BRIDGEMAN IMAGESSir Peter Lely’s portrait of
King Charles II wearing the
robes of the Sovereign of the
Order of the Garter, c1675
I
n the spring of 1660, the 29-year-
old Charles II and his court were
virtually in rags, with – wrote
Samuel Pepys – not a coat among
them worth more than 40 shillings.
All this was soon to change.
On 4 April 1660, Charles was in
Breda in Holland, at the court of his sister
Mary, the widow of William II of Orange.
From here he issued the Declaration of
Breda, a document that the parliament at
Westminster would seize upon as offering
the terms for his return.
Charles’s tone was confident and his
promises clear. They included a full pardon
to all who appealed to the king within 40
days, except those who had signed his
father Charles I’s death warrant in 1649,
“liberty to tender consciences” (unless
religious differences threatened national
peace), and payment of arrears of army
pay. Questions regarding the complicated
property deals during the Commonwealth
(the republic that ruled from 1649–60)
would be resolved by the new parliament- deftly ducking a potentially divisive task.
On the same day, Charles wrote a bold
letter to the speaker of the House of
Commons. Its language would have
horrified his father, who had so strongly
defied the Commons’ authority. The
liberties and powers of both king and
parliament, Charles II wrote, were “best
preserved by preserving the other”. True,
he desired to avenge his father’s death, but
his chief desire was peace and he appealed
to the MPs as “wise and dispassionate men
and good patriots”.
This appeasing letter was typical of
Charles’s strategy. By April 1660, he had
been in exile for almost 15 years, dragging
his impoverished supporters around the
continent, appealing for help, begging for
favours. His sheltered childhood at the
courts of St James and Whitehall had been
shattered by the Civil War. At 12, he stood
by his father’s side when Charles I raised
his standard at Edgehill; at 15, he was made
commander of the army in the West
Country; and when his father begged him
to leave, in 1647, he fled first to Jersey and
then to join his mother, Henrietta Maria,
in the echoing corridors of St Germain, a
pensioner of his young cousin Louis XIV.
In 1651, he had made an ill-fated return
to Britain, leading a Scottish army south
to Worcester where his troops were cut
down in the narrow streets. His escape,
wandering the countryside supported
by local people until he took a boat to
France, would become the stuff of
Restoration myth.
By April 1660, Charles’s chief aim was
to regain his throne – and stay there.
He had recently moved to Breda from
Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands on
the advice of General Monck, the former
parliamentary commander in Scotland,
who had suggested that a Catholic city
might not be the best base for an aspiring
Protestant king.
Monck was to be the true architect of the
king’s return. After Cromwell’s death in
1658, the British people, worn down by
high taxes and declining trade, had
become increasingly dispirited by the
disputes between parliament and the New
Model Army. When Monck marched south
from Scotland, people besieged him with
pleas to call a new parliament, knowing
that it would return the king. In March, the
new ‘Convention Parliament’ was duly
elected, full of royalist supporters. It was
then that Monck made his private
overtures to Charles.A flood of petitioners
Breda was flooded with supplicants and
place-seekers, all of whom Charles received
graciously. Some sought pardons; others
brought gold, hoping to win his support.
Once parliament’s vote was known, the
flood of petitioners swelled.
Charles’s days of begging were over. At
one point, he received a trunk with £10,000
in sovereigns. When the young king saw
this, Pepys was told, he became “so joyful,
that he called the Princess Royal and Duke
of York to look upon it as it lay in the
Portmanteau before it was taken out”.
The shimmering gold was no illusion.
In mid-May, Charles sailed down river to
The Hague, where he received the
parliamentary commissioners, and
deputations from the City of London, and
was feted by the Dutch Republic. Finally,
on 23 May, Charles set sail for Dover in
clear, breezy weather.
Two days later, crowds blackened the
crest of the white cliffs of Dover to watch