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This chapter explores ambiguities and contradictions in the thinking of Milton and other republicans, whose ideas about toleration came into conflict with their demands for freedom of conscience. Beginning with the politics of virtue whereby they strove to displace divine right with secular claims to an ethical absolute, the chapter demonstrates how republican requisites for both societal cohesion and free conscience were compromised by simultaneous commitments to temporal and eternal orders of value. Drawing on evidence of rhetorical strain in Milton's Readie and Easie Way, deliberative pathos in Samson Agonistes and Buckingham's The Rehearsal, and the devastating triumph of virtue over uncertainty dramatized during the Exclusion Crisis by Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, the chapter demonstrates representative variations on the free conscience dilemma. Restoration era pressures for free agency are thus shown to be a struggle both for and against temporal reality, both for and against an eternal ideal.

This chapter begins with the political nadir for the Royal African Company: the Exclusion Crisis. From 1679-1681 the House of Commons tried on three occasions to exclude the Duke of York from the royal succession. As a result of this attack on York and the royal prerogative, the Crown’s designs of increased imperial centralization that had accelerated during the previous decade necessarily waned. Plans to overhaul Jamaica’s constitutional relationship with England, for example, were scrapped. In addition, the African Company suffered as a result of this attack on its patron, and was forced into a position of political weakness until Exclusion subsided. After the failure of Exclusion, however, the company once again enjoyed significant commercial success in the slave trade as well as greater influence over imperial administration. This period, labeled the “Tory Ascendancy,” included the reign of James II (1685-1688) and represented the triumph of the Stuart imperial agenda, during which Crown influence over imperial administration increased significantly.

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).

The Emperor of the Moon, a heretofore unrecognized parody of Dryden’s Albion and Albanius, restages debased spectacle in order to contain and defuse it. Aphra Behn’s play is analogous to what the Royal Society is teaching in texts like the Musaeum Regalis Societatis. Both the museum catalog and the play promote parallel anti-spectacular epistemologies that offer a corrective to the wild speculation—political, theatrical, experimental—that marks what this chapter identifies as a “culture of spectacle” that emerges during the Exclusion Crisis in the late Restoration. Behn’s farce offers physic to a culture addicted to empty spectacle; but in doing so, she aims not to do away with spectacle; rather, like the Royal Society’s new course in natural philosophy, she seeks to teach a rational mindfulness to an entire society overrun with enthusiastic virtuosi.

This chapter explores William Penn’s political thought as it developed during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678–1681). During these years, Penn became an increasingly prominent member of the Quaker leadership, defending Friends in print and before Parliament. He also remained active in the nation’s political life and, given increasingly dim prospects for toleration in England, began exploring the possibility of securing land in America. Penn’s political thinking during these years focused on two primary issues: Parliament and popery. He reiterated his long-standing commitment to Parliament’s role in the governance of the realm and, while echoing popular concerns about the seditious potential of English Catholics, also attempted to find ways to guarantee loyal English Catholics their civil rights. In all these endeavors, Penn sought to articulate a social and political vision that would enable individuals to build a common life together despite their religious differences.

James, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85) embodied the paradoxes involved in distinguishing between force and fraud in late seventeenth‐century England. He appears as both seducer and victim of seduction in innumerable literary productions of the late 1670s and early 1680s, including John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681). The figure of Monmouth proved a magnet for a Protestant nation anxious about a Catholic succession, specifically that of the aging Charles II's designated heir, James, Duke of York. Monmouth led an armed rebellion after James's accession in 1685, a rebellion that resulted in bloodshed, dislocation, and, eventually, governmental savagery against his supporters. The Monmouth Rebellion became a site for public debate over the doctrine of passive obedience and the problem of imagining virtuous resistance to authority. Monmouth's cause and execution continued to resonate, paradoxically, among tory writers, for whom his tragic career as seduced seducer made visible pressing anxieties about their own positions as collusive and coerced subjects.

This chapter introduces the effect and influence that Andrew Marvell had after his death in August 1678. Emerging as a posthumous hero of the emergent Whig party during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–1681, he is seen as a figure who greatly rocked the kingdom with his An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677). In this pamphlet, Marvell provided a close analysis of Parliamentary procedure in 1677 and political history during the previous ten years—all the while showing just how the government had been undermining English liberties, placing the blame on pro-Catholic courtiers led by the King's brother, James, Duke of York. The chapter goes on to narrate the fullness of Marvell's work and how this overall affected the political context of the country during its time.

This chapter addresses the afterlives of Miltonic texts, most obviously the ‘state letters’ that were prepared during the 1650s, by assessing their translation, re-publication, and polemical deployment during the Exclusion Crisis. It shows not just how continental history and politics could be utilized to comment on English affairs, but also that texts produced collaboratively by Whig exiles and Dutch printers serve to highlight the connection between print culture and Early Modern diplomacy. Indeed, it suggests that apparently inconsequential and undecipherable texts can be shown to have been deployed carefully and purposefully, not just in order to avoid censorship and censure, but also to engage with European affairs and transnational publics and advance a radical political agenda.

A series of treason trials highlighted the increasing concerns over the succession to the throne by a practicing Catholic, James Duke of York. After rescinding the Declaration of Indulgence in 1673, the Test Act required all office holders to receive Anglican communion and acknowledge the King as the head of the Church of England. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 increased the number of unlicensed printers and the amount of political propaganda for both sides. Plays and popular entertainments were carefully screened for political content as well as blasphemy.

This chapter begins with some consideration of the libertine anti-clericalism of court wits such as Rochester, but its principal points of focus are the career of John Dryden in the 1670s and 1680s, the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, and the rhetoric of atheism and religious imposture to which both whigs and tories resorted at this time. The structure of contemporary political argument provides the basis for new readings of Dryden’s anti-exclusionist satires, Absalom and Achitophel and The Medall, although some consideration is also given to the former poem’s allusions to the writings of John Milton, along with Dryden’s Miltonic adaptation, The State of Innocence. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther in their relation to the rapidly shifting ecclesiastical politics of the 1680s.