UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE TACNA

FECH – IDEX ENGLISH LITERATURE 4th Year

THE COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION (1649-1713)

Setting the scene.-

After many years of difficult relations between the King and parliament, in the 1640s the Puritans
(Roundheads) and the King’s followers (cavaliers) went to war against each other.
The Victory of the Roundheads led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. After this, Oliver Cromwell
became the leader of the Commonwealth, the Lord Protector. When he died in 1658, his son was named
Lord Protector, but he was less successful than his father, and in 1660 Parliament invited Charles I’s son to
return from France. He was made king as Charles II.
Although the Monarchy was restored, most of the power was held by parliament; two parties, The
Whigs and The Tories, and a prime minister governed the country. On the death of Charles II in 1685, his
brother King James II became king, but after he became a Catholic his reign ended with the Glorious or
Bloodless Revolution of 1688, and no catholic monarch has reigned since then. The new king and queen
was Mary, the sister of Charles and James, and her husband, William of Orange from Holland.
The main concern of the time was to avoid another revolution. The Spirit of the Restoration was one reason;
Society did not want to see again the kind of problems of the first half of the century. The new middle classes
had more and more influence as their wealth grew and they wanted stability above all. This was also a time
of great commercial growth, and of scientific advances.
The Royal Society was begun in 1662-63 for the improving of natural Knowledge. In 1694 another important
institution, The bank of England, was begun.
The main philosophical text behind the thinking of the second half of the century was “Leviathan” by Thomas
Hobbes, written in exile in France in 1651. Hobbes’s theory of Society is presented in the medieval form of
an allegory: the leviathan, a huge animal, is the commonwealth, and the individual man is totally controlled
by The State. Self-interest is man’s main motivation, so a strong state is necessary, to keep the “article’s of
peace” and to control the people of the nation. This very much reflects the Society of Britain after the
Restoration: a strong Government to prevent the risk of another revolution, and self-interest as the driving
force behind the individual and the new middle classes.
It was also a time of war in Europe, the war of the Spanish Succession lasting from 1701 until The Treaty of
Utrecht in 1713. The United Kingdom was finally united when the Union of the parliaments of England of
England and Scotland took place in 1707. But Ireland was still a problem – The battle of the Boyne in 1690
gave the Protestants victory, although the majority of the population was still Catholic.

Poetry, Politics and John Milton

The period between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and The restoration of the Monarchy with his
son Charles II in 1660 is called the Commonwealth. Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Roundheads, was named
Lord Protector of the Nation. One of the main texts of the Commonwealth is the poem by Andrew Marvell,
“An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland” (1650), which has been called “the greatest political
poem in English. “ It celebrates “Cromwell as the nation’s hero:
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE TACNA
FECH – IDEX ENGLISH LITERATURE 4th Year
1
So restless Cromwell could not cease
2
In the inglorious Arts of peace.
But through adventurous war
Urged his active star…
What field of all the Civil Wars
Where his were not the deepest scars?
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stop not bringing good results
The theme of the poem is strength , and strong government . These were to become major concerns of the
nation during and after Cromwell’s rule.

The New Society of restoration gave much more importance than before to stable values , and much less
importance to the search for new values, or the exploration of new worlds, as in the Renaissance . So the
major figure that links the Renaissance and The Restoration, John Milton, can be seen as both a
Renaissance and a post Renaissance man.
Milton lived from 1608 until 1674, and saw all of the greatest struggles of the century. In his early career he
gave himself a role as a poet in the classical sense, influenced by Latin writers and traditions but with the
clear ambition to make himself one of the great poets in English, in the line of Chaucer. His writing was also
deeply Christian, as in “On the morning of Christ’s nativity” (nativity=birth). Both Classical and Christian
Influences run through all his work, particularly in Lycidas (1637) , which is an elegy about the early death of
his close friend Edward King. Its last lines are optimistic which was unusual in the 1630s:

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Tomorrow to fresh woods , and pastures new
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small forest fields

But for the next twenty or so years Milton wrote little poetry, Instead he concentrated on writing prose
pamphlets on many of the most controversial subjects of the time : he wrote about divorce, politics,
education, freedom, freedom of the press, and religion , and became Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell in
the early years of the Commonwealth . After the Restoration, he went into hiding, and was later arrested ,
but he was able to return to his writing after some time . he was now blind , but his major work , Paradise
Lost , was published in twelve books, in 1667.
Paradise Lost is the major epic poem in English. Milton had thought <bout using the English myth of King
Arthur for his great epic poem , but finally decided to use the more general myth of Creation , with the figures
of God and Satan ( The devil), Adam and Eve, and The Fall of Mankind as his subject. His aim , he said,
was :
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To assert Eternal Providence
2
And Justify the ways of God to men.
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to stress that God is always looks after mankind explain

ACTIVITY: Answer and develop the following questions.

1. Why commonwealth and restoration?
2. What happened on the death of Charles II?
3. Why Ireland was still a problem?
4. Who was John Milton?
5. Design a graphic organizer for the Commonwealth and Restoration.