Restoration England, 1660–1685

How this unit works

This is your Paper 2 Section B British depth study (option 2B/D), including the historic environment. It is worth 40 marks, takes about 60 minutes, and the four questions are always the same shape:

• Q1 (8 marks) — how convincing is Interpretation A? You judge a historian's claim against your own knowledge. This unit is full of genuine debates — was Charles II clever or lazy? was the Popish Plot hysteria or rational fear? — and the workbench at the end covers the five the questions come from.
• Q2 (8 marks) — explain what was important about something. That means consequences within the period, in more than one area of life. Never a description.
• Q3 (8 marks) — write an account: a connected story where one development leads to the next. In a 25-year depth study, precise Acts, names, ships and sums of money earn the marks.
• Q4 (16 marks) — the historic environment question, on a site that changes every year: the Dutch Raid on the Medway (2027) or St Paul's Cathedral (2028). Check with your teacher which is yours. The method chapter and the dossiers below cover both.

The one-sentence version, worth memorising: Charles II had his father's rights and none of his father's independent income. He could dissolve Parliament whenever he liked — and then had no way of paying for his government. Every crisis in Chapter 1, the Medway humiliation in Chapter 3, even the funding of St Paul's by a parliamentary coal tax: the same fact in different clothes.

Timeline: the spine of the unit

Learn the order first — a date becomes useful when you can also say why it mattered.

Crown, Parliament, plots and court

Life, culture, trade and war

Chapter 1 — Crown, Parliament, plots and court

Charles II was restored because the alternative had collapsed, not because the country wanted him back on his father's terms. What follows is twenty-five years of working out what 1660 had actually settled — over money, over religion, over the succession, and finally over whether Parliament needed to meet at all.

1.1 A restoration on terms

Start with what the Civil War and Interregnum had proved. A king could be tried and executed — after January 1649, everyone knew monarchy was removable. The country could function for eleven years without a king. Religious uniformity had broken down, and the Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers who had worshipped openly did not vanish in 1660.

And — the point most easily missed — the state had grown. The Interregnum built a standing army, a navy that beat the Dutch, and a tax system (the excise, the monthly assessment) that raised sums Charles I could only dream of. England in 1660 was a far more heavily taxed, militarily capable state than in 1640.

Why did the monarchy come back? Not through a royalist rising. Cromwell died in 1658, his son Richard could not hold the army, and the country slid towards chaos — until General Monck marched south from Scotland and secured free elections. The Restoration was a solution to anarchy, not a royalist victory. That is why it happened so fast, with so little blood.

From exile Charles issued the Declaration of Breda (April 1660): a general pardon, “liberty to tender consciences” in religion, settlement of disputed land, and the army's back pay. The shrewdest move of his career was hidden in the drafting — every promise was referred to Parliament to decide. That made the offer credible, and it moved the blame for what followed onto Parliament. Parliament proved far harsher than he was.

• The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (August 1660) pardoned almost everyone except the regicides: thirteen were executed, and the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were dug up and hanged at Tyburn. A wit called it an act of indemnity for the king's enemies and oblivion for his friends.
• The land settlement made the most enemies. Crown, Church and confiscated royalist land was returned — but land royalists had sold voluntarily, to pay the fines the republic had imposed on them, was not. Many who had ruined themselves for the Crown got nothing back.

What was restored, and what was not, decided the whole reign:

Read the right-hand column again: every item on it was a way a king could raise money or enforce his will without Parliament. And in memory, everything had changed — everyone in politics had lived through a civil war and would do almost anything to avoid another. That memory cut both ways for the next twenty-five years.

1.2 Money and religion: one connected problem

Parliament voted Charles an ordinary revenue meant to yield £1.2 million a year, from customs, the excise, and (from 1662) the hated hearth tax — two shillings per fireplace, counted by officials who came into your house. It failed twice over: the yield fell short, and £1.2 million was too little anyway. The navy alone was ruinously expensive.

The consequences: constant borrowing; the Stop of the Exchequer (1672), when the government simply stopped repaying its bankers and ruined several of them; and dependence on Parliament — which learned to attach conditions, demand accounts, and specify what money could be spent on. That practice, called appropriation, was a permanent constitutional gain. Eventually there was a fourth consequence: dependence on France, whose subsidies were attractive precisely because Parliament could not vote on them.

Parliament charged for its money in religion. Charles had promised liberty to tender consciences at Breda; the Cavalier Parliament (elected 1661, fiercely Anglican) had other ideas. The so-called Clarendon Code is misnamed — it was Parliament's programme, not Clarendon's. The persecution of dissenters was imposed on the King by his own supporters.

Dissent went underground, not away — Quakers, who refused to hide, suffered worst — and the surviving congregations later became a Whig constituency. Charles tried twice to suspend the penal laws by royal Declaration of Indulgence (1662 and 1672) and lost both times. In 1673 Parliament simply refused to fund the Dutch war until the Declaration was withdrawn — and then went further.

The Test Act (1673) required every officeholder to take Anglican communion and to deny transubstantiation — the one declaration no practising Catholic could make. It excluded Catholics from office without naming them. Its first spectacular casualty told the country what it had only suspected: James, Duke of York, resigned as Lord High Admiral. The heir to the throne was a Catholic.

1.3 From the Cabal to Whigs and Tories

After the Medway disaster of 1667, Charles threw his loyal chief minister Clarendon to the parliamentary wolves — dismissed, impeached, exiled. No single minister replaced him. Instead came the Cabal — Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, Lauderdale, whose initials happen to spell the word — five men who fundamentally disagreed with each other. That suited Charles: he dealt with each separately and told none of them everything.

