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My name is Jeff, I'm 27. These essays were for my upper level coursework. I lost this account for many years until running across it again today and cleaning it up.

Democritus

The Milesians are commonly referred to as the first philosophers, the first scientists of the natural world. Thales, and under him Anaximander and Anaximenes, bucked the prevailing trend of explaining the world around them through mythological means, and began to formulate theories based on evidence and direct observation carried out in the name of discovery. It was not enough for these men that the sun was blotted out of the sky by the Gods certain days of the year, they wanted to know how it was done. Let it not be said that these were not Godly men, devoted to their religion; they most certainly were. They simply yearned for knowledge beyond that of mythology, and wanted to know how the universe around them functioned. And how, if it be true that the Gods were at the head of creation, destruction, change, and everything, by what process were these things achieved? How were they able to do these things, physically?

A common theme throughout Milesian thought was that of the universal element, the underlying stuff that composed everything in the universe. For Thales, the first of the Milesians and the leader of the Milesian school of thought, it was water. Aristotle tells us that Thales “thought that the Earth rests because it can float, like a log or something else of that sort”. For Thales, everything was made from and depended upon water. The Earth rested in water because it could not rest in air, much like the aforementioned log. Anaximander had a similar view of a permeating elemental substructure to the universe, but chose fire instead as his element. For him, the “heavenly bodies are a circle of fire, separated off from the fire in the world and enclosed by air.” He further explained that the stars and sun were a result of vents or tubes through the heavens, and eclipses occurred when some object obscured the view of these holes. He developed his fire explanation to encompass a primitive form of human evolution, a detailed description of the workings of the sun, and a process of generation and destruction through evaporation and moisture. Anaximenes, too, thought the universe was an expression of a single element, though he differed from his two precursors, and instead “said that the principle is limitless air, from which what is coming into being and what has come into being and what will exist and gods and divinities come into being”. His complex theory of air includes mechanics for generation of each other element in progression, using observed processes like evaporation, condensation, and others as the process by which one element becomes another. His explanation even goes so far as to include souls, which “being air, hold us together , and breath and air encompass the whole word.”

The Milesians, as the initiators of scientific enquiry, had a great influence on the philosophers to come. Democritus in particular, had a developed and complex theory for an underlying structure of the universe, much the same as the Milesians did. For him, “the nature of eternal things consist in small substances, limitless in quantity, and for them he posits a place, distinct from them and limitless in extent.” This is the core of his doctrine of Atomism. The universe according to Democritus is composed of a limitless number of atoms, small units without any properties other than shape, size, and maybe weight. Every space not taken up by an atom is a propertyless, limitless void. This is a departure from the Milesians, who believed that there really was no empty space, and that everything contained one of their elements, such as fire, water, or air. Democritus’s atoms come together to form compounds, and depending on the type of atoms involved, create distinct properties that we can perceive, such as color. It is staggering when considered alongside modern knowledge of science how close Democritus was to the truth using simply observation in Milesian tradition and logical extrapolation. For him, real physical masses were, for humans, “by convention sweet, by convention bitter: in reality atoms and the empty.” This is an important departure from the Milesians, in that Democritus has determined that what human beings actually perceive is not the true reality, and that there is an underlying truth. He goes further and states that what we perceive of as different qualities are simply the result of differently shaped atoms interacting, and has a very specific explanation of different tastes, which we perceive when the atoms in the flavor combine with atoms in our tongues. For example, “Sour flavor is constituted by large shapes with many angles and as little roundness as possible. For when these enter the body they clog and stop the vessels and prevent things from flowing together. That is why they also settle the bowels.” His doctrine, while allowing for a universal element (atoms and void) explicitly states that what appears and is perceived by humans is not what is real. This is clearly in response to an author who flourished in the years directly between the Milesians and Democritus, Parmenides.

