2

Life

Born at St James’s Palace at Westminster on 29 May 1630, Charles was the first surviving son and heir to Charles I and his French Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. He was delivered by Madame Peronne – personal midwife to his maternal grandmother, Marie de’ Medici – whose return journey to Paris was disrupted when she, together with her accompanying dwarf and a dancing master, were captured by Flemish pirates in the Channel and only released after a ransom was paid. The young prince was christened by Bishop William Laud of London on 27 June. His godparents comprised his uncle Louis XIII of France, his grandmother Marie de’ Medici (mother of Louis) and Charles I’s brother-in-law Frederick V, the beleaguered titular Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, on whose behalf English forces had become involved in the Thirty Years War. Charles’s safe arrival nevertheless lessened the dynastic need to continue supporting the Bohemian cause, provoking dismay among militant Protestants who had hoped that the Stuart dynasty might ultimately revert to the descendants of the Calvinist Frederick. Across Catholic Europe, however, Charles’s arrival was welcomed with celebratory bonfires in the courtyards of Habsburg royal palaces, while the English ambassador in Madrid was honoured at a public bullfight. At home, Charles was the first prince born as heir to all three crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, while it was nearly a century since the English had last welcomed a male heir to the throne in the person of Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI. In due course, Charles I and Henrietta Maria also produced an extensive number of spare Stuart heirs: a daughter, Mary, in 1631; a son, James, Duke of York, in 1633; two further daughters, Elizabeth and Anne, in 1635 and 1637; another son, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in 1639; and finally another daughter, Henrietta Anne (‘Henriette’), in 1644.

Charles’s early years, like those of his siblings, were spent mostly at Richmond Palace, several miles west of his parents’ sophisticatedly baroque court at Whitehall. A royal chaplain, Brian Duppa, was appointed as Charles’s tutor in 1635 and, on his eighth birthday, the prince’s household was separately established under William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, who wrote to Charles shortly after his appointment as the prince’s governor, endorsing a style of education that prioritized practicalities and eschewed scholastic pedantry. ‘I would rather have you study things than words,’ Newcastle advised Charles, counselling him not to ‘take heed of too much book’ since ‘known bookworms’ rarely became effective statesmen. His warning against ‘Bible-mad’ individuals, alerting Charles I’s son to the fate of ill-advised monarchs who ‘in seeming to gain the throne of Heaven, have lost their own’, reflected a nervousness about religious politics in 1638 that would later prove prophetic.¹

Charles’s childhood was, however, prematurely cut short when his father’s royal authority started to disintegrate, first in Scotland and subsequently in Ireland and England. Opposition to a new Scottish Prayer Book – deemed unacceptably ‘popish’ in form and content – unleashed the ‘Bishops’ Wars’, and leaving his son at Whitehall Palace, Charles I spent the summers of 1639 and 1640 fighting Scottish ‘Covenanters’ whose resistance to royal religious policy was enshrined in a ‘National Covenant’ drawn up in 1638. In May 1641, the ten-year-old prince unsuccessfully attempted to plead in the House of Commons to save the life of Charles I’s former associate, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, despite his father having signed a bill of attainder against Strafford, while Newcastle was dismissed as the prince’s governor after becoming implicated in a plot to rescue Strafford from the Tower of London. As relations between crown and Parliament deteriorated, Charles I sent his wife to safety on the continent in February 1642 and, after a threatened custody battle with Parliament over his eldest son, admitted to his adviser Edward Hyde that having ‘gotten Charles, I care not what answer’ was returned regarding MPs’ subsequent demands.²

For the next three years, Charles was almost constantly in his father’s company on campaign, covering nearly a thousand miles in 1642 alone and witnessing major pitched battles between Royalist and Parliamentarian troops, such as the encounter at Edgehill. Based in a relocated royal court in Oxford, Charles sat in a reconvened ‘House of Lords’ in the university’s lecture hall and, together with his brother James, received an MA from the university in January 1644. By early 1645, however, the king decided to create a separate focus for Royalist activities around his eldest son, indicating to Hyde that it was ‘now time to unboy him, by putting him into some action’.³ In March, the fourteen-year-old Charles was given nominal command of the Royalist war effort in the West Country and, leaving Oxford for Bristol, never saw his father again. Following the king’s heavy defeat at the Battle of Naseby in June, south-western towns including Bath, Bridgwater and Sherborne quickly fell to Parliamentarian forces and the prince retreated to Pendennis Castle in Cornwall. Shortly after Naseby, Charles I wrote to his son insisting that, in the event of his own capture, the prince should not submit to ‘any conditions that are dishonourable, unsafe for your person, or derogatory to royal authority’; rather, if Charles upheld his father’s dignity, he would ‘make me die cheerfully, praising God for giving me so gallant a son’.⁴

