The use of anthropological methods and models to inform the conceptualization of social history is no longer a novelty by any means. Whereas the historian has long documented and interpreted the events and sometimes the material objects of past times, and placed them in causal relationships, in recent years anthropologists have helped historians to unveil the multiplicity of meaning in a particular sets of events or material objects. Common and effective applications of such collaboration have been made with regard to such concerns as kinship and marriage, the nature of personal honor, hospitality, and the ritualized expression of group identity. Yet historians have also employed an anthropological approach to the ritualistic or semiotic aspects of whole communities.

Conrad Russell has recently asked, not for the first time, how far the divided allegiances of members of the Long Parliament were anticipated in the parliaments of the 1620s. Many who sat as M.P.s in the third decade of the seventeenth century had died by the early 1640s, while not all those who still survived were either sufficiently vocal before 1629 or politically active after 1641 to be classifiable for the purposes of this exercise. Nevertheless, Professor Russell manages to assemble a small bloc of members whose earlier politico-religious sympathies and civil war alignments are both more or less known. This group of twenty-six men splits neatly 50:50 between Royalists and Parliamentarians. According to Russell, all that distinguished one from the other in the 1620s, and the sole effective predictor of their later allegiances, was religion. More specifically, the crucial variable turns out to be commitment to further godly reformation, strong in the case of future Parliamentarians, weak in the case of future Royalists. But for Russell's explicit rejection of any “supposed correlation between ‘Puritanism and Revolution,’” the casual reader might conclude that something resembling the Puritan Revolution was sneaking back into historio-graphical favor.

The prevailing view of Quakers in the Restoration era depicts them as a defeated movement no longer on the attack but henceforth under siege. They institutionalized, in the words of Richard Bauman, a strategy “of disengagement from the world's affairs” and embraced “a social policy founded on quietism.” Defeated politically, they were forced, according to this view, to relinquish their efforts to advance the cause of liberty “by militant, political means.” Thus the adoption of the peace principle as a hallmark of the Society of Friends emerged, according to Barry Reay, as a response to political defeat and as a stratagem for survival. This interpretation of Restoration Quakerism is similar in many respects to the stereotypical depiction of the Friends in terms of withdrawal and quiescence. I would like to suggest some modifications in this view by reexamining Quaker expectations at the Restoration, the Friends' involvement in political and legal matters, and the emergence and enforcement of the peace principle. The dominant characteristics of Restoration Quakerism are not withdrawal and quiescence but engagement and vigor.

“Friends, take heed of setting up that which God will throw down, lest you be found fighters against God.”

The nearly two decades comprising the period of the English Revolution were marked by a widespread interest in the timely appearance of the millennium, the thousand year period of Christ's promised earthly reign. From scholarly biblical studies of Daniel and Revelation to omens such as total eclipses of the sun and rumors of a Nottingham girl returning from the dead to warn a sinful world of approaching destruction, people in revolutionary England were bombarded with “evidence” of divine intervention and the expected arrival of the new kingdom. Parliament's victory in the English civil wars and its execution of Charles I in 1649 dramatically blew away the aura of divinity surrounding the monarchy and promised a new and glorious age. As they read prophecies in Revelation about a New Jerusalem where God would dry all tears and banish death, sorrow, and pain, enthusiasts of the seventeenth century anxiously looked for the Christ who promised, “Behold, I come quickly.” So prevalent were such notions that, as one authority has stressed, popular millenarianism seemed only a small step beyond received orthodoxy.

In 1965 Kingsley Martin, who had recently retired as editor of the New Statesman, published an article in Encounter entitled “Arguing with Keynes.” Although the self-serving memoir acknowledged Martin's admiration for “the swiftest and most powerful intellect that I have ever met,” it did little to enhance Keynes's reputation, revealing him as an apologist for Chamberlain's appeasement policy. Despite mutual respect, Keynes, the most active and certainly the most vociferous member of the New Statesman board of directors, regularly censured Martin for self-righteousness, complaining on one occasion that he was “perpetually engaged in conducting an indignation meeting.” After a dinner in 1945 at which Keynes castigated him for losing his “intellectual integrity,” the outraged editor retorted that he was “never again going to subject [himself] to [Keynes's] insults,” adding, “I understand now why people hate Maynard so much.”