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Charles II,
byname THE MERRY MONARCH (b. May 29, 1630, London--d. Feb. 6, 1685, London),
king of Great Britain and Ireland (1660-85), who was restored to the throne
after years of exile during the Puritan Commonwealth. The years of his reign
are known in English history as the Restoration
period. His political adaptability and his knowledge of men enabled him to
steer his country through the convolutions of the struggle between
Anglicans, Catholics, and dissenters that marked much of his reign.
Charles II, the eldest surviving son
of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, was born at St. James's Palace,
London. His early years were unremarkable, but before he was 20 his
conventional education had been completely overshadowed by the harsh lessons
of defeat in the Civil War against the Puritans and subsequent isolation and
poverty. Thus Charles emerged into precocious maturity, cynical,
self-indulgent, skilled in the sort of moral evasions that make life
comfortable even in adversity. (see also English Civil Wars)
But though the early years of tawdry
dissipation have tarnished the romance of his adventures, not all of his
actions were discreditable. He tried to fight his father's battles in the
west of England in 1645; he resisted the attempts of his mother and his
sister Henrietta Anne to convert him to
Catholicism and remained openly loyal to his Protestant faith. In 1648 he
made strenuous efforts to save his father; and when, after Charles I's
execution in 1649, he was proclaimed Charles II by the Scots in defiance of
the English republic, he was prepared to go to Scotland and swallow the
stringently anti-Catholic and anti-Anglican Presbyterian Covenant as the
price for alliance. But the sacrifice of friends and principles was futile
and left him deeply embittered. The Scottish army was routed by the English
under Oliver Cromwell at Dunbar in September 1650, and in 1651 Charles's
invasion of England ended in defeat at Worcester. The young king became a
fugitive, hunted through England for 40 days but protected by a handful of
his loyal subjects until he escaped to France in October 1651. (see also Solemn
League and Covenant)
His safety was comfortless, however.
He was destitute and friendless, unable to bring pressure against an
increasingly powerful England. France and the Dutch United Provinces were
closed to him by Cromwell's diplomacy and he turned to Spain,
with whom he concluded a treaty in April 1656. He persuaded his brother James
to relinquish his command in the French army and gave him some regiments of
Anglo-Irish troops in Spanish service, but poverty doomed this nucleus of a
royalist army to impotence. European princes took little interest in Charles
and his cause, and his proffers of marriage were declined. Even Cromwell's
death did little to improve his prospects. But George
Monck, one of Cromwell's leading generals, realized that under
Cromwell's successors the country was in danger of being torn apart and with
his formidable army created the situation favourable to Charles's
restoration in 1660.
Most Englishmen now favoured a
return to a stable and legitimate monarchy, and, although more was known of
Charles II's vices than his virtues, he had, under the steadying influence
of Edward Hyde, his chief adviser, avoided
any damaging compromise of his religion or constitutional principles. With
Hyde's help, Charles issued in April 1660 his Declaration
of Breda, expressing his personal desire for a general amnesty,
liberty of conscience, an equitable settlement of land disputes, and full
payment of arrears to the army. The actual terms were to be left to a free
parliament, and on this provisional basis Charles was proclaimed king in May
1660. Landing at Dover on May 25, he reached a rejoicing London on his 30th
birthday.
The unconditional nature of the
settlement that took shape between 1660 and 1662 owed little to Charles's
intervention and must have exceeded his expectations. He was bound by the
concessions made by his father in 1640 and 1641, but the Parliament elected
in 1661 was determined on an uncompromising Anglican and royalist
settlement. The Militia Act of 1661 gave Charles unprecedented authority to
maintain a standing army, and the Corporation Act
of 1661 allowed him to purge the boroughs of dissident officials. Other
legislation placed strict limits on the press and on public assembly, and
the 1662 Act of Uniformity created controls of education. An exclusive body
of Anglican clergy and a well-armed landed gentry were the principal
beneficiaries of Charles II's restoration.
But within this narrow structure of
upper-class loyalism there were irksome limitations on Charles's
independence. His efforts to extend religious toleration to his
Nonconformist and Roman Catholic subjects
were sharply rebuffed in 1663, and throughout his reign the House of Commons
was to thwart the more generous impulses of his religious policy. A more
pervasive and damaging limitation was on his financial independence.
Although the Parliament voted the king an estimated annual income of £
1,200,000, Charles had to wait many years before his revenues produced such
a sum, and by then the damage of debt and discredit was irreparable. Charles
was incapable of thrift; he found it painful to refuse petitioners. With the
expensive disasters of the Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-67 the reputation of the
restored king sank to its lowest level. His vigorous attempts to save London
during the Great Fire of September 1666 could not make up for the negligence
and maladministration that led to England's naval defeat in June 1667.
Charles cleared himself by
dismissing his old adviser, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and tried to
assert himself through a more adventurous foreign policy. So far, his reign
had made only modest contributions to England's commercial advancement. The
Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, which had been prompted by the threat to
British shipping of the rise of the Dutch carrying trade, were valuable
extensions of Cromwellian policies, and the capture of New York in 1664 was
one of his few gains from the Dutch. But although marriage to Princess
Catherine of Braganza of Portugal in 1661 brought him the possession of
Tangier and Bombay, they were of less strategic value than Dunkirk, which he
sold to Louis XIV in 1662. Charles was,
however, prepared to sacrifice much for the alliance of his young cousin.
