The Shadow of a King? Charles II in Exile
Charles II was the only king of England for two hundred years to survive exile and return to power. Anna Keay considers how he kept up his regal appearances whilst in exile, paving the way for his return to the throne.
Destined to be viewed from the vantage point of the Restoration, Charles II’s decade-and-a-half in exile has always benefitted from the wisdom of hindsight. Like the king himself, historians have looked back on it through the lens of the years after 1660, and assessments have been coloured by assumptions about the sovereign he would become and the course his reign would take. In the case of the third Stuart king of England, these have often been unforgiving.
For the prudish, Charles’ colourful love-life, entangling him with a series of notorious mistresses and resulting in twelve illegitimate children, would be enough to seal his personal reputation. For historians of politics and power, his signature of the Secret Treaty of Dover in 1671 – in which he took a pension from Louis XIV in return for a secret undertaking to return England to the Catholic church – and his death-bed conversion to Catholicism have been convincing evidence of his moral and personal weakness. As far back as the 1850s Macaulay described Charles II as
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