The masterpiece of that method was the Secret Treaty of Dover (1670), the most dangerous document of the reign. Publicly: England joins France in war on the Dutch, for subsidies. Secretly — known to only two ministers — Charles promised to declare himself a Catholic, with French money and, if needed, French troops behind him. Whether he ever meant it is genuinely disputed (he converted only on his deathbed). What matters is the fact of the commitment: the King of England had secretly agreed with a foreign Catholic monarch to change his country's religion for cash. Enough leaked to poison everything — when the Popish Plot came in 1678, it was believed because this was the kind of thing the government was known to do.

Danby (Lord Treasurer 1673–79) tried the opposite of evasion: build a court majority inside Parliament through systematic patronage — offices, pensions, and lists of MPs and their reliability — behind a popular Anglican, anti-French programme, sealed by marrying James's Protestant daughter Mary to William of Orange (1677). He fell when it emerged he had been writing to Paris for French money, on Charles's own instructions, while publicly running an anti-French policy. Charles let him take the fall too.

Out of the Exclusion struggle that followed came England's first political parties — both names began as insults:

Four conditions made parties possible, and all were needed: a binary issue that allowed no compromise (James succeeds or he doesn't); three general elections in two years (1679, 1679, 1681); the lapse of press licensing in 1679, which let pamphlets pour out uncensored; and organisation — Shaftesbury's clubs, petitions and candidate lists were the first recognisably modern political machine in England, promptly copied by its enemies.

1.4 The Exclusion Crisis

Charles had no legitimate children, so the crown would pass to his brother James — publicly Catholic from 1673, and remarried to the Catholic Mary of Modena, which raised the prospect of a Catholic son displacing his Protestant daughters Mary and Anne.

Why was a Catholic king intolerable to so many? The fear was not irrational, and stating its grounds properly earns marks:

• Living memory. The Marian burnings, the Gunpowder Plot and the Irish massacres of 1641 were commemorated every year.
• The working example of France. Louis XIV was persecuting his Protestant subjects. Absolutism and Catholicism looked like one package — and Charles's French subsidies made the connection concrete.
• Property. Half the political nation held former Church lands from the Reformation.
• The prerogative itself. A Catholic king would appoint the bishops, judges and army officers. The powers that made Charles tolerable made James terrifying.

Three Exclusion Parliaments tried to bar James by statute. In 1679 the Bill passed its second reading 207–128 — Charles dissolved Parliament. In 1680 it passed the Commons and was thrown out by the Lords, with Charles attending in person. In March 1681 he summoned Parliament to Oxford, away from London's Whig crowds, and dissolved it inside a week. His own line never moved: he would concede almost anything about James's powers — he repeatedly offered legal limits on a Catholic successor — and nothing about his right.

The Tory answer to exclusion was just as serious: once Parliament can choose a king, monarchy is elective and authority dissolves — and excluding James means civil war. The memory of 1642 was their strongest card. One permanent thing survived the wreckage: the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) — a gaoler must produce a prisoner before a court and state the cause. Passed by men afraid of arbitrary arrest under a Catholic king, it outlasted everything else they attempted. The Whigs lost the fight they chose and won a limitation they had almost incidentally imposed.

1.5 Plots: invented, fabricated and real

The Popish Plot (1678) was invented by Titus Oates — expelled in his time from a school, a college, a naval chaplaincy and two Catholic seminaries — and the clergyman Israel Tonge: Jesuits would murder Charles, crown James and massacre Protestants. It was a fabrication. Oates's story kept changing, and Charles personally caught him out in errors of fact.

Yet it was believed for three years, for five specific reasons:

• The magistrate who took Oates's depositions, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was found dead on Primrose Hill — and his death has never been explained. To contemporaries, the man who knew had been silenced.
• The Coleman letters were real: a royal secretary had genuinely corresponded with Louis XIV's confessor about restoring Catholicism in England. Coleman was executed.
• The government's own record — the Indulgence, the French alliance, the rumours of Dover — made a secret Catholic design exactly what people already suspected.
• The heir really was Catholic.
• The plot was politically useful, and Shaftesbury's Whigs rode it.

Around thirty-five people were executed (figures vary — treat as approximate), and a second Test Act barred Catholics from both Houses of Parliament. Then the weapon changed hands. The Meal Tub Plot (1679) was a fabricated Presbyterian conspiracy designed to smear the Whigs. And the Rye House Plot (1683) was, at least in part, real: radicals planned to ambush and kill Charles and James on the road from Newmarket. The government deliberately merged that genuine plan with vaguer talk among Whig leaders — and used the assassins' crime to destroy the politicians. Russell and Sidney were executed (the evidence against Sidney was an unpublished manuscript, treated as a second witness), Essex died in the Tower, Shaftesbury fled abroad and died there. Whig organisation was annihilated.

1.6 Personal rule, 1681–1685

After Oxford, Charles never called another Parliament. (The 1664 Triennial Act required one every three years — but had no enforcement mechanism.) Four things let him afford it: a new secret French subsidy deal in 1681; customs and excise receipts rising with booming trade; peace — he avoided war after 1674, and war was the one expense his revenue could never meet; and the Tory reaction after the Rye House Plot, when loyalism became genuinely popular.