Fleeing the Parliamentarian advance, Charles left mainland Britain in March 1646 and initially stayed on the Scilly Isles, before moving to Jersey where he remained until June with an entourage of around three hundred, including Hyde. Following his father’s surrender to the Scottish Covenanters, Charles joined his mother at the French court, where diplomatic protocol was set aside, allowing him to be treated on terms of equal respect by his cousin Louis XIV, eight years his junior, whose minority rule as French king had started in 1643. Charles and his mother were joined in April 1648 by Charles’s brother James, who had escaped Parliamentarian custody and, amid abortive plans for Royalist invasions, Charles moved to The Hague to stay with his sister Mary, Princess of Orange. As it became increasingly likely that Parliament would place his father on trial, Charles appealed to the French court to intervene but, on 4 February 1649, he received a newsletter from London reporting that the king had been publicly executed five days earlier. When he was then addressed as ‘Your Majesty’, Charles ‘burst into tears’ as all the ‘ideals, loyalties, responsibilities, and dilemmas which had confounded and killed his father … crashed on to his eighteen-year-old shoulders’.⁵

Although the English Parliament swiftly abolished both the institution of monarchy and the House of Lords, when news reached Edinburgh of Charles I’s execution, on 5 February, the Scottish Parliament instantly proclaimed Charles II King of Scotland, England and Ireland in succession to his father. While hostility to the latter’s imposition of the Scottish Prayer Book had been the fatal spark that had subsequently ignited opposition throughout Britain, the Scots’ attachment to their native Stuart dynasty remained unshakeable. Debating the relative advantages of joining either Irish Catholic or Scottish Presbyterian forces hostile to the English Parliament, Charles and his entourage left The Hague and wandered uncertainly to Antwerp, Brussels and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris. After another sojourn on Jersey, the exiled court returned to Breda in the Dutch Republic for discussions involving Scottish emissaries with whom Charles decided to conclude terms.

Arriving off the Scottish coast in June 1650, Charles put his signature to two documents that his father had steadfastly refused to sign – the Scottish National Covenant (1638) and Solemn League and Covenant (1643) – which thereby committed him to establishing Presbyterianism in all three kingdoms. In later years, the MP for Aberdeen Alexander Jaffray rued how ‘that poor young prince’ had been obliged by the Scots delegation to swear an oath ‘which we knew … he hated in his heart’, concluding that ‘our sin was more than his’.⁶ In September, Charles was reminded by a prominent Presbyterian, Robert Douglas, of the seriousness of the Covenant’s obligations and warned of suspicions that ‘self-interest and gaining of a crown have been more in your eye than the advancing of religion and righteousness’.⁷ Kept under uncomfortable scrutiny by his Scottish hosts – and repeatedly exhorted to repent publicly for his own sins and those of his family – Charles even attempted escape and spent several nights sleeping rough in Glen Clova, before becoming the last monarch to be crowned in Scotland, at a ceremony at Scone Palace on 1 January 1651. In his coronation sermon, Douglas again impressed on Charles that, as a Covenanted king, he was obliged to promote Presbyterianism and, in the event of any attempt to disregard ‘the very fundamentals of this contract and covenant’, his subjects ‘may and ought to resist by arms’.⁸

Charles’s main aim in going to Scotland – to raise a Royalist force to invade England – was eventually achieved by the summer of 1651, but his advance was humiliatingly terminated by a comprehensive defeat at Worcester on 3 September, when his army of 12,000 soldiers was trounced by Oliver Cromwell’s force of 28,000 Parliamentarians. Imprisoned in Chester, one Royalist soldier, William Ellison, wrote to Hyde shortly afterwards, admiring the young king’s courage under fire and insisting that ‘certainly a braver prince never lived’. According to Ellison, Charles had supplied an inspirational example at Worcester, riding from one regiment to another to offer encouragement, ‘calling every officer by his name’ and constantly displaying ‘so much steadiness of mind and undaunted courage in such continual danger’.⁹ Having fled the carnage, the twenty-one-year-old monarch then spent forty-three nights on the run, travelling clandestinely through Bromsgrove, Stratford-upon-Avon, Cirencester, Somerset, Bridport, Brighton and Shoreham, before securing a passage to Fécamp, on the Normandy coast, where he arrived on 16 October. Relying on the repeated loyalty, courage and discretion of ordinary subjects to evade his captors, Charles famously spent the day after the battle sheltering in an oak tree in Boscobel Wood. Eventually becoming part of Restoration folklore, the king’s dramatic flight from Worcester was an experience that both inspired and haunted him for the rest of his life. Even before Charles’s final return from exile, the Convention Parliament had decreed that his birthday, 29 May, should be permanently preserved as a day of thanksgiving. Popularly known as ‘Royal Oak Day’ or ‘Oak Apple Day’, the anniversary was a British public holiday until 1859, while ‘The Royal Oak’ remains the third most popular pub name in England.¹⁰

