Charles II of England

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles II was received in London on the 29th of May 1660, which happened to be his 30th birthday. The crowds met the returning king with public acclaim. He would go on to rule England, Scotland and Ireland until 1685. Contemporaries found him affable and friendly, and he allowed his subjects unusually easy access to his person. Yet he also kept an almost impenetrable reserve, especially about his political plans. His court earned a reputation for moral laxity, and he patronised both the arts and the sciences. How does a king without a throne win one back? What does he do with a kingdom that has just executed his father's monarchy out of existence and then asked him home? And who was the man behind the easy manner, who revealed so little of his own mind?

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• 2. Exile And Escape

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  In October 1642, Prince Charles and his younger brother James were present at the Battle of Edgehill, early in the First English Civil War. Charles was the eldest surviving child of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, since a first son had died within a day of birth. By January 1645 he had his own Council and was titular head of the Royalist forces in the West Country. By spring 1646 Parliamentarian troops held most of that region, so he left from Falmouth for the Isles of Scilly, then Jersey, then France. His mother was already living there under the protection of his first cousin, the eight-year-old Louis XIV.

  On the 30th of January 1649, Charles I was executed at Whitehall, and England became a republic. Within a week, on the 5th of February, the Covenanter Parliament of Scotland proclaimed his son king at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh. The Scots set a harsh condition. They would not let him enter the country unless he agreed to make Presbyterianism the state religion in all three of his kingdoms. Charles first tried pressure, authorising Lord Montrose to land in the Orkney Islands with a small army. Montrose feared a compromise and invaded the mainland anyway, and he was captured and executed. Charles then reluctantly accepted the terms agreed at Breda. When he reached Scotland on the 23rd of June 1650, he formally accepted the Covenant, though he soon came to despise the "villainy" and "hypocrisy" of the Covenanters.

  On the 3rd of September 1650, Oliver Cromwell defeated the Covenanters at Dunbar with a much smaller force. The Scots then split between moderate Engagers and the more radical Kirk Party, who even fought each other. In October, Charles rode north to join an Engager force, an episode remembered as "the Start". Within two days the Kirk Party had recovered him. He was crowned King of Scotland at Scone Abbey on the 1st of January 1651. The Kirk Party had barred many of the most experienced soldiers on religious grounds, and few English Royalists joined the mostly Scottish army as it marched south. It was beaten at the Battle of Worcester on the 3rd of September 1651.

  Six weeks later, on the 16th of October, Charles landed in Normandy. His escape had been dangerous. A reward of £1,000 hung over him, anyone caught helping him risked execution, and at over 6 ft he was unusually tall for the time and hard to disguise.

  After Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653, Charles lived a life of leisure at Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, on a grant from Louis XIV of 600 livres a month. He could not raise the money or support to challenge Cromwell. From 1654 France and the Dutch Republic allied with Cromwell's government, which forced him out of France and towards Spain, the ruler of the Southern Netherlands. The Treaty of Brussels in 1656 secured Spanish backing for a restoration in return for his help against France. He gathered a force from his exiled subjects that was tiny, badly paid, poorly armed and unruly. It nonetheless became the nucleus of the post-Restoration army. At the Battle of the Dunes in 1658 his army of around 2,000 fought Commonwealth troops allied with the French, and it ended the day at about 1,000. Dunkirk passed to the English, and the hope of a Royalist expedition died with it.

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• 3. A Kingdom Restored

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  Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and his son Richard succeeded him as Lord Protector with little experience of either military or civil administration. In 1659 the Rump Parliament was recalled and Richard resigned. George Monck, the Governor of Scotland, feared that the country would slide into anarchy during the unrest. He marched his army into the City of London and forced the Rump to readmit members of the Long Parliament who had been excluded in December 1648, during Pride's Purge. Parliament then dissolved itself, and the country held its first general election in almost 20 years.

  The outgoing Parliament set the voting qualifications in the hope of producing a Presbyterian majority. The restrictions on royalist candidates and voters were widely ignored. The resulting House of Commons was fairly evenly split between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and between Anglicans and Presbyterians. This Convention Parliament assembled on the 25th of April 1660 and soon welcomed the Declaration of Breda. In that document Charles promised lenience and tolerance, with liberty of conscience and no harsh Anglican policy. He would not exile past enemies or confiscate their wealth, and he offered pardons to nearly all his opponents except the regicides. Above all, he promised to rule in cooperation with Parliament.

