harles 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]
Charles II (of
England) (1630-85), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1660-85),
whose reign marked a period of relative stability after the
upheaval of the English Revolution.
Charles was born in London on May 29, 1630. He was the second,
but eldest surviving, son of King Charles I and was Prince of
Wales from birth. He took his seat in the House of Lords in 1641
and held a nominal military command in the early campaigns of the
first civil war of the English Revolution. He later fled from
England and went into exile at The Hague, the Netherlands, from
where he made two attempts to save his father. On the execution
of Charles I in 1649, Charles II assumed the title of king and
was so proclaimed in Scotland and sections of Ireland, and in
England, then ruled by Oliver Cromwell. After an acknowledgment
of the faults of his father, Charles accepted the Scottish crown
on January 1, 1651, at Scone from the Scottish noble Archibald
Campbell, 8th earl of Argyll. He invaded England the following
August with 10,000 men and was proclaimed king at Carlisle and
other places along his route. His army, however, was routed by
Cromwell at Worcester on September 3, 1651. After this battle
Charles fled to France.
He spent eight years in poverty and dissipation while in exile
on the Continent. In 1658, following the death of Cromwell and
the succession of his son, Richard, as Lord Protector, the demand
for the restoration of royalty increased. In February 1660,
General George Monck led an army into London and forced the Rump
Parliament to dissolve. In April, in the Declaration of Breda,
Charles announced his intention to accept a parliamentary
government and to grant amnesty to his political opponents. A new
Parliament requested Charles to return and proclaimed him king on
May 8, 1660. He landed at Dover on May 26 and was welcomed at
Whitehall by Parliament three days later.
Charles
was crowned on April 23, 1661. Noted for subservience and
insistence on royal prerogative, his first Parliament was
overwhelmingly Royalist and gave him free rein. Edward Hyde, 1st
earl of Clarendon, his companion in exile, was appointed chief
minister. Clarendon restored the supremacy of the Church of
England, and English and Scottish Nonconformists and
Presbyterians were persecuted contrary to the Declaration of
Breda. Extravagant and always in want of money, Charles assented
to the abolition of the feudal rights of knight service, wardship,
and purveyance in consideration of a large annuity that, however,
was never fully paid. On May 20, 1662, he married the Portuguese
princess Catherine of Braganza for her large dowry. The failure
of Parliament to produce the amount agreed on and the chronic
mismanagement of the English finances brought the king to a
desperate need of money. In return for subsidies from Louis XIV
of France, Charles formed a secret alliance with that country; in
1672 that alliance plunged England into a war with the
Netherlands.
The war was popular. Commercial and colonial rivalry had
already brought about two wars between the two countries, the
last one occurring between 1665 and 1667. The Dutch War of 1672
resulted in the English acquisition of the Dutch colony of New
Netherland (now New York). Knowledge of his negotiations with
France, together with his efforts to become an absolute ruler,
brought Charles into conflict with Parliament, which, buoyed by
French subsidies, he dissolved in 1681. The struggle was
heightened by enactment of the anti-Catholic Test Acts and by the
so-called popish plot fabricated by Titus Oates. From 1681 until
his death on February 6, 1685, Charles ruled without Parliament.
Although a member of the Anglican church, Charles received the
last rites of the Roman Catholic church. He was succeeded by his
brother James II. [Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia]
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