For the next nine years, Charles’s life in exile was characterized by itinerancy and impoverishment and by factionalism among his dispirited advisers. Indeed, the peripatetic nature of his existence is epitomized by the royal bed: ingeniously designed by Charles himself, it could be easily disassembled for stowing on a wheeled cart with packing cases.¹¹ To a great extent, the Stuarts became pawns of international diplomacy as long-running Franco-Spanish hostilities determined the exiled court’s relative attractiveness or unacceptability to potential foreign allies. As the French court inclined towards an anti-Spanish alliance with the English Republic, Charles was obliged to leave France in 1654 and moved to Germany, where he was received as a guest in Cologne and Spa by princes of the Holy Roman Empire. The fact that Charles primarily resided in Catholic territories during his exile generated widespread hope, especially among Irish Royalists, that he might follow the example of his Protestant French grandfather, Henri IV, who had converted to Catholicism in the 1590s. Yet throughout his years in exile, Charles regularly attended Anglican service, fasted weekly in his father’s memory and was appalled when his mother placed his youngest brother, Henry, in a Jesuit seminary in 1654. Having arranged to remove Henry from his mother’s influence, Charles warned him that if he failed to ‘remember the last words of your dead father’ to remain steadfastly attached to the Protestant faith, he should be prepared never to see England, or indeed his eldest brother, again.¹²

In 1654, Charles also spent a summer holiday with his sister Mary and visited Aachen, where the siblings inspected the relics of the Emperor Charlemagne and Charles wistfully compared the size of his own sword with that of his illustrious namesake. The next year, Cromwell’s audacious seizure of Jamaica from Spain rendered Charles a potentially attractive ally to Felipe IV of Spain and prompted the exiled court to move to Bruges and Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands, where Charles assembled a small army of around 2,500 soldiers dependent on Spanish pay, awaiting a combination of sufficiently propitious international and domestic circumstances to attempt a Royalist invasion.

Following Cromwell’s death in September 1658, the Protectorate under his eldest son, Richard, proved short-lived, as Richard not only lacked military experience, but also struggled to control Parliament. In April 1659, the English army abolished the Cromwellian Protectorate and restored the ‘Rump’ Parliament that had sanctioned the regicide a decade earlier. Having failed to co-ordinate a Royalist rising from Calais in August, Charles attended the Franco-Spanish peace negotiations at Fuenterrabía in Spain before returning to Brussels. As the domestic political initiative shifted to General George Monck – who had been Cromwell’s military governor in Scotland – covert negotiations started with the exiled court as, ironically, Charles’s restoration was ultimately facilitated by the same army that had overseen the execution of his father. In April 1660, the exiled court issued a shrewdly worded ‘Declaration’ from its Dutch base in Breda, confirming its urgent wish to heal ‘those wounds which have so many years together been kept bleeding’ and, to reassure those who feared imminent royal vengeance, by undertaking to satisfy army arrears and, where possible, extend an indemnity for past actions.¹³ In the same month, fresh elections to a ‘free’ Convention Parliament returned a Royalist Commons majority and, by a unanimous vote in both Houses on 8 May, Charles II was declared to have been king since his father’s execution. The new monarch was, however, keenly aware of the deep ideological fault-lines that divided his kingdoms. Shortly before returning to England, he wrote to Monck, expressing his gratitude for ‘your very discreet conduct of this great work’ in bringing together ‘persons of such different humours and contrary affections’.¹⁴ More ominously, a Parliamentarian cleric, Ralph Josselin, had privately observed, at the start of the year, ‘the nation looking more to Charles Stuart, out of love to themselves not him’.¹⁵

On 23 May 1660, Charles left Scheveningen in the Netherlands and arrived at Dover two days later, before astutely delaying his entry into London until his thirtieth birthday on 29 May. Widely acclaimed as an event of providential deliverance, Charles’s return as king generated a mood of optimistic euphoria. As the diarist John Evelyn marvelled, the monarchy’s return had been achieved ‘without one drop of blood and by that very army which rebelled against him’.¹⁶ The Convention’s statute confirming 29 May as an annual holiday placed an emphasis on national resurrection, describing Charles’s kingdoms as ‘all in a great measure newborn and raised from the dead on this most joyful day’.¹⁷ Moreover, Charles’s restoration was accompanied by a deliberate decision to erase public memory of recent trauma: his reign was deemed to have started on 30 January 1649 and events that had occurred during the previous two decades were physically expunged from official records. In May 1660, the Convention passed an Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion that avoided attributing culpability for the civil wars to any party. The premium henceforth to be placed on reconciliation was confirmed by a general pardon issued to individuals who had committed all but the most serious of crimes (such as unlicensed murder or rape and witchcraft) during the civil wars and Interregnum, and also exempting twenty-seven named regicides. Legal judgements in private cases tried under English common law were upheld, but all public acts passed since 1641 – such as parliamentary statutes – were revoked, since they lacked royal consent. In Scotland, an Act Rescissory (1661) radically annulled all legislation enacted by ‘pretended Parliaments’ since 1633, including those which Charles I had attended in 1648 and over which his son had likewise presided in 1650 and 1651. Addressing the English Parliament in July 1661, Charles himself exhorted MPs to ‘look forward, and not backward; and never think of what is past’.¹⁸ Several years later, another diarist, Samuel Pepys, recorded a conversation with a colleague in which both men had resolved to set aside their differences: ‘just like the interstice between the death of the old and coming in of the present king, all that time is swallowed up as if it had never been’.¹⁹