  The invitation to return reached Charles at Breda on the 8th of May 1660. Ireland had already moved, with a convention declaring for him, and he was proclaimed king in Dublin on the 14th of May. He set out from Scheveningen and landed at Dover on the 25th of May.

  The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion granted amnesty to nearly all of Cromwell's supporters, but 50 people were specifically excluded. Nine of the regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered, while others received life imprisonment or lifelong exclusion from office. The bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were subjected to posthumous decapitations.

  Money was a problem from the start. Parliament granted Charles an annual income of £1.2 million, raised largely from customs and excise duties. It proved insufficient for most of his reign, and actual revenue ran much lower. The court economised by shrinking the royal household and its expenses, and the government raised funds through unpopular novelties such as the hearth tax.

  Personal blows came in the second half of 1660, when his siblings Henry and Mary died of smallpox. Around the same time, Anne Hyde, daughter of Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, revealed she was pregnant by Charles's brother James, whom she had secretly married. Edward Hyde had known nothing of the marriage or the pregnancy, yet he was created Earl of Clarendon and became an even stronger favourite minister.

  The Convention Parliament was dissolved in December 1660. Soon after Charles's English coronation, the Cavalier Parliament assembled, overwhelmingly Royalist and Anglican. It passed a run of acts to secure Anglican dominance. The Corporation Act 1661 required municipal officeholders to swear allegiance. The Act of Uniformity 1662 made the 1662 Book of Common Prayer compulsory. The Conventicle Act 1664 banned religious assemblies of more than five people outside the Church of England. The Five Mile Act 1665 kept expelled non-conforming clergymen five miles (8 km) from the parish they had been banished from. Together they became known as the Clarendon Code, though Clarendon was not directly responsible and even spoke against the Five Mile Act. Charles accepted these laws despite favouring religious tolerance.

  The Restoration changed daily life as well. Puritanism lost its momentum, and the theatres Cromwell's regime had closed reopened. Bawdy Restoration comedy became a recognisable genre, and libertines such as Lord Rochester shaped the literature of the restored court. Charles's theatre licences required that female parts be played by "their natural performers" rather than by boys, as had often been the practice before.

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• 4. Plague, Fire And Defeat

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  In September 1665, the Great Plague of London peaked at up to 7,000 deaths per week. Charles, his family and the court had already fled the city in July for Salisbury, and Parliament met in Oxford. The disease eased over the winter, and the king came back to London in February 1666.

  The summer of 1666 was long, hot and dry. On the 2nd of September, the Great Fire of London started in Pudding Lane. Strong winds spread it, and wood and fuel stockpiled for winter fed it. It destroyed about 13,200 houses and 87 churches, among them St Paul's Cathedral. Charles and his brother James joined in and directed the firefighting. The public blamed Catholic conspirators.

  The Second Dutch War, fought from 1665 to 1667, began with English attempts to muscle in on Dutch possessions in Africa and North America. At first it went well. The English captured New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York in honour of Charles's brother James, Duke of York. They also won the Battle of Lowestoft. In 1667 the Dutch struck back with a surprise attack, the Raid on the Medway. They sailed up the Thames to where a major part of the English fleet lay docked, and sank almost all of it. Only the flagship, Royal Charles, was spared, and the Dutch took it home as a prize. The Treaty of Breda ended the war.

  Charles needed someone to blame, and he chose Lord Clarendon. Impeached for high treason, a crime that carried the death penalty, Clarendon fled to France. Power passed to five politicians known collectively by a whimsical acronym, the Cabal. They were Baron Clifford, the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, Baron Ashley (later Earl of Shaftesbury) and the Duke of Lauderdale. In practice the Cabal rarely acted together. The court divided into two factions led by Arlington and Buckingham, and Arlington came out the more successful.

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• 5. Marriage Treaties And Empire

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  On the 23rd of June 1661, a marriage treaty with Portugal was signed. Portugal had been fighting Spain since 1640 to restore its independence after 60 years of dynastic union. France had helped, but abandoned the Portuguese in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. Negotiations for Charles to marry Catherine of Braganza had begun in his father's reign, and Queen Luísa of Portugal, acting as regent, reopened them after the Restoration. England gained the port of Tangier in North Africa and the Seven Islands of Bombay in India, which had a major influence on the development of the British Empire. It also received valuable trading privileges in Brazil and the East Indies, religious and commercial freedom in Portugal, and two million Portuguese crowns, worth £300,000 then. Portugal gained military and naval support against Spain, and liberty of worship for Catherine.

