British History: Restoration and 18th Century (1660-1786)

The Restoration and the 18th Century (1660-1786)

After the Republic ruled by Oliver Cromwell and Richard Cromwell, the Restoration period began in 1660 (when England stopped being a republic), the year in which Charles II (the exiled Stuart King) was restored to the English throne.
England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.
The period was one of increasing commercial prosperity and global trade for Britain.
Literacy expanded to include the middle classes and even some of the poor.
Emerging social ideas included politeness – a behavioral standard to which anyone might aspire – the new rhetoric of liberty, rights, sentiment, and sympathy.

The monarchical restoration was accompanied by:
- The re-opening of English theaters (closed during Cromwell’s Puritan regime) and the restoration of the Church of England as the national church.

The Test Act of 1673 required all holders of civil and military offices to take the sacrament in the Anglican Church and deny transubstantiation.
Those who refused (e.g., Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics) were not allowed to attend university or hold public office.
King Charles II, though he outwardly conformed to Anglicanism, had Catholic sympathies that placed him at odds with his strongly anti-Catholic Parliament.
Charles had no legitimate heir. His brother James (a Catholic) was next in line to the throne.

Parliament tried to force Charles to exclude his brother from the line of succession.
Charles ended this “Exclusion Crisis” by dissolving Parliament.
The exclusion crisis, in a sense, created modern political parties: the Tories, who supported the King, and the Whigs, who opposed him.
Once crowned, King James II quickly suspended the Test Act.
In 1688, the birth of James’s son alarmed the county with the prospect of a new succession of Catholic monarchs, that secret negotiations began to bring a new Protestant ruler from Europe to oust James.

In 1688, William of Orange and his wife Mary (James’s daughter) landed in England with a small army and seized power in an event known as The Glorious or Bloodless Revolution.
James II fled to exile in France. For over 50 years, his supporters (called Jacobites from the Latin Jacobus, for James) mounted unsuccessful attempts to restore the Stuart line of Catholic kings to the British throne.

Queen Anne, another of James’s daughters, was the next monarch (1702-1714).
Anne’s reign was a prosperous time for Britain, as the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) created new trade opportunities.
England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.
As Anne, like Mary, had no heirs, the succession was settled upon the royal house of Hanover. A long line of King Georges (I-IV) ensued, which is why the 18th century is also known as the Georgian period.

We now associate the term “Whig” with liberalism and “Tory” with conservatism, but the principles behind these two parties remained fluid and responsive to political circumstances throughout the period.
Robert Walpole, a Whig politician who served under both King George I and George II, held a parliamentary seat from 1701 until 1742. Walpole was the first man to be described as a “prime” minister.
During King George III’s long rule, Britain became a major colonial power. At home and abroad, George III’s subjects engaged with a new rhetoric of liberty and radical reform, as they witnessed and reacted to the revolutions in America (1776) and France (1789).