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MERRY MONARCH: THE LIFE AND LIKENESS OF CHARLES II (274 pp.)-Hesketh Pearson-Harper...
Biographer Hesketh Pearson (Dizzy, Oscar Wilde) argues persuasively for the opposite view. The Charles he describes in a witty and partisan book was a tall, swarthy man who played a powerful game of tennis, made handsome settlements on his numerous bastards, encouraged science and literature, and left England a happier and more prosperous nation than he found it. Amid religious fanaticism, he remained tolerant and humane, and his chief fault was that he forgave anybody anything. He gained his political ends by letting himself be persuaded to do what he wished. "He had a sense of reality shared...
...most energetic and terrifying of wowsers, Oliver Cromwell, was fighting the first civil war, Charles was a 16-year-old exile whose doltish father was soon to be be headed. At 21, Charles invaded England at the head of a Scots army, but his Presbyterian soldiers were more concerned, Pearson notes, with religion and robbery than fighting, and Cromwell crushed them easily. For six weeks, before he made his way to France, Charles hid out in various guises, including that of "Will Jackson," a farmer's son. In 1660, after Cromwell had died and the protectorate...
Dismal Jimmy. Charles played his international affairs, as Pearson sees it, with the skill of a chess master. He captured New Amsterdam, and thereby, as it turned out, consolidated England's hold in the New World. Deftly, he outdistanced The Netherlands as a maritime power. Whenever he needed cash, he allowed Louis XIV to bribe him, but contrived to give little value for money. In 1670 Louis agreed to pay Charles ?160,000 to become a Catholic, but-knowing well that open conversion would cause civil war and wreck an Anglo-French alliance-he asked Charles to defer...
...worst temblor of the early Restoration was a delirium of anti-Catholic hatred. Although the frenzy was started by a supposed plot to murder the King, Charles tempered the witch hunt when he could, signed death warrants when he had to, and eventually restored order. Pearson tells the famed story of how, at the furor's height, a boisterous mob stopped a gilded carriage, thinking that Charles's French mistress, Louise de Keroualle, was inside. Nell Gwynn saved matters by sticking her head out and saying, "Pray, good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore...