ABSTRACT
Royalists and Tories frequently accused their opponents of prolonging the ‘good old cause’, which, by their estimation, had brought rebellion, regicide and usurpation upon the Stuart kingdoms in the 1640s and 1650s. This chapter uncovers and explains evidence of identification with the good old cause after the Restoration. It does so by situating the phrase within its longer-term deployment as an ‘ideograph’, including its etymological roots in the sixteenth-century and growing popularity in the immediate aftermath of Parliament’s victory in the civil wars. In this way, the potential of the term to legitimise and mobilise a range of political and religious opinions before and after the Restoration is disclosed. This includes but is not limited to use of the phrase to connote the ‘reformation’ that peaked in the turbulent decades of the mid-seventeenth-century and with which a later generation identified in their crusade against ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary government’.
