Revolution Remembered

Following the Restoration of Charles II and the Church of England in 1660, it seemed that the people of Britain were ready to put the revolutionary period behind them. Yet despite a regime of surveillance and censorship, Parliamentarians and republicans continued to identify with the oppositional spirit of the civil war, brazenly endorsing the "good old cause." This book explores "seditious memories" in speech and writing between 1660 and 1688. It shows how they functioned as points of resistance within the Restoration's politics of memory, counteracting and even subverting efforts by Royalists to censure those who had opposed crown and established church. Historians have tended to view Parliamentarian and republican ideas as the preserve of a minority of malcontents, but legal records and government documents reveal a reservoir of sympathy among ordinary people. This sympathy was manifested both in speech and in misbehavior on the official anniversaries of the regicide and the Restoration. The book concludes by examining how seditious memories were transmitted by a generation of men and women who had experienced was and revolution to their children and grandchildren.