Charles Ii

PREFACE. FEW words of introduction are necessary to this book. I need scarcely say that it does not pro- fess to be a record in any completeness of the life and reign of Charles II. It is little more than the result of an endeavour to trace in outline the influences which acted upon the inherited qualities of Charles himself, and which made him what we know him to have been at thirty years some idea of age and, in the second place, to give ofthe illimitable confusion into which the domestic policy of England, her social morality, foreign relations, alike fell, because, and her at the moment when the reaction towards kingship in the House of Stuart had obscured other considerations, and when the loosening of all ties, social, moral, and political, had left the soil vacant for the seed of evil example, such a monarch came to the throne. Limited however as was my scope, it appeared that, in dealing with Charles from early boyhood to his last days, the only chance of a satisfactory result in the space atmy disposal was to put what I had to say in the form of a continuous narrative. In doing this it has been necessary to keep along a narrow road, and to refrain from entering upon many tempting bye-paths. My principal business has been with Charles himself. On the other hand I have come to fairly close quarters with a good many of the men and women by whom he was surrounded, and have found it necessary to deal in some detail with the Anglicanfuror, the tumult of Parliament, the profligacy of statesmen, and the degradation of womanhood. In all essentials the character of Charles was fixed before the Restoration. I did not therefore think that two chapters out of five were too much to beoccupied with the life to which that character was due. It is impossible to understand why he was so bad a man until we realise what were the lessons which he learned as a boy in England and France, and as nominal king in Scotland, and what were the temptations, the petty miseries, the disappointments, and the humiliations, of the nine years of exile which followed the ruin of his cause at Worcester. The narrative has been founded entirely upon contemporary authorities, whose words I have generally preferred to quote rather than paraphrase. No one can be more aware than myself how much remains to be said. But I have some confidence that the judgment which I have been compelled to form of Charles II. will not, in its main statements, need very serious modification by future investigators. I have to thank Messrs. Longmans for per- mission to transfer one or two paragraphs from a former work of my own, Louis XIV. and the Restoration in England, published by them in 1888 and Mr. John Murray for a similar liberty with regard to an article upon Lauderdale, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, in 1884. For the curious details regarding the rewards to the Penderel family p. 105, I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. J. Penderel Brodhurst. My debt to Dr. Firth for his continuous help is one which scarcely admits of due recognition here. OSMUND AIRY.