In general, the more autonomous coercive power a party has in the revolution (as military bodies often have), the more precarious the balance between the bargains proposed by the new regime and what they can expect by continued revolution. Each party to the Restoration (or other government-creating bargain) had to balance the uncertainties of trying to continue the revolution and trying to get in on a stable regime being bargained out. The passage gives a synopsis of the difficulties of finding a set of bargains among the interests contending in a revolution and a reliable apparatus to enforce them, of adapting those bargains thereafter to changing circumstances, and so of stably regenerating the authority of the government being created. The restoration of a banished family, concerning whom they knew little, and what they knew not entirely to their satisfaction with ruined, perhaps revengeful, followers the returning ascendance of a distressed party, who had sustained losses that could not be repaired without fresh changes of property, injuries that could not be atoned without fresh severities the conflicting pretensions of two churches-one loth to release its claim, the other to yield its possession the unsettled dissensions between crown and parliament all seemed pregnant with such difficulties, that prudent men could hardly look forward to the impending revolution without some hesitation and anxiety.
As the moment approached, men turned their attention more to the obstacles and dangers that lay in their way. Veryone spoke of the King's restoration as imminent, yet none could distinctly perceive by what means it would be effected, and much less how the difficulties of such a settlement could be overcome. Writing on the Restoration of Charles II coming in 1660, after the death of Oliver Cromwell, Hallam, a historian sensitive to the “defensible claims” of parties to the English Revolution, described the problem of constructing a government as follows ( Hallam 1854 2:286–87, footnotes omitted):
This article is one of 13 articles in the Domestic Political Violence and Civil War compilation.
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