Amnesty and amnesia were, however, easier to proclaim than to achieve. Writing to Charles in exile, his former mentor, the Earl of Newcastle, had identified the ‘greatest error of state’ committed by Charles’s father and grandfather as being that they had always ‘rewarded their enemies, and neglected their friends’.²⁰ Inevitably, anxieties quickly surfaced that the Restoration settlement risked perpetuating wartime impoverishment of Royalists while preserving the enrichment of erstwhile Parliamentarian enemies, reflected in a witticism circulating at the time that Charles had passed an act of indemnity for his enemies and an act of oblivion for his friends. Although the monarchy’s constitutional powers remained virtually intact from the pre-civil war period, former Royalists faced scant prospect of compensation for their extensive losses.

Deep divisions also persisted between advocates of religious accommodation and toleration and those who wished to restore the established Church’s monopoly of lawful worship. In his ‘Declaration’ from Breda, Charles had explicitly committed himself to granting ‘a liberty to tender consciences’, insisting that ‘no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’.²¹ Although a conference at Worcester House in October 1660 proposed a pragmatically inclusive settlement that envisaged a single Protestant church and flexible enforcement of the law in regard to controversial forms of religious ceremonies, the English Parliament’s Corporation Act (1661) was more draconian. It obliged all holders of public office to swear oaths of allegiance and supremacy to the king, to denounce as illegal the taking up of arms against him, and to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant. The following May, an Act of Uniformity required all English clergymen to subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer and receive episcopal ordination by 24 August 1662. On that date – which also marked the ninetieth anniversary of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants – over nine hundred parish clergy, including a third of London’s ministers, failed to comply with the Act’s requirements and left their livings. Before the Act’s approval, Charles had reassured MPs that perceived delays in reaching a religious settlement should not be misinterpreted: as he ironically observed, he should have ‘the worst luck in the world, if, after all the reproaches of being a Papist whilst I was abroad, I am suspected of being a Presbyterian now I am come home’.²² North of the border, legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1662 imposed a re-established Episcopalian church structure on a predominantly Presbyterian population, which resulted in around 270 ministers – or a quarter of parish incumbents – being deprived of their cures for refusing to accept Episcopal collation.

To secure the restored monarchy’s dynastic future, Charles contemplated different marriage options before announcing in May 1661 that he had resolved to wed the daughter of John IV of Portugal. Acknowledging the likely unpopularity of a Catholic bride, Charles warned English MPs that if he had waited to find a marriage partner who could attract universal approval, ‘you would live to see me an old bachelor, which I think you do not desire to do’.²³ Forming an Anglo-Portuguese alliance that endorsed Portugal’s recent independence from Spain – and which was thereby supported by Louis XIV – Charles’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza in April 1662 brought with it an attractive dowry and the trading ports of Tangier and Bombay, making Charles II’s the most generous marriage settlement hitherto received by an English monarch. Meeting his twenty-four-year-old bride on her arrival at Portsmouth, the king found that Catherine could speak neither English nor French, so the couple communicated in Spanish. As Charles reported to Edward Hyde – now ennobled as the Earl of Clarendon – it was also ‘happy for the honour of the nation’ that the marriage had not been immediately consummated, since his fatiguing journey from London had made him ‘afraid that matters would have gone very sleepily’.²⁴

Although substantial, the new queen’s dowry could not provide a permanent substitute for other forms of revenue and disputes over crown finance soon broke out. As early as November 1661, Charles appealed to Parliament ‘to put you in mind of the crying debts which every day call upon me’ and confirmed his willingness for MPs to ‘make a full inspection into my revenue’ and expenditure.²⁵ Thereafter, royal demands for increased funding became a regular leitmotif, despite the House of Commons’ acceptance that the crown’s peacetime costs, to govern England alone, amounted to £1.2 million, and that such a sum should be raised by taxation. In the event, however, state receipts fell far short of that figure and additional agreements regarding unpaid army arrears presented further demands.

More financial strain was placed upon Parliament by Charles’s declaration of war against the Dutch in March 1665 as opposition to Dutch commercial rivalry fused with Anglican aversion to Dutch republican government and religious toleration. Although the conflict was initially popular and opened with a rout by the English of the Dutch fleet off Lowestoft in June, subsequent defeats incurred heavy casualties and mounting expense. Dislocation arising from the war also coincided with an alarming outbreak of bubonic plague in London, the death toll for which peaked in September 1665, when over seven thousand deaths were recorded in one week alone, prompting the royal court to move from Whitehall to Hampton Court and then to Salisbury and Oxford. At the end of January 1666, Louis XIV entered the war on the Dutch side, while the conflict proved deeply unpopular in Charles’s northern kingdom: denying any quarrel with the Dutch, the Scots nevertheless suffered extensive disruption to trade at a time when sectarian divisions also erupted in Lowland Scotland during the Presbyterian Covenanters’ fortnight-long ‘Pentland Rising’ in November.

