ABSTRACT
Parliament was a place where much prosaic, but necessary, business was done. Closer analysis of the business of Parliament also reveals that the process of legislation was designed to foster consensus. Historians of Restoration Parliaments have perhaps been slow to apply the insights offered by their early Stuart colleagues. The Commons expected Charles II to govern, but to govern responsibly and responsibility lay in the eye of the beholder. His struggles with Parliament were fought out in the political arena, rather than on the battlefield. There is general agreement that one cannot analyse parliamentary politics in isolation: what happened in Parliament was part of a wider political world, embracing also the royal court and the localities. Looking at the actual business of the Commons suggests a different picture. After voting him a series of revenues for life, the Commons preferred temporary to perpetual grants, as the king remarked.
