Restoration

The English Interregnum from 1649–1660 was a republican period in Britain, comprising the Commonwealth and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell after the regicide of Charles I and before the restoration of Charles II

During the Interregnum, England had been dominated by Puritan literature and the intermittent presence of official censorship (see, for example, Milton’s Areopagitica and his later retraction of that statement). While some of the Puritan ministers of Oliver Cromwell wrote poetry that was elaborate and carnal (e.g. Andrew Marvell’s “Mower” poems and To His Coy Mistress), such poetry was not published. Similarly, some of the poets who published with the Restoration produced their poetry during the Interregnum. However, the official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards effectively created a gap in literary tradition. At the time of the English Civil War, poetry had been dominated by Metaphysical poetry of the John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Lovelace sort. Drama had developed the late Elizabethan theater traditions and had begun to mount increasingly topical and political plays (the drama, for example, of Thomas Middleton). However, the Interregnum put a stop, or at least a caesura to these lines of influence and allowed a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration.

The last years of the Interregnum were turbulent, as the last years of the Restoration period would be, and those who did not go into exile were called upon to change their religious beliefs more than once. With each religious preference came a different sort of literature, both in prose and poetry (the theaters were closed during the Interregnum). When Cromwell himself died and his son, Richard Cromwell, threatened to become Lord Protector, politicians and public figures scrambled to show themselves allies or enemies of the new regime. Printed literature was dominated by odes in poetry, and religious writing in prose. The industry of religious tract writing, despite official efforts, did not reduce its output. Figures such as the founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox, were jailed by the Cromwellian authorities and published at hazard.

During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II and conducted a brisk business in intelligence and fund-raising for an eventual return to England. Some of the royalist ladies installed themselves in convents in Holland and France, and these convents offered safe haven for indigent and travelling nobles and allies. The men similarly stationed themselves in Holland and France, with the court-in-exile being established in The Hague before setting up more permanently in Paris. The nobility who travelled with (and later travelled to) Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent’s literary scene. However, as Holland and France in the 17th century were little alike, so the influences picked up by courtiers in exile and the travellers who sent intelligence and money to them were not monolithic. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation. John Bramhall, for example, had been a strongly high church theologian, and yet, in exile, he debated willingly with Thomas Hobbes and came into the Restored church as tolerant in practice as he was severe in argument. Courtiers also received an exposure to the Roman Catholic Church and its liturgy and pageants, as well as, to a lesser extent, Italian poetry.

When Charles II came to the throne in 1660, the sense of novelty in all forms of literature was tempered by a sense of suddenly participating in European literature in a way that England had not before. One of Charles’s first moves to was reopen the theaters and to establish Letters patent and mandates for the theater owners and managers. William Davenant received one of the patents, and Thomas Killigrew received the other. Drama was public and a matter of royal concern, and therefore both theaters were charged with producing a certain number of old plays, and Davenant was charged with presenting material that would be morally uplifting. Additionally, the position of Poet Laureate was recreated, complete with payment by a barrel of “sack” (brandy), and the requirement for birthday odes.

Charles II was a man who prided himself on his wit and his worldliness. He was well known as a philanderer as well. Consequently, highly witty, playful, and sexually wise poetry had court sanction. Additionally, Charles, and the Duke of York (the future James II of England), were sponsors of mathematics and natural philosophy, and so, again, spirited skepticism and investigation into nature were favored by the court. Charles II sponsored the Royal Society, and courtiers were eager to join the Royal Society (for example, the noted diarist Samuel Pepys was a member), just as Royal Society members moved in court. Charles and his court had also learned the lessons of exile, and so, although Charles was High church (and secretly vowing to convert to Roman Catholicism on his death) and James, Duke of York was crypto-Catholic, Charles’s policy was to be generally tolerant of religious and political dissenters. While Charles II did have his own version of the Test Act, he was slow to jail or persecute Puritans, preferring merely to keep them from public office (and therefore to try to rob them of their Parliamentary positions). As a consequence, the prose literature of dissent, political theory, and economics increased in Charles II’s reign.

The general first reaction to Charles’s return was for authors to move in two directions. On the one hand, there was an attempt at recovering the English literature of the Jacobean period, as if there had been no disruption, but, on the other, there was a powerful sense of novelty, and authors approached Gallic models of literature and elevated the literature of wit (particularly satire and parody). The novelty would show in the literature of skeptical inquiry, and the Gallicism would show in the introduction of Neo-classicism into English writing and criticism.