ABSTRACT
The Restoration period's importance as a subject for study owes much to the excellence of its historians, notably Sir Keith Feiling, David Ogg and, more recently, Sir John Plumb, J.R.Western and J.R.Jones (see ‘Select bibliography’, pp. 53–4, for worksby these and other authorities). Their studies of our period have focused on politics, and this pamphlet adopts the same approach, thereby missing (for instance) the opportunities for study provided by Restoration literature, by the foundation of the Royal Society and the flourishing of the spirit of scientific inquiry, by the social and economic consequences of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, even by the amours and escapades of Charles II. These are not much referred to below, save where they seem important to developments in Restoration politics. Despite the gaps left by these omissions, the political focus is surely right. Politics in its more intense forms marked both the beginning and the end of the Restoration era. The Puritan Revolution (1642–60) and the Glorious Revolution (1688–9) were centrally concerned with great political questions. The settlement of 1660 marked another attempt to answer these questions (or possibly, as we shall see, to avoid answering them), and that settlement gives to our twenty-eight year period its own identity within the larger and persistent themes of seventeenth-century English political history. Limitations of space, then, are by no means the only reason for the pamphlet's concentration on political issues.
