Introduction

Yet it is now becoming clear that continuity can be carried too far. Some historians have redefi ned ‘politics’ so that it does not focus solely on institutions like parliament. According to John Miller, politics should be seen ‘in a wider sense than [that used by] most political historians, a sense closer to that employed by social historians interested in power relationships and dispute resolution, often within small communities’.2 Historians like Miller have shown that popular participation in and awareness of political issues increased greatly after 1660. This development of ‘the public sphere’ was not, of course, new. As has been seen, it was signifi cant in the politics of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Yet the popular participation in politics and the ideological divisions (principally over religion) that had characterized the 1640s and 1650s intensifi ed after 1660 and were carried over to shape the partisan politics of Restoration England. This was arguably one of the major consequences of the English Revolution.