ABSTRACT
Though in hindsight the momentum towards a restoration of the monarchy in early 1660 seems irresistible, the exiled Stuart court was apprehensive. Charles II (1630-85) and his advisors feared that powerful interests might yet unite to frustrate the king’s return. These worries were uppermost in the mind of Sir Edward Hyde (1609-74), soon to be earl of Clarendon, when he drafted the Declaration of Breda. Hopes for a restoration grew as political chaos overwhelmed the English state in the winter of 1659-60. The king moved from Catholic France to the Protestant Low Countries, distancing himself from his Catholic mother and cousin Louis XIV. The Declaration Charles issued at Breda was an important step towards a formal restoration. It offered reassurance and promised reconciliation rather than vengeance. Soldiers of the revolutionary army would be paid, old political conflicts buried, and religious persecution forbidden. Further, those who had bought royalist lands in good faith would remain in possession. In fact the promise of the Declaration was not entirely fulfilled thanks to the ferocious royalist backlash that followed the assembly of the Cavalier Parliament (1661-79), but its soothing words helped insure that less than a month after it was issued, Parliament invited Charles II home to assume his throne.
