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It is the object of this section to explore the impact of the Restoration upon local office-holding and the structure of local patronage in Hampshire, drawing some comparisons with the 1650s. The Restoration government stood in a very different relationship with the provinces from its Interregnum predecessors. With the wide support of the landed classes, it lacked the incentive to use patronage to win over enemies. There was considerable freedom of choice over who was appointed. But the government was also heir to the partisan attitudes engendered by the Civil War, and was just as interested in the loyalty of local office-holders as its Interregnum predecessors had been. The Restoration government, even before the election of the Cavalier Parliament, tended to rely on men of proven loyalty, and in many cases with royalist pasts, to perform important tasks in Hampshire. The lieutenancy was a more compact, more carefully hand-picked, and no less partisan body than the militia commissioners of the 1650s. Lord Treasurer Southampton, the lord lieutenant, was one of the more conciliatory of former royalists, but four out of his six deputies had been active royalists, and the fifth was the son of a royalist. Richard Norton was the isolated, one is tempted to say token, former parliamentarian. The same partisan spirit is discernible in the appointment of officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The king's flight and its aftermath provoked confusion rather than consensus amongst the ruling elites of Hampshire. Richard Norton probably spoke for many when he wrote to the earl of Dartmouth in amazement soon after the king's first departure: ‘Oh, unhappy man to follow such counsel, the like was never or will be in story, a king with a great army driven out of his kingdom by a lesser army without fighting.’ The Convention Parliament of 1689 would settle James' fate. But the Revolution of 1688–9 far from uniting Hampshire's elites, merely contributed further to their political fragmentation, as different groups and interests reacted to central events. Personal ambition and rivalry were very apparent in the elections to the Convention, in which four of the county's boroughs experienced contests, and three gentlemen competed for one of the county seats in February 1689 after Lord William Paulet, who had been elected with his elder brother Lord Wiltshire, took the unusual step of deciding to sit for Winchester, where he had also been elected. Sir Robert Holmes was able to use his position as coroner of the Isle of Wight to defend his interest there, in the face of strong opposition. He lost control of Newport to the local gentry, but retained the nomination in the other two boroughs, having himself returned for Yarmouth and two officials Lord Ranelagh and Thomas Done for Newtown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English politics in the decade which followed the revelation of the Popish Plot in the autumn of 1678 were characterized by confusion and crisis. These hectic years saw the break-up of one opposition, the country coalition of the 1670s, a rallying to the Crown in the early 1680s and the dissipation of this support and the creation of a new opposition by James II, in the latter part of the decade. The stronger central government became under Charles II, the more positive support it obtained in the localities, and conversely the weakness and unpopularity of James' regime grew simultaneously. More centralized and authoritarian government was not necessarily unpopular in the provinces of England and independence of provincial opinion as enjoyed by James II, far from being an asset, was merely a symptom of the decadence of his regime. The revelation of the Popish Plot seems to have caused genuine panic in some parts of Hampshire, and in the winter of 1678–9 the country coalition looked formidable. In the attack on Danby, the opposition could deploy the accumulated local and personal resentments against his ministry. Indeed, some office-holders connected with Hampshire such as Sir Robert Howard and Sir Robert and Sir John Holmes voted for Danby's impeachment in the last days of the Cavalier Parliament. As the old Parliament gave way to a general election early in 1679, several opposition leaders were involved in promoting like-minded candidates in Hampshire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DEFENCE AND INTERNAL SECURITY The atmosphere of conspiracy between 1678 and 1683, followed by the rebellions of 1685, and their suppression, and the Dutch invasion of 1688 gave central government ample cause to be involved in managing defence and security arrangements at local, especially in strategically vital areas like the Solent. Though the means changed over the period, both Charles II and James II insisted on keeping these arrangements under their own control. On 30 November 1678, Charles rejected a militia bill on the grounds that it would take the militia out of his control, which he would not tolerate even for half an hour. Over the next seven years, control over the personnel and activities of local lieutenancies remained strong. J. H. Plumb has written about the country gentry that ‘in the last resort they controlled the militia’. During the 1680s, many gentry had cause to wish that this were true. In fact, ultimate control over the militia lay with the Crown. The gentry were powerless to prevent James II's move to reliance on a standing army to meet defence and security needs, indeed, Professor Schwoerer has written of the majority of the gentry in the 1685 Parliament: ‘It may be argued that if James had asked for a standing army officered by Protestants, he could probably have won it from this Parliament.