Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars by Edward Legon (review)

Mapping the “mnemonic landscape” of any period is a difficult exercise. The terrain is uncertain and deceptive. Memory is, by nature, evanescent. Even when it is recorded, memory is unreliable for a variety of reasons. Legon is, despite these challenges, an intrepid and largely successful cartographer of the seditious memories of those who, after the Restoration, harbored positive views of the trial and execution of King Charles I, the rule of Cromwell, the Commonwealth, and the Covenants.

The central thesis is that the early impulse of the restored Charles II to forgive and forget in the interest of national reconciliation (exemplified by the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion of 1660) gave way to a Restoration parliament bent on demonizing and marginalizing the “fanatics” who had ousted the Stuarts. Royalist attempts at “mnemonic hegemony” were intended to emphasize the wickedness of regicide and republic and the happy return of king and church. Instruments of this hegemony included the Sedition Act, the Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity and the Licensing Act—the so-called Clarendon Code. There were also the enforced commemorations of the royal martyrdom on January 30 and of the return of the monarchy on May 29. Legon devotes an interesting chapter on the mis-commemoration of Royalist anniversaries through non-observance, absenteeism, and disruption (although he is wisely sceptical of the flimsy evidence for the Calves-Head Club having celebrated the execution of Charles I with animal heads on platters). Censorship, censure, control, and enforced commemoration often had the perverse effect of perpetuating “the very identities that Royalists sought to forestall.”

Legon marshals good evidence for this thesis. He takes his primary sources not so much from print, as that was subject to heavy censorship by the authorities and privileged the Royalist perspective. Taking a cue from Paul Monod, a historian of Jacobitism, Legon looks at the records of prosecutions for the utterance of seditious words between 1660 and about 1685, which has the advantage of rescuing plebeian voices that would not otherwise be captured. He exercises due caution in approaching this material, which can give only a partial, somewhat random, and not always accurate (the “alehouse chatter” problem) view of the mnemonic landscape. Trials and keepers of the records may not have been impartial, the instigators of prosecutions and their witnesses positively malicious. What nevertheless emerges from Legon’s trawl through the State Papers Domestic and other sources is the clear sense of a widespread resistance to the Restoration and its censure of the previous regime, even if it was scattered or clustered in small “communities of hope.” Through “counter-memories” that challenged the Royalist view of recent history, people identified with the “good old cause.” They expressed nostalgia for it, looked forward to its return, and attempted to justify their previous participation in it. There was the odd active expression of opposition (the Fifth Monarchy Men rebelled in a small way in 1661), but seditious memories translated mostly into hopes and words rather than deeds.

One chapter provides an account of how these seditious memories were adopted and continued by a generation that had no actual experience of the Commonwealth. They were aware of it through social, religious, and familial networks—a theme that will be familiar to historians of Jacobitism. Undercurrents of opposition to the Restoration settlement ultimately informed Whig identity in the 1680s in the form of support for the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession to the throne, Monmouth’s Rebellion, and the Revolution of 1688. What would have been seditious in 1665 was channelled into anxieties about “popery” and “arbitrary government” that became mainstream.

The discussion is not confined to England, and Legon is good at distinguishing the experience in both Scotland and Ireland. In Scotland, the “tenacity” of the Covenants of 1638 and 1643 is defining. Ireland’s social and religious complexion made it unique. Roman Catholics in Ireland naturally favoured...