Charles II Stuart, King of England

  General Notes:

Notes on Charles II, King of England (ruled 1660-1685)
Charles was born at St James’s Palace 29 May 1630. He was created Prince of Wales in his ninth year; on the outbreak of the Civil War, he accompanied his father at the battle of Edgehill. By 1644, the Royalist cause had declined so sharply that Charles was forced into exile, first to Scilly and Jersey - where James, Duke of Monmouth, was begotten of his liaison with Lucy Walter - and finally to France. His offer to agree to any conditions that would preserve his Father’s life having been rejected, on the royal captive’s execution, Charles Stewart assumed the title of King. In 1650, he agreed to the terms laid down by the Scottish Commissioners, and having subscribed to the Covenant, he was crowned at Scone on 1 Jan 1651. He speedily found himself the prisoner of rancorous politico-religious factions far too busy quarrelling amongst themselves to combine to assert the King’s title. Marching into England at the head of a scratch force lacking in all cohesion and control, he suffered such grievous defeat at Worcester (3 Sep 1651) that flight was inevitable. With £1,000 set on his head by Parliament, for forty-four days he stole through the Western counties, only preserved from capture by the unswerving devotion of the many loyalists, of all classes, who risked their lives to help him on his way. Finally smuggled aboard a coal-brig at Shoreham, he was safely landed in Normandy. Nine years of wandering, indigent exile ensued before a distracted and impoverished England, in dread of a revival of military despotism, summoned Charles to take up the reins of government; a recall very largely engineered by General George Monck. Landing at Dover, Charles entered London in triumph on 29 May 1660. Two years later he married the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza, but the union was childless. The first seven years of the reign were characterised by a loyal parliament and widespread constitutional support for a Church and State as anti-Catholic as it was anti-Puritan; although Clarendon’s control of policy exhibited an inflexible authoritarianism dangerously at variance with the prevailing climate of opinion. The intransigent attitude of the extremist Catholic-Presbyterian "Cabal" was ultimately reduced to impotence by the provisions of the Test Act of 1673. But failure to appreciate that the retention of Dunkirk without Calais to support it was no more than an empty gesture, rendered Charles’s sale of the former Cromwellian incubus extremely unpopular; while the limited success attending the attempt to win back the valuable trans-oceanic carrying trade from the Dutch by the war of 1665 aroused general dissatisfaction. This was further exacerbated by de Ruyter’s destructive raid on shipping in the Medway and Thamesmouth, where much of the Fleet had been "laid up in ordinary" for want of an adequate parliamentary grant to fit it out and the necessary seafarers to man it - this last a consequence of the Great Plague. Clarendon’s alleged mismanagement of the war led to his dismissal, hard on the conclusion of the Peace of Breda (1667). This was the outcome of the exhaustion of both belligerents, and left France free to pursue her design for an Anglo-Gallic combination against the States General. This aim was temporarily checked by Sir William Temple’s negotiations for a triple alliance between Britain, Holland and Sweden, a sop to the party of the "Cabal." But denied the requisite funds - particularly for the upkeep of the Navy by Shaftesbury’s intemperate "Country Party," Charles, believing that a king’s only morality is the welfare of his people, and that an Anglo-French alliance against Holland was the only alternative to a dangerously powerful Franco-Dutch coalition against Britain, signed the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). If by this pact the British sovereign became in some sort the pensioner of Louis of France, he sinuously contrived to evade the services expected of him in return, including the forcible conversion of his realm to Roman Catholicism, while sedulously devoting £76,000 of his first subsidy of £84,700 to the build-up of a fighting marine powerful enough to exact wary respect from Frenchman and Hollander alike. The Dutch War of 1672 sufficiently avenged the Medway raid; but Gallic co-operation therein was so half-hearted that public opinion refused to support a conflict in which "the French only accompanied their allies to the scene of action to see if the British Navy earned its pay." Peace with Holland was concluded and cemented by the marriage of Charles’s niece, Mary, to the Prince of Orange. With Shaftesbury heading an Opposition intent on making the utmost political capital out of Titus Oates’s trumped-up "Popish Plot," Charles steered an astutely prudent course. Pretending to be duly impressed by reported machinations too infeasible to beguile any but the most gullible, he nonetheless steadfastly refused to tamper with the succession to exclude his brother James. The immoderate violence of the Whig leaders, together with the unmasking of the Rye House Plot to assassinate the king and his brother, turned the tide in Charles’s favour. With his implacable opponents vanquished, for the last three years of his life Charles reigned tranquilly and without obstruction. Stricken with apoplexy, he died on 6 Feb 1685. Shrewd, supple and of great political acumen, Charles was "an exact knower of mankind" and one who "had a world of wit and not a grain of ill-nature in him" (Defoe). Above all, he was determined to restore his country’s prosperity and safeguard it by building the most powerful Navy afloat. Inheriting a tremendous load of debt and an Exchequer containing exactly £11, 2s. 10d., by 1685 he had wrought so well that "there were more men to be found on the Exchange worth £10, 000 than in 1651 had been worth £1,000" (Sir Josiah Child). Indeed, "England has rarely been so prosperous as under Charles II" (Sir Charles Petrie), and the rise in living standards was shared by all classes. The Fleet was stronger than at any time under the Parliament, while 300,000 tons of merchant shipping wore the English flag. Men’s liberty had been underwritten by the passage of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679; science had been advanced by the construction of Greenwich Observatory and the production of the Nautical Almanac. Charles sharply differentiated between his duties as a sovereign and his indulgences as a man. If his numerous amours expanded the ranks of the nobility with a dozen natural offspring, no woman who had granted him her favours could justly accuse him of ingratitude or neglect. His marriage being childless, he was succeeded by his brother, James. {Burke’s Peerage and Chamber’s Biographical Dictionary} {Concise Dictionary of National Biography} Succeeded to the throne after his Father’s execution by the Parliamentarians. Forced into exile in France, he returned with the Restoration period in 1660. He changed the spelling of his family to Stuart after the French fashion. [GADD.GED]

  Noted events in his life were:

• Title: Prince of Wales, 1630-1660.

• Title: King of England, 1660-1685.

Charles married Catherine of Braganza, daughter of John IV of Portugal, King of Portugal and Luisa de Guzman, in 1662.⁷⁷¹ (Catherine of Braganza was born on 25 Nov 1638 in Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal ⁷⁷³ and died on 30 Nov 1705 in Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal ⁷⁷³.)

Charles also had a relationship with Eleanor Gwynne. (Eleanor Gwynne was born on 2 Feb 1649/50,⁷⁷³ died on 14 Nov 1687 in London, London, England ⁷⁷³ and was buried in 1687 in St. Martin's in the Fields, London, England ⁷⁷³.)

Charles also had a relationship with Lucy Walter, daughter of William Walter and Unknown. (Lucy Walter was born circa 1630 in Roch Castle, Pembroke, Wales ⁷⁷³ and died in 1658 in Paris, Île-de-France, France ⁷⁷³.)

Charles also had a relationship with Elizabeth Killigrew. (Elizabeth Killigrew was born in 1622 ⁷⁷³ and died in 1680 ⁷⁷³.)

Charles also had a relationship with Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. (Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland was born in Nov 1640 ⁷⁷³ and died on 9 Oct 1709 ⁷⁷³.)