Then he did something more alarming than avoiding Parliament: he prepared a compliant one. Using quo warranto writs (“by what warrant do you hold your privileges?”), the Crown attacked the borough charters that controlled parliamentary elections. London's charter was forfeited by court judgment in 1683; dozens of boroughs surrendered theirs; the new charters gave the Crown power over corporation officers. Whig sheriffs in London were replaced by Tories — which mattered, because sheriffs picked juries.

Charles died on 6 February 1685, received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. James II succeeded without a shot fired — and his first Parliament, elected under the remodelled charters, was overwhelmingly loyal. So had royal power genuinely been restored? On any practical measure, yes: Charles was stronger in 1685 than in 1660, and stronger than his father in 1640. But notice what it rested on — peace and French money (any war would have broken it instantly), Tory-Anglican support (conditional on defending the Church, and gone within three years once James tested it), and no permanent change at all: no statute repealed, no new revenue created. A political victory, not a constitutional one.

The formulation worth learning: Charles restored royal power by not testing it. He avoided war, conceded when pressed, and waited for his opponents to overreach. A king who could not afford to fight found a way to rule by not fighting.

1.7 The King and his court

Charles was six foot two, fast-walking, affable, witty and accessible — and secretive, cynical and evasive to the point of dishonesty, formed by fourteen years of exile in which he learned that promises were negotiable and survival mattered more than dignity. Rochester's famous verse — a king who “never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one” — and Charles's reported reply (his words were his own; his actions were his ministers') are both characteristic, and both anecdote rather than record.

The mistresses are examined content, not gossip, because they carried political weight. Barbara Villiers extracted titles, pensions and appointments on a scale that became a public grievance. Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth — French, Catholic, and correctly believed to serve French interests — was a channel to Louis XIV: her position connected the King's private life to the exact fear driving the Exclusion Crisis. Nell Gwyn, the Protestant actress, was popular precisely because she was neither French nor grand. Charles acknowledged twelve or more illegitimate children and made several of them dukes — creating, in Monmouth, the Protestant claimant of the Exclusion Crisis.

The court was the machine of government — offices, pensions, commissions and Church livings all flowed through it, and access to the King was the currency of politics. It was also a deliberate cultural statement: reopened theatres, restored Christmas, racing at Newmarket, French fashion. (In 1666 Charles introduced the vest — ancestor of the three-piece suit — as a sober English answer to French style; Pepys records it.) The Restoration of pleasure announced that the godly experiment was over, and it was popular. But it also created a constituency of the offended — dissenters, sober Anglicans, provincial gentry — for whom the court's expense and morals proved the King could not be trusted. The same court culture that consolidated the Restoration armed its opponents.

Chapter 2 — Life in Restoration England

Within eighteen months London suffered the worst epidemic in living memory and then burned down. Within a decade it had a rebuilt city in brick, two licensed theatres with actresses on stage, several hundred coffee houses arguing about politics, a chartered scientific society and the beginnings of the greatest classical building in England. The disasters and the flowering are the same story: a society remaking itself in public.

2.1 The Great Plague, 1665

Nobody in 1665 knew that plague travelled with rat fleas. People held three explanations at once — God's punishment (days of fasting were proclaimed, and many pointed at the court), miasma or “bad air” (hence street bonfires and posies), and plain contagion, which every practical measure actually rested on. That is why the response looks more modern than the theory behind it.

• Infected households were shut up for forty days, sick and healthy together, behind a door painted with a red cross and Lord have mercy upon us — the measure people hated most, since it condemned the healthy to share a house with the dying.
• Searchers of the dead — poor older women, untrained, paid a small fee, bribable — reported causes of death for the weekly printed Bills of Mortality.
• Plague pits took the overflow of burials at night; fairs, plays and gatherings were banned.
• Dogs and cats were killed in huge numbers — which, by removing the rats' predators, probably made things worse.

The Bills recorded around 69,000 plague deaths in London; the true figure was substantially higher — possibly nearing 100,000, since searchers misrecorded and dissenters, Quakers and Jews buried outside the parish system were never counted. Out of a city of roughly 400,000–460,000, that is something like a fifth. Present it as a range and say why.

And mortality followed wealth almost exactly. The court left for Oxford (noticed, and resented); the physicians and many clergy left; the poor, shut into the crowded parishes outside the walls, could not. Some stayed: the Lord Mayor kept the administration running, Pepys stayed at the Navy Office — his diary records the grass growing in Whitehall — and a number of ejected dissenting ministers returned to the pulpits they had been driven from, which did the Church of England no good afterwards. One evidence warning worth marks: Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is a later reconstruction by a man who was a small child in 1665. Superb writing — and not evidence.

2.2 The Great Fire, 1666

In the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666 a fire began in Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane. Why did it take the City? Timber-and-pitch houses with jettied upper storeys almost touching across narrow streets; riverside warehouses full of pitch, tar, oil, brandy and gunpowder; a long hot drought; and — probably decisive — a strong east wind that drove the flames west for days. The water supply failed at the start: the wheels under London Bridge burned, and the pipes were wooden.

The response failed with it. The Lord Mayor, Bloodworth, woken in the night, reportedly sneered that a woman might piss it out — and refused to order demolition for firebreaks, fearing he would have to pay for the houses. By the time gunpowder was used to blast gaps, the fire was days ahead. One genuine bright spot: Charles and James took personal charge of the firefighting, organising posts and reportedly working alongside the men. It was the most publicly admired thing Charles ever did.

