ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, the MPs of 1660 were no more united on what form a settlement should take than the victorious parliamentarians of 1646. Not only was the Convention split on religious lines – Anglicans, Presbyterians and Independents – but political divisions were sharpened by the bitterness of civil war and regicide. There was a wide gulf between those who had remained committed royalists throughout the revolution and those who had collaborated with the republican regimes of the 1650s and who had only supported the Restoration as a means of ending the political anarchy of the months following Oliver’s death. Charles II was only recognizing political realities when he included representatives of both groups in his new privy council: consistent royalists like Hyde (the new lord chancellor, created earl of Clarendon in 1661), Sir Edward Nicholas, and the duke of Ormonde, alongside men who had only recently served the Cromwellian government, notably Monck (now duke of Albemarle), Edward Montague (now earl of Sandwich), and Anthony Ashley Cooper (later earl of Shaftesbury). Seen in this context it is perhaps not surprising that the Convention failed to solve problems which had defeated earlier regimes.