With the numeral ‘666’ denoting the sign of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, the year’s apocalyptic resonances only intensified with the Great Fire of London in September 1666. The five-day conflagration destroyed over 13,000 homes, laid waste to 400 acres of land in the City and caused damage to property and goods estimated at around £3 million. During the fire, Charles’s personal courage again attracted extensive admiration, with Evelyn deeming it extraordinary to observe the king and his brother James ‘labouring in person, and being present, to command, order, reward and encourage workmen; by which [the king] showed his affection to his people and gained theirs’.²⁶ Addressing displaced Londoners directly, Charles insisted that the fire had been from the ‘hand of God’, exacerbated by ‘the terrible wind’, thereby blaming divine displeasure, rather than a Dutch, French or more widespread Catholic conspiracy.²⁷ Meanwhile, as the costs of the Dutch war mounted and public opinion turned against the conflict, peace talks were initiated during which a large proportion of the English fleet was withdrawn and anchored at Chatham in Kent. In June 1667, however, a Dutch flotilla surged up the River Medway on an incoming tide and captured Sheerness. Breaking the iron chain intended to safeguard the English fleet, the Dutch sank several warships and towed two others back to Holland, including the Royal Navy’s flagship, the Royal Charles.

Successive catastrophes of plague, fire and ignominious military defeat took their toll and rapidly reversed the initial optimism that had accompanied the Restoration. For all the euphoria that had greeted Charles on his return as king in 1660, ruling a people deeply divided by two decades of civil turmoil was always likely to be challenging. In a sermon preached on 30 January 1667, the Rector of Bath Abbey, Joseph Glanvill – also a Fellow of the Royal Society – chose an appropriately scientific metaphor to warn that a ‘people that rebelled once, and successfully, will be ready to do so often’, just ‘as water that has been boiled, will boil again the sooner’.²⁸ Charles himself also became the target of mounting personal criticism for, despite having not yet produced an heir by his wife, by 1667 he had fathered at least nine illegitimate children by four different women, the majority of whom were publicly acknowledged in a way that brought inevitable humiliation for his wife, Catherine. While Charles was in exile, his eldest son, James (later Duke of Monmouth), had been born in 1649 to Lucy Walter, followed by a daughter, Charlotte (later Countess of Yarmouth), to Elizabeth Killigrew, Countess of Shannon. In 1657, he had a son, Charles (later Earl of Plymouth), by the daughter of a Derbyshire Royalist, Catherine Pegge, by whom he also had a daughter, Catherine, the following year. After the Restoration, Charles had five children by Barbara Villiers (Countess of Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland): a daughter, Anne, in 1661; two sons, Charles and Henry (later Dukes of Southampton and Grafton respectively), in 1662 and 1663; followed by a daughter, Charlotte (later Countess of Lichfield), in 1664, and a son, George (later Duke of Northumberland), in 1665.

Amid an increasingly apprehensive public mood, even instinctively loyal observers like Evelyn and Pepys, walking together in Westminster Hall in April 1667, found themselves ‘talking of the badness of the government, where nothing but wickedness, and wicked men and women command the king’ and blaming Charles for being insufficiently principled to ‘gainsay anything that relates to his pleasures’. In the ‘Bawdy House Riots’ that took place the following March, crowds attacked London brothels, incensed that Charles’s government seemed more concerned to persecute pious Nonconformists who worshipped outside the established Anglican Church than to suppress vice and licentiousness. As Pepys recorded, the rioters reportedly ‘had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses’, regretting that they had not instead gone to ‘pull down the great bawdy-house at Whitehall’.²⁹

At Whitehall, Charles’s long-serving political manager, the Earl of Clarendon, was impeached and exiled, ostensibly for mismanagement of the Dutch war, but having also fallen under suspicion of deliberately promoting Charles’s marriage to a barren queen to promote his own family’s interests via his daughter, Anne, who had married the king’s brother, and heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, in 1660. The dynasty’s precariousness was exposed in March 1669 when a coach transporting Charles, the Dukes of York and Monmouth and Prince Rupert of the Rhine through London at night overturned at Holborn. Although Charles escaped unhurt and poor street lighting was blamed, the accident had nevertheless threatened the king, his only surviving brother and heir presumptive, his eldest (illegitimate) son and his cousin. The fragility of the restored monarchy’s fortunes was also apparent overseas. When Charles’s mother died in France that September, her funeral sermon was delivered by the renowned court preacher Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who warned that the English people had become so ‘factious, rebellious and opinionated’ and ‘incapable of constancy’ that, after the civil wars, nothing but ‘appalling precipices’ could be anticipated.³⁰

