At daybreak, English Army Colonel George Monck, with two brigades of troops from his Scottish occupational force, fords the River Tweed at Coldstream in Scotland to cross the Anglo-Scottish border at Northumberland, with a mission of advancing toward London to end military rule of England by General John Lambert and to accomplish the English Restoration, the return of the monarchy to England. By the end of the day, he and his soldiers have gone 15 mi (24 km) through knee-deep snow to Wooler while the advance guard of cavalry had covered 50 mi (80 km) to reach Morpeth.[1][2]
At the same time, rebels within the New Model Army under the command of Colonel Thomas Fairfax take control of York and await the arrival of Monck's troops.[3]
Samuel Pepys, a 36-year-old member of the Parliament of England, begins keeping a diary that later provides a detailed insight into daily life and events in 17th century England. He continues until May 31, 1669, when worsening eyesight leads him to quit. .[4] Pepys starts with a preliminary note, "Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe-yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three." For his first note on "January 1. 1659/60 Lords-day", he notes "This morning (we lying lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other clothes but them," followed by recounting his attendance at the Exeter-house church in London.[5]
January 6 – The Rump Parliament passes a resolution requesting Colonel Monck to come to London "as speedily as he could", followed by a resolution of approval on January 12 and a vote of thanks and annual payment of 1,000 pounds sterling for his lifetime on January 16.[6]
January 11 – Colonel Monck and Colonel Fairfax rendezvous at York and then prepare to proceed southward toward London. gathering deserters from Lambert's army along the way.[3]
January 16 – With 4,000 infantry and 1,800 cavalry ("an army sufficient to overawe, without exciting suspicion"),[6] Colonel Monck marches southward toward Nottingham, with a final destination of London. Colonel Thomas Morgan is dispatched back to Scotland with two regiments of cavalry to reinforce troops there.
January 31 – The Rump Parliament confirms the promotion of Colonel George Monck to the rank of General and he receives the commission of rank while at St Albans.[1]
February 3 – General George Monck, at the head of his troops, enters London on horseback, accompanied by his principal officers and the commissioners of the Rump Parliament. Bells ring as they pass but the crowds in the streets are unenthusiastic and the troops are "astonished at meeting with so different a reception to that which they had received elsewhere during their march.".[6][7]
February 26 – The Rump Parliament, under pressure from General Monck, votes to call back all of the surviving members of the group of 231 MPs who had been removed from the House of Commons in 1648 so that the Long Parliament can be reassembled long enough for a full Parliament to approve elections for a new legislative body.[3]
March 3 – General John Lambert, who had attempted to stop the Restoration, is arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He escapes on April 9 but is recaptured on April 24. Though spared the death penalty for treason in 1662, he remains incarcerated on the island of Guernsey for the rest of his life until his death at age 64 on March 1, 1684.[8]
March 16 – The Long Parliament, after having been reassembled for the first time in more than 11 years, votes for its own dissolution and calls for new elections for what will become the Convention Parliament to make the return from republic to monarchy.[3]
April 25 – The Convention Parliament, a new House of Commons for England, freely elected with no requirement for candidates to swear loyalty to the Commonwealth of England, assembles in London to work out the restoration of the monarchy.[3]
May 1 – The Convention Parliament votes to welcome the Declaration of Breda and unanimously approves a resolution for England declaring that "according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by Kings, Lords and Commons."[3]
May 23 – With the way cleared for his return to England, King Charles II ends his exile at the Hague in the Netherlands and departs from Scheveningen harbor on the English ship Naseby, renamed for the occasion HMS Royal Charles , as part of a fleet of English warships brought by Admiral Edward Montagu.[11] On commemorative memorabilia in the Netherlands, the date of Charles's departure is listed as June 2, 1660, the date on the Gregorian calendar used in continental Europe but not in England.
July – Richard Cromwell, the last Lord Protector of England during its years as a republic, leaves the British Isles quietly and goes into exile in France, taking on an alias as "John Clarke".[17]
August 29 – The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, officially "An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion" is given royal assent.[18] as a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English Civil War and Interregnum (with the exception of certain crimes such as murder, piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft, and people named in the act such as those involved in the regicide of Charles I). It also said that no action was to be taken against those involved at any later time, and that the Interregnum was to be legally forgotten.
December 8 – The first English actress appears on the professional stage in England in a non-singing role, as Desdemona in Othello at Vere Street Theatre in London, following the reopening of the theatres (various opinions have been advanced that the actress was Margaret Hughes, Anne Marshall or Katherine Corey).[21][22][23] Historian Elizabeth Howe notes, however, that both William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew had women in their acting companies before 1660, and that Anne Marshall might be just one of the first rather than the actual first.[24]
December 15 – Andres Malong, a native chieftain of the town of Binalatongan (now San Carlos) in the Philippines, leads a successful revolt against the Spanish colonial administrators to liberate Pangasinan.[25] He is proclaimed the King of Pangasinan, but the rebellion is suppressed on January 17, 1661,[25] and Pangasinan is reconquered by February.
^ abJ. W. Fortescue, The History of the British Army (Musaicum Books, 2020)
^"January 1". Chambers' Book of Days. Archived from the original on December 17, 2007. Retrieved December 9, 2007.
^ abcdefghThe History of Nations: England, by Samuel R. Gardner (John D. Morris and Company, 1906) p. 374-275
^ abPenguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN0-14-102715-0.
^Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 1, transcribed and edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews (University of California Press, 1970) p. 3
^ abcFrançois Guizot, translated by Andrew R. Scoble, Monk, Or, The Fall of the Republic and the Restoration of the Monarchy in England, in 1660 (Henry G. Bohn, 1851) pp.64-69
^ abcPalmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 187–188. ISBN0-7126-5616-2.
^"Lambert, John (1619—1694)", by F. Warre Cornish, Encyclopedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, Volume 14 (Henry G. Allen Company, 1890) p. 236-237
^Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna (University Press of Mississippi, 2012)
^Gilder, Rosamond (1931). Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theatre. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 166.
^"The Vere Street Desdemona: Othello and the Theatrical Englishwoman, 1602—1660", by Clare McManus, in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2013) p. 222
^ abRenato Constantino and Letizia R. Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (Monthly Review Press, 1975) p. 95
^George Frederick Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading Into Africa, reprinted from The Journal of Negro History (April 1919), reprinted by The New Era Printing Company, 1919) p. 8
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