Poetic gardens and political myths: The renewal of St James's Park in the restoration (original) (raw)

The Journal of Garden History, 1995

Abstract

Few political events in English history can have excited as immense a literary and artistic response, and made as many demands upon the artist, as the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. In the first blush of enthusiasm that followed the king's landing at Dover on 25 May, the reading public was inundated with panegyrics on the returning monarch and celebratory works predicting a glorious revival of the nation's supposedly sagging fortunes. England, however, had undergone a sudden, radical and, as many have noted, surprising transformation. It was therefore not enough merely to praise: there was an even greater necessity to justify this transformation. Speaking of what he terms the ‘Panegyric Task’ of England's writers during the first decade of the reign of the newly restored king, Nicholas Jose comments that royalist writers ‘had to justify a political movement they supported and validate in imaginative celebration a world they longed to see “restored.” '

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