Jackson - Charles II the star king

Clare Jackson

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CHARLES II

The Star King

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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2016

Copyright Clare Jackson, 2016

Cover design by Pentagram
Jacket art by Anne Siems

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-97977-9

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THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

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In Charles IIs reign, the Julian (Old Style) calendar was in use throughout his three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland; this was ten days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar followed in continental Europe. In this book, 1 January is taken as the start of each year, as had been the case in Scotland since 1600, although the English New Year officially started on 25 March. In quotations from primary sources, original orthography has usually been modernized and punctuation amended.

If you were to stop someone on the street and show them images of British monarchs through the ages, Charles II would be among the most recognizable. As the cover of this volume vividly confirms, few kings so readily embody the distinct texture of their period: for many, the Merry Monarch is the Restoration. Lusciously flowing dark ringlets and sumptuously rich Cavalier attire evoke nostalgic impressions of baroque theatricality, swashbuckling extravagance and sexual innuendo. In popular memory, costume dramas and romantic fiction, Charles is affectionately remembered as one of this countrys most charismatic and affable monarchs. He was that rare phenomenon: a king with real star quality.

Precisely because of this correlation, however, few monarchs have acquired so polarized a posthumous reputation. Scholarly opinion has preserved a more equivocal distance, refusing to be seduced by this kings popular appeal. To aspiring biographers, Charles presents a challenge, having repeatedly evaded attempts to capture his personality. Since contemporary accounts of his character yield only a prevailing feeling of unreachability, frustrated historians have reluctantly concluded that the man inside the king

This biography emphasizes instead the vital importance that Charles attached to popular perceptions and public representations of his kingship. No other monarch in British history has succeeded as king after a republican experiment. No other monarch was thus so acutely aware of the extent to which, following a largely peaceful restoration to his English, Scottish and Irish thrones in 1660, his survival as monarch depended on his subjects goodwill after two traumatic decades that had seen prolonged and bloody civil wars, culminating in his fathers execution, and a period of republican and military rule dominated by , followed by four chapters focusing on visual, ceremonial, literary and posthumous depictions of Charles II. This thematic approach reflects not only this particular monarchs preoccupations, but also our own modern obsessions with external appearance and presentational spin.

An appreciation of this kings performance is thus key to probing his personality. Indeed, as an avid supporter of Restoration theatre, Charles was adept at donning different roles, of which being monarch was just one. As an eight-year-old, he had been advised by his governor, William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, that a king must know at what time to play the king, and when to qualify it and, during the civil wars, Charles preserved his life precisely by disguising his identity and successfully impersonating his humblest subjects while on the run from Parliamentarian enemies. Moreover, at the Restoration, Charless image became central to reasserting royal authority and to reconstituting monarchical culture more widely. Accordingly, he remains one of the most frequently depicted monarchs in British history before the advent of modern photography and film, with many more portraits, prints and sculptures surviving of Charles II than of his father, despite the cult of martyrdom that attached to Charles I after his execution in 1649. Posteritys appreciation of Charles II is also necessarily refracted through his public persona and the observations of others since he left no published writings or diaries and few personal letters, unlike his father or his grandfather James I and VI.