Through his sister Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans, he had direct
contact with the French court, and it was through her that he negotiated the
startling reversal of the Protestant Triple
Alliance (England, the Dutch United Provinces, Sweden) of 1668. By
the terms of the so-called Secret Treaty of Dover of May 1670, not only did
England and France join in an offensive alliance against the Dutch but
Charles promised to announce his conversion to Roman Catholicism. If this
provoked trouble from his subjects he was assured of French military and
financial support. Charles saw to it that the conversion clause of the
treaty was not made public. (see also Dover,
Treaty of)
This clause, which was the most
controversial act of Charles II's reign, can be explained as a shortsighted
bid for Louis XIV's confidence. In this, however, it failed. Louis neither
welcomed Charles's intentions nor believed in them and, in the event, it was
only upon his deathbed that Charles was received into the Roman Catholic
church. But Charles had now fatally compromised himself. Although he
subsequently attempted to pursue policies independent of Louis, he remained
bound to him by inclination as well as by the fear of blackmail. More
seriously, he had lost the confidence of his subjects, who deplored the
French alliance and distrusted the whole tendency of Charles's policies.
Other circumstances deepened
Englishmen's discontent with their king. By the 1670s, the miscarriages of
the queen had reduced hopes that Charles would have a legitimate heir, and
in 1673 the second marriage of his brother James, Duke of York, to Mary of
Modena, increased the possibility of the Catholic line of succession, for
James's conversion to the Roman church was well known. But it was for his
autocratic character as much as for his religion that James was feared as
his brother was not, and it was on his brother's behalf that Charles
eventually had to face the severest political storm of his reign.
The Popish
Plot of 1678 was an elaborate tissue of fictions built around a
skeleton of even stranger truths. The allegations of Titus
Oates, a former Anglican cleric who had been expelled from a Jesuit
seminary, that Roman Catholics planned to murder Charles to make James king,
seemed to be confirmed by scraps of evidence of which Charles was
justifiably skeptical. But Charles was obliged to bow before the gusts of
national hysteria that sought to bar his brother from the line of
succession. Between 1679 and 1681 Charles very nearly lost control of his
government. Deprived of his chief minister, the Earl of Danby, who had been
compromised by his negotiations with France, the king had to allow the Earl
of Shaftesbury and his Whig supporters, who upheld the power of the
Parliament--men whom he detested--to occupy positions of power in central
and local government. Three general elections produced three equally
unmanageable parliaments; and although Charles publicly denied the
legitimacy of his first son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, he had to send
his Catholic brother James out of the country and offer a plan of
limitations that would bind James if he came to the throne. The plan proved
to be unacceptable both to the Whigs and to James, and, when Charles fell
seriously ill in the summer of 1679, there was real danger of civil
conflict.
But Charles kept his nerve. He
defended his queen against slanders, dismissed the intractable parliaments,
and recovered control of his government. His subjects' dread of republican
anarchy proved stronger than their suspicion of James, and from March 1681,
when he dissolved his last Parliament, Charles enjoyed a nationwide surge of
loyalty almost as fervent as that of 1660. He had made yet another secret
treaty with France and in addition to a French subsidy could now count upon
a healthy public revenue. Reforms at the Treasury, which he had inaugurated
in 1667, provided the crown with a firm basis of administrative control that
was among Charles II's most valuable legacies to English government.
As a result of these actions,
Charles, who died in February 1685 at Whitehall in London, was able to end
his reign in the kind of tranquil prosperity he had always sought.
Believing that God would not
"make a man miserable only for taking a little pleasure out of the
way," he had made quite sure of his own share and left at least 14
illegitimate offspring, of whom only James, Duke of Monmouth, played any
part in English politics. Mistresses like Barbara Villiers, Duchess of
Cleveland, and Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, were
always costly and often troublesome, but Charles probably paid a smaller
price for his amours than for his laziness. He was tall and active and loved
riding and sailing but, although robust enough to outsit his advisers at the
Council board, he hated routine and prolonged application. This failing
undermined the effectiveness of his government and led to his dependence on
France. But the relaxed tolerance he brought to religious matters in the end
may have contributed more to the stability of his reign than was lost by his
shifty insincerity.
Charles fully shared the interests
of the skeptical, materialist century that saw the foundation of the Royal
Society under his charter, and he did something to foster technological
improvements in navigation and ship design. The sincerity of his interest in
England's naval advancement is held by some historians to be the most
important of his redeeming features, although, like his reputation for wit
and high intelligence, it may not stand up to close examination. Any verdict
on Charles is therefore controversial. A contemporary wrote of him that
"he had as good a claim to a kind interpretation as most men," and
on this basis it may be agreed that his image as a man remains more
attractive than his reputation as a king. (H.G.R.)
Both Arthur Bryant, King Charles II, rev. ed. (1955); and Antonia Fraser, Royal
Charles: Charles II and the Restoration (1979), are sympathetic
vindications of Charles, but many scholars remain unconvinced of these
views. The most penetrating assessment of Charles and his interpreters is
K.H.D. Haley, Charles II (1966). Other biographies include Maurice Ashley, Charles
II, the Man and the Statesman (1971); Christopher Falkus, The
Life and Times of Charles II (1972); J.R. Jones, Charles
II: Royal Politician (1987); Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1989);
and John Miller, Charles II
(1991). Richard Ollard, The Image of
the King: Charles I and Charles II (1979), is a critical character
study, focusing primarily on Charles II. |