  Philip IV of Spain opposed any match between Catherine and a powerful monarch. His government offered Princess Maria of Orange-Nassau, with Spain providing the dowry. It also offered Caterina Farnese, youngest sister of the Duke of Parma, and in February 1661 the Earl of Bristol travelled to Parma to inspect her. She refused, because she wanted to become a nun. Charles dismissed both offers and chose Catherine because of her huge dowry. She travelled to Portsmouth on 13-the 14th of May 1662, but he did not visit until the 20th. The couple married the next day in two ceremonies, a secret Catholic one followed by a public Anglican service.

  The marriage produced no surviving heir. Catherine's four pregnancies ended in miscarriages and stillbirths in 1662, February 1666, May 1668 and June 1669.

  The same year as the wedding, Charles sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV for about £375,000, an unpopular move. The channel port was a valuable strategic outpost, but it cost the Treasury £321,000 every year.

  In 1670, still seeking a solution to his financial troubles, Charles agreed to the Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV. Louis would pay him £160,000 each year. In return Charles would supply troops and announce his conversion to Catholicism "as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit". Louis was to provide 6,000 troops to suppress anyone who opposed the conversion. Charles worked hard to keep the treaty secret, especially the conversion clause. Whether he ever seriously meant to convert remains unclear.

  At the same time he was handing out powers overseas. Through five charters, he granted the East India Company the right to govern its territorial acquisitions autonomously. That included minting money, commanding fortresses and troops, making war and peace, and exercising civil and criminal jurisdiction. In 1668 he leased the islands of Bombay to the company for a nominal £10, paid in gold. The Portuguese dowry territories proved too expensive to maintain, and Tangier was abandoned in 1684. In 1670 a royal charter gave the Hudson's Bay Company control of the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin. Charles named the territory Rupert's Land, after his cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the company's first governor.

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• 6. Laboratory And Dockyard

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  In October 1660, Charles visited Gresham College to see new telescopes built by Sir Paul Neile. He was so impressed that he ordered a 36-foot telescope of his own, which was installed in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. He liked to invite friends and acquaintances to look at the heavens through it. John Evelyn described a visit in May 1661 with several other scientists to view Saturn's rings. Charles also had a laboratory installed in Whitehall, within easy reach of his bedroom.

  His early tutors had not encouraged any of this. William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, and the tutor Brian Duppa both thought science unsuitable for a future king. The surgeon William Harvey, famous for his work on the circulation of blood, was later appointed as a tutor and shaped the prince's attitude. In exile, Charles studied physics, chemistry and mathematics. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes taught him mathematics, and the cleric John Earle taught him Latin and Greek. He also helped his childhood friend George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, with chemistry and alchemy experiments, while Buckingham believed he was close to making the philosopher's stone. By the time Charles returned to England, he knew the mathematics of navigation and was a competent chemist. A visiting French traveller named Sorbier was astonished by the extent of the king's knowledge.

  From the start of his reign Charles appointed experts to assist him. Timothy Clarke, an anatomist, performed dissections for him. Robert Morison was his chief botanist, in charge of the king's own botanical garden. Edmund Dickinson ran experiments in the royal laboratory. Sir Thomas Williams compounded medicines, sometimes in the royal presence. Nicasius le Febure came from abroad as royal professor of chemistry and apothecary to the household.

  The king was also fascinated by clock mechanisms, and kept seven clocks in his bedroom alone. Robert Bruce, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, complained that the constant chiming kept him awake whenever he slept nearby. A sundial in the Privy Garden let Charles set his pocket watch, and he personally logged the performance of a spring-balance watch given to him by Robert Hooke.

  In 1662 Charles granted a royal charter to the society of scientists formed in 1660, now the Royal Society. Sir Robert Moray, a member of his court, became its first president and served as go-between with the king. He was even allowed to use the royal laboratory for his own experiments. Charles never attended a meeting. Robert Boyle once gave him a private viewing of the Boyle/Hooke air-pump. Yet Charles preferred experiments with an immediate practical outcome, and he laughed at the members' efforts to "weigh air". He seemed unable to grasp the importance of laws such as Boyle's law and Hooke's law, or of atmospheric pressure and the barometer.

  Still, he kept funding practical science. In 1673 he founded the Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital. Two years later, worried about French advances in astronomy, he founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. On the morning of Friday, the 15th of January 1669, the king invited Samuel Pepys into his chemistry laboratory. Pepys admitted that what he saw there was beyond him.

