ABSTRACT
LOOKING BACK TO THE Restoration late in his life, the royalist leader and historian, Edward, earl of Clarendon, attributed the immorality of King Charles II to the attacks on all hierarchy and authority in the 1640s and 1650s:
All relations were confounded by the several sects in religion which discountenanced all forms of reverence and respect, as relics and marks of superstition. Children asked not blessing of their parents; nor did they concern themselves in the education of their children. … The young women conversed without any circumspection or modesty, and frequently met at taverns and common eating houses; and they who were stricter and more severe in their comportment, became the wives of the seditious preachers or of officers of the army. … Parents had no manner of authority over their children, nor children any obedience or submission to their parents, but everyone did that which was good in his own eyes. This unnatural antipathy had its first rise from the beginning of the rebellion, when the fathers and sons engaged themselves in the contrary parties, the one choosing to serve the king and the other the Parliament … there were never such examples of impiety between such relations in any age of the world, Christian or heathen, as that wicked time, from the beginning of the rebellion to the king's return. (The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon)