Democritus shows in his writings and theories an influence from Parmenides, sometimes incorporating pieces of his thought, sometimes using them to contrast his own theory. For example, Democritus says “what exists no more exists than what does not exist – because body no more exists than what is empty.” Parmenides had argued that it was futile to try to think of something that doesn’t exist, because doing so was impossible. “Never will this prevail, he says: that what is not is – bar your thought from this road of inquiry.” It is not much of a stretch to see that Democritus was responding to this Parmenidean idea, by asserting that since things don’t really exist because they are made from atoms, and only atoms and void exist, that “what is not” is equivalent to “what is”. A commonality, however, is that reality and the way things appear are not one in the same. Democritus makes a point to emphasize this idea, and his atomic explanation does not include anything that would invalidate Parmenides’ assertion that nothing can be created from nothing or destroyed into nothing, and things cannot change into each other. Democritus says when atoms “approach one another or collide or intertwine, the aggregates appear as water or fire or plants or men,but all things really are atomic forms… and nothing else.” For Democritus, change in the Parminidean sense is also impossible, for if there is only atoms and void, then nothing changes, but he explains our perception of change is based on motions and combinations of atoms. Destruction and generation too, are simply scattering and regrouping of “atomic forms”, and properties and qualities are simply results of these differently shaped atoms in combination.

The Milesians lacked a distinction between reality and appearance, and looked for a single universal element that permeated all things. Directly in response to their thought, Parmenides asserted that we cannot even begin to imagine what is real, because all we have to go on are appearances, and that in truth processes of change and generation and destruction are impossible. Democritus, through his theory of Atomism, was able to combine these two ideas successfully into an explanation of the process of appearance.

• References:
  • Jonathan Barnes, “Early Greek Philosophy”, 2nd ed., 2001

English Civil War Radicals

Which of the concepts of liberty, equality, and justice was most important to the radical groups during the English civil war? It is necessary to tread lightly when trying to answer a question like this due to multiple inconsistencies and difficulties encountered when trying to analyze such a question. The term “Radical groups” refers to the totality of splintered and varying groups who made their names during the years leading up to the execution of Charles I, and some groups who existed during the actual wars, each with their own beliefs, ideas, and goals. This is complicated further by the fact that sometimes individuals in the same group did not completely agree on any one goal or idea, and these groups rarely committed to writing a coherent and standardized vision of what they believed in or wanted to achieve. An additional complication arises when one tries to focus on the somewhat vague and nebulous concepts of liberty, justice, and equality, each sharing some things and differing in others. Anyone seriously attempting to answer this question, as I am, is obliged to clarify not only which groups they are including in their analyses, but what they mean by liberty, equality, and justice. Only then will any judgment of importance be able to be made. In the following paragraphs I will address those demands before coming to a conclusion about the importance of those concepts.

When presented with a long list of radical groups from this era, including the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Ranters, Anabaptists, Brownists, Muggletonians, etc., it is important in the context of our question to focus on those who had the largest impact on history or the ones with the largest followings. For the purposes of this essay, I will concentrate mainly on the Levellers, and also address the Diggers: the two groups who are the most well known both in contemporary and modern terms. Importantly, these two groups shared basic underlying beliefs that will help define their understanding of the aforementioned concepts.

The most important of these shared beliefs was that that each and every human being has the exact same direct relationship with their Lord and Maker, and that this relationship supercedes any relationship between earthly men or institutions. Equality was the core of natural and divine law, and against these standards “all human contrivance, legal and other, could be measured.” The Diggers had based much of their views of property rights and their ideals that we now refer to as proto-communism off of this assumption, as evidenced by Winstanley: “If by creation right he call the earth his and not mine, then it is mine as well as his; for the spirit of the whole creation, who made us both, is no respecter of persons.” The Levellers, too, believed in this divinely granted equality, and Overton himself had explicitly stated: “For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety — as it were writ in the table of every man's heart, never to be obliterated — even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free.”. This underlying concept of the equality of God’s design and mercy played an extremely important role in the understanding of various concepts which were used polemically and rhetorically to define these groups’ goals and beliefs.

The concept of Liberty then, for our purposes, must be viewed with this underlying assumption intact. It is the conflict between this God given equality and the implicit inequality under a system of arbitrary rule which gives rise to the concept of “liberty”. Both the Levellers and the Diggers come to the conclusion that if men did not participate in their government, they would never be truly free, no matter how the terms liberty and freedom were applied to their situation by the ruling powers. Wildman said that:

“All power is originally in the people… no authority whatsoever hath an image of justice upon it, which is not derived from the People, either immediately by their personall consent, or agreement, or mediately by the mutuall consent of those who are elected by the people to represent them.”

