ABSTRACT

Political conflict under the later Stuarts was to be fought out along two major axes - the constitutional and the religious. Disagreements over the relative powers of Crown and Parliament, and tensions between Church and Dissent, were to feed in to the bitter party struggle which emerged between Whigs and Tories at the end of Charles II's reign, a struggle which was to divide not just the elite but the whole of society. The roots of this conflict can be traced back to the Restoration. The Restoration of monarchy in the spring of 1660 is normally seen as being genuinely popular. The High Anglican cleric, George Hickes, looking back on the Restoration in a sermon of 1684, commented that 'then were strange things to be seen, Republicans with Royalists, Churchmen with Church-robbers, Rebels and Traytors with Loyal Subjects, Papists with Protestants, Episcopalians with Anti-Episcopalians, all agreed to bring in the King, or let him be brought in'.