In four days the fire destroyed about 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and old St Paul's — roughly 80 per cent of the walled City — leaving perhaps 70,000–80,000 people camping in the fields. Recorded deaths were around six to eight: handle that number with care, because it is what the parish registers recorded, and deaths among the poor, in a fire hot enough to melt pottery, likely went uncounted. Nobody believed a fire that size was an accident. Suspicion fell on Catholics and the Dutch; Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker of unsettled mind, confessed — his confession was demonstrably false (he described a building that did not exist) — and he was hanged anyway. A Commons committee found no evidence of conspiracy; an inscription blaming Catholics still went onto the Monument, and stayed there, with an interval, into the nineteenth century.

The Rebuilding Act (1667) turned disaster into regulation: brick or stone only; four standard classes of house with set heights and wall thicknesses (the beginning of building regulation in England); wider streets and no more jetties; a coal tax to fund the public works, including the churches and eventually St Paul's; and a Fire Court to settle landlord–tenant disputes fast — the reason rebuilding could begin at all. Wren's grand plan for a new baroque city of avenues and piazzas was never adopted: thousands of small private plots, no money for compensation, and merchants who needed to trade now. London was rebuilt on its medieval street plan, in brick, to new standards — and never burned like that again.

The Q1 formulation: a disaster converted into a limited, regulated improvement by a government that could legislate but could not expropriate. Private property and trade outranked royal vision, even in an emergency — and that tells you something true about Restoration England.

2.3 The theatre reopens — for a different audience

Parliament had closed the theatres in 1642; Charles reopened them in 1660 as one of his first acts — an announcement that the godly regime was over. He granted letters patent to two loyal courtiers, Killigrew (the King's Company) and Davenant (the Duke's Company): a duopoly, meaning all legitimate London drama was royal-licensed court entertainment made public.

The new playhouses were nothing like the Globe: indoor, candlelit, small and expensive — audiences in the hundreds, not thousands — with painted perspective scenery sliding in grooves, stage machinery, and a proscenium arch. The most conspicuous innovation was the actresses, on the English public stage from 1660–61 and approved by royal patent in 1662 — which changed what plays could be written.

Restoration comedy — courtship, money, adultery and reputation among the fashionable London elite, delivered with verbal wit and cheerful cynicism — divided opinion then as now: satire exposing vice, said its defenders; vice made attractive, said its critics. Know the names: Dryden (Poet Laureate — his Absalom and Achitophel of 1681 satirised the Exclusion Crisis: literature as party politics), Etherege (The Man of Mode), Aphra Behn (The Rover), and Wycherley (The Country Wife).

2.4 Women: new visibility, unchanged position

What was genuinely new: actresses (Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle) — a real profession with real earnings and real fame, and precarious and disreputable, because a woman visible on a public stage was assumed to be sexually available. Aphra Behn — spy for Charles II in the Netherlands, then the first Englishwoman to earn her living by writing (about nineteen plays, plus Oroonoko) — was attacked for her frankness in terms no man would have faced. And Quaker women preached, to the scandal of orthodox opinion.

What did not change:

• Coverture. On marriage a woman's legal personality was absorbed into her husband's: no independent property, contracts, lawsuits or will. Widows and unmarried women had far more capacity — so always say which women you mean.
• Divorce with remarriage needed a private Act of Parliament. Universities and the professions were closed.
• Most women worked — domestic service above all, plus dairying, spinning, trading, midwifery, and widows running their husbands' businesses — at consistently lower wages than men.

The court's famous libertinism describes a tiny handful of people. A royal mistress could be made a duchess and remain, in law, a woman without legal personality: the court converted sexual relationships into property, which is not emancipation. The honest judgement: change at the margin, continuity at the centre — visibility is not status, and treating Nell Gwyn and Aphra Behn as evidence about “women” confuses the two.

2.5 Coffee houses: the penny universities

From one house in Oxford around 1650, London had several hundred coffee houses by the 1680s (contemporary counts vary). A penny bought entry, a seat, the newspapers and the conversation — hence “penny universities”. Merchants and peers sat at the same tables, and four things grew around the drink: business (marine insurance grew up at Lloyd's coffee house, and early stock dealing happened over coffee), news, politics (particular houses became known Whig or Tory resorts, and the Popish Plot was sustained by coffee-house talk), and science.

The proof of their significance is what happened in December 1675: Charles issued a proclamation suppressing coffee houses as nests of sedition — and withdrew it within days, in the face of protest, doubtful legality and plain unenforceability. A government that tries to close a form of sociability and fails has told you two things: it correctly identified where public opinion was being formed, and it could not control it. Together with the lapse of press licensing in 1679, the coffee house is the physical infrastructure of public opinion — and one of the clearest limits on royal power in the unit. A king who could dissolve Parliament at will could not shut a coffee shop.

2.6 The Royal Society, Pepys and the new science

Natural philosophers who had met informally since the 1640s formalised in 1660 and received a royal charter in 1662 as the Royal Society. Its motto states its method: Nullius in verba — take nobody's word for it. Experiment over ancient authority; public demonstration before witnesses; publication (the Philosophical Transactions from 1665, the first scientific journal in English); and international correspondence.

• Robert Hooke — Curator of Experiments; his Micrographia (1665) showed a flea at a scale nobody had seen. Pepys sat up till 2 a.m. reading it.
• Robert Boyle — The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle's law, and the insistence on describing experiments so others could repeat them.
• Isaac Newton — elected 1672; the Principia appeared in 1687, after this unit's dates, but the work belongs to it.
• The Royal Observatory (Greenwich, 1675, designed by Wren) had a flatly practical purpose: star charts to crack the longitude problem, which mattered enormously to a trading and naval power.