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central government during the 1680s in England has attracted considerable scholarly interest over the years and yet there is much about its relationship with the localities that is still obscure. This is partly because of the inordinate amount of attention which has been directed towards the necessarily ambiguous motivations of kings and such elusive còncepts as ‘absolutism’. This is surprising, as all historians agree that an absolute monarchy was not established in England in the 1680s, and Dr Miller has recently questioned whether the concept is a useful one in this particular context. Equally all historians agree that the 1680s did see the rise of a stronger more authoritarian central government in Britain, but the discussion about the impact of successive regimes upon the country has been circumscribed and little of the surviving local evidence has been tapped to answer crucial questions about the period which have hardly yet been formulated. For example, it is still unclear to what extent local government continued to function in the period 1687–9 under the strain of successive purges and re-instatements. The relationship between localism and the opposition to James II has not been explained in any depth, and it is hard on the basis of present knowledge to generalize intelligently about the continuities and contrasts between this period and those which preceded and followed it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Restoration was probably the single most popular political event of the seventeenth century in England. Public jubilation in 1660 is well attested in most contemporary sources and their accounts do not need to be re-iterated here. Suffice it to say that Hampshire was no exception to the national pattern. Many people turned out for the proclamation of Charles II at Winchester, and showed ‘greate joy and rejoycing’. Four thousand people including all the gentry joined in the celebrations in the Isle of Wight. It is hard to determine the exact grounds for the popular enthusiasm for the restored monarchy. Some of it at least may have stemmed from false expectations as to what its rule would actually bring. Before the Restoration, Marchamont Nedham had attributed popular royalism to a belief that Charles II's return would mean ‘Peace and no taxes’. On both counts the people were to be rudely disillusioned. Those who expected less government would also have been disillusioned. As has been seen hitherto in this part, the restoration of traditional institions such as the Exchequer, the lieutenancy and the episcopate did not herald a retreat of central government from involvement in the localities or a decline in effective government generally; in fact quite the reverse was the case. The Restoration in some respects saw a re-assertion of central control after the troubled years of the Interregnum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DEFENCE AND INTERNAL SECURITY The Restoration saw changes in the structure of local defence and security arrangements. But these should not distract attention from the fact that the Restoration government was just as involved in the provinces for these purposes as its Interregnum predecessors had been, at least for the first seven years of Charles II's reign. The government was equally capable of interfering in the localities to ensure its own safety and was in many ways more successful in the policies which it pursued than the regimes of the 1650s. In the years which immediately followed the Restoration, the hand-picked lieutenancy in Hampshire was plied with detailed instructions from the Privy Council. These concerned the mustering of militia, the observation, disarming and detention of those disaffected to the government, and the suppression of false news. Though the earl of Southampton was confined to London by government business or illness, his deputy-lieutenants were not simply left to their own devices, but were expected to return detailed accounts of their proceedings to Southampton and the Privy Council, a requirement which they gladly fulfilled. This stream of orders, which slowed down somewhat between 1663 and the outbreak of the second Dutch War, thereafter resumed until peace was concluded, with a new emphasis on the defence of the coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DEFENCE AND INTERNAL SECURITY In accounting for the Rump's failure to develop imaginative domestic policies, Professor Underdown has succinctly summarized its main casues: Defence against the Commonwealth's enemies, internal and external, was necessarily their first priority; this meant dealing with Ireland, Scotland, the French, Royalists in and outside the country, and finally, overwhelmingly, the Dutch war. It meant the militia, the navy, and foreign policy. Much of the government's involvement in the provinces was now concerned with defence and security. Even when the Council of State turned its attention to poverty, it is not hard to detect a concern for internal security motivating the initiatives it took. In July 1651, the Council of State