The Diggers asked for this liberty from the Rump Parliament, which they argued “not only is our Birthright, which our Maker gave us, but which thou hast promised to restore unto us”. It is clear that in contemporary experience, arbitrary government had put a sour taste in the mouths of those who truly believed in a God-given equality, and they were prepared to do what they could to prevent Charles’ freshly empty throne from ever holding an arbitrary power over them again.

This brings us to the concept of justice, which developed when the idea of God-given equality came into conflict with the everyday execution of laws and the running of the courts. Lilburne, one of the best known leaders of the Levellers, had been imprisoned multiple times without having been charged, and it was clear that this and other instances had brought justice to the forefront of Leveller writings. To the House of Commons they wrote, “And they [the Lords] have used many of us accordingly, by committing divers to prison upon their own authority — namely William Lamer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, and other worthy sufferers — who upon appeal unto you have not been relieved.” These imprisonments could not happen in a world where every man was equal under God, and Levellers complained that every man, whether a representative or not, should be subject to the same laws in the same manner as any other man, apparent in Lilburne’s “England’s new chains discovered”, published in 1649. How appropriate that the man unjustly imprisoned multiple times would be the author of the most important Leveller works dealing with the fair execution of law. Winstanley directly accuses the executors of law and justice of ignoring this principle of equity, and challenges them to change: “You Attornies and Lawyers, you say you are Ministers of Justice, and we know that equity and reason is or ought to be the foundation of Law. If so, then plead not for money altogether, but stand for Universal Justice and Equity: then you will have peace; otherwise both you and the corrupt Clergy will be cast out as unsavoury salt.” Though the concepts of liberty and justice are related in certain facets, what is important is that they were generated in response to unique catalysts applied to the underlying assumption of equality under God.

Terms used commonly throughout the works of both the Levellers and Diggers include “right reason” and “equity”. For example, Overton said: “the Lawes of this Nation are unworthy a Free-People and deserve from first to last, to be... reduced to an agreement, with common equity and right reason.” It is necessary to address these words along with liberty, justice, and equality, because they were used in pamphlets and writings almost as much as the others. Burgess uses the example of Overton to show that “right reason” and equity were “general principles of fairness and justice, prior and superior to positive law.” Equity and reason, then, were used to bring closer together the underlying assumption of equality under God and the necessity to govern efficiently using laws and statutes. This meshes with what we know about Winstanley, namely: “he was prepared to endorse the legislative capacity of the house of Commons, demanding only that it enact equitable and reasonable laws.” After all, if God had already granted men equality, why oppose laws that did not infringe upon that birthright when an efficient form of government was required for men to govern themselves?

It should be clear now that no concept used in the writings of these radical groups could be defined without the most central assumption: that God had the same relationship with all men, and none could claim any different. In the postscript to Overton’s “An Arrow Against All Tyrants”, he says: “Let not the greatest peers in the land be more respected with you than so many old bellows-menders, broom-men, cobblers, tinkers, or chimney-sweepers, who are all equally freeborn with the hugest men and loftiest Anakims in the land.” It is this that sits at the very core of these groups of men who had their differences and disagreements, and permitted them to present a (mostly) united front against the exercise of arbitrary power, the unfair execution of laws, and the claim by any man to hold more station in the eyes of God than any other.

Here then is the answer to our question. Since the very definitions of liberty and justice, and even those of right reason and equity, cannot be understood without first understanding the basic assumption of equality, it is the most important of any. Indeed, Locke was to draw on this very assertion, years later, and even Jefferson can trace his definition of equality to these men. The Levellers, who hated their name, and the Diggers did not want anything from England they thought they had not already been granted by God, as equal and free men under the watch of their creator. Perhaps it is fitting to end with the words of Winstanley, challenging England to accept this divine grant of equality, or face the consequences:

“In thee, O England, is the Law arising up to shine,
If thou receive and practice it, the Crown it will be thine.
If thou reject, and still remain a froward Son to be,
Another Land will it receive, and take the Crown from thee.”