By the late 1660s, one potential solution to securing the succession might have been for Charles to follow Henry VIII’s precedent and divorce Catherine of Braganza in order to remarry, defying any diplomatic repercussions with Portugal. Aristocratic divorce became politically prominent at this time when John Manners, Baron Roos, introduced private legislation into the House of Lords in 1670, seeking a divorce in order to remarry and sire an heir, after unexpectedly succeeding to the earldom of Rutland. Roos’s bill was promoted by Bishop John Wilkins of Chester, who confirmed that divorces might be granted, both for adultery and for ‘immundicity of the womb, which is given forth to be the queen’s condition’.³¹ Having provoked widespread surprise by deciding to attend the Lords debates in person, Charles enthusiastically proclaimed parliamentary proceedings to be ‘better than going to a play’ and his known support for Roos’s case aided the bill’s narrow victory. As the poet and MP Andrew Marvell noted in a letter to his nephew, Charles had also stated that ‘he knew not why a woman might not be divorced for barrenness, as a man for impotency’.³² Moreover, once peers became accustomed to Charles’s presence at Westminster, it was alleged by Gilbert Burnet that some evidently started ‘to speak with the more boldness’ about politics, aware that an official ban on the publication of parliamentary debates gave them ‘more liberty because what they had said could not be reported wrong’. Burnet disapproved, however, of Charles’s descent into parliamentary politics, lamenting that the king thereby ‘became a common solicitor, not only in public affairs, but even in private matters’.³³

Meanwhile, on the giant chessboard of international diplomacy, Charles proved a risky and audacious strategist. In February 1668, he entered a Triple Alliance with Sweden and his former enemy the Dutch United Provinces to try to halt French expansionism. Simultaneously, however, he fomented a plan to form a defensive alliance with France that could potentially reduce his financial dependence on Parliament. In September 1668, his cherished sister and confidante, Henriette – married to Louis XIV’s brother Philippe – advised Charles that such an alliance ‘would be the veritable foundation of your own greatness’, offering access to French troops, who would be ‘practically in sight of England, could keep it in check and render Parliament more amenable’. Once covert relations with the French court were underway, Charles provided Henriette with a cipher for future correspondence, warning that ‘the whole matter [must] be an absolute secret, otherwise we shall never compass the end we aim at’.³⁴ Indeed, when Pepys caught wind of a rumour in April 1669 that private French financial subsidies might offer Charles a means of achieving independence from Parliament, he judged it ‘a thing that will make the Parliament and kingdom mad, and will turn to our ruin’.³⁵

Notwithstanding, Charles spent his fortieth birthday on 29 May 1670 – coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his restoration – at Dover, relishing a visit from Henriette, with the strategic purpose of her trip concealed by shared enjoyment of yacht races, an expedition to Canterbury, banquets and a ballet performance. Five days earlier, a treaty had been signed in secret at Dover by four English Catholic courtiers and the French ambassador to London, Charles Colbert de Croissy. This envisaged a combined Anglo-French invasion of the Dutch Republic and committed Charles to professing his conversion to Catholicism, while Louis undertook to provide regular financial support and, if necessary, troops to assist Charles in re-establishing Catholicism in all his kingdoms. A ‘sanitized’ version of the treaty – with all clauses concerning Catholicism excised – was later signed at Westminster in December, pledging an Anglo-French attack against the Dutch. On 3 June, Henriette’s departure to France was observed by Croissy, who reported to Louis XIV that he had ‘never seen before so sorrowful a leave-taking, or known before how much royal personages could love one another’; indeed, it was widely acknowledged that Henriette had ‘much more power over the king her brother than any other person in the world’.³⁶ But when Henriette suddenly died later that month, Charles was consumed by anguish and his interest in the more risky aspects of the treaty soon evaporated. The controversial clauses relating to Charles’s public conversion and England’s return to Catholicism were quietly disregarded, while Louis supplied lump sum payments of £160,000 in 1672 and £230,000 the following year.

Fortified by French funds, Charles deployed prerogative action in January 1672 by suspending repayment on the majority of outstanding loans in a ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ that released over £1.2 million. Observing that ‘the sad experience of twelve years’ had shown there to be ‘very little fruit’ in forcibly promoting religious conformity, Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence in March which suspended all penal laws and permitted Protestant dissenters to obtain licences for public worship and Roman Catholics to worship privately at home, before declaring war on the Dutch two days later.³⁷ Military success proved elusive, however, and when the English Parliament next convened in February 1673, Charles could obtain further financial supply only by withdrawing the provisions of his Indulgence and reluctantly accepting a new ‘Test Act’ that prohibited anyone from holding public office who refused to deny the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Clearly directed at Charles’s brother and heir presumptive, the Duke of York, the Test Act’s terms prompted York’s resignation as Lord High Admiral in June, after his failure to take Anglican communion at Easter publicly confirmed his conversion to Catholicism. York’s status as heir presumptive became increasingly significant with every year that passed in which no offspring were born to the king and queen, even though, by 1673, Charles had sired yet more illegitimate children: two sons, Charles (later Duke of St Albans) and James (Lord Beauclerk), by the actress Nell Gwyn; a son, Charles (later Duke of Richmond and Duke of Lennox), by Louise de Kérouaille (later Duchess of Portsmouth); and a daughter, Mary (later Countess of Derwentwater), by another actress, Mary (‘Moll’) Davis.

