A Whig Apocalypse: Astrology, Millenarianism, and Politics in England During the Restoration Crisis, 1678–1683

Abstract

The ideological nature of Restoration politics, particularly in the period from the Popish Plot in 1678 to the Revolution settlement in 1689, has recently been a much-debated subject among historians. The traditional interpretation was one of a Whig-Tory split beginning with, and originally centering on, the issue of the Exclusion from the succession of the King’s Catholic brother James, Duke of York, with Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, providing leadership to the Whigs. This position, set forth in J.R. Jones’s The First Whigs and K.H.D. Haley’s The First Earl of Shaftesbury, has been challenged by Jonathan Scott and Mark Knights who, to use Scott’s terminology, see a larger crisis of “Popery and Arbitrary government” — a “Restoration Crisis” — provoked by the triumph of the European Counter-Reformation in which Exclusion was simply one of a number of solutions put forward and Shaftesbury one of a number of Whig leaders.1 Students of popular politics such as Tim Harris and Gary de Krey have also focused on issues of Catholicism and authoritarian government.2 However, all of this work has a common feature in its dependence on a narrow view of early modern political culture. As opposed to work on the English Revolution of the mid-century, which has recovered such discourses as ancient prophecy, political astrology, and sacral monarchy, scholarly analysis of the “Restoration Crisis,” which for purposes of this paper I am defining as the period between the Plot in 1678 to the culmination of the establishment of Tory control in 1683, has portrayed politics in a cool and secular, “Lockean,” light.3 Even studies specifically on Whig ideology and propaganda, such as Harris’s and De Krey’s studies of London politics or Richard Ashcraft’s work on John Locke, have not, in my opinion, fully plumbed those aspects of the motivations of the Whigs, particularly the religious motivations, that seem less rational in the twentieth century.4 Dependence on less than the full range of sources, and in particular ignoring almanacs, prognostications, and other astrological and millenarian works, has also impoverished our picture of the controversy.