  Painful gout in later life limited the daily walks of his younger years, so he poured his energy into the laboratory. He sometimes spent hours there, occasionally with Moray. Alchemy interested him most, and he spent whole mornings trying to distil mercury. Heating mercury in an open crucible releases toxic vapour, which may have damaged his health.

  The navy drew an equal share of his attention. Between January 1674 and April 1679, he was the most frequent participant at Admiralty Board meetings. Pepys described the management of the navy from 1673 to 1679 as "wholly performed by the immediate direction of" the king. Charles almost exclusively decided where warships were deployed and who would command them. He signed every captain's and lieutenant's commission, attended most important ship launches, and alone chose the names of new ships. He had learned to sail in Jersey in 1646, where Royalist naval officers taught him to take the helm of a pinnace. After the Restoration he owned several Royal Yachts and sailed them often.

  His naval architecture was more than a hobby. For the thirty ship programme, he reasoned that fighting the French would keep ships at sea longer than fighting the Dutch. He therefore insisted that the third-rates be built larger than Parliament's minimum, giving them more stores, better seaworthiness and steadier gun platforms. He promised to pay the extra cost himself, then went back on it once the ships were built. He also ordered ships launched as soon as the hulls were ready, with the remaining work finished afloat, which freed up docks and slipways. When shipwrights strongly resisted a proposal to reduce the ships' draught, which Pepys had suggested and he had backed, the king deferred to their expertise.

  When the Admiralty Board split along political lines in 1682, Charles created the "Irish Squadron" under his own direct administration. Its orders came through the Secretary of State rather than the Admiralty, and it was used at once to supply the English colony at Tangier.

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• 7. Parliament Against The Crown

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  In 1672, Charles issued the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which purported to suspend all penal laws against Catholics and other religious dissenters. That same year he openly backed Catholic France and began the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The Cavalier Parliament, once favourable to the Crown, objected on constitutional grounds. It argued that the king had no right to suspend laws that Parliament had passed. Charles withdrew the Declaration and also agreed to the Test Act. That law required public officials to take the sacrament in the Church of England form and later to denounce transubstantiation and the Catholic Mass as "superstitious and idolatrous". Clifford, who had converted to Catholicism, resigned rather than take the oath and died shortly afterwards, possibly by suicide. By 1674 England had gained nothing from the war, and Parliament refused more funds, forcing Charles to make peace. Lord Danby, Clifford's replacement, rose as the Cabal's power faded.

  With no surviving legitimate child, Charles had an unpopular Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, as heir presumptive. Partly to calm fears that the royal family was too Catholic, he agreed that James's daughter Mary should marry the Protestant William of Orange.

  In 1678, Titus Oates, who had been alternately an Anglican and a Jesuit priest, falsely warned of a "Popish Plot" to assassinate the king. He even accused the queen of complicity. Charles did not believe him, but told Danby to investigate. Danby seems to have been rightly sceptical, but the Cavalier Parliament took the claims seriously. Anti-Catholic hysteria gripped the country, judges and juries condemned supposed conspirators, and numerous innocent people were executed.

  Later that year the House of Commons impeached Danby for high treason. Charles had secretly negotiated with Louis XIV, offering to keep England neutral in return for money, even though much of the nation wanted war with Catholic France. Danby had publicly professed hostility to France but had reluctantly agreed to follow the king's wishes. The Commons saw him as the author of the policy. To spare him a trial, Charles dissolved the Cavalier Parliament in January 1679. The new Parliament that met in March was hostile. Many members feared he meant to use the standing army to suppress dissent or impose Catholicism. Short of funds, he had to disband his troops gradually. Danby resigned as Lord High Treasurer and received a pardon, but the Commons ruled the pardon invalid. Charles finally committed him to the Tower of London, where he stayed for another five years.

  The Earl of Shaftesbury, a former member of the Cabal, led the opposition to a Catholic successor. The House of Commons of 1679 introduced the Exclusion Bill to bar the Duke of York from the line of succession. Some even wanted to give the crown to the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, the eldest of Charles's illegitimate children. The bill's opponents were called Abhorrers, and became known as Tories, after a term for dispossessed Irish Catholic bandits. Its supporters, the Petitioners, were called Whigs, after a term for rebellious Scottish Presbyterians. These two labels became the first Whig and Tory parties.

