Illustrations
1. In Van Dyck’s Three Eldest Children of Charles I (1635), the five-year-old Prince Charles offers a reassuring arm to his young brother, James, who stands between Charles and his older sister, Mary. Following Charles I’s execution in 1649, this poignant family portrait was sold to a Parliamentarian army officer before being acquired by Sir Peter Lely, who returned it to Charles II after the Restoration.
2. Charles II Discovered by Colonel Careless and William Penderel Seated on a Tree-stump in Boscobel Wood by Isaac Fuller (c.1660s) was one of five narrative canvases illustrating Charles’s flight from the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Camouflaged in rustic clothing and sitting with his flies seemingly open, Charles’s kingly status is indicated only by his companions’ deferential poses.
3. The broadside illustration The Scots Holding their Young King’s Nose to the Grindstone (1651) satirized the stringent conditions exacted from Charles before his austere coronation at Scone Palace on 1 January 1650.
4. Hieronymus Janssens’s Charles II Dancing at a Ball at Court (c.1660) is probably an imagined reconstruction of a banquet held in Charles’s honour at The Hague, shortly before his return to England. In this painting, Charles appears twice: dancing in the outer room with his sister Mary, Princess of Orange, and dining in the inner room, seated next to Mary.
5 and 6. Two unfinished and undated miniatures of Charles II and his wife, Catherine of Braganza, by Samuel Cooper. Known to have been painted ad vivum, the likeness of Charles evinces a rare intimacy, while the painting of Queen Catherine dates from the time of the couple’s marriage in 1662.
7. This painting of Barbara Villiers and Charles Fitzroy (c.1664) by Sir Peter Lely epitomizes the audacity with which baroque portraiture’s conventional pieties were derailed when Charles II’s court painter chose to present the king’s favourite mistress and her son by Charles as the Madonna and Child.
8. Although Charles’s amorous pursuit of Frances Stuart was unsuccessful, her figurative appearance as ‘Britannia’ in Jan Roettier’s medal commemorating the Peace of Breda (1667) reflected this king’s dangerous tendency to conflate private lust and state affairs.
9. Charles reportedly hung Sir Peter Lely’s Portrait of a Young Woman and Child, as Venus and Cupid (c.1670s) – believed to be of another favoured mistress, Nell Gwyn – behind a landscape painting that could be swung back to allow private viewings.
10. Measuring nearly ten feet high, John Michael Wright’s full-frontal Charles II is an iconic image of the restored Stuart monarchy, in which Charles wears the new version of St Edward’s Crown made for his coronation in 1661.
11. Charles II Presented with a Pineapple (c.1675–80) is unusual in depicting the king in fashionable clothing from the 1670s rather than ceremonial attire.
12. Robert White’s engraving of Charles II touching a patient for the king’s evil (scrofula) appeared as the frontispiece to John Browne’s treatise, Adenochoiradelogia … or King’s-Evil-swellings (1684).
13. This flamboyant and over-life-sized bust of Charles II, with billowing drapery and tight ringlets, was sculpted in marble by the French artist Honoré Pellé in 1684.
14. In January 1684, Charles and his family visited ‘Freezeland’, depicted here in The Frost Fair of the Winter of 1683–4 on the Thames, with Old London Bridge in the Distance.
15. Cedric Hardwicke and Anna Neagle as Charles II and Nell Gwyn in the film Nell Gwyn (1934), directed by Neagle’s husband, Herbert Wilcox.
16. Undoubtedly a travesty of Charles II’s actual physical appearance, the lascivious and cynical character portrayed in Thomas Hawker’s King Charles II (c.1680) continues to shape this king’s posthumous image and reputational afterlife.