Restoration

Restoration, the return in 1660 to the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland of Charles II (1630–85), exiled following the defeat of the royalists in the English civil wars (1642–6, 1648). In May 1659 English army leaders had deposed Oliver Cromwell's son Richard, who had succeeded his father as lord protector, thus initiating a series of complex ideological and factional struggles. On 13 December Col. Theophilus Jones and other Irish officers, quickly supported by Sir Charles Coote and Viscount Broghill (later Ist earl of Orrery), seized Dublin Castle, and declared their support for those in England and Scotland demanding a recall of parliament. They also began to purge the Irish army of religious and political radicals. Over the next few months support for a return to monarchy, seen as the only alternative to anarchy or military dictatorship, grew in all three kingdoms. On 15 February Coote and Broghill defeated an attempted counter‐coup by Sir Hardress Waller, a Co. Limerick landholder and one of the ‘regicides’ who had sentenced Charles I to death. An elected convention then awaited events in England, proclaiming Charles king on 14 May 1660, six days after London.

Irish Catholic hopes that the restored monarchy would improve their position were only partially fulfilled. Individual proprietors with a personal claim on the king's favour were restored to their estates. For others, however, the Acts of Settlement and Explanation modified rather than overturned the Cromwellian land settlement. Overall Catholics were left with just over 20 per cent of Irish land, compared with 59 per cent in 1641. The Protestant landed class, a newly united blend of Cromwellian and older elements, was now dominant, enjoying an effective monopoly of public office, central and local, until the reign of James II, when the fate of the Restoration land settlement became central to Catholic hopes and Protestant fears.

The king's personal religious sympathies remain unclear. A short period of open toleration under Baron Berkeley of Stratton, lord lieutenant 1670–2, may reflect Charles's own preferences, but might also be seen as an adjunct to the pro‐French foreign policy he had embarked on at that time. The position of Catholics was further complicated during the 1660s by the Remonstrance issue, while after 1673 and again during the Popish Plot pressures in England led government to adopt a tougher anti‐Catholic policy.

Bibliography

Hutton, Ronald , Charles II (1989)
Miller, John , Popery and Politics in England 1660–88 (1973)