London and the Restoration, 1659-1683 (review)

Gary De Krey's study of the politics of Restoration London—which follows his 1985 account of the city in the age of Revolution and party, 1688-1715—investigates in rich and fascinating detail how in the national political crises of 1659-60 and the early 1680's London citizens mobilized, or tried to mobilize, popular protest to defend their rights and privileges and, ultimately, to overthrow their rulers: and how in the period in-between they constantly struggled to manipulate the city institutions to achieve national political ends. It complements an existing body of work on elite and popular politics in the capital, most notably Tim Harris's London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II and Mark Knights's Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81, but its breadth and detail over the period provide new and significant insights.

Much of the work consists of a rich and lively narrative of civic politics and its interaction with national politics throughout the period. Its account of the events of the winter of 1659-60, focussed on the actions of London's civic leaders, provides a welcome new perspective which helps to suggest how the actions of General Monck, so often regarded as the skillfully enigmatic architect of the Restoration of Charles II, are perhaps more accurately to be seen as an uncertain response to the changing balance of power in the capital. After the Restoration De Krey ably traces the establishment of the hegemony of an artificially narrow Anglican royalist elite, and the challenge to it posed by the forces of London dissent, a challenge that grew in strength and bitterness after 1667. He shows how during the third Dutch war of 1672-1674 and its aftermath the dissenting community of London coalesced into a civic opposition which could work in co-operation with country MPs to confront the Anglican royalist revanche led by the Earl of Danby with growing confidence at both corporation and national level. The book's account of the events of 1679-1683 covers ground that is now fairly well trodden, but it provides fresh levels of complexity to the story, emphasizing quite how narrowly the government did escape popular insurrection in London in response to its assault on civic government.

As this suggests, De Krey unsurprisingly stresses the importance of religious division within London's politics, and his detailed prosopographical analyses of those involved in civic affairs show a strong relationship between the dissenting community and the Whig leadership, while his analysis of 'Whig' and 'Tory' space in the crisis of 1679-1683 finds a close link between the topography of urban Whiggism and that of dissent and Reformed Protestantism. But Londoners were also used to a significant degree of autonomy from national government, and of involvement in governing their own affairs through popular institutions, and were as a consequence accustomed and committed to representative government in a way that few other of their countrymen were. De Krey shows how their determination to defend it played a strong role in their responses to civic and national political crisis. He dissects the rhetoric of the Whig resistance in London during the crisis of 1679-1682 to show up the extent to which it deployed the languague of consent, and he argues that the crisis, and specifically the shrieval election of 1682, drove Whig writers to make more explicit existing assumptions about the primacy of common hall, and therefore of the people's will.

Much of De Krey's book is concerned with the development of the increasingly formalized polarities which defined Restoration politics. In underlining the real division that the crisis of 1679-1683 engendered in London political society he contributes to a debate concerning the degree to which "party" should be used as an organizing category in the politics of the period, and concludes firmly that "in London parties were first generated in 1679-1682, as these communities struggled to reform or...