ABSTRACT
The Restoration of 1660 was a restoration of the united class which Parliament represented, even more than of the King. The Convention Parliament was not summoned by the King; it summoned him. ‘It is the privilege, . . . the prerogative, of the common people of England,’ Clarendon told the Lower House in 1661, ‘to be represented by the greatest and learnedest and wealthiest and wisest persons that can be chosen out of the nation. . . . The confounding the Commons of England . . . with the common people of England was the first ingredient into that accursed dose . . . a commonwealth.’ ‘Without the safety and dignity of the monarchy,’ Charles II said twenty years later, ‘neither religion nor property can be preserved.’