  Fearing the bill would pass, and encouraged by acquittals in the continuing Plot trials, Charles dissolved Parliament in mid-1679. Within months he dissolved the next one too, after it again tried to pass the bill. When a new Parliament met at Oxford in March 1681, he dissolved it after just a few days, the fourth dissolution. Support for exclusion then ebbed, and the king enjoyed a nationwide surge of loyalty. Shaftesbury was prosecuted for treason in 1681, unsuccessfully, and later fled to Holland, where he died. Charles ruled without Parliament for the rest of his reign.

  Opposition to exclusion angered some Protestants, who devised the Rye House Plot. They planned to kill Charles and James as they returned to London from the horse races at Newmarket. A great fire destroyed the king's lodgings at Newmarket and forced him to leave early, so he unwittingly avoided the ambush. News of the plot leaked. The Earl of Essex slit his own throat while imprisoned in the Tower. Algernon Sydney and Lord Russell were executed for high treason on flimsy evidence, and the Duke of Monmouth went into exile at the court of William of Orange. Titus Oates was convicted of defamation and imprisoned.

  The Whigs compared Charles's rule in these years to that of Louis XIV and called it "slavery". He replaced judges and sheriffs at will and packed juries to win convictions. Many opponents were prosecuted and had their estates seized. In the 1682 municipal elections he disenfranchised many Whigs, and in 1683 the London charter was forfeited. In retrospect, this use of the courts against opposition, later continued by James, helped establish the Whig idea of separating the judiciary from the Crown.

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• 8. Final Days And Afterlife

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  On the morning of the 2nd of February 1685, Charles suffered a sudden apoplectic fit. He died four days later, at 11:45 am, at the Palace of Whitehall, aged 54. The speed of his decline led many to suspect poison, including one of his own doctors. A modern medical analysis found his symptoms similar to uraemia, a syndrome caused by kidney dysfunction. Mercury poisoning can damage the kidneys irreversibly, but the case for it as the cause remains unproven. In his final days he endured bloodletting, purging and cupping, which may have worsened his uraemia through dehydration.

  On his deathbed, Charles asked his brother James to look after his mistresses: "be well to Portsmouth, and let not poor Nelly starve". He told his courtiers, "I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such a time a-dying", and expressed regret over his treatment of his wife. On his last evening, in the presence of Father John Huddleston, he was received into the Catholic Church. How conscious or committed he was, and whose idea it was, is unclear. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 14th of February "without any manner of pomp". His brother succeeded him as James II and VII.

  His love of theatre, horse racing and traditional celebrations helped revive public Christmas festivities after Puritan rule. His reputation for hedonism earned him the nickname "Merry Monarch", and his reign was later called a "Golden Age". His biographer Antonia Fraser has argued that the nickname does not fit, since Charles was at heart marked by melancholy.

  Charles had no legitimate children but acknowledged at least twelve by seven mistresses. Five were with Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, for whom the Dukedom of Cleveland was created. His other mistresses included Moll Davis, Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Killigrew, Catherine Pegge, Lucy Walter and Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. In his lifetime he was often nicknamed "Old Rowley", after his favourite racehorse, a notable stallion. His subjects resented taxes spent on his mistresses and their children, many of whom received dukedoms or earldoms. The present Dukes of Buccleuch, Richmond, Grafton and St Albans descend from him in unbroken male line. He is an ancestor of both Diana Spencer and Queen Camilla, and Diana's son William, Prince of Wales, is likely to be the first British monarch descended from Charles II.

  His eldest son, the Duke of Monmouth, led a rebellion against James II and was defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor on the 6th of July 1685. He was captured and executed. James was eventually dethroned in 1688, in the Glorious Revolution.

  His contemporary John Evelyn judged him "a prince of many virtues and many great imperfections, debonair, easy of access, not bloody or cruel". Historians have long been divided. Tories tended to remember a benevolent monarchy, while Whigs saw a terrible despotism. Professor Ronald Hutton says Charles was a popular king in his own day and a "legendary figure" in British history.

  For years he entertained and wearied listeners with stories of his escape after Worcester. Numerous accounts of his adventures were published after the Restoration. Charles himself seems to have enjoyed most his ability to keep up the disguise of an ordinary man and move unrecognised through his realm. In England the anniversary of the Restoration was marked until the mid-nineteenth century as Oak Apple Day, after the Royal Oak in which he hid from Cromwell's forces. People wore oak leaves, but the custom has died out.

  His name survives on the map. Charleston, South Carolina, and South Kingstown, Rhode Island, are named after him. In the Galapagos Archipelago, King Charles's Island and Charles Island were once the names of both Floreana Island and Española Island.

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