wrote to the mayor and aldermen of Portsmouth, ordering them to relieve and find employment for the growing number of poor in the town. But this was not part of a coherent social policy. The Council made no attempt to conceal the fact that its concern arose solely from the potential threat which growing poverty posed to the security of the garrison. Though its enemies changed slightly, the government's main concerns did not greatly alter under the Protectorate. Even spectacular initiatives, like the major-generals' experiment, were primarily concerned with internal security. The major-generals' militia was part of a retrenchment scheme designed to sustain the reduction of the tax burden on at least those members of the landowning classes who had not fought against Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is extremely difficult to measure attitudes and reactions of people in the provinces to central government during the 1650s. This is partly a problem of evidence: for many places the silence is impenetrable. But there are also problems with interpreting the evidence that there is. For Professor Underdown, ‘There is no great mystery about the politics of the elite’ in this period, and yet his own pioneering interpretation of the subject has been questioned in the light of recent research. Underdown concedes that there is more difficulty in gauging popular opinion. In Hampshire, as in other counties in the period, treasonable activities were the preserve of only a small minority at least before 1659. Twenty-five obscure gentlemen and others from Hampshire were taken prisoner in the west, in the wake of Penruddock's Rising in 1655. Even treasonable words were rare, or at least were rarely reported. There were only six presentments or indictments for seditious or libellous words at Hampshire quarter sessions between Easter 1646 and Michaelmas 1660. Despite the difficulties of the evidence, many historians have argued that Interregnum governments were unpopular in the provinces, and have in turn attributed this unpopularity mainly to their supposed commitment to centralization and the extensive military presence. Unfortunately there is no commonly agreed definition of centralization and detailed local studies of the military presence and military–civilian relations are still few. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local office-holding was clearly vital to the relationship between central government and the localities. Nomination to office at county level lay with central government, but it was up to those named to decide whether to serve the state in the office to which they had been appointed. The Civil Wars, Pride's Purge and the establishment of the republic rendered the situation one of unprecedented complexity, with ambivalent and ambiguous motivations existing side by side within both Whitehall and local society. Yet the evidence of appointments in local government has been used to assess the commitment of members of central government in this period to the conciliation of their erstwhile opponents and the creation of a lasting political settlement; and a willingness on the part of these opponents to serve at the local level has been seen as signifying a wider acceptance of the permanence of Interregnum regimes. Conversely, the new resources of the state, notably in the military and revenue establishments brought into existence by the Civil Wars, may be seen as providing central government with unpopular but effective levers in local administration, overcoming entrenched elites and interests. Paradoxically, Hampshire seems to conform neither to the conciliation nor the centralization model. As will be demonstrated below, the impact of Interregnum governments upon office-holding in the county was far from clear-cut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of early modern England no longer need to apologize for devoting considerable attention to the localities. In recent decades, local studies have provided vital insights into the origins and course of the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the Civil Wars of the seventeenth. However, for some obscure reason, until recently this approach has not been extended to the decades of the seventeenth century after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Historians already established in the field of Restoration politics have acknowledged the significance of the local dimension, but have done little to follow this up with local research. Other scholars have not been so coy and the last few years have seen the appearance of several important local studies which extend beyond the previously hallowed watershed of 1660. However, this is the first such study to make centre–local relations rather than local administration and society its principal theme. Central involvement in the localities after the mid-century and especially after the Restoration has been widely ignored and underestimated by historians, with a resultant distortion in current views of the Restoration regime. Local reactions to central government and its policies have fared little better for the same period. The intention of this present study is to go some way towards redressing the historiographical balance. But even while shifting to a slightly later period, it is difficult to throw off the influence of the local historians of the early Stuart period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]