously granted by Charles I during the Civil War – but under Commonwealth legislation they were not recognised under the Protectorate (hence the Lord Protector's regranting of them), however when that legislation passed into oblivion these two baronets were entitled to use the baronetcies granted by Charles I – and Charles II regranted four more. Only one now continues: Sir Richard Thomas Willy, 14th baronet, is the direct successor of Sir Griffith Williams. Of the remaining Protectorate baronets one, Sir William Ellis, was granted a knighthood by Charles II.

Edmund Dunch was created Baron Burnell of East Wittenham in April 1658, but this barony was not regranted. The male line failed in 1719 with the death of his grandson, also Edmund Dunch, so no one can lay claim to the title.

The one hereditary viscountcy Cromwell created for certain,[lower-alpha 1] (making Charles Howard Viscount Howard of Morpeth and Baron Gilsland) continues to this day. In April 1661, Howard was created Earl of Carlisle, Viscount Howard of Morpeth, and Baron Dacre of Gillesland. The present Earl is a direct descendant of this Cromwellian creation and Restoration recreation.

On 6 January 1661, about 50 Fifth Monarchists, headed by a wine-cooper named Thomas Venner, tried to gain possession of London in the name of "King Jesus". Most were either killed or taken prisoner; on 19 and 21 January 1661, Venner and 10 others were hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason.

The Church of England was restored as the national Church in England, backed by the Clarendon Code and the Act of Uniformity 1662. People reportedly "pranced around May poles as a way of taunting the Presbyterians and Independents" and "burned copies of the Solemn League and Covenant".[15]

Barbados, as a haven for refugees fleeing the English republic, had held for Charles II under Lord Willoughby until defeated by George Ayscue. When news reached Barbados of the King's restoration, Thomas Modyford declared Barbados for the King in July 1660.[19] The planters, however, were not eager for the return of the former governor Lord Willoughby, fearing disputes over titles, but the King ordered he be restored.[20]

Jamaica had been a conquest of Oliver Cromwell's and Charles II's claim to the island was therefore questionable. However, Charles II chose not to restore Jamaica to Spain and in 1661 it became a British colony and the planters would claim that they held rights as Englishmen by the King's assumption of the dominion of Jamaica.[21] The first governor was Lord Windsor. He was replaced in 1664 by Thomas Modyford who had been ousted from Barbados.

New England, with its Puritan settlement, had supported the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. Acceptance of the Restoration was reluctant in some quarters as it highlighted the failure of puritan reform.[22] Rhode Island declared in October 1660 and Massachusetts lastly in August 1661.[23] New Haven provided refuge for Regicides such as Edward Whalley, William Goffe and John Dixwell and would be subsequently merged into Connecticut in 1662, perhaps in punishment.[24] John Winthrop, a former governor of Connecticut, and one of whose sons had been a captain in Monck's army, went to England at the Restoration and in 1662 obtained a Royal Charter for Connecticut with New Haven annexed to it.

Maryland had resisted the republic until finally occupied by New England Puritans/Parliamentary forces after the Battle of the Severn in 1655. In 1660 the Governor Josias Fendall tried to turn Maryland into a Commonwealth of its own in what is known as Fendall's Rebellion but with the fall of the republic in England he was left without support and was replaced by Philip Calvert upon the Restoration.

Virginia was the most loyal of King Charles II's dominions. It had, according to the eighteenth-century historian Robert Beverley, Jr., been "the last of all the King's Dominions that submitted to the Usurpation".[25] Virginia had provided sanctuary for Cavaliers fleeing the English republic. In 1650, Virginia was one of the Royalist colonies that became the subject of Parliaments An Act for prohibiting Trade with the Barbadoes, Virginia, Bermuda and Antego. Sir William Berkeley, who had previously been governor up until 1652, was elected governor in 1660 by the House of Burgesses and he promptly declared for the King. The Anglican Church was restored as the established church.

The Somers Isles, alias Bermuda (originally named Virgineola), was originally part of Virginia, and was administered by the Somers Isles Company, a spin-off of the Virginia Company, until 1684. The already existing contest between the mostly Parliamentarian Adventurers (shareholders) of the company in England and the Bermudians, who had their own House of Assembly (and many of whom were becoming landowners as they were sold the land they had previously farmed as tenants as the profitability of the tobacco farmed exclusively for the company fell), placed the Bermudians on the side of the Crown despite the large number of Puritans in the colony. Bermudians were attempting to shift their economy from tobacco to a maritime one and were being thwarted by the Company, which relied on revenue from tobacco cultivation. Bermuda was the first colony to recognise Charles II as King in 1649. It controlled its own "army" (of militia) and deposed the Company appointed Governor, electing a replacement. Its Independent Puritans were forced to emigrate, settling the Bahamas under prominent Bermudian settler, sometime Governor of Bermuda, and Parliamentary loyalist William Sayle as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Although eventually reaching a compromise with the Commonwealth, the Bermudians dispute with the company continued and was finally taken before the restored Crown, which was keen for an opportunity to re-assert its authority over the wealthy businessmen who controlled the Somers Isles Company. The islanders' protest to the Crown initially concerned the mis-treatment of Perient Trott and his heirs (including Nicholas Trott), but expanded to include the Company's wider mismanagement of the colony. This led to a lengthy court case in which the Crown championed Bermudians against the Company, and resulted in the Company's Royal Charter being revoked in 1684. From that point onwards the Crown assumed responsibility for appointing the Colony's governors (it first re-appointed the last company governor). Freed of the Company's restraints, the emerging local merchant class came to dominate and shape Bermuda's progress, as Bermudians abandoned agriculture en masse and turned to the seafaring.

In 1663 the Province of Carolina was formed as a reward given to some supporters of the Restoration. The province was named after the King's father, Charles I. The town of Charleston was established in 1669 by a party of settlers from Bermuda (some being Bermudians aboard Bermudian vessels, others having passed through Bermuda from as far as England) under the same William Sayle who had led the Eleutheran Adventurers to the Bahamas. In 1670, Sayle became the first Colonial Governor of the Province of Carolina.

Restoration literature includes the roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of King Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a commodity, the essay develop into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.[27]

The return of the king and his court from exile led to the replacement of the Puritan severity of the Cromwellian style with a taste for magnificence and opulence and to the introduction of Dutch and French artistic influences. These are evident in furniture in the use of floral marquetry, walnut instead of oak, twisted turned supports and legs, exotic veneers, cane seats and backs on chairs, sumptuous tapestry and velvet upholstery and ornate carved and gilded scrolling bases for cabinets.[28] Similar shifts appear in prose style.[29]

Comedy, especially bawdy comedy, flourished, and a favourite setting was the bed-chamber.[30] Indeed sexually explicit language was encouraged by the king personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues:

The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper....The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.[31]

The socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle-class segment.[32] These playgoers were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. This period saw the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn.[33]

This naval battle was one of the sets for Elkanah Settle's Empress of Morocco (1673) at the theatre in Dorset Garden.

The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged machine play, hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.[34]

Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all.[35] Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys.[36] The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as John Dryden's Albion and Albanius would leave a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell's Psyche or Dryden's King Arthur would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.[37]