Note the funding: Charles's patronage was real and mostly cheap — charters and encouragement, not money. The Society ran on members' subscriptions. Was it a scientific revolution or a gentlemen's club? Both — and the amateurs were not incidental. In a country that had recently fought a war over authority, systematic doubting needed protection, and a royal charter plus a membership of peers supplied it. The gentlemen paid for the room in which the scientists worked.

Two diarists anchor the period's evidence. Samuel Pepys matters three ways: as the outstanding naval administrator of the reign (see 3.5 — he was an administrator first and a diarist incidentally); as the diarist of 1660–69, written in shorthand for himself and unusually candid; and as President of the Royal Society in 1684, whose name is on the imprimatur of Newton's Principia. The caution that earns marks: the diary is one man's, nine years, London — not a window on England. John Evelyn covers the whole reign — less candid, partly written up later, stronger on public occasions. Where both describe the same event, you have the rarest thing in this period's evidence: two independent eyewitnesses to test against each other.

2.7 Wren and the classical style

Christopher Wren was not trained as an architect. He was Professor of Astronomy at Oxford and a founder of the Royal Society, and came to building in his thirties — from books, one visit to Paris in 1665, and practice. Three things converged to change English architecture at once: the Fire (an enormous amount of building needed fast), the court's continental taste after years of exile, and the Royal Society's mathematical habits.

Wren directed the rebuilding of about fifty-one City churches, funded by the coal tax — each fitted to an awkward medieval plot, each designed as a Protestant preaching space (one room, clear glass, prominent pulpit), each crowned with a different steeple designed to be seen together as a skyline. Robert Hooke, as City Surveyor, did the unglamorous work that made it all possible — staking out street lines, settling boundaries, certifying plots. The rebuilding of London was a surveying achievement before it was an architectural one.

The new vocabulary — classical orders, pediments, symmetry, the sash window (the quickest way to date a building), brick with stone dressings, corridors and privacy as a design goal — spread from statute in London to fashion everywhere. And the style was an argument: after civil war, regicide and upheaval, a style proclaiming order, rule and inherited authority was not a neutral choice.

Chapter 3 — Land, trade and war

This is where the wealth of Chapter 2 came from — and where its cost is stated. England under Charles II acquired Bombay, Tangier and Hudson Bay, chartered companies with the powers of states, turned Jamaica from a raiders' base into a plantation economy, legislated the Dutch out of its trade, fought them twice, entered the transatlantic slave trade on an organised national basis, and rebuilt a navy it could not afford to keep at sea.

3.1 Empire by charter

The characteristic English method of expansion was the chartered company: a monopoly of trade with a region, in exchange for bearing all the cost and risk. The Crown got an empire without paying for one. The East India Company's charters granted powers far beyond trade — to acquire and govern territory, build forts, keep armed forces, make war and peace with non-Christian powers, coin money and run courts. A company with the powers of a state — and it duly became one.

Bombay and Tangier came with Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661. The Crown could not afford to run Bombay, so in 1668 Charles handed it to the East India Company for a nominal £10 a year. The Hudson's Bay Company (1670, promoted by Prince Rupert) got a monopoly and ownership over Rupert's Land — the entire Hudson Bay watershed, a vast slice of modern Canada — trading furs at coastal posts with the Indigenous peoples who did the trapping.

Tangier is the control case: the one possession the Crown kept and paid for directly. A Mediterranean naval base with a half-built breakwater, a garrison under constant attack, and a Parliament that refused to fund what it suspected was a Catholic-officered standing army — it was abandoned and demolished in 1684 (Pepys went along to record the evacuation). The pattern in one line: what the state ran, it lost; what companies ran, it kept. England acquired an empire without deciding to, as a by-product of the Crown's poverty.

3.2 Jamaica and Henry Morgan: from plunder to plantation

Jamaica was an Interregnum conquest — taken from Spain in 1655 as a consolation prize after Cromwell's expedition failed at Hispaniola — that the restored monarchy kept. Weakly defended, its governors systematically licensed buccaneers: a privateer with a letter of marque was waging war; the same man without one was a pirate, and the difference was legal, not practical. Violence outsourced to private enterprise — the chartered-company logic again.

Henry Morgan led the Port Royal buccaneers through three great raids under Jamaican commissions: Portobello (1668), Maracaibo (1669) and Panama (1671) — about 1,400 men marched across the isthmus, and the city fell and burned. The problem: Panama came after the Treaty of Madrid (1670) had made peace with Spain in the Americas. Morgan was recalled to England — and then knighted (1674) and sent back as Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, with orders to suppress the piracy he had led. He died there in 1688, a plantation owner.

3.3 Mercantilism and the Navigation Acts

Mercantilism was the shared assumption of everyone in government: world trade is a fixed quantity (one nation's gain is another's loss); wealth is bullion; colonies exist for the mother country; and shipping is strategic, because merchant seamen man the navy in war. The problem was the Dutch, whose cheap ships and Amsterdam finance dominated the world's carrying trade — including England's own colonial produce.

