Charles II

6 Key excerpts on "Charles II"

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  eBook - ePub

  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Agreements of the People , in the Heads of the Proposals and in the failed negotiations at Oxford, Uxbridge and Newport were not imposed at the Restoration and in most respects Charles II continued to exercise very wide and sweeping prerogative and executive power. He oversaw the personnel, role and work of the Privy Council, of local and county administration and of the militia and royal navy, he exercised almost unrestricted powers to appoint and dismiss officers of state, to call and dissolve parliaments at will and to veto parliamentary legislation and he determined and directed all important state policies, including foreign policy. Thus, in order to understand the Restoration regime in action it is important to gain some insight into the newly returned monarch.

  Unfortunately, Charles II can appear opaque and contradictory. For example, it is very difficult to get to the core of his personal faith and true religious beliefs – was he a devoted Anglican or a closet Catholic, was he at heart an atheist or simply a flexible opportunist in terms of his faith as much as his political outlook? At times, he seems mild and forgiving – seen perhaps in his support for a broad pardon and indemnity at the start of his reign and in his reported desire then to forgive and forget past deeds – but at times he could be fierce and vengeful – seen most clearly in his dogged pursuit of opponents, to the point of judicial murder, during the last years of his reign. At times he seems very much the ‘Merry Monarch’ of repute, a happy-go-lucky, affable and theatrical King, who – as his many mistresses could testify – was keen to spread his charms widely. Yet scholarly biographers often admit to struggling to unravel his personality and many have come to see the King’s affability as a façade behind which lurked an altogether darker man, wary, slippery, very good at deception and at playing his cards close to his chest, a cynic for whom self-preservation was always uppermost, even if that meant sacrificing cherished policies and loyal ministers. Some modern academic biographers have ended up seeing Charles as a thoroughly unpleasant man, in a way that his father, for all his ineptitude and incompetence, never was.

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  eBook - ePub

  Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture

  Britain and Ireland, 1660-1714

  • George Southcombe, Grant Tapsell(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4:Was Charles II a Successful ‘Royal Politician’?

  To play the king was an exceptionally demanding role in early modern Europe. The difficulty sprang from the pressure of satisfying three distinct audiences: a monarch’s own subjects; his royal peers in other states; and posterity. This was the harsh reality facing any king but the scale of the challenges facing Charles II was unusually high. For all the initial jubilation surrounding the Restoration the task of maintaining the regard of a people deeply divided by 20 years of chronic political crisis, bloody civil war, and bewildering constitutional changes would have taxed even the most brilliant ruler. Once a thousand years of monarchy had been temporarily eclipsed by a republic could its appearance of timeless invulnerability ever be rebuilt? As the Anglican cleric John Glanvill opined in 1667 with the aid of a homespun analogy:

  Though government may be fixed again upon its foundations and laws turned into their ancient channel after the violence they have suffered, yet they lose much of their reverence and strength by such disestablishment. And the people that have rebelled once and successfully will be ready to do so often. As water that hath been boiled will boil again the sooner.1

  The situation abroad was scarcely less problematic. There the geo-political reality was that after more than a century of intense conflict between the Habsburg rulers of the Spanish kingdoms and the Valois and Bourbon kings of France, the latter was emerging as the hegemonic European power under the personal rule of Louis XIV from 1661. The Stuarts could no longer act – or pretend to act – as the balancing force between two competing powers: they would have to choose between moving within the orbit of a more powerful France or lending weight to some kind of coalition of lesser princes attempting to rein in French power and ambition. Yet arguably posterity was the toughest audience of all. Most rulers felt a need to be remembered, to take their place within the annals of their nation, and to do so in rivalry with the greatest of their predecessors. Thanks to the political developments of Charles’s reign, his kingship would be subjected to severe censure from both of the rival parties that emerged and which would quickly develop their own historiographical traditions. His personality and policies did not make him an uncomplicated object of Whig celebration or Tory praise.