• References:
  • G. Burgess, “Protestant polemic: the leveler pamphlets.” Parergon ns 11.2 (1993)
  • Winstanley, “The law of freedom in a platform.” London, 1652
  • Overton, “An arrow against all tyrants.” Newgate, 1646
  • S.D. Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular vs. Elitist Republicanism”, Past and Present 164 (1999)
  • John Lawmind (pseudo.), Putney Projects, 1647, p44: Brit Lib, E.421(19)
  • John Taylor, in “The true levellers standard advanced.” London, 1649
  • Overton and Walwyn, “A remonstrance of many thousand citizens.” London, 1646
  • Winstanley, “A watchword to the city of London and the army” London, 1649
  • Overton and Walwyn, “A remonstrance of many thousand citizens.” London, 1646
  • J.C. Davis, “Gerrard Winstanley and the Restoration of True Magistracy.” Past and Present, 70 (1976)

Yamagata Aritomo

Roger Hackett, the author of the book detailing Yamagata's life that this paper is based upon, ends his work with a quote that I think is more fitting for an introduction: “the biography of Yamagata Aritomo is more than a story of a gifted individual, it is the history of modern Japan” (349). This man had perhaps more to do with the modernization of Japan after the Meiji restoration than any other singular person, especially in the military realm.

Yamagata was one of those lower ranking samurai who were born in the right period of time to make a large impact on the direction Meiji Japan would take. He was educated in a less formal setting, and while schooling only part-time he had the opportunity to work various odd jobs around the domain, first serving as a errand boy, then consecutively as a school helper, a minor administrative lackey, and a police informer, all by age 17. What is perhaps most important to not about these small jobs early in Yamagata's life is that they occurred in what Hackett calls “an atmosphere of change”. The reforms going on in the Choshu domain were important to Yamagata's future and included education in foreign literature, expenses given to students to travel throughout Japan to study, development of gunnery, electricity, and photography, and the ambitious but not completed construction of a gun casting plant. Coupled with a deeply anti-Tokugawa attitude, these developments would prove to be formative in Yamagata's later actions.

At age 20, Yamagata was sent as part of a group to Kyoto, to be the “eyes and ears” of the Choshu lords in the capital. There he became involved with two forward-thinking scholars, Yanagawa Seigan, and Umeda Umpin. His time spent in this super-loyalist atmosphere foreshadowed his own beliefs and actions, and he returned to Hagi in 1858 to study under Shoin and express his loyalism. After the Shimonoseki straits, he was so furious he wrote a poem to protest not being able to bring force to bear on the foreigners, something he deeply resented. The embarrassment of Japan drove him to propose irregular military units, called the Kiheitai, which would be used to repel the “barbarian” foreigners. His command of some of the first Kiheitai shows exactly the dedication to modern military tactics and the cautious and realistic analysis that would characterize his later construction of Japan's military might.

Hackett makes an interesting connection with an event during the command of a fort battery firing on allied ships and later trends towards westernization in Yamagata's decision making. He tells us of a wound Yamagata received on his forearm during the clash, and says that Yamagata would be reminded of the superiority of western weapons and tactics for the rest of his life, with the scar as the reminder. Despite his injury, he regrouped the Kiheitai and led the forces at edo-ota and up to the end of the Choshu civil war. Victorious, he and his allies rebuilt the Choshu military along decidedly western lines and was eventually vindicated a year later during the four borders war when Tokugawa forces were crushed by the superior westernized Choshu foot soldiers. During this engagement, Yamagata himself led a group of soldiers in a raid on Kokura, routing the enemy forces. It was here where this evolution from anti foreign to westernized is most apparent. Yamagata was now not only a gifted strategist, but a vocal and aggressive westernizer. He showed his valor and drive in an arduous campaign in the north of Japan during the Meiji restoration as compatriots of his were winning the war against Tokugawa forces in the south.

The next period in Yamagata's relationship with Japan involves the consolidation of power with the Emperor and the beginning of what would become a vaunted fighting machine, equally as capable as those of the great world powers. Some facts and figures: in 1840, the Japanese had no national standing army. The Germans (Prussians) had a standing army of 210,000. But by 1920, the Japanese had an army of 650,000 compared to Germany's 840,000. Though behind by 30 to 40 years in terms of their first rifle units, Japan developed its own tanks just 7 years after Germany had their first ones. During Yamagata's tenure Japan's military saw a growth and development faster than the west had ever seen... along their own lines.

