Acts of Indemnity and Oblivion: ‘This Excellent Art of Forgetfulness’

This chapter surveys various attitudes to royal mercy and oblivion in the poetry written to celebrate the king’s return. The 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion made forgetting law, but poetry of the early Restoration reveals some of the problems implicit in what the Earl of Clarendon called the ‘Art of Forgetfulness’: if the return to the status quo ante is an art, then how can one practise this art without reminding oneself of what is to be forgotten, namely the Interregnum? And if the effacement of the Interregnum is indeed a piece of art, is the restoration of monarchical culture that rests on this fiction not also an artifice, something made not by God or nature, but people? Restoration panegyrics by Cowley, Davenant, Dryden, and Waller probe these questions and reflect insightfully on the roles such poetry might play in mediating public memory.