Restoration. Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660-1685 (review)

Tim Harris is best known for his work on extra-parliamentary politics in the later seventeenth century. Those seemingly excluded from conventional participation, and therefore from sustained historical attention, have attracted him. This long-standing concern is related to an ambition to write a social history of politics. His new study, the prime focus of which is the Glorious Revolution, is the result. In it, he aims to reinstate the revolutionary element in the events and settlement of 1688-9. Also, he presents the crisis as a British one. This volume is the first of two, and, in some senses, serves as an overture to the main drama that is still to come. The prelude is a lengthy one, since the motifs that are to be taken up later have to be introduced and identified.

With the abundance of recent writing on Charles II's reign, Harris synthesizes what others have uncovered about the king, the court, parliament and the localities. He brings his own emphases to all these matters, and is never less than a clear and reliable guide. Whatever the author's intentions, this book will be welcomed as a full and provocative guide. In re-examining the Popish plot and Exclusion crisis, he tends to play down the skill of the king and to insist on the depth and seriousness of the crisis and the participation of many beyond Whitehall and Westminster. Close attention is then focussed on the reaction that followed the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681. Hereafter, Professor Harris's reinterpretation gathers momentum. Three successive series of loyalist addresses are examined in detail, as are both tory and whig propaganda. In general, he is cautious about accepting that there was a massive swing of opinion towards the tories, although not denying that these years saw them entrenched in power at the centre and in the regions. Occasionally he seems to verge on a double standard: insistent on the extent of politicization among whigs and religious dissenters but more sceptical that manifestations of high church toryism indicated widespread popular support.

In tracing the intellectual genealogies of the combatants, he is alert to the legacy of the 1640s and 1650s. Opponents of the whigs conjured with the fear that 1641 was about to come again, with a fresh civil war as the likely consequence. The experiences of individuals, the persistence of feuds and memories, not just from the civil wars and interregnum, but maybe from the troubled 1620s and 1630s, may have had influence over stances now adopted in the 1680s. Professor Harris acknowledges that further investigation of specific localities may bring out the continuities and variations in responses. At the same time, he is clear that in vital respects the crisis of Charles II's reign did not resemble that of his father's. Scotland, while unsettled in 1678, did not rebel in a manner that wrecked the monarch's plans. Similarly, Ireland, always a worry, failed to rise as it had in 1641.

The kind of evidence that Harris deploys, notably the pamphleteering, preaching and newspapers, suggests apprehensions and approaches shared across the country, and indeed across the three kingdoms. Yet, just as a sociology of political affiliations and behaviour is hard to construct, so too is any assessment of regional variations. Yet, they mattered, not only in England and Wales, but also in Ireland and Scotland. Despite suggestions of more research to be done, this account, with its analysis of the interlocking of ideology and activism between 1681 and 1685, is the fullest and most authoritative that we have. In particular, it gives unusual weight to the interactions in and between the Stuarts' three kingdoms.

There is an older view that Charles, freer from constraints in Ireland and Scotland, allowed the two kingdoms to be used as laboratories in which to experiment with more brusque methods of government. In the case of Ireland, Harris shows the governors, Ormond and his son, Arran, striving not...