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  The Stuart Age

  England, 1603–1714

  • Barry Coward, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 But after 1660, as in the early part of the Stuart age, what people perceived to be the case was at least as important (and often more so) than historical reality. One of the principal reasons why many people believed that the monarchy was intent on absolutism after 1660 grew out of the crown’s financial weakness, which (at least before the 1670s) was as severe as it had been in the early seventeenth century. Consequently, like his predecessors, Charles II was sometimes forced to try to secure revenue outside parliament by trying to control town governments or commissions of the peace, or inside parliament by manipulating opinion among MPs. Not surprisingly, these measures were interpreted as part of a concerted ‘absolutist’ campaign to erode parliament’s place in the constitution. This belief was strengthened by a second factor which continued to destabilize politics in England after, as before, 1660: the impact of events in Scotland and Ireland. What Charles II and James II as kings of England did as rulers of their other British kingdoms had as great an impact in fuelling mistrust of them among their English subjects as had Charles I’s unfortunate intrusion into Scottish affairs in the late 1630s and his negotiations with Irish Catholics in the 1640s.

  Second, religion continued to play an important role in politics and society. The history of Restoration England makes it clear that religion, far from losing its importance, remained a powerful political and social force. In a great wave of militant Anglicanism, some local gentlemen suppressed conventicles and ejected church ministers even before the Cavalier Parliament met in 1661, and when it did meet it put a savage, repressive code (the Clarendon Code) on the statute book, directed at all those who refused to conform to the established Church. But as in the constitutional sphere, the effects of the English Revolution were diverse. The history of the patchy way in which the Clarendon Code was put into practice makes clear that not everyone was sympathetic to the intolerant aspirations of militant Anglicans and that some were more sympathetic to the long post-Reformation tradition of a comprehensive Church, broken by Charles I and Laud in the 1630s and revived by Cromwell in the 1650s, than they were to the narrow Church erected in the early 1660s.

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  Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England

  • Gesa Stedman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Charles II is nevertheless the central figure of this network of cultural mediators. Like Sir Charles Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth and Keeper of the Privy Purse, this group, according to Samuel Pepys, learned ‘in France of thinking [themselves] obliged to serve the King in his pleasures’ 1 and therefore helped to spread French cultural practices and ideas. In contrast to Henrietta Maria’s more circumscribed courtly circle, many different people of different social backgrounds were involved in spreading these practices and ideas during and after the Restoration, for instance tradesmen like the Batelier family with whom Pepys and his wife were friends and of course the Pepys themselves – members of the rising middle ranks who emulated the aristocracy. If that had not been the case, Dryden could not have complained of a ‘second Norman conquest’, 2 nor could Pepys have fretted about ‘æmulacion, poverty, and the vices of swearing, drinking, and whoring’ 3 – in other words, fears of imitation, competition, and of being unable to maintain what was considered ‘cultural purity’ would not have arisen. Biographical accounts of Charles II abound, 4 therefore, the following section will concentrate on his activities only in so far as they are related to Anglo-French cultural relations

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  Early Modern England 1485-1714

  A Narrative History

  • Robert Bucholz, Newton Key(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Clearly, the monarch and the Church of England had been restored to their primacy. But a careful reading of the Restoration Settlements in church and state shows that the monarch's primacy was qualified: for all their protestations of loyalty and submission to the king, the parliamentary aristocracy had reserved a great deal of power to their own hands, not only in Parliament but also in the localities. The new regime revived the lieutenancy and stocked it with Royalists and some loyal Presbyterians. They worked with the JPs, using the militia to enforce the new religious settlement and purge corporations of the disloyal. But this return to defused local control after the infamous centralizing experiment of the major‐generals meant that provincial officials could once again be selective about how they enforced the cascade of statutes and proclamations coming down from Whitehall or Westminster – strictly or laxly as the local situation (i.e. their neighbors) dictated. In other words, if the Restoration political settlement was a qualified win for the king, it was an unalloyed triumph for the largely conservative local nobility and gentry. Political leaders would ignore this basic fact at their peril. Flouting Charles II's intentions at Breda, the aristocracy had already created winners and losers. The success or failure of the Restoration Settlements would ultimately depend on the new king's willingness to ally with those winners and accommodate his policies to their power.