The answer came in two Acts. The Navigation Act (1660) — re-enacting an Interregnum Act of 1651, another continuity across the Restoration — required imports in English ships with majority-English crews, and routed “enumerated” colonial goods (sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo) only to England or English colonies. The Staple Act (1663) forced European goods bound for the colonies to land in England first and pay duty. Combined effect: England became the compulsory middleman of its own empire. Enforcement was patchy and smuggling extensive (a grievance with a long American future), but English shipping, London's re-export trade and the Crown's customs revenue all grew substantially.

And the logic pointed one way. If trade is a fixed prize, and the Dutch hold too much of it, and the law cannot be enforced against them without force — then legislation that can only be enforced by a navy is a war policy in statutory form. Fighting began overseas before any declaration: English attacks on Dutch West African posts in 1663–64, and New Amsterdam seized and renamed New York in 1664.

3.4 The slave trade

What changed under Charles II is that English participation in the transatlantic slave trade became a chartered national enterprise organised at the centre of the court. The Company of Royal Adventurers (1660) and its successor the Royal African Company (1672) held the monopoly of English trade on the West African coast — and their governor was James, Duke of York, the King's brother and heir, with Charles II himself among the investors. The state did not merely permit the trade; it constituted it.

How the trade worked, stage by stage:

• From fortified coastal stations — principally Cape Coast Castle — the Company's agents bought enslaved people from African traders and rulers, paying in textiles, metalware, firearms and alcohol. (Those enslaved had usually been captured in inland warfare and raiding; stating this accurately does not reduce the responsibility of the purchasers, who created and sustained the demand.)
• The Atlantic crossing — the Middle Passage, middle leg of the triangular trade — carried people chained and confined on platforms fitted between decks. Mortality was high, from disease, violence and suicide; all totals are estimates from continuing research.
• The Company branded some of those it transported — in some cases with the letters DY, for the Duke of York.
• In Barbados and Jamaica, sugar worked people to death faster than births could replace them, so the plantations required continuous re-supply. Slave codes (Barbados 1661, copied by Jamaica) defined human beings as property, with almost no restraint on owners.
• Resistance was continuous — escape, sabotage, revolt, and Jamaica's Maroon communities of escaped people, who fought the English for generations.

In England, in this period, there was no organised opposition at all — a handful of uneasy voices, no campaign, no debate. That is a historical fact about Restoration England's moral assumptions, not a defence of it. And the trade was integral to the reign's economy, not a side-story: the Navigation Acts required plantation sugar to come to England in English ships; the plantations required forced labour; the Royal African Company supplied it under royal charter; the customs revenue on sugar helped fund the Crown; and the commercial institutions that grew around the trade — insurance, credit, shipping — are the coffee-house world of Chapter 2. Any account of Restoration prosperity that omits the human cost at its base is incomplete.

3.5 Sea power: ships the Crown could not afford to use

The navy was the largest single item of government spending — which makes the revenue problem of Chapter 1 a naval problem. England inherited a strong Interregnum fleet and enlarged it: over a hundred vessels, classified into six rates (first rates carried around a hundred guns on three decks), fighting by broadside in the period's great tactical innovation, the line of battle — the fleet in a single column so every ship could fire without hitting its own side, formalised in written Fighting Instructions.

But in peacetime, or when the money ran out, ships were laid up “in ordinary”: masts struck, guns landed, stores ashore, a skeleton crew aboard. It was the only way to keep a fleet in being on the available revenue — and it left the ships immobile and defenceless. Add the chronic problems: victualling contracted and underfunded; pay months in arrears, sometimes in “tickets” that men sold to speculators at a heavy discount; manning by press gang.

Pepys's reforms — systematic accounts, checked contracts, pursued fraud, examinations for lieutenants that began professionalising the officer corps — made the administration honest. They could not make it solvent: no administrative reform can pay a fleet Parliament has not funded.

3.6 The Dutch Wars — and the raid that ended one

The Second Dutch War (1665–67) was the merchants' war: commercial rivalry made law by the Navigation Acts, clashes in Africa and America, court pressure (the Duke of York and his Africa company expected to profit), and the memory of beating the Dutch in the 1650s. It opened with victory at Lowestoft (June 1665) — which achieved nothing: the pursuit was not pressed, and the Dutch fleet was rebuilt within months while plague raged in London. The Four Days' Battle (June 1666), fought with the English fleet fatally divided on a false report of a French approach, cost around ten ships and thousands of men (figures vary).

Then came the Dutch Raid on the Medway (June 1667). With the Treasury empty after war, plague and Fire, the great ships had been laid up in ordinary and the seamen were unpaid — and de Ruyter sailed into the Thames estuary, took the unfinished fort at Sheerness, broke the chain across the river, burned English warships at their moorings and towed away the fleet flagship, the Royal Charles. The guns were heard in London; Pepys sent his wife and gold out of town and made his will. Consequences: Clarendon's fall, a parliamentary inquiry that strengthened appropriation, and a quick peace — the Treaty of Breda (July 1667): England kept New York, the Dutch kept Surinam, and the Navigation Acts were softened in their favour. The full environmental analysis is in the 2027 dossier below.

The Third Dutch War (1672–74) had entirely different causes — do not merge the two wars. It was the child of Dover: fought as the paid ally of Catholic France against a Protestant republic, with no public demand behind it. De Ruyter's defensive campaign prevented invasion, the Dutch flooded their own land to stop the French army, and William of Orange emerged as their leader. At home the war collapsed: Parliament refused supply, and Charles made peace in 1674 with nothing gained.

