Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King Charles II

1630 – 1685 · Generation XXVII · King of England, Scotland and Ireland (r. 1660–1685) · House of Stuart

Portrait of King Charles II

Charles II was born at St James’s Palace on 29 May 1630, the eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France. The Civil War broke out when he was twelve, and he was with his father at the battle of Edgehill. At fourteen he was made nominal commander of the royalist forces in the West Country, and when the war was lost he escaped by way of the Isles of Scilly and Jersey to France. News of his father’s execution at Whitehall in January 1649 reached him in the Netherlands.

The Parliament of Scotland proclaimed him king within days, though on strict Presbyterian terms. He landed in Scotland in 1650 and was crowned at Scone on 1 January 1651, the last coronation held there. That summer he led a largely Scottish army into England, and on 3 September Oliver Cromwell destroyed it at Worcester. Charles spent six weeks as a fugitive with a price of £1,000 on his head, conspicuous at more than six feet tall, and by tradition hid in an oak tree before he reached Normandy in October. Nine years of exile followed, in France, the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands.

Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the resignation of his son Richard opened the way home. From Breda in the spring of 1660 Charles promised pardon for almost all his former enemies, liberty of conscience and a willingness to govern with Parliament. He landed at Dover on 25 May and entered London on the 29th, his thirtieth birthday, to general rejoicing. The amnesty that followed left out some fifty people, and nine of those who had condemned his father were executed. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661 with regalia newly made, the old having been melted down under the Commonwealth.

In 1662 he married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, whose dowry brought Tangier and Bombay to the English crown. They had no surviving children. Charles acknowledged at least twelve by his mistresses, and some counts make it thirteen. The mistresses included Barbara Villiers, Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kérouaille, and the eldest of the children, James, Duke of Monmouth, became a figure in politics. His easy manners, his encouragement of the theatre and horse racing and the loose morals of his court later earned him the name of the Merry Monarch. He was also a patron of learning. The Royal Society, formed in 1660, received its royal charter from him in 1662, and in 1675 he founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

The reign was harder than its reputation. Parliament imposed a narrow Anglican settlement, the Clarendon Code, which the king accepted against his own preference for toleration. The Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 fell in the middle of a war with the Dutch that ended badly in 1667, although England had taken New York from them in 1664. Short of money, Charles signed the secret Treaty of Dover with his cousin Louis XIV in 1670, taking a French subsidy in return for joining another Dutch war and promising to declare himself a Catholic at some future date. When he tried in 1672 to suspend the laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters, Parliament forced him to withdraw and passed the Test Act, which obliged holders of public office to take the Anglican sacrament.

His brother and heir James, Duke of York, was a Catholic, and at the end of the 1670s Titus Oates’s invented Popish Plot set off a national panic in which innocent people were executed. The Commons brought in a bill to exclude James from the throne, and the struggle gave English politics its first parties, the Whigs who supported exclusion and the Tories who opposed it. Charles sided with the Tories, dissolved the Parliament that met at Oxford in March 1681 after only a few days, and ruled without one for the rest of his life. After the Rye House Plot of 1683, a scheme to murder the royal brothers on the road from Newmarket, Whig leaders were executed or driven into exile.

He suffered a sudden seizure on 2 February 1685 and died at Whitehall four days later, aged fifty-four, having been received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, quietly and at night, and his brother succeeded him as James II.

Place in the family

  • King Charles II was a 4× great-nephew of King Henry VIII.
  • King Charles II was the eldest of 3 children of King Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France recorded in this archive.

Images

One of 17 people of House of Stuart (from 1371) in this archive. Scotland’s royal house for three centuries before James VI inherited England and wore both crowns.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → King Charles I → King Charles II.

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Life

  • 1630 — Born
  • 1660 — Charles II returns to England from Holland and is restored to the throne.
  • 1662 — Married Catherine of Braganza
  • 1670 — Secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles agrees to declare himself a Catholic and restore Catholicism in England in return for secret subsidies from Louis XIV of France.
  • 1678 — The Popish Plot is fabricated by Titus Oates. He alleges a Catholic plot to murder the King and restore Catholicism. The Government over-reacts, and many Catholic subjects are persecuted.
  • 1679 — Exclusion Bill attempts to exclude James, Charles’s Catholic brother, from the succession.
  • 1683 — The Rye House Plot a conspiracy to kill Charles and his brother James and return to parliamentary rule is uncovered.
  • 1685 — Died
  • 1685 — Charles is received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed.

Sources

  1. Charles II of England · Wikipedia
  2. Charles II · Westminster Abbey
  3. Charles II (1630–1685) · BBC History
  4. Charles II (r. 1660–1685) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)

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