In Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, Erin Peters seeks to uncover the ways in which the Restoration regime and its supporters navigated this tension, paying particular attention to their various attempts to use printed material to prescribe which aspects of the turbulent recent past should be remembered, and how, and which were best consigned to oblivion. The monarchy may have been restored, but all was not as it had been before, and the new regime was faced with a tricky balancing act between the competing impulses of retribution and reconciliation, commemoration and oblivion, remembering and forgetting. However, in spite of the apparently jubilant reception of his subjects, upon his return Charles was confronted with a difficult political situation: on the one hand, the King owed his restoration to a broad coalition of support – including members of the army, Presbyterians, and moderate revolutionaries – while on the other hand, many royalists who had fought for Charles I and suffered during the years of Interregnum anticipated that the tables would now turn, and they would be able to reap revenge on their erstwhile enemies. (1) His restoration to the throne marked the end of the 11 years of republican rule that had followed his father’s execution on 30 January 1649. On 25 May he landed at Dover, where according to the diarist Samuel Pepys, he was greeted with ‘all imaginable love and respect’, the ‘shouting and joy’ expressed by the crowds ‘past imagination’. In the spring of 1660, Charles Stuart set sail for England after almost ten years in exile on the continent. Erin Peters, Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1667 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 184 pp., ISBN: 978-4-2, £52.99

Oblivion content restoration project