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The Restoration Period Facts & Worksheets

The Restoration Period was the years that followed after the return of the Stuart king, Charles II.

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The Stuart monarchy was restored in the Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile. The preceding period of the Protectorate and Civil Wars was dubbed the Interregnum (1649–1660). The term Restoration is also used to describe the years that followed when a new political settlement was established.

See the fact file below for more information on the Restoration Period, or you can download our 27-page Restoration Period worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

BACKGROUND

  • The monarchy was replaced by Republican rule in May 1660. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, Parliament abolished the monarchy and established a republic led by Oliver Cromwell. The Republic lasted only a few years after its founder died peacefully in his bed in 1658.
  • Cromwell was succeeded by his son, Richard, who quickly demonstrated that he lacked his father’s qualities and personality. He did not receive the necessary support, and it was not long before nobles plotted the return of Charles I’s exiled son, Charles II, to claim the throne.

THE PROTECTORATE

  • From 1653 to 1659, the English government was known as the Protectorate. Following King Charles I’s execution, England was declared a commonwealth (1649) under the rule of Parliament.
  • However, after dissolving the Rump and Barebones parliaments in succession in 1653, Oliver Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland on December 16, 1653, under the authority of the Instrument of Government, a constitution drafted by a group of army officers.
  • The Protectorate, as Cromwell’s government is now known, was continued by his son Richard after his death on September 3, 1658, until the latter resigned from office on May 25, 1659, when Parliament’s resumption of power served only as a prelude to the Restoration of Charles II.

RULE OF OLIVER CROMWELL

  • Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was a British general and statesman who led the New Model Army against King Charles I during the English Civil War, first as a subordinate and later as Commander-in-Chief, later ruling the British Isles as Lord Protector from 1653 until he died in 1658.

RULE OF OLIVER CROMWELL

  • Cromwell and his Council of State passed more than 80 ordinances enacting a constructive domestic policy before summoning his first Protectorate Parliament on September 3, 1654. His goal was to reform the law, establish a Puritan Church, allow toleration outside the church, and promote education and a decentralized administration.
  • The lawyers’ opposition dampened his enthusiasm for legal reform, but he was able to appoint good judges in England and Ireland.
  • The committees known as Triers and Ejectors were formed during his Protectorate to ensure that the clergy and schoolmasters maintained a high standard of conduct. Despite opposition from some members of his council, Cromwell allowed Jews back into the country. 
  • He was an excellent chancellor of Oxford University, founded a college at Durham, and ensured that grammar schools flourished as they had never done before.

Foreign and economic policies

  • Cromwell brought the Anglo-Dutch War to a satisfactory conclusion in 1654, which he had always despised as a contest between fellow Protestants. The question of how best to employ his army and navy arose. 
  • His Council of State was divided, but he ultimately decided to form an alliance with France against Spain. 
  • He dispatched an amphibious expedition to the Spanish West Indies, and Jamaica was conquered in May 1655.
  • He obtained control of the port of Dunkirk in exchange for sending an expeditionary force to fight alongside the French in Spanish Flanders. 
  • He was also interested in Scandinavian affairs, which led to his attempt to mediate in the Baltic for the benefit of his own country.

KING CHARLES II RETURNS

  • After crossing from the Netherlands, Charles II landed at Dover in Kent on May 25, 1660. On his 30th birthday, he marched into London unopposed.
  • Much of what had been suppressed under the Republic was resurrected by Charles. Theaters quickly reopened, the Church of England was restored, and all manner of entertainment flourished.
  • In retaliation for his father’s death, Charles II had Oliver Cromwell’s body exhumed the following year. His body was chained and thrown into a pit, and his severed head was displayed outside Westminster Hall for several decades.
  • For the most part, Charles II pardoned anyone who was not directly involved in his father’s execution.
  • Some feared that the city would be plagued if the monarch changed. When this did not happen, many people assumed that God was pleased with a return to the natural order of things.

KING CHARLES II

  • Charles II, also known as The Merry Monarch, was the King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1660 to 1685. After years of exile during the Puritan Commonwealth, he was restored to the throne.
  • His political adaptability and understanding of men enabled him to steer his country through the Anglican, Catholic, and Dissenter conflicts that dominated much of his reign.
  • His early years were unremarkable, but by the age of 20, the harsh lessons of defeat in the Civil War against the Puritans, followed by isolation and poverty, completely overshadowed his conventional education.

RESTORATION SETTLEMENT

  • The unqualified nature of the settlement that emerged between 1660 and 1662 owed little to Charles’ intervention and must have exceeded his expectations.
  • He was bound by his father’s concessions in 1640 and 1641, but the Parliament elected in 1661 was set on an uncompromising, Anglican and royalist settlement. 
  • The Militia Act of 1661 granted Charles unprecedented authority to maintain a standing army, and the Corporation Act of 1661 empowered him to purge dissident officials from the boroughs.
  • Other legislation restricted the press and public assembly, and the 1662 Act of Uniformity established educational controls. 
  • The chief beneficiaries of Charles II’s restoration were an exclusive body of Anglican clergy and a well-armed landed gentry.
  • However, there were vexing constraints on Charles’ independence within this narrow structure of upper-class loyalty. His attempts to extend religious toleration to his nonconformist and Roman Catholic subjects were sharply rebuffed in 1663, and the House of Commons was to thwart the more generous impulses of his religious policy throughout his reign.
  • His financial independence was hampered by a more pervasive and damaging limitation. The Parliament granted the king an estimated annual income of £1,200,000. However, Charles had to wait many years before his revenues produced such a sum, by which time the damage caused by debt and discredit was irreversible. 
  • Charles lacked thrift and found it difficult to turn down petitioners.
  • With the costly disasters of the Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–1667, the restored king’s reputation plummeted to its lowest point. 
  • His valiant efforts to save London during the Great Fire of September 1666 were insufficient to compensate for the incompetence and maladministration that led to England’s naval defeat in June 1667.

