The years between 1667 and 1673 marked a crisis in the English Restoration. This crisis was produced by parliamentary consideration of an act to replace the expiring Conventicle Act of 1664. Hoping for relief from the provisions of the first act, dissenters in London and elsewhere were described by late 1667 as “mighty high and…expect[ing] to have their day now soon.” But having briefly experienced de facto religious freedom, the English nonconformists met with disappointment in 1670 when parliament adopted a second Conventicle Act. The act of 1670 reaffirmed the settlement of religion in an established Church protected by a coercive and persecuting state. Indeed, it offered the Church even greater security than the act of 1664. It provided for the distraint of the goods of those convicted of attending conventicles, and it established fines for justices and magistrates who failed to carry out its provisions. In renewing the policy of persecution, parliament also repudiated arguments made in public and in the prints, since the fall of the Earl of Clarendon, for such other ecclesiastical options as comprehension, toleration, and indulgence. The result of parliament's decision was a crisis—a period of confrontation, throughout the country, between the defenders of conscience and many magistrates charged with the enforcement of religious policy.

The Restoration period has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years, with the result that many of our commonly held assumptions about politics in the reign of Charles II have come under increased critical scrutiny. Nowhere is this more true than for the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent Tory Reaction. For a long time we thought we had the dynamics of this period worked out: the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two parties—the Whigs and Tories—with the Whigs being the anti-Catholic, exclusionist, and Parliamentarian party, who carried with them the support of the people out-of-doors, and the Tories being the party of divine-right, absolute monarchy, anti-populist in their outlook, putting their belief in the sanctity of the hereditary principle before the interests of the people. The Whig challenge was essentially defeated with the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, and thereafter the 1680s saw a drift towards monarchical absolutism, until this trend was defeated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.

Despite the initial welcome extended to him, Charles II returned to the English throne in 1660 accompanied by skepticism and even hostility from substantial numbers of his subjects. In the years immediately following the Restoration, the king, his government and the landed order, all uncertain of the extent of their power, strove together to define, reassert, and make it permanent. This was no easy task, in part because the messages of the Restoration were confusing. One was conciliatory, acknowledging that the events of the 1640s and 1650s could not be undone and had to be accommodated in some manner by the new regime. Legal proceedings under the republic were confirmed, passage of the Act of Indemnity signalled the eschewal of systematic revenge, and the retention of Interregnum officials, especially in local administration, deprived triumphant Anglican royalists of the monopoly of power and office for which they had hoped. The other message was conveyed in harsher terms. In many places and from many institutions, adherents of the revolutionary regime did lose their positions, while followers of recently-respectable creeds were now cast as enemies of the state and good order. The new monarchical order held no brief for republicans, and many dissenters of no very radical stripe were quickly placed beyond an official pale because they could not accept a prayer-book order in the church. In the early years of the Restoration, then, policies of accommodation coexisted with those of repression, and we may well ask how in these circumstances an enduring regime was reconstructed.