Introduction

Summary

This volume contains the text of the first 457 pages of volume P of Roger Morrice's Entring Book. This portion of the Entring Book chronicles the last eight years of Charles II's reign. Its entries cover the tumultuous years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, the last sessions of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, which had first convened in 1661 and was finally dissolved in 1679, the three short-lived ‘Exclusion Parliaments’ of 1679, 1680–1, and 1681, and the backlash against Whigs and Nonconformists in the early 1680s. In these pages we can trace the offensive against the Whig leadership in 1681 ; the mounting campaign against Nonconformists and their conventicles, preachers, and printers ; the quo warranto proceedings against London and other corporations ; the show trials of the Catholic Lord Stafford, the Whig Stephen College, and the republican Algernon Sidney ; and the alarm caused by news of the 1679 rising in Scotland and the 1683 Rye House Plot. Morrice recounts in detail parliamentary and civic politics, the legal machinations of the government and its opponents, the petitions, tracts, and sermons that fuelled the ‘talk of the town’, and innumerable incidental occurrences from murders to births. Yet this first section of the Entring Book is something more than a chronicle of public events however widely defined. It also appears at different times to be a notebook, a newsletter, or a documentary scrapbook.

From the outset this volume poses questions about its real character and purpose. The cryptic shorthand note on p8 hints at the possibility of this being a later compilation or recension of notes that we might otherwise judge from their vivid present tense to be contemporaneous with the events they recount. The first 250 pages especially are puzzling : the contents are diverse and disorderly, sheets are missing, and the pagination is aberrant. The second half of the volume seems to reflect a more settled and purposeful composition with regular entries and, it appears, a continuous scribal hand.