Catherine of
Braganza,
who married
Charles
in 1662“It was reported that an old woman in the
crowd spat, and shouted: ‘A pox on all kings!’”
ALAMY/MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY, DE AGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES
the king land. In Canterbury Cathedral,
he held his first privy council, setting the
pattern for his administration, a shrewdly
balanced ‘team of rivals’, by granting
honours to Presbyterian grandees like
Monck as well as royalist supporters.
From here, Charles’s progress to the
capital was one great show. The timing
was immaculate, for he entered London
on 29 May, his 30th birthday.
In a dramatic set-piece, the
parliamentary army, summoned by
Monck, acknowledged Charles’s command
on Blackheath. After a tented banquet in
St George’s Fields, where the lord mayor
presented him with the sword of the city,
the king rode bareheaded over London
Bridge. It took several hours to reach
Whitehall through the throng.
John Evelyn, a committed royalist,
had tears in his eyes. “I stood in the
Strand,” he wrote, “& beheld it & blessed
God, and all this without one drop of
bloud, & by that very army, which rebell’d
against him: but it was the Lord’s doing,
et mirabile in oculis nostris: for such a
Restauration was never seene in the
mention of any history, antient or modern,
since the return of the Babylonian
Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, & so bright,
ever seene in this nation.” Yet reports also
mentioned that one old woman in thecrowd simply spat, and shouted: “A pox
on all kings!”
Despite such murmurs, Evelyn’s point
was good: not only had the Restoration
been bloodless, but it had taken place
without the intervention of a foreign
power, and its agents were the king’s
potential enemies. It was vital, therefore,
that he should quickly pay attention to
fulfilling his Breda promises. The New
Model Army was paid (leaving Charles
sorely out of pocket) and peacefully
disbanded, but other issues proved more
problematic. Charles and Hyde fought
the passionately royalist MPs for months
to ensure that the Act of Oblivion and
Indemnity, awarding pardons to those
who had opposed the crown, was
eventually passed.
Charles’s speeches to the Commons
hammered home this point, so much so
that disgruntled royalists complained he
was passing “an act of indemnity to his
enemies and oblivion to his friends”.
Even the execution of leading regicides
in October 1660 failed to quell the
complaints, especially as Charles stopped
the executions as soon as they had achieved
their symbolic role.
In these early months, Charles presented
himself as the ‘healing king’, resolved to
salve the wounds of his three countries:England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
But, from the start, he was short of cash.
He was the first monarch dependent on
parliament for a peacetime budget and the
MPs grossly underestimated the cost of
running the nation. The new Cavalier
parliament, elected in the spring of 1661,
was fiercely partisan and because the king
was at parliament’s mercy with regard to
money, he could not run counter to their
wishes. This fatally undermined his key
promise of “liberty to tender consciences”.
Despite well-intentioned conferences,
the religious settlement never materialised.
Uprisings in London and the north fuelled
the preconception that, as Charles’s later
minister, Halifax, put it: “It is impossibleCharles II on his way to Dover for
the Restoration. He would arrive in
London on his 30th birthday