The rising tide of visceral anti-Catholicism swelled when the widowed Duke of York then married an Italian Catholic, Mary of Modena, in September 1673, thereby raising the spectre of a perpetual Catholic dynasty, should his new wife produce a son. Amid annual celebrations on 5 November that year, to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, an effigy of the pope was carried in procession and publicly burned in London in what could plausibly be construed as satirical enactment of York’s future coronation entry into the city. Charles’s staunch support for his brother remained intact, however, and was observed the following year by the Venetian representative in London, Girolamo Alberti, who attended a dinner at which ‘the king, throwing aside all reserve, tenderly embraced his brother several times, declaring that those who sought to separate them were rebels’. The ‘tears of tenderness’ accompanying Charles’s outburst ‘might have been attributed in others to weakness of head’, mused Alberti, but no one present ‘doubts the genuineness of the demonstration’.³⁸

Fraternal solidarity did not, however, allay suspicions regarding the king’s pro-French leanings and, by the mid 1670s, charged clouds of mistrust were massing over Charles’s court as tensions increased between monarch and Parliament. In 1673, Charles appointed Sir Thomas Osborne (later Earl of Danby) as treasurer, who increased royal solvency by skilful management of crown revenue, boosted by an expansion in trade. Danby also tried to assuage anti-Catholic anxieties by visibly supporting the established Church and promoting a pro-Protestant foreign policy that included a popular decision by Charles to marry York’s elder daughter, Mary, to the Dutch Stadholder, William of Orange, in 1677. Yet as Danby consolidated support for royal policy through an extensive patronage network of parliamentary placemen and one-off payments to secure loyalty, the court’s retreat from religious inclusiveness in favour of a partisan endorsement of the Anglican establishment began to encourage disquieting parallels to be drawn between Charles’s reign and that of his father. An anonymous Letter from a Person of Quality (1675) – often attributed to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, and John Locke – identified ‘a distinct party’ that attracted ‘the High Episcopal Man and the Old Cavalier’ intent on seeking ‘to fight the old quarrel over again’ with their former adversaries, and regretted that Charles II lacked ‘a temper robust, and laborious enough’ to withstand such pressure.³⁹

As the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ that had been elected in 1661 continued sitting without re-election, the erstwhile Parliamentarian leader Denzil Lord Holles complained in 1676 about its unrepresentative nature, since its members had been elected at a time ‘when the people of England were in a kind of delirium or dotage’.⁴⁰ Theories of malevolent conspiracy were elaborated in Andrew Marvell’s anonymously published Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677), which purported to accept that, although Charles ‘would strip himself to his shirt rather than hazard the nation’, he had become the victim of systematic intrigue to ‘change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny’ and to substitute Protestantism with ‘downright popery’. Skilfully presenting radically subversive claims as ostensibly uncontroversial, Marvell insisted that ‘as none will deny’ that converting the monarchy into a republican commonwealth had been treasonable in the 1650s, ‘so by the same fundamental rule, the crime is no less to make that monarchy absolute’.⁴¹ Royalists, however, distrusted such postures of disingenuous counsel from Charles’s most trenchant critics. Identifying the ‘crocodile of 41’, the government’s press licensor, Roger L’Estrange, grimly recalled civil war pamphlets which had proclaimed ‘nothing but love and reverence to his late Majesty too, till his head was off’.⁴²

As politics became increasingly polarized, Charles received ‘revelations’ in August 1678 via a clerical informer, Israel Tonge, and a renegade priest, Titus Oates, of an alleged Jesuitical plot to assassinate him, install his brother as king and return England to Catholicism. Despite Charles’s cool assurance to Parliament that he would ‘leave the matter to the law’, some of his privy councillors and the general public quickly convinced themselves of the plot’s veracity.⁴³ Critics of Charles’s policies made capital from the rumoured conspiracy, fuelling fears that Jesuits had intended to set fire to London for a second time in a giant pro-Catholic conflagration. Circumstantial details added credibility to the alleged plot, especially after the magistrate to whom Oates had sworn his deposition, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was found murdered and incriminating correspondence was discovered between Louis XIV’s confessor and the Duke of York’s former secretary. In response, Catholics were banned from London, searches for priests were conducted across the country and twenty Catholic laymen and thirteen priests were executed. In November, the House of Commons passed a motion calling for the queen and all Catholics to be removed from Whitehall, although the proposal was defeated in the Lords. The following month, however, documents were produced in the Commons by Charles’s former ambassador to France, Ralph Montagu, revealing that – for all his outward rhetoric of a partisan pro-Protestant foreign policy – Danby had simultaneously been involved in secret negotiations with the French court for further subsidies aimed at freeing Charles from financial dependence on Parliament.

