England welcomed Charles II home in May 1660 and attempted to restore things to what they had been in 1642. Only a dozen men were executed for their role in the execution of Charles I. Both the people and Charles had learned the value of moderation, but the issue of sovereignty remained to be resolved. Parliament restored bishops to the church and expelled Dissenters (Protestants who did not conform to the Church of England), restricting their worship and political activity. In 1673 the Test Act removed Roman Catholics from the royal government. The Popish Plot of 1678 and the move to exclude James, the king's Roman Catholic brother, from the succession revealed the political parties then forming. The Whigs, favoring Parliament and hating popery, urged exclusion; the Tories, favoring the kings and the Anglican church, opposed it. When emotions cooled, Charles regained control and ruled without Parliament. He died in 1685, passing the throne to James.
The Restoration was a reaction against Puritanismæin behavior, literature, and dramaæyet John Milton's Paradise Lost was published in Parliament offering the crown to William and Mary in 1689 in Banqueting Hall, the only remaining part of the Palace of Whitehall, London.Bettmann Archive 1667 and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in 1678-84. In 1662 Charles chartered the Royal Society, to promote the study of natural science. In 1665 the last outbreak of bubonic plague occurred. After London burned in 1666, Christopher Wren rebuilt it in beauty and grandeur.
James II soon lost the goodwill he inherited: He was too harsh in his suppression of a revolt by James Scott, duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of Charles), in 1685; he created a standing army; and he put Roman Catholics in the government, army, and university. In 1688 his Declaration of Indulgence, allowing Dissenters and Catholics to worship freely, and the birth of a son, which set up a Roman Catholic succession, prompted James's opponents to invite William of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands and husband of the king's elder daughter, Mary, to come to safeguard Mary's inheritance. When William landed, James fled, his army having deserted to William. William was given temporary control of the government. Parliament in 1689 gave him and Mary the crown jointly, provided that they affirm the Bill of Rights listing and condemning the abuses of James. A Toleration Act gave freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters. This revolution was called the Glorious Revolution because, unlike that of 1640-60, it was bloodless and successful: Parliament was sovereign and England prosperous. It was a victory of Whig principles and Tory pragmatism. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690) provided an attractive theoretical justification for it.
Those who would not swear allegiance to the new monarchs were called nonjurors or Jacobites, Jacobus being Latin for James. The Jacobites were most numerous among the Roman Catholics in the Scottish Highlands and in Ireland. Both areas were subdued, but at a cost of the Massacre of Glencoe in Scotland and the Battle of the Boyne and greater repression of Roman Catholics in Ireland.
With William England also got William's war with France, the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97), and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13). William spent his entire life fighting the territorial ambitions of France's Louis XIV. The first war accomplished little save Louis's recognition of William as William III, king of England. In the second war, the victory of John Churchill (later duke of Marlborough) at Blenheim in 1704 showed that England was once again a force to be reckoned with in European affairs. See Blenheim, Battle of . The wars also demonstrated the wealth that England now had at its disposal and the willingness of the English to levy taxes on themselves in Parliament. In 1693 England created a permanent national debt and in 1694 chartered the Bank of England. These and the developing stock exchange were the basis of London's growing financial position in Britain and in the world.
Locke's Two Treatises and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), based on empiricism and common sense, and Isaac Newton's Principial(1687), integrating the laws of motion with the idea of universal gravitation, gave England a commanding place in the world of thought. This, matched with its wealth and military success, showed that England had not destroyed itself in the internal quarrels of the previous century, but had in fact put its house in order and created the ba-sis of ideas and power by which it would dominate the modern world.
Before James II's younger daughter, Anne, came to the throne in 1702, her many children had all died. To prevent a return of the Roman Catholic Stuarts, Parliament in 1701 passed the Act of Settlement, providing that the throne should go next to the Protestant Electress Sophia of Hannover (1630-1714), the granddaughter of James I, and to her descendants. Scotland, angry at its exclusion from trade with the English Empire, hesitated to duplicate the act, as it had the Bill of Rights in 1689. The only solution was to combine the two kingdoms, which was done by the Act of Union of 1707, creating the kingdom of Great Britain.
Last modified on: Thursday, July 11, 1996.