The elaborate pageantry and festivities of grand public processions have proven to be of great interest to historians writing on late medieval and early modern Europe. The more limited ceremonies and protocol at court have attracted somewhat less attention, although on occasion they have been adopted as evidence of a monarch's personal feelings about his attendants and family members. A study of royal protocol and the social and political framework in which rulers fulfilled their roles as sovereigns is timely, for it will surely lead to a new and fuller understanding of how monarchs's public roles, such as those of the Tudors, related to their private motivations.

Greeting ceremonies, which were one aspect of the “law of hospitality,” require special attention, because they offer insights into the interactions of people of varying status who were of fundamental importance to the hierarchical communities of Europe. As Esther Goody points out, “Greeting becomes a mode of entering upon or manipulating a relationship in order to achieve a specific result.” How monarchs privately greeted their brides, the topic of this essay, not only offers insights into the complexity of the relationship of individuals who were wed by proxy before they had become acquainted, but also offers evidence of how the greeting ritual performed by monarchs differed from that enacted by their royal and noble relatives.

In the mid-1980s Stuart historians began a major re-evaluation of the restoration era. Among the principal themes are the period's unsettledness, the continuing impact of the radical tenets that had been manifested so forcefully in the mid-century upheavals, the significance of religion and ideology, and renewed debate over the origin of political parties. As I have suggested elsewhere, the period is most accurately conceived as a time of recurring crises of varying magnitude and duration. The first extended from Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658 to the passage of the Conventicle Act in 1664, the second from 1667 to the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, the third from the revelation of the spurious Popish Plot in 1678 to the repression of the Rye House schemers and the Monmouth/Russell/Essex cabal in 1683, the fourth the rebellions of the earl of Argyll and the duke of Monmouth in 1685, and the fifth the crisis that entailed the collapse of James II's regime and the constitutional settlement of 1689.

Bunyan lived through the first four periods of crisis and died amid the final one. It is appropriate to ask how this reinterpretation of the restoration period affects our interpretation of Bunyan. Elsewhere I have offered some suggestions, particularly with respect to the crisis of 1678–83 and our understanding of The Holy War, Of Antichrist and His Ruine, and Seasonable Counsel: or, Advice to Sufferers. This essay will focus on the crisis of 1667–73, the principal interpreter of which is Gary De Krey. For him this controversy at root entailed a crucial debate about liberty of conscience—a revival of the debate that in his judgment was central to the mid-century revolution. De Krey makes a compelling case for the significance of the debate in the period 1667–73 because it challenged many of the assumptions on which the restoration settlement was founded, including the limits of political authority, the relationship between church and Crown, and the rights and obligations of subjects. In their various assertions of the right of conscience, nonconformists rejected the restoration settlement by insisting on God's ultimate sovereignty in the spiritual realm and “the autonomy of the conscience as God's vicegerent in that sphere.” For them the issue was not parliamentary versus royal sovereignty—not least because the policy of persecution was parliamentary—but the sovereignty of the conscience against any persecutorial authority.

This article is intended as a sequel to that written in 1992 and published in Albion the following year (vol. 23, 2 [Fall 1993]: 419–41). It reflects the wealth of scholarship published in recent years, evidence, if any is needed, that the eighteenth century is far from dead; however, it is more than an update or appendix. One of the major problems with review articles and historiographical surveys is that they can range so far back in time that they seem to repeat the controversies of the past rather than to take sufficient note of those of the present or to point the way to those that may be imminent.

Too much historiographical work relates to long-published scholarship. Though this older work was important, surely less emphasis should be placed today on Butterfield and Namier. Not only do their studies appear dated or superseded; they are of interest from the point of how we have got to where we are, while no longer throwing much light on matters. The same is true of works that caused a splash when they appeared, but now seem very much of their time, such as John Brewer's Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (1976).

We are all devoured by time. One of the great pleasures of scholarship is that others come along and build on, revise, or reject our work. Thus, one of the advantages of writing a sequel is that adopting the historiographical longue durée is not necessary and going for the here and now is possible. As with my former essay, there is a powerful element of choice and subjectivity.

“…before I die I must know my beloved London again: for me it is the centre of civilization—tolerant, intelligent and completely out of control now, I hear”—Hanif Kureishi, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988)

“D'you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Bri. The game is up!”—Mike Leigh, Naked (1993)

In an essay published in 1969, Alastair Macintyre reflected upon the contradictory place of faith in the modern world, caught between absence and presence, absent because it is apparently no longer central to life, present because its structures still lie all around us. Macintyre suggests that it is at the moment when faith is lost that it becomes more easily, if trivially, incorporated into modern life: “[o]nly since the crisis of belief in the last century, however, has theism so emptied itself of any content that might affront us culturally that it has proved wholly assimilable.”

From the contemporary perspective, one might make the same observation of the secular creed of “Englishness.” It has been suggested that the post-1945 crisis of confidence in the pillars of that mythic “Englishness”—imperial greatness, economic strength, a uniform national and racial identity—can be set against the relatively easy and successful assimilation of past notions into perceptions of the present, perceived, for instance, in the “heritage” industry, whether in tourism or in film. If, as Macintyre remarks of faith in the modern world, we are saddled with “an identity that we can now neither fully recover nor yet quite disown,” it might be argued that England enjoys or endures the same predicament with regard to its national identity.