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Sunday 30 July 2017

Restoration (England)

The term Restoration means both the actual event which puts a monarch back in power and the period of several years afterwards in which a new political settlement was established.

The English Restoration was a period in English history beginning in 1660 after the fall of the puritan republican government and the re-establishment of the English monarchy, Scottish monarchy and Irish monarchy under King Charles II. The term is very often used to cover the whole reign of Charles II (1660–1685).

King Charles II

King Charles II returned from exile in Holland and on May 29, 1660, his 30th birthday, he was received in London to public acclaim. To celebrate Charles' return to the country of his birth, May 29th was made a public holiday, popularly known as Oak Apple Day.

The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which became law on August 29, 1660, pardoned all past treason against the crown, but specifically excluded those involved in the trial and execution of Charles I. Major-General Thomas Harrison, who had been the seventeenth of the 59 commissioners to sign the death warrant, was the first regicide to be hanged, drawn and quartered because he was considered by the new government still to represent a real threat to the re-established order.

Thomas Harrison. By Moustaky 

Charles' coronation in April 1661 marked a reversal of the stringent Puritan morality.

At the time of the Restoration of the Monarchy there were many hundreds of meeting houses including around 300 Baptist churches in Britain. However between 1661 and 1665 a series of statutes named the Clarendon Code was passed by Parliament that abolished Oliver Cromwell's toleration of independent (non-Anglican) congregations. As a consequence the meeting houses were sealed and locked up and the dissenters were forced to meet together for worship in woods and private homes always fearing arrest.

Among these statutes were the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which made the meetings of the Protestant "sects", (such as Baptists) illegal and also made non-attendance at the parish churches a crime. Those ministers who did not conform to the Book of Common Prayer would lose their positions and become Non-conformists. (This is where the word "Non-conformist" comes from.)

The Act of Uniformity also required the new 1662 edition of the prayer book to be used in all churches and some 2,000 ministers who refused to comply were ejected.

The activities of Non Conformists were further clamped down on with the 1664 Conventule Act, which forbade non-Anglican meetings for religious purposes of more than five people and the 1665 The Five-Mile Act, which prohibited Non-conformists from going within five miles of a corporate town and from teaching in schools.

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