The English Republican Exiles in Europe During the Restoration

Description

"The restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 changed the lives of English republicans for good. Despite Charles II's Declaration of Breda, in which he had promised to forgive those who had acted against his father and the monarchy during the Civil War and Interregnum period, opponents of the Stuart regime felt unsafe, and many were actively persecuted. Nevertheless, their ideas lived on in the political underground in England and in the exile networks they created abroad. While much of the historiography of English republicanism has focused on the British Isles and the legacy of the English Revolution in the American colonies across the Atlantic, this book traces the lives, ideas and networks of three seventeenth-century English republicans who left England for the European continent after the Restoration: Edmund Ludlow in Switzerland, Henry Neville in Italy, and Algernon Sidney, who travelled widely across Europe before settling in the south of France. Bringing together the history of political thought with lived experience, this book offers novel insights into the ways in which the exiles' transnational networks contributed not only to the evolution of the republicans' political ideas but also helped to shape their lasting legacy on the Continent"--