FOREIGN POLICY OF CHARLES

  • Charles cleared the air by dismissing his old adviser, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and attempting to assert himself through a more daring foreign policy. His reign had so far made only minor contributions to England’s commercial advancement. 
  • The Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, prompted by the rise of the Dutch carrying trade as a threat to British shipping, were valuable extensions of Cromwell’s policies, and the capture of New York in 1664 was one of his few victories over the Dutch.
  • However, while his marriage to Princess Catherine of Braganza of Portugal in 1662 brought him Tangier and Bombay, they were less strategic than Dunkirk, which he sold to Louis XIV in 1662. Charles, on the other hand, was willing to make significant sacrifices for his young cousin’s alliance. 
  • He had direct contact with the French court through his sister Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans, and it was through her that he negotiated the startling reversal of the Protestant Triple Alliance (England, the Dutch United Provinces, and Sweden) of 1668.
  • The so-called Secret Treaty of Dover, signed in May 1670, not only united England and France in an offensive alliance against the Dutch, but Charles also promised to announce his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
  • If he enraged his subjects, he was assured of French military and financial support. Charles made certain that the treaty’s conversion clause was not made public.

COMMONWEALTH REGICIDES AND REBELS

  • The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which became law on August 29, 1660, pardoned all previous treason against the crown, but specifically excluded those involved in Charles I’s trial and execution. Thirty-one of the 59 commissioners (judges) who had signed the death warrant in 1649 were still alive. 
  • The regicides were pursued; some escaped, but the majority were apprehended and tried. Three of them fled to the American colonies. After American independence, New Haven, Connecticut, named streets after Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell to honor them as forefathers of the American Revolution.
  • In the subsequent trials, twelve people were sentenced to death. The Fifth Monarchist Thomas Harrison, who had been the 17th of the 59 commissioners to sign the death warrant, was the first regicide to be hanged, drawn, and quartered because the new government still saw him as a real threat to the re-established order.

CULTURE DURING THE RESTORATION PERIOD

  • For some, King Charles II’s restoration in 1660 resulted in a painful revaluation of the political hopes and millenarian expectations fostered by two decades of civil war and republican government. 
  • Others were inspired to celebrate kingship and even to interpret the events of the new reign as signs of a divinely ordained scheme of things.
  • The term Restoration literature refers to the literature of those who belonged to, or aspired to belong to, Charles II’s restored court culture—the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” as Alexander Pope put it later.  
  • This identification was intended to allow Pope’s contemporaries to view the Restoration as a period of excess and licentiousness.
  • However, Puritans and Republicans had not vanished. With the Act of Uniformity (1662) and the Test Act (1673), Protestants who did not adhere to the Church of England were barred from holding most public offices. 
  • Nonetheless, they constituted a significant body of opinion within the country. They were also to make a significant contribution to the intellectual life of the country over the next century.
  • Dissent was muted or concealed in the early years following Charles II’s return. With the restoration of effective censorship, ambitiously heterodox ideas in theology and politics that had found their way freely into print during the 1640s and ’50s were denied publication once more.
  • For former Commonwealth supporters, the experience of defeat took time to absorb, and new strategies had to be devised to meet the challenges in hostile times. 
  • During the reigns of Charles II and James II, much caustic and libelous political satire was written and circulated anonymously and widely in manuscripts (due to repressive legal constraints on printing).

The Restoration Period Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle that includes everything you need to know about the Restoration Period across 27 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use worksheets that are perfect for teaching kids about the Restoration Period, which was the years that followed after the return of the Stuart king, Charles II.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.

  1. The Restoration Period Facts
  2. Documentary Analysis
  3. Trivia
  4. How To Be A Leader
  5. Then and Now
  6. Sequence of Events
  7. Economic Impact
  8. Picture Analysis
  9. Reading Comprehension
  10. Paint My Word
  11. Man of the Hour

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Restoration period known for?

The time period refers to when James II was king (1685-88). People during this time traded a lot with other countries, there were wars between England and the Netherlands, and people started to enjoy going to the theater and reading books more.

How did the Restoration start?

Monck arranged to have Charles II restored in England, under the condition that there would be religious tolerance for his former enemies. In 1660, Charles landed at Dover and four days later triumphantly entered London.

Who are the most important people during the Restoration period?

Some of the most popular writers during the Restoration were Aphra Behn, John Dryden, John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester, Samuel Pepys, William Wycherly, and Margaret Cavendish.

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Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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