Studies of the social history of memory in early modern England have tended to focus on the reformation of the civil and religious calendars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or on popular understandings of “custom,” casting considerable light on the concept of an English Protestant nation and on the making of the English class system. Matthew Neufeld's book differs from others, first in his relatively narrow focus on late Stuart England and second in his clearly stated intention to study “public memory” after the Restoration of monarchy in 1660 as a “prison” (5), a misuse of the civil war and revolutionary past to make the “puritan impulse” (11–12) embodied by Dissenters into a scapegoat for the war and to exclude them from political office as a threat to the regime's Anglican orthodoxy and to the political stability of Charles II's kingdoms (see 2–3). This type of critical history incurs a considerable risk of introducing into its historical analysis modern ideas about the nature of history or about the interrelationship of religious belief, church attendance, and political morality, for example, that were not those of the early modern past. To avoid the tautology of suggesting that people of late Stuart England made mistakes they could not have perceived, let alone understood, requires equally critical attention to their own terms of reference in forming judgments.

The approach has merit, and a study using the concept of “public memory” to explore Mark Goldie's characterization of Restoration England as a “persecuting society” could usefully bring together a good deal of work on the social, political, and cultural history of the late seventeenth century. A major problem in Neufeld's ambitious attempt to this end involves the failure to delimit the scope of “public memory” at the book's outset. Where was this public memory? When crowds marched against brothels in the streets of London in March 1668, for example, carrying the green banners of the levellers, did this constitute an act of public memory? Do the “pope burning processions” organized by the Green Ribbon Club in London's streets, and emulated elsewhere, during the 1670s warrant consideration as evidence of a public memory of the national crisis in 1642? Neufeld limits the sources of public memory to “accessible” printed texts, “particularly histories and memoirs . . . along with published sermons, petitions, images, and letters” (6–9) and thus ensures its domination by the regime that licensed the presses before 1679. To assume that “historical writing in particular was the most important product of cultural remembering in late Stuart England” is to exclude a diverse spectrum of social and political practices that regularly challenged the Restoration regime's public memory of the past across the late Stuart period.

In the first chapter, English public memory of the civil wars and revolution moves swiftly from the “indemnity and oblivion” of the Convention Parliament in 1660 to the vindictive, antipuritan Anglican settlement of the Cavalier Parliament in 1662, the basis of late Stuart England's exclusive political society. The account reflects Neufeld's flair for textual analysis, and establishes a “sanctioned narrative” of the violent past marked by a general antipuritanism. (Neufeld does not address the question of why Catholics were excluded from the narrative and from power, despite overwhelming support for Charles I during the war.) But this sanctioned narrative is also studded with stock images of heroism and villainy, all licensed to serve the exclusive Anglican political goals of the Restoration regime after 1662. Neufeld generally argues that “public remembering of the English civil wars and Interregnum after 1660 was not ultimately concerned with re-fighting the old struggle, but rather commending and justifying, or contesting and attacking, the Restoration settlements that underlay the Anglican confessional state” (2). This is sensible for the later decades of the seventeenth century, but why should anyone in 1660 have had to make this choice? In December 1660, when the Lords and Commons ordered the exhumation and posthumous execution of John Bradshaw, Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and Thomas Pride, the renewal and final settlement of the old struggle, as well as anticipation of the future settlement, must have numbered among their motives. Does this act of state—executed in January 1661, following the radical uprising in London—occurring as it did months before the assembly of the Cavalier Parliament, and published afterwards as an engraving, complicate the analysis of public memory during the months immediately following Charles II's return? It could fit in Neufeld's reconstruction of the “sanctioned narrative,” but its early arrival demands some rethinking of the narrative's straightforward connection to the Cavalier Parliament.

Succeeding chapters chart the impact of political conflicts that resulted from the Restoration settlement on printed promotions and critiques of this “sanctioned [antipuritan] narrative” of civil war and revolution. In the second chapter, the petitions of royalist soldiers express a “resilient royalism” calculated to support the regime's view of its providential return, while even those parliamentarian soldiers who actively supported the Restoration find themselves excluded from the sacred flow of events. In the third chapter, Neufeld uses the explosion of Whig and Tory publications after 1679 to argue for the emergence of a shorthand code of reference to the Restoration settlement—the key battleground, including its stereotypic rendering of civil war experience—across a range of printed sources, including visual images. In the fourth and fifth chapters, Neufeld shows how the revolution of 1689 and its aftermath mobilized this shorthand in new ways that nevertheless reflected patterned responses to the exclusions of 1662: celebrations of the original Restoration in 1660 that echoed the new Toleration Act; Whig attacks on the exclusivity of the Anglican settlement of 1662 that embraced and justified the religious liberty of Presbyterians and Independents in 1689; and Tory reassertions of the cult of royal martyrdom, more important than ever in defense of the Anglican church and the political order it symbolized after 1689. Neufeld makes instructive use of the work of Edmund Calamy and John Walker in this latter part of the book, clearly connecting two of the most important documents for the modern study of seventeenth-century English Protestantism to the ideological poles of the late Stuart political arena. In general, Neufeld has assembled an impressive array of evidence to demonstrate the importance of history in late Stuart politics and, more specifically, to show how the political crises of the 1670s and 1680s turned on stylized reactions to the Restoration settlement rather than on personal memories of the English civil war. He has begun a more detailed and closely argued discussion of late Stuart public memory than any to date, and The Civil Wars after 1660 will serve as an important frame of reference for future work on this subject.