The political fallout from the ‘Popish Plot’ quickly swelled into a full-blown ‘Exclusion Crisis’ when a bill demanding that Charles’s Catholic brother and heir, the Duke of York, be removed from the royal line of succession passed its second reading in the Commons by a majority of seventy-nine votes in May 1679. Often identified as the predicament that created modern Britain’s two-party political system, the Exclusion Crisis pitted Charles II and his ‘Tory’ supporters against a ‘Whig’ opposition, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury. While Tory loyalists insisted that altering the hereditary succession after Charles’s death would return the country to the chaos of civil war, their Whig opponents argued that the nation’s Protestant establishment simply could not withstand the accession of a Catholic monarch. Aside from the personal sadness arising from her infertility, Catherine of Braganza’s inability to provide Charles with an heir thus threatened to destabilize the restored monarchy as the same anxieties that had accompanied the ‘succession crisis’ during the reign of Elizabeth I resurfaced. In practical terms, excluding the king’s brother meant either obliging Charles to divorce Catherine and remarry, or legitimizing Charles’s eldest natural son, the Duke of Monmouth, who was increasingly hailed as a popular, Protestant alternative to his Catholic uncle.

Persistent rumours of a clandestine, youthful marriage between Charles and Monmouth’s mother, Lucy Walter, forced Charles to issue three separate declarations confirming that ‘I never was married nor gave any contract to any woman whatsoever but to my wife, Queen Catherine, to whom I am now married’.⁴⁴ In August 1679, Charles removed both Monmouth and York from London – to the Netherlands and Scotland respectively – and issued seven successive prorogations to prevent Parliament reconvening between October 1679 and October 1680, thereby frustrating further legislative attempts at exclusion. Although, as a rule, Charles was a pragmatic and flexible political operator, maintaining hereditary succession as an integral part of the dignity of monarchical authority was the one principle over which he refused to compromise, precisely because he had himself been deprived of his thrones for over a decade after his father’s execution. A second Exclusion Bill was defeated in the Lords in November 1680, and was followed by Parliament’s dissolution. Following fresh elections, a new parliament convened in Oxford in March 1681, when Charles denounced attempts at exclusion as an illegal invasion of the royal prerogative, firmly insisting that ‘I, who will never use arbitrary government myself, am resolved not to suffer it in others’.⁴⁵ Finding MPs still intent on pursuing exclusion, Charles dissolved the ‘Oxford Parliament’ after one week and never called an English parliament again.

Realizing that public opinion dreaded a descent into anarchy even more than it feared a Catholic successor, Charles seized the political initiative by directing charges of irresponsible recklessness against his Whig enemies. In April 1681, he issued a public declaration – which he commanded be read aloud in all parish churches – attacking ‘the restless malice of ill men who are labouring to poison our people, some out of fondness for their old beloved Commonwealth principles’ and some from private jealousies and resentments.⁴⁶ In July, he convened a Scottish parliament under the direction of the Duke of York as High Commissioner. Having stated its intention ‘to let [Charles’s] other kingdoms and all the world see’ the illegality of exclusion, the Scottish Parliament’s Succession Act (1681) confirmed that monarchical succession was solely determined by proximity of blood and was unalterable by parliamentary statute.⁴⁷ Victory in the Exclusion Crisis thereafter unleashed a partisan ‘Tory Reaction’ that lasted for the rest of Charles’s reign and attracted considerable popular support. Depicting his Whig adversaries as dangerous republican rebels, Charles’s administration purged local commissions of the peace, remodelled municipal boroughs and interfered with judicial appointments. Further political capital was secured in June 1683 when another Whig-sponsored conspiracy, known as the ‘Rye House Plot’, was uncovered, with its intention to assassinate both Charles and York on their return from attending horse-racing at Newmarket. At the same time, annual crown revenue increased by more than a quarter from £1.1 million to £1.4 million, largely through fiscal levies on overseas trade. During his final years as king, Charles thus became, as his physician James Welwood put it, ‘quite lulled asleep with the charms of a new-swelled up prerogative’.⁴⁸

On 2 February 1685, however, Charles became critically ill, suffering either a stroke or the exacerbation of chronic kidney disease. He died four days later at Whitehall, having been received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, at York’s encouragement. By curiously fitting coincidence, the priest summoned to hear Charles’s deathbed confession was Father John Huddleston, who, thirty-four years earlier, had courageously sheltered Charles during his dramatic flight from Worcester. Although a state funeral had initially been planned, a scaled-down evening burial was held, reflecting the nervousness that surrounded his brother’s accession as the first openly Catholic monarch of England since the unfortunate reign of Mary Tudor. Although Charles had been seriously ill in 1679 and 1682, his death came as a shock. Only a week earlier, Evelyn recalled observing ‘a scene of utmost vanity’ at court, comprising ‘the King, sitting and toying with his concubines … a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery’ and about ‘twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons’ gambling large sums at cards. As Evelyn mused, those present ‘thought they would never have an end: six days after was all in the dust’.⁴⁹