ABSTRACT
Charles II officially dated his reign from 30th January 1649. An Act of 1st June 1660 declared the Long Parliament fully dissolved, and the existing Convention a legal Parliament even though it had not been summoned by the King. Another Act arranged for continuity of judicial proceedings started before the King’s return, and confirmed all legal decisions of the Interregnum, subject to a right of appeal. So the constitutional niceties were preserved. The abolition of the Court of Wards and of purveyance was confirmed by statute: Charles was compensated for loss of revenue by a grant of £100,000 a year from an excise on beer, cider, and tea. A revised version of the Navigation Act was passed on 4th September. Nearly £1 million was voted to pay off the Army. An Act of Indemnity pardoned all offences arising from the hostilities of the preceding decades, but excepted fifty-seven persons, mostly
regicides. Thirty of these were condemned to death, of whom eleven were executed. A land settlement, ambiguously promised in the Declaration of Breda, proved difficult. Church, crown, and confiscated Royalists’ lands were (in theory at least) restored; lands sold privately during the Interregnum were not. In Ireland the Act of Settlement (1661) and the Act of Explanation (1665) left adventurers and soldiers with two-thirds of their estates; several thousand Catholics failed to recover land which they had held in 1641. At least two-thirds of the good cultivable land in Ireland was now owned by Protestants, many of them absentees. In England extruded ministers were restored to their livings, but no Act was passed to implement the promise of religious toleration made at Breda. On 25th October the King issued a Declaration granting a purely temporary liberty, pending the decisions of a national synod which never met. There had been no religious settlement when the Convention Parliament was dissolved on 9th December.
