Restoration of Charles II (1660): The Monarchy Returns

The Restoration of Charles II in May 1660 brought the monarchy back to England, Scotland and Ireland after eleven years of republican rule. Following the collapse of the Protectorate, General George Monck’s march on London and Charles’s conciliatory Declaration of Breda made it possible for Parliament to invite the exiled king home. Charles landed at Dover on 25 May and entered London on 29 May, his 30th birthday, to scenes of great rejoicing.

Background: the collapse of the republic

Oliver Cromwell’s death in September 1658 removed the one figure who could hold together the army and civilian politicians. His son Richard resigned in May 1659 after the army forced the dissolution of his Parliament, ending Cromwell’s Protectorate. The army recalled the Rump, the remnant of the Long Parliament, but the two soon quarrelled again.

In October 1659 General John Lambert expelled the Rump and the army ruled through a Committee of Safety. Trade slumped, taxes went unpaid and London apprentices rioted. Many people now feared anarchy or permanent military rule more than the return of a king.

Monck’s march

George Monck, commander of the English army occupying Scotland, declared his support for the expelled Parliament. He purged his regiments of radicals and on 1 January 1660 crossed the River Tweed at Coldstream with an army of several thousand men. Lambert’s army in the north melted away, and the Rump returned to Westminster before Monck even arrived.

Monck reached London on 3 February 1660. He kept his intentions secret, but he quickly sided with the City of London against the Rump. On 21 February he allowed back the members who had been excluded in Pride’s Purge of 1648, most of them moderate Presbyterians. This restored Long Parliament arranged new elections and then dissolved itself on 16 March 1660.

The Declaration of Breda

Charles II had spent most of the 1650s in exile in France, Germany and the Spanish Netherlands, after his escape following the Battle of Worcester. Secret contacts with Monck now encouraged him, on Monck’s advice, to move from Spanish territory to Breda in the Dutch Republic.

The Declaration of Breda, dated 4 April 1660 and drafted largely by Charles’s chief adviser Edward Hyde, offered a general pardon to all except those Parliament chose to exclude. It promised “a liberty to tender consciences” in religion, a settlement of land bought during the upheavals, and full payment of arrears to Monck’s soldiers. By leaving the details to Parliament, it reassured those who feared vengeance.

The newly elected Convention Parliament, so called because it had not been summoned by a king, met on 25 April 1660. On 1 May both Houses received Charles’s letters and the Declaration, and voted that government belonged to King, Lords and Commons. Charles II was proclaimed king in London on 8 May.

A fleet under Edward Montagu sailed to the Netherlands to bring him home. The flagship Naseby, named after a Parliamentarian victory, was hastily renamed the Royal Charles. The naval official Samuel Pepys travelled with the fleet and described the voyage in his famous diary.

Charles landed at Dover on 25 May 1660, where Monck knelt to greet him. Four days later he rode into London through cheering crowds, past streets hung with tapestries and fountains running with wine. The diarist John Evelyn, who watched the procession, thanked God that the change had come without bloodshed.

The settlement

The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, passed in August 1660, pardoned most offences committed during the civil wars and Interregnum. Those directly involved in the trial and execution of Charles I were excluded. Ten men, including Thomas Harrison and the preacher Hugh Peters, were hanged, drawn and quartered in October 1660, and others were imprisoned for life or fled abroad.

In January 1661 the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were dug up and hanged at Tyburn. Most of the New Model Army was paid off and disbanded, although Monck’s own regiment survived to become the Coldstream Guards.

Laws passed during the Interregnum without royal assent were treated as void, and the legal fiction was adopted that Charles II had reigned since his father’s death in 1649. Land confiscated from the Crown and the Church was returned, but Royalists who had sold estates to pay fines received no compensation, which caused lasting bitterness.

Scotland and Ireland

The Restoration also ended the Cromwellian union of the three kingdoms. Scotland regained its own Parliament, which in 1661 passed the Act Rescissory, annulling most legislation since 1633, and bishops were restored to the Church of Scotland. The Marquess of Argyll, the leading Covenanter, was executed in Edinburgh in May 1661, and resistance to the new church settlement simmered among Presbyterians for decades.

In Ireland, Catholic landowners hoped to recover the estates confiscated in the 1650s. The Act of Settlement of 1662 and the Act of Explanation of 1665 restored some of them, but most land granted to Cromwellian soldiers and investors stayed in Protestant hands, leaving a lasting grievance.

Religion and the Cavalier Parliament

The promise of religious toleration was not kept. The Cavalier Parliament, elected in 1661, passed a series of laws known as the Clarendon Code, including the Act of Uniformity of 1662, which drove nearly 2,000 Puritan ministers out of the Church of England.

The Corporation Act of 1661 had already excluded non-Anglicans from town governments, and the Conventicle Act of 1664 and the Five Mile Act of 1665 restricted Nonconformist worship and preaching. The mass expulsion of clergy, which took effect on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1662, became known as the Great Ejection and created a permanent body of Protestant Dissenters outside the national church.

Key people

• Charles II (1630–1685): the exiled king, whose flexibility and charm made the settlement easier. He was crowned on 23 April 1661.
• George Monck (1608–1670): the general whose decisions made the Restoration possible. He was made Duke of Albemarle.
• Edward Hyde (1609–1674): Charles’s adviser in exile and chief minister after 1660, created Earl of Clarendon.
• Samuel Pepys (1633–1703): naval administrator whose diary gives a vivid eyewitness account of the king’s return.

Timeline

• 1658, 3 September: Oliver Cromwell dies.
• 1659, May: Richard Cromwell resigns; the Rump is recalled.
• 1660, 1 January: Monck crosses the Tweed at Coldstream.
• 1660, 3 February: Monck enters London.
• 1660, 4 April: Charles II issues the Declaration of Breda.
• 1660, 25 April: The Convention Parliament meets.
• 1660, 8 May: Charles II is proclaimed king in London.
• 1660, 25 May: Charles lands at Dover.
• 1660, 29 May: Charles enters London on his 30th birthday.
• 1661, 23 April: Coronation of Charles II at Westminster Abbey.

Legacy

The Restoration opened a period of cultural revival. Theatres, closed since 1642, reopened, and women appeared on the English public stage for the first time. Science flourished with the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, which received a royal charter in 1662.

Yet the old disputes about religion and the limits of royal power had not been resolved. They returned under Charles’s Catholic brother, James II, and ended only with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Why it matters

The Restoration showed that a monarchy could return peacefully through Parliament rather than conquest. It re-established the institutions of Crown, Lords and Church of England, but on terms that left Parliament stronger than before 1640. The period’s name is still used for the era’s distinctive literature, architecture and comedy.