Put the two wars together and you have the best evidence on the unit's central question. Charles had an undoubted prerogative right to make war — and was defeated in the first war by his own insolvency and stopped in the second by Parliament's refusal of money. The prerogative was intact and unusable. One more consequence with a future: the wars made William of Orange the Dutch leader; Danby married him to James's daughter Mary in 1677 — and in 1688, three years after Charles died, William invaded England and took the crown.

3.7 France, Spain and the money that changed the constitution

Charles inherited a Europe in which Spain was declining and Louis XIV's France was becoming dominant. His Portuguese marriage (1662) was aimed at Spain; Dunkirk was sold to France the same year (Clarendon got the blame). After the Medway, England joined the popular, Protestant Triple Alliance (1668) with the Dutch and Sweden to check France — and within two years Charles had reversed it completely at Dover, for money, for family (his mother was French, his sister married to Louis's brother), and out of shared hostility to the Dutch.

The subsidies — paid at intervals from 1670, renewed in 1681 — were not large relative to the whole revenue, and that should be stated accurately: they did not make Charles rich. What they did was close the peacetime gap between his income and his needs — the exact gap that had forced him to call Parliament. A foreign king's payments let an English king dispense with his own Parliament. That is why the personal rule was possible, and why the arrangement horrified those who suspected it.

And the suspicion was structurally sound even where its details were wrong: Louis was an absolutist persecuting Protestants; the heir, the queen and the chief mistress were Catholic; the King took secret French money under secret agreements; and a royal secretary really had corresponded with Louis's confessor about restoring Catholicism. The Dover treaty is the hinge of the reign: before it, an underfunded king managing a difficult Parliament; after it, a king with a secret, a foreign paymaster, and a brother whose religion made the secret credible.

Chapter 4 — Reading a Restoration site (the Q4 method)

Q4 is worth 16 of the 40 marks and names a site that changes every year — a building one year, an event or landscape the next. The statement always proposes one reason, and your job is to weigh it against the alternatives using the site's own evidence. The mark scheme's aspects: location, function, structure, design, people connected with the site, how the design reflects the culture and values of the time, and links to the period — plus how the site differs from earlier periods and how it changed during 1660–85.

Reading a building

Every feature does something practically and something rhetorically — and the marks live in the second. A pediment sheds rain and borrows the dignity of a Roman temple. Symmetry organises a plan and proclaims order in a country that had recently had none. A dome spans a space and announces that the builder expects to be there for centuries. Brick was fireproof — and in London after 1667, the law.

Four moves take you from fabric to intention. Ask what a feature costs — effort is evidence of priority. Separate the necessary from the chosen — a wall must stand; ashlar facing is a statement. Ask who could see it — a river front does different work from a courtyard. And ask what it replaced — Restoration building is almost always building after something: a fire, a demolition, an Interregnum confiscation, and what was lost is part of the argument.

Reading an event or landscape

For a naval event, water is the decisive variable. Tides: a tidal river works to a timetable set by the moon — a ship carried upriver on a flood tide with a fair wind is nearly unstoppable, and the same ship at slack water is barely under control. Depth and channel: big ships must follow the channel, so channels can be blocked — and a pilot is essential. Wind: what serves the attacker may pin the defender.

River defences all have specific weaknesses, and naming them is the skill: a chain resists a static pull, not a ship under sail with a spring tide behind it; blockships achieve nothing sunk in the wrong place; a fort commands one reach, within gun range, if it is manned. Then add the human variables — unpaid crews, ships in ordinary with nobody aboard to fight them, orders from London never carried out. The most productive move of all: separate the strategic from the tactical. An operation can be decided months earlier by a financial decision, then fought out in a few hours on the tide.

Weighing motives and explanations

For a building, the standard motives: display, fashion, religious statement, practical rebuilding after disaster, comfort and privacy, profit, administration, political assertion. For an event: strategic choice, financial failure, administrative neglect, geography and tides, enemy skill (the explanation candidates most often forget, and frequently the strongest), decisions taken months earlier, command on the day, chance.

Three moves separate the top band: split the claim (“display” — to whom? “the tide” — at which phase?); find the interlock (an operation that succeeded on the tide succeeded because financial failure had left nothing else in the way); and rank with a named criterion — scale, duration, enabling power, or the counterfactual. Three evidence cautions, each worth one well-placed sentence: major Restoration projects finished decades after 1685, so date what you argue from; rivers have been dredged and embanked, so 1667 depths are reconstructions; and marine paintings and prints were made to celebrate and to sell — evidence of how something was meant to be seen, not of what happened.

Site dossier — the Dutch Raid on the Medway (2027 exam)

The 2027 environment is an event and landscape: the raid of June 1667, read through the river itself. The wider war story lives in section 3.6; this dossier owns the water, the defences, and the argument built from the ground.

The river, with numbers

The Medway joins the Thames estuary at Sheerness; roughly fifteen miles of winding tidal river separate Sheerness from Chatham, the principal royal dockyard — with Upnor Castle on the west bank below the yard and a chain across Gillingham Reach. The estuary is wide, shallow and laced with sandbanks: no large ship enters without a pilot. And the tide is the fact to remember above all — a range of several metres on a spring tide, a flood running upriver carrying ships with it. Timing is everything.

Chatham looked safe: far enough upriver to avoid surprise, guarded by sandbanks, a fort, a castle and a chain. Every one of those defences was an assumption about the environment — and the fleet's most valuable ships lay there in ordinary: unmasted, disarmed, skeleton-crewed. Everything of value concentrated, immobile, in one predictable place.