  Charles II and the Unraveling of the Restoration Settlements

  It is practically impossible to separate the failure of the Restoration Settlements from the personality of King Charles II (see Plate 9.1 ). In an age of personal monarchy, royal personality mattered. At first, as with nearly all new rulers, only the king's good points shone through. Charles II was highly intelligent. He spoke fluent French and some Italian; he had a particular interest in science, maintaining a laboratory and serving as the founding patron of the Royal Society. He was also witty, affable, and approachable. (He would, in our own day, have made a terrific TV talk‐show host.) This was in sharp and, for the most part, agreeable contrast to his father, who had been impossibly aloof and formal. The new king was also vigorous, as he proved on the tennis court and in the bedroom: in the words of one historian, he was “unmistakably the ‘sport’ of his line.”2 More important, he was tolerant, flexible, and open to compromise – again, in welcome contrast to his father. Above all, Charles II saw the need for healing after a quarter‐century of bitter conflict. At Breda he had promised forgiveness to his enemies, and, in general, he lived up to that promise: fewer than 40 old rebels and servants of the Commonwealth and Protectorate were left out of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660). The most serious revenge was reserved for those who had signed Charles I's death warrant and, of these, only 11 were executed. Those unfortunate souls, however, suffered the full fury of the traditional punishments associated with treason: they were hanged, drawn, and quartered, and their boiled remains impaled on the City gates. The new regime even vented its wrath on the dead: the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw were exhumed and hanged at Tyburn in their shrouds. Afterwards their heads were placed on pikes at Westminster Hall – the place of Charles I's trial – as a warning to all potential rebels.3

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  A Political History of Tudor and Stuart England

  A Sourcebook

  • Victor Stater, Victor Stater(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  An important theme in English history in the early modern period is the changing centrality of the court in political and social life. Its importance under the Tudors grew, if anything, as Henry VII and Henry VIII consolidated the monarchy’s power over church, state, and nobility. For the earlier Stuarts, maintaining the courtly edifice built by the Tudors was a challenge, met with varying degrees of success. James I sought to shape courtly life through the exercise of his undoubted intellectual powers – but his success was inevitably undercut by his lack of interest in ceremony and ritual. Charles I redressed this balance, returning to an almost Elizabethan fascination with ritual magnificence, but without the queen’s common touch. Civil war and revolution swept the court away altogether, but Cromwell himself found that governance without one was impossible. Garbed in a purple robe and sitting upon a throne, the nemesis of monarchy in England found himself engaged in the very same mysteries as his kingly predecessors. But the Civil Wars undoubtedly altered the nature of the court. Though Charles II sought to recreate the prewar institution, his efforts never could restore the court to its former centrality. Under the later Stuarts, the court dwindled in importance, even as the power wielded by the monarchy rose – William III chafed under the limits upon his powers imposed by the Revolution of 1688, yet he commanded far greater resources than any previous British monarch. As Queen Anne’s example shows, the personal power wielded by a king such as Henry VIII was overshadowed by the need to manipulate a vigorous new political system, one whose centre was at Westminster rather than Whitehall.

  But in every case, the personality of the monarch was a matter of crucial importance. In what follows, something of the personal qualities of individual monarchs, as perceived by their contemporaries, and the significance of those qualities for millions of subjects might be seen. Even under Anne, royal whims and quirks could make an important difference in policy.

  HENRY VII: AN AMBASSADOR’S REPORT IN 1498

  When Sanchez de Londoño and Johannes de Matienzo, ambassadors of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, arrived in London in the summer of 1498, Henry VII had worn the English crown almost thirteen years. But the first Tudor monarch never rested easy on his throne. Only a year before a major tax rebellion roiled Cornwall and Henry had faced down the latest pretender to his title, the impostor Perkin Warbeck (1474?–1499), self-styled King Richard IV. Henry’s determination to assert his own place as England’s legitimate king against such threats forms the background to much of his foreign policy. An alliance with Spain, sealed by the marriage of his heir Arthur, Prince of Wales, and the eldest daughter of Spain, Katherine, was a cornerstone of Henry’s plans.

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