Raising the Dead to Die Again: The English Restoration and the Transformation of Memory

When King Charles II of England returned to his throne in 1660, his supporters pretended that the very idea of “Restoration” was a formality. He had been king, it was said, since his father’s execution in 1649, despite his exile in France. The Restoration was a pseudo-resurrection in which the deceased had only been sleeping. Yet the King’s father had died at the scaffold, and he was joined by dozens of his supporters after various ill-fated uprisings. And Charles II, who barely escaped with his life after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, was fully aware of the enormous amount of luck that had returned him to power.

The royalist presses had remained warm during the decade of exile, with pamphlets enshrining each Royalist revolt as a service to Charles. Now in the hands of the establishment once again, print shops produced “Royall Maryrologies,” which often included pictures of the men who had died for the King. Meanwhile the scaffolds now held the bodies of the regicides themselves, some of whom, like Cromwell, were already dead, dragged from the grave only to “die” again. The King presented this moment as punishment for crimes far more effectively than Parliament had presented the death of Charles I, whose memory only warmed after death. This paper assesses the legitimization of monarchical authority through the contested interpretations of martyrs and traitors. By extension it will also consider the ways that “resurrections” are constructed to alter popular memory, especially in the establishment of power.