In May 1869 Yamagata first traveled abroad, it has been said to satisfy the unrealized ambitions of his teacher Shoin, but more importantly to gain first hand knowledge of how the west was organized and run, especially their military and political institutions. He traveled to a host of different nations, cautiously recording information in haiku or poem, and absorbing all the knowledge he could, with Japan's fledgling military on his mind. Upon his return, his intimate knowledge of western militarizes coupled with his impressive tactical record led to his invitation to become the Vice Minister of Military Affair, which he accepted on the sole condition that Saigo Takamori be offered a position. This ostensibly was to gain the support of Satsuma, where most of the non-Choshu military men came from. Once in his post, he advocated the strict adoption of the Prussian conscription and military system, thought the government first adopted the French method. He was impressed by Prussian drill and obedience, and wanted a corps of men ready at all times to fight forming a ready reserve. First on his mind, however, was protecting the Emperor. It was to this end that Yamagata organized the goshempei, or the Imperial bodyguard. This group was immediately turned towards another of Yamagata's main goals: the elimination of the Han.

While the destruction of the Han was being waged by the goshempei, Yamagata persuaded the Emperor that conscription was necessary to keep an effective military force and in 1872 the Rescript Act was passed amongst the rumblings of rebellion from Saigo and his Satsuma men, who opposed the destruction of the Han and wanted to push for an invasion of Korea, something Yaamagata knew the young army was not capable of. When Saigo was shut down by the government, he and a majority of the Satsuma men in the goshempei resigned their posts and returned home to prepare for war. Yamagata spent the majority of the next few years putting down rebellions, but made sure to keep the integrity of the budding Japanese military system by refusing to use outside units to put down the rebels. The westernized peasant soldiers handily defeated Saigo Takamori and the Satsuma men and Yamagata turned his attention to strengthening the military through further development and the creation of a military police force.

Yamagata, one of the Japanese military's most senior and respected commanders, would not see the field of battle again until the Sino-Japanese war. He had been approached by the government and entered his political career with the backing of a strong military force and the Emperor's good graces, and he strongly believed that the government was the executor of Imperial privilege. Once he became the Home Minister, he pushed for internal unity and continued his prior destruction of the Han by instituting local governmental reforms and creating the prefecture / county / city program, that redivided and reorganized the local units of government throughout the country. His theory was that local bodies were more susceptible to central control, and that these divisions would strengthen the Emperor's hold over his nation. He would continue to rise in political circles, and while abroad the whole of Japan waited with baited breath for his return and to hear his opinion on the matter of the unequal treaties. His importance had skyrocketed, and soon after his return he was appointed Prime Minister of Japan, where he tried to minimize internal conflict and political rivalries, helped to engineer the Imperial Rescript on Education, and presided over the first Diet.

When the Sino-Japanese war broke out, Yamagata, now ex-Prime Minister, took up a field command of the 1st Army, and was finally able to operate the machine he had so carefully assembled. Japan's military would continue to grow and develop, and even as Yamagata spent the last years of his life in his residences across Japan, with flowing brooks, beautiful gardens, and serene settings, the gears and cogs of the machine he created still turned. After his death, some referred to him as the “key figure in Japanese reaction and agression” and “responsible for the Pacific war”. But would the cautious and realistic Yamagata have let his country go to war with another with 5x its GDP, or one with 10x its population? It is hard to believe that the prudent man who raised Japan's army from its infancy would have let it fall so hard into the war that ended up being the end of his proud creation.

Hackett's treatment of Yamagata's life is well done and chronological account. However, he tends to concentrate a disproportionate amount on the small economic and political things that Yamagata did while in office, and devotes less time to the things that rocked the world not 20 years after his death. His creation of a modern military juggernaut deserved more time in the story of his life, especially if Hackett himself refers to that life as parallel with the history of modern Japan.