The raid, stage by stage — and why each defence failed

The dockyard itself survived, and the Dutch withdrew to blockade the Thames for weeks. Why did the political effect exceed the material damage? The fleet was rebuilt — but the Dutch had been in an English river, and the guns were heard in London. In a nation whose self-image and Navigation Acts rested on sea power, that was a humiliation of a different order from a lost battle. Hence Clarendon's fall, the inquiry, and a rapid peace.

Evidence and limits at this site. The river has been dredged, embanked and reclaimed since 1667 — depths and channels are reconstructions, and should be presented as such. Chatham Historic Dockyard survives magnificently and is mostly eighteenth-century and later — superb evidence for what a royal dockyard was, not for the fabric of 1667. Sheerness fort is gone; Upnor survives, valuable precisely because it shows the river's real defences were Elizabethan. The Dutch marine paintings and the preserved Royal Charles stern carving show how the Republic wished the victory remembered, not what happened in any particular hour. English numbers were recorded during a hunt for scapegoats, Dutch numbers in celebration — treat all totals as approximations. And Pepys, the best-known English source, did not see it: his diary records the panic in London, not the river.

Site dossier — St Paul's Cathedral (2028 exam)

The 2028 environment is a building: the new St Paul's, begun in 1675 on the ashes of the old. The Fire is covered in 2.2 and Wren's wider work in 2.7; this dossier owns the site, the design process and the argument built from the fabric.

The site and the building it replaced

St Paul's stands on Ludgate Hill — the highest ground in the City of London, above the Thames. If you remember one thing about the location, remember the height: in a low-rise city whose main traffic was on the river, a dome on Ludgate Hill is a dome seen from every boat on the Thames.

The site had held a cathedral for centuries. Old St Paul's was one of the longest churches in Europe — its spire lost to lightning in the sixteenth century, its fabric decayed and misused during the Civil War (it had served as cavalry stabling), part-repaired behind Inigo Jones's classical portico. Wren was consulted on repairs, and proposed a dome, shortly before the Fire gutted the whole building in September 1666. He then argued the ruin was beyond safe repair — and the slow, difficult demolition (battering rams, and at points gunpowder) is itself evidence he was right. Why rebuild on the same spot? Because the replanning of London had already been abandoned: the ground was consecrated, owned, and hemmed in by streets nobody could redraw. The persistence of the site is evidence about what the Restoration could and could not change.

The design process: a negotiation made permanent in stone

As built, the plan is a Latin cross — the long nave and choir the clergy wanted — under the great crossing dome Wren wanted. The building is a compromise made permanent in stone. The dome itself is three layers: an inner dome shaped for the interior, an outer dome shaped for the skyline, and a hidden brick cone between them carrying the lantern — engineering solving an aesthetic problem, by a designer who had been Professor of Astronomy and a founder of the Royal Society. The screen walls above the aisles hide the buttresses so the exterior reads as one unbroken classical elevation: a building willing to conceal its structure for its appearance, from the same culture that reopened the theatres. The interior — clear glass, light stone, sightlines and audibility — is a Protestant preaching space, built while the Clarendon Code excluded Dissenters. And the materials and money tell their own story: Portland stone brought by sea from Dorset for decades, funded substantially by a coal duty voted by Parliament.

The whole unit in one table: 1660 vs 1685

The pattern worth stating: read the first two rows together — nothing changed in what the King was entitled to do, and everything changed in what he could afford to do, and the second is what decided the politics of the reign. Then read the last three rows: the commercial and naval expansion was real and chronically underfunded. The same problem in a different sphere.

Interpretation workbench for Q1

Q1 prints a historian's interpretation and asks how convincing it is, judged against your knowledge. Five debates supply the likely interpretations — for each, know both positions and what each leaves out. And use the period's special evidence problem once, where it bites: most contemporaries did not know about Dover's Catholic clause; the Popish Plot's court records are genuine documents of false testimony; Pepys stops in 1669.

Judgement bank: frames for the big questions

How far did the Restoration restore royal power? Fully in law — and the means of using the powers were not restored: no prerogative revenue, no prerogative courts, an income that never sufficed. Judge on enabling power: rights without resources. By 1685 the gap had been closed — by peace, French money and Tory loyalty, all contingent, all gone within three years of his death.

What was the main cause of the Exclusion Crisis? James's Catholicism on sufficiency (no Catholic heir, no crisis); the Popish Plot on enabling power (it supplied the panic and the majorities); the 1660 settlement on duration (in a state where the king appoints bishops, judges and officers, his religion is a constitutional question). Name your criterion and rank.

Who gained more by 1685 — Charles or Parliament? Charles: ruling without Parliament, funded, boroughs remodelled, Whigs destroyed, succession secure. Parliament: supply as leverage, two Indulgences forced back, the Test Acts, appropriation and accounts, two chief ministers impeached, a war destroyed by refusing money. Judge on duration: Charles's gains were personal and undone within three years; Parliament's were procedural and permanent.

What was the main reason for the Dutch Wars? Commercial rivalry — for the Second war: mercantilism made trade a fixed prize and the Navigation Acts a war policy in statutory form. The Third war was Dover's child: French subsidies and a secret treaty, against the merchants' wishes, ended by Parliament's refusal of supply. Refuse a single cause for two different wars — same enemy, eight years apart, entirely different reasons.

Quick self-test

Cover the answers and check yourself. Each answer names the section where the full detail lives.