Charlie and the Chocolate Inventory

ver since the death of Charles II on February 6th, 1685, there has been a constant stream of books written about him, most of which I have read as part of my research on the seventeenth century. Somehow none of these biographies made me feel that I knew the King, however, and it wasn’t until I recently discovered his Privy Purse Accounts for 1666-69 in the Bodleian Library, (MS. Malone 44), that he suddenly sprang vividly to life. For these extracts possess an immediacy that turns the remote monarch into a flesh-and-blood human being.