• References:
  • Roger Hackett, Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of Modern Japan, 1838-1922. Harvard University Press, 1971

The Restoration to 1670

By 1670, the restoration had been a decade long process seeking to bind “those wounds which have so many years together been kept bleeding” by returning the monarchy to England. Though the visible institutions and trappings of Monarchy seemed to be restored, the England of 1670 was very different from the England of James Stuart. What follows is an explanation of what had and had not been restored by 1670, divided into three sections. First I will detail which institutions were restored, to what degree, and how this restoration affected the monarchy and the rule of the kingdom. Second, I will address the attempted restoration of the Church of England and the dissent and division created by this attempt. Third, I will address what was new and what was very old in the people's attitudes towards their governance.

On May 29th, 1660, “Charles the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.” set foot in London, the first monarch to do so since the beheading of his father a decade prior. Monck's Convention Parliament had accepted the terms Charles had set for acceding to the throne, opening the door for the return of monarchy to what had of late been a hotbed of republican thought and experiment. It was clear upon Charles II's coronation that the monarchy was restored, though it was the constitutional form “amended with Charles I's reluctant consent in 1641”. Once the crown was safely upon the brow of the King, the monarchical cleanup of interregnum and subsequent restoration began, although a wholesale redaction of the acts of Parliament that Charles I had been forced to accede to was conspicuously absent. In fact, only two of the acts from 1641 and 1642 were repealed. First to be brought back were the organs of government. Implicit in the reintroduction of the monarchy was a restoration of the Houses of Parliament, including both Commons and Lords, and the Privy Council. In 1661 the first restored Parliament, the Cavalier Parliament, was held and the Clergy Act (one of the reversals of 1642 acts) was passed allowing ministers of the Anglican faith to again hold public office for the first time since 1640. The Bishops of the Anglican Church quickly and eagerly returned to the House of Lords to hold the seats they had lost in 1649. Next, the Privy Council was reestablished in a traditional Stuart fashion as a small group of close advisers to King Charles.

The King needed these institutions to legitimize his rule after two long periods of arbitrary government had preceded him. He also was in financial straits upon his return, as the old forms of unauthorized kingly revenue were most definitely not restored. Though the monarch was supplied with a fixed amount of annual revenue, this did not come from the places where James had extracted monies decades prior, but from new forms of efficient parliamentary taxation. As part of financial restructuring, the majority of the standing forces were demobilized and paid off and an act was passed easing the transition for veterans into guild positions, a measure which the army had wanted since the 1640s. Another important restoration involving the military was the King's reasserted control. Far from the interregnum years in which Cromwell, at the head of the New Model Army, controlled the country, after the restoration the army was unquestionably subordinated to the King in the Militia Act of 1661. The act stated that the command of all forces in England was “the undoubted right of his Majesty and his royal predecessors, kings and queens of England” and that the Parliament “cannot nor ought to pretend the same”. However, the military successes of the New Model Army and the interregnum Navy were not to continue for Charles as English forces suffered grave defeats at the hands of the Dutch during the Second Anglo-Dutch war. It is certain that Charles was able to restore the majority of pre-1649 governmental bodies and the crown and trappings of the Stuart monarchy, but it seemed as if he also restored the terrible military luck of his forefathers.

Though the King and Lord Clarendon, his Chancellor, were intent on keeping the promises made in the Declaration of Breda in 1660, such as liberty of conscience, the access of Anglicans to Parliamentary power made it difficult for them to achieve this goal. The Bishops associated their absence from Parliament with the absence of the National Church and accordingly assumed their reintroduction would come part and parcel with the restoration of the Church of England. They were aided by what has (unfairly) become known as the Clarendon Code, a series of four acts passed that attempted to solidify and secure the power of a restored Church of England. The first of these, the Corporation Act, required all holders of public office to take Anglican communion and reject the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, effectively breaking the power of the Presbyterians and Independents in the government if they wished to keep their beliefs. The second act was the Act of Uniformity in 1662, which was responsible for the “Great Ejection”, the removal of nearly two thousand ministers who refused to agree to use the common prayer book and recognize the episcopalian church hierarchy. The Conventicle Act of 1664 prevented anyone from holding a private worship meeting with more than 5 people, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 prevented those previously ejected clergy from going within five miles of their previous churches and towns in which their property lay.

