Ideas of Restoration I : The Panegyric Task

Abstract

Looking back after a half-century, Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, could write of the Restoration that ‘the king enjoyed a peaceful number of years, and his subjects most happy under his benign government’. He lamented Charles’s passing ‘not only for the public good of our then happy country, we living then in a golden age, but likewise for myself in particular’.¹ Ailesbury, who was five-years-old when the king returned, naturally added nostalgia for his own youth to his glowing account of the 1660s and 1670s. Nonetheless his reminiscence shows that the Restoration could be seen as a golden time to someone who had grown up in it. Ailesbury is one (among many) for whom the Restoration lived in memory as those who had promoted it would have wished. His recollection suggests something of the lasting success of those who, in their praises and in print, had built up such a positive impression of the new regime. It was impossible, however, to separate the regime and the ensuing period from the event which set it all in train. Charles’s Restoration was so momentous that it contributed largely to defining the political issues, the social attitudes and even the art of what is still loosely called ‘the Restoration’, for a quarter of a century or more. Coming to terms with the king’s return in 1660 was a central feature of any concern with contemporary society and for writers in the early 1660s giving voice to this focal event was an important task.