| Notes |
- Succeeded his father in 1649, but was not restored to the throne until
1660 after the period of Commonwealth.
King of Great Britain and Ireland (166085), 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.
But though the early years of tawdry dissipation have tarnished the
romance of his adventures, not all 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.
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 166567 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 1662 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.
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 Parliamentmen whom he detestedto 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.
(Source: Encylopedia Britannica 2002)
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1630 - 1685 (54 years)