Charles II

    Charles II (1630-85), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was the eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.
    Prince of Wales at the time of the English civil war, Charles was sent to the West of England with his council, which included Edward Hyde and Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton. In 1646, Charles was forced to escape to France, where he stayed with his mother and was tutored by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Charles vainly attempted to save his father's life by presenting to Parliament a signed blank sheet of paper, thereby granting whatever terms might be requested.
    After his father's execution Charles was proclaimed king in Scotland and in parts of Ireland and England. He was crowned in Scotland 2 years later after agreeing to enforce Presbyterianism in England as well as Scotland. Thus in 1651 he marched into England but was defeated by Oliver Cromwell at the battle of Worcester. Charles then escaped to France, where he lived in relative poverty. The Anglo-French negotiations of 1654 forced Charles into Germany, but he moved to the Spanish Netherlands after he had concluded a treaty with Spain.
    In 1660 George Monck engineered Charles's Restoration to the throne, and the king returned to England. Charles had promised a general amnesty in his conciliatory Declaration of Breda, and he and Clarendon, who became first minister, acted immediately to secure passage of the Act of Indemnity, pardoning all except the regicides. Charles also favored religious toleration but the strongly Anglican Cavalier Parliament, passed the series of statutes known as the Clarendon Code , which was designed to strike at religious nonconformity. The king attempted unsuccessfully to suspend these statutes by the declaration of indulgence, which he was forced to withdraw.
    Charles took England into the Triple Alliance with Holland and Sweden, but he simultaneously sought the support of Louis XIV of France, with whom he negotiated the secret Treaty of Dover. By this treaty, designed to free the king from dependence on Parliament, Charles was to adopt Roman Catholicism, convert his subjects, and wage war against the Dutch, for which Louis was to advance him a large subsidy and 6,000 men. In 1672 the third Dutch War began. Many suspected it to be a cloak for the introduction of arbitrary government and Roman Catholicism. Charles was forced to rescind his second declaration of indulgence toward dissenters and to sign (1674) a peace with the Dutch.
    Anti-Catholic feeling in England exploded in the affair of the Popish Plot in which Charles did not intervene until his wife, Catherine of Braganza, was accused. However, the affair was made use of by the 1st earl of Shaftesbury , who led a movement to exclude Charles's brother, the Catholic duke of York (later James II ), from succession to the throne, promoting instead the claim of Charles's illegitimate son the duke of Monmouth . Charles died a Roman Catholic and was succeeded by his brother James. He had no legitimate offspring but many children by his various mistresses.
    Charles was a ruler of considerable political skill. His reign was marked by a gradual increase in the power of Parliament, which he learned to circumvent rather than manipulate. The period also saw the rise of the great political parties, Whig and Tory ; the advance of colonization and trade in India, America, and the East Indies; and the great progress of England as a sea power. The pleasure-loving character of the king set the tone of the brilliant Restoration period in art and literature.