This is a big and important book that offers the best account to date of the interaction between London corporation politics and religion during the Restoration. In a carefully researched and erudite piece of scholarship, Gary S. De Krey stresses the bitterness and national importance of the capital's tensions, much of which he explains in terms of a contest between “Reformed Protestants” on the one hand and persecuting Anglicans on the other. De Krey is thus to be located among those Restoration scholars who have recently emphasized the politics of religion in determining political outlook and behavior.
The first chapter examines the prominence of London Presbyterians, rather than royalists, in the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and hence how the former “regained the dominant civic voice they had lost in 1648–9” (38). But, as chapter 2 demonstrates, “all this had changed by early 1663, when Anglican royalists in London achieved the political control” of the city as a result of the Corporation Act and other penal legislation that created nonconformity (80). That Anglican regime was nevertheless “too narrowly constituted” (83) and therefore only served to unsettle the capital. De Krey shows how the proscription of “reformed protestants” from civic office “fed perceptions that Anglican royalism was inherently prejudicial to the rights and liberties that Londoners had sought to preserve in 1659–60” (84) and hence reanimated discontent. Moreover, he claims, the “shared disasters of 1660–2” nurtured a “common dissenting identity” (90), based largely on a common “language of conscience,” so that “dissenters of all persuasions became a community for conscience” (100–101). Presbyterians “who had once feared the religious pluralism of the sects, were now beginning to embrace the protestant diversity they had formerly reviled” (104) and saw no incompatibility, as once they had, between demands for comprehension and toleration (106). Arguments in favor of liberty of conscience “undermined the premises and purposes of the church settlement of 1660–1665” (104). Thus by the end of the 1660s, the reformed Protestants were again in a position to challenge, and in 1669–70 briefly break, the Anglican royalist hold.
Just as religious divisions explain the 1660s, so “the history of civic opposition in London in the 1670s reinforces this emphasis upon religious issues” (117). Fear of popery fueled fear of arbitrary government among the reformed protestants, while fear of Dissent drove Anglican loyalists to defend the Restoration church-state. And the process of reformed protestant integration marched on accordingly: “never firm, the boundaries between civic Presbyterianism and Independency were becoming increasingly fluid by the second decade of the Restoration” because they acted together “on behalf of liberty for conscience” (127–28). And they were radicalized. Indeed, by 1675 “the dissenting community of London had produced a civic opposition, which could, by acting in cooperation with Country MPs, disrupt parliament itself” (134), and much of this agitation “rested upon the precedents of the city's 1649 revolution” (147). Activists such as Francis Jenks “were prepared to adapt the libertarian language of the 1640s and 1650s to the political circumstances of the 1670s” (148). This, it is argued, produced political polarization well before the Popish Plot, and it also allowed the reformed protestants to recapture the city.
The second half of the book offers a narrative and analysis of the subsequent divisions of 1679–83. While acknowledging a significant role for disputes about the succession, De Krey places greater weight on the campaign to reshape the religious framework and on London's importance in the opposition to the king. “Just as much as his father before him, Charles II had lost political control of his capital, and that loss had momentous consequences for the nation” (201). London “took the place of parliament” (211) after the dissolution of the Oxford parliament in 1681, thereby ensuring (as chaps. 5 and 7 argue) that the city became the focus of an ongoing crisis that lasted until 1683. De Krey identifies for this period four different but related contests: about parliament, about law, about conscience, and about civic control. Divisions culminated in the bitterly fought 1682 shrieval election, which was the true “climax of the Restoration Crisis” (254). The 1682 city conflict resulted in a contest for legitimacy between pairs of Tory and Whig sheriffs, both of which claimed to have been elected. These claims were subsequently fought out in the courts but also fostered thoughts among frustrated Whigs of resistance and rebellion, particularly when legal efforts failed. “The resorts to law and resistance were … parallel strategies rather than opposites” (348, 362), though most Whig leaders pursued the former rather than the latter. The urban conspiracy of May 1683 was brought about by sectarian “plebs,” it is suggested, who nevertheless reveal fractures in the Dissenting community. “The division between prosperous Reformed Protestants, especially Presbyterians, and sectarian and republican enthusiasts of lesser rank, that had contributed to the collapse of the revived commonwealth in 1659–60, seems again apparent in the alternate Whig strategies of 1682–3” (382).
De Krey succeeds in refocusing our attention on party, conscience, and consent. He splendidly highlights the role London played as a crucible of Dissent and as an important stage on which the Restoration drama was played out. His detailed account is based on a careful reading of primary sources. Handling of secondary material is, however, far less sure. The first half of the book lacks an adequate historiographical framework. There is no attempt in the introduction to position the work in relation to previous scholarly work and debates. This makes the book less accessible than it might have been but also has the effect of marginalizing much of the older historiography. Moreover, De Krey exaggerates his disagreements with other historians, whose views are often given piecemeal. The book also ignores almost entirely some issues that have generated an interesting wider agenda. The reader will find little about comparative urban politics, about the changing nature of urban society, about metropolitan culture, about attitudes to office holding and oath taking, or about artisanal culture. Socioeconomic factors play only a small part in the account. There is, to be sure, a chapter devoted to an analysis of the parties of 1679–82, which offers some very useful information about occupation, residency, and the political hue of livery companies, but the focus is always on the party leaders, and there is no systematic attempt to relate economic life to political mind-sets, despite the intrinsic link between civic liberties and trading privileges. As a contribution to the ongoing debate about Restoration ideology, De Krey does have some important things to say about the context of Locke's writing, relating it closely to the shrieval contest of 1682 and its immediate aftermath, but the comments are fragmented and again need setting in a firmer framework of debate.
Definition of the term “reformed protestant” could also do with clarification since it is used extensively throughout the book and is key to its argument, but the criteria for inclusion are not spelled out. Nor is it always clear how far the ranks of reformed protestants penetrated the church of England or how far disagreements between Dissenting groups can be papered over. Was there a single “community of dissenters”? There is, for example, no mention of the Quakers’ conflict with other sects even though great stress is placed on Penn's defiant stand in favor of conscience at his trial in 1670. And we have already seen how sectarian divisions in 1682 were, by the book's own account, in part responsible for different responses to the crisis. We might, by contrast, question how far the reformed protestants’ “language of conscience” was new to the Restoration period. An earlier start date might have questioned how far both a united godly community and discussion about conscience and consent had to be “established” (125) after the Restoration. Indeed the chronological parameters of the study might be questioned. The end date of 1683 curtails any discussion of the repeated attempts to purge the liveries and hence both of the economic dimension and of 1688, when reformed protestants and churchmen cooperated. Similarly, a redrawing of the first Restoration crisis as 1659–63 rather than 1659–60 would question how far it was “profoundly different” (386) to the second crisis of 1682–83, since both would appear to have resulted in triumphs for the intolerant churchmen, and as short-term gains that could not be held. These flaws detract from what is otherwise a very useful, detailed account of a crucial period in London's history.
