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The Civil War, or the War of Three Kingdoms, ended with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, but the society to which Charles II was heir in 1660 was very different from the one his grandfather, James I, had come from Scotland to rule in 1603. The terms of modern life were formulated during this period, even though they were only partially and inconsistently realized. They helped to shape these essentially modern institutions: a representative government under law, a market economy fueled by concentrations of capital, and a class system determined by wealth and the power it conferred. They supported a culture in which extreme and opposing points of view were usual. Milton's republican Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) was followed by Thomas Hobbes's defense of absolute rule, The Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651). Hobbes rejected the assumption that had determined all previous political thought—based on Aristotle's idea that man was naturally sociable—by characterizing the natural condition of human life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." A civil state, said Hobbes, depended on the willingness of each and every citizen to relinquish all his or her rights to the sovereign, which is the Commonwealth. The vigorous language of Puritan sermons, preached and published during the 1640s and 1650s, underlay such topical writing as Oliver Cromwell's letters from his campaign to subdue Ireland on behalf of Parliament, the Leveller John Lilburne's pamphlets supporting the common man (for God, he wrote, "doth not choose many rich, nor many wise"), and the corantoes, newsbooks, and Diurnalls of the period. These new forms would eventually lead to the sophisticated commentary of eighteenth-century journalism. Nationalism, however problematic, was registered in history and epic, as well as in attempts to colonize the Americas and to subdue the Gaelic peoples to the west and the north. Irish poems supporting the Stuarts and lamenting the losses of the Cromwellian wars would become rallying cries in the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nationalist risings against English control, eventually to result in Ireland's inclusion in the 1801 Union of Great Britain. Intellectual thought, mental attitudes, religious practices, and the customs of the people fostered new relations to the past and a new sense of self. While Milton was perhaps the greatest humanist of his time, able to read and write Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, his contemporaries witnessed the disappearance of the culture of Petrarch, Erasmus, and More—humanists who had fashioned the disciplines of humanism. Much seventeenth-century literature reflected personal experience; the diary of Ralph Josselin, a prosperous country squire, and the printed testimony of the trial of Anna Trapnel, a Quaker woman accused of witchcraft, convey the details of social life with an immediacy that avoids the studied figures of earlier Renaissance prose. Such personal reckonings are comparable to the spiritual interiority revealed in John Bunyan's allegorical novel about his conversion to faith in God, The Pilgrim's Progress, and the first-person narrative of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the story of a sailor shipwrecked on an island somewhere off the coast of South America, which was actually modeled on the history of a Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk, who was similarly marooned. As more particularized portraits of individual life emerged, new philosophical trends promoted abstract figurations of the world. The modern organization of Europe was based on new modes of representation, such as schematic outlines of arguments, the grids sectioning the world maps of Gerardus Mercator (facilitating the circumnavigation of the globe), and the discourses of political economy characterized by an interest in quantitative analysis. Shortly after the Restoration of Charles II, the Royal Academy of Science would form "a committee for improving the English language," an attempt to design a universal grammar and an ideal philosophical language. This project, inspired by the intellectual reforms of Francis Bacon, would have been uncongenial to the skeptical casts of mind exhibited by Erasmus and More. The abstract rationalism of the new science, the growth of an empire overseas, a burgeoning industry and commerce at home, and a print culture spreading news throughout Europe and across the Atlantic would continue to be features of life in the British Isles through the eighteenth century.
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