Bound
by these promises, he was welcomed back to England in 1660 and crowned
the following year. The reinstatement of the king was accompanied by a
general resumption by bishops and royalist nobles of their offices and
lands: things seemed to slip back into the old grooves. Charles II
dated his reign not from his actual accession but from his father's
death, and his first Parliament declared invalid all those acts and
ordinances passed since 1642 which it did not specifically confirm.
The history of constitutional government under the restored Stuarts is
a history of renewed financial and religious disputes. Charles II and
his younger brother and heir, Prince James, duke of York, alike adhered
to the political faith of their Stuart father and grandfather. Cousins
on their mother's side of Louis XIV of France, in whose court they had
been reared, they were more used to the practices of French absolutism
than to the peculiar customs of parliamentary government in England.
Unlike their father, who had been most upright in private life and most
loyal to the Anglican Church, both Charles and James had acquired from
their foreign environment at once a taste for vicious living and a
strong attachment to the Roman Catholic Church.
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