Revolution Remembered - Seditious Memories After the British Civil Wars

Following the restoration of Charles II and the Church of England in 1660, it seemed the people of Britain were ready to put the revolutionary period behind them. Yet despite a regime of monitoring and censorship, parliamentarians and republicans continued to identify with the oppositional spirit of the civil war, brazenly endorsing the ‘good old cause’.

This book explores ‘seditious memories’ in speech and writing between 1660 and 1688. It shows how they functioned as points of resistance within the Restoration’s politics of memory, counteracting and even subverting efforts by royalists to censure those who had opposed crown and established church. Historians have tended to view parliamentarian and republican ideas as the preserve of a minority of malcontents, but legal records and government documents reveal a reservoir of sympathy among the ordinary people of the era. This sympathy was manifested in the form of misbehaviour on the official