The effect of these laws was dramatic. On the outside, it appeared as if the Church of England had restored itself to pre-1642 levels of power and influence, as the Bishops sat again in the House of Lords and non-Anglicans were barred from office and worship. However, reality was much different in the towns and cities of England, as a growing dissatisfaction with the restored church and a longing for Cromwellian religious freedom stirred among the people, and by 1670 the Church of England was again faltering. The Church itself may have been restored, but the Anglican aims of religious unity under their narrow episcopalian umbrella were not coming to fruition, and Anglicanism in London especially was in danger.

The King spent a lot of his first few years trying to fix the attitudes and opinions of his people towards the monarchy, church, and the interregnum. He had made it clear in the Declaration of Breda that he wanted to forgive all his “loving subjects, how faulty soever” and concentrate instead upon the peaceful reorganization of his new government. Only a few troublemakers like Henry Vane (who despite a skillful defense was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1662) were exempted from the sweeping Act of Oblivion of 1660, which granted protection from revenge or rebuke for conduct in the years since 1649. In fact, it was even made illegal to write or speak about any man's actions in the previous 20 years in an attempt to alter the memory of the interregnum in addition to the effects.

What is essential to note is that despite these attempts at reconciliation, a substantial part of the English people during the first decade of restoration did not go back to the relative complacency of the reigns of Elizabeth or even James I. Dissidence was popular despite acts passed by the Parliament that forbade discussion of topics termed seditious, such as referring to the King as a papist. Much of this unrest stemmed from the active suppression by the government of non-Anglican subjects, especially in the city of London. What followed the Clarendon Code in the capitol was a veritable coalition of Presbyterians, Independents, and others in a loose “anti-episcopal party”.

In a sense, the restoration had resurrected the very same disagreements that had resulted in the new King's father ending up a foot shorter. The Monarchy and Church worked actively to suppress religious freedom, and the common man was left hearkening back to “Oliver's Time”. The English, especially in London, walked the streets and sat in alehouses talking of openly treasonous subjects. Pepys noted in 1667 that popular sentiment against the episcopal bishops was “as bad... as ever in the year 1640.” With the restored monarchy came the problems of the previous monarchy. Another belief that survived the years of interregnum and therefore was restored with the Monarchy was that of predestination. The people were well aware of God's “messages of war, disease, and fire” and the apparent ignorance of His word by those in power. The people thus unsettled, and not free to practice their faith (though in London, illegal worship was widespread and by 1670 “fanatic” churches were widespread) was eerily reminiscent of the days of the prior King Charles.

Though the King was mostly successful in restoring the institutions of the Stuart monarchy, the first ten years of his reign saw the revival of old problems to go along with old establishments. The King himself lost the means to raise money outside of parliaments, and began to accrue quite a large personal debt supporting his lifestyle. Though his control of the military was restored, Charles suffered defeat and war quickly outgrew the country's budget, while the people were loathe to experience “international military impotence” once more. The Church of England was vastly unpopular and actively resisted against, especially in a London that had gotten used to the kind of freedoms they were allowed under the Protectorate and Cromwell; dissident non-conformists frequented the streets of the capitol city. The late 1660s saw Clarendon impeached and exiled; other personnel and policies were overhauled in reaction to early restoration failures. The Cavalier parliament, originally mostly Royalist, would grow critical of the King's policies as its membership changed. It is clear that rocky roads lay ahead for the restored King, along with the ghost-like and shadowy problems that clung to the revived monarchy and were resurrected alongside it, but perhaps this famously witty epitaph would have consoled him:

Here lies a great and mighty King,
Whose promise none relied on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.
- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

• References:
  • Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age. 3rd Ed. Edinburgh Gate, England: Pearson Education, 2003.
  • De Krey, Gary. London and the Restoration, 1659-1683. Cambridge: University Press, 2005.
  • Kenyon, J.P. The Stuart Constitution. Cambridge: University Press, 1986.
  • Roberts, Clayton. “The Impeachment of the Earl of Clarendon.” Cambridge Historical Journal. Vol. 13, No. 1. (1957), pp. 1-18.
  • Scott, Jonathan. England's Troubles. Cambridge: University Press, 2000.
  • Scott, Jonathan. "The Protectorate and the Fall of the Republic." Stuart England. University of Pittsburgh. Frick Fine Arts, 8 November, 2006.
  • Spurr, John. England in the 1670s. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000.

Kita Ikki

This one is coming once I actually turn it in for a grade.