Child’s Play to Charles II – a guest post by Claire Hobson

A periwig is usually prominent in our minds when we think of Charles II. With those long black curls, he’s recognised as the English king restored to power by a counterrevolutionary parliament in 1660, but he actually sported his natural hair for more than half his life, before 1660.

His escapade up an oak tree is nearly all the public consciousness remembers of Charles pre-Restoration, even though his pre-Restoration life was eventful in the extreme. It spanned exactly three decades from his date of birth and plunged him into war, conspiracy, corrupt politics and financial crisis. Along the way, he became a desperate exile in myriad locations as far as Spain and the Holy Roman Empire as his Cavalier cause crumbled, and the resultant distress meant suicide seems to have beckoned him after his father’s beheading. Perhaps we therefore shouldn’t be surprised that his wigs served to hide the fact he was going grey by around the age of 30. However, when writing Charles II: From the Cradle to the Crown, I realised his early greying aligned with innate tendencies.

 

Charles is labelled the most enigmatic monarch in British history, and I was keen to increase our understanding of him. As a result, I looked closely at his most formative years, learning fascinating facts about his childhood. This period began in splendour for him as the heir to the Stuart thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Between the grand ceremonies he thus attended, a model ship and the chance of apple pie and cheesecake excited him like the average little boy, but he meanwhile stood out, for more than his eminent status of prince. Something that stands out to me, certainly, is how advanced Charles was for his age.

At 4 months, his physical characteristics displeased his French mother Queen Henrietta Maria, who reported: ‘he is so fat and so tall, that he is taken for a year old’. She then added: ‘his teeth are already beginning to come’. Her focus nonetheless soon shifted to his behaviour. The physician James Chambers had noted ‘mirth’ increasing in Charles, just under three months after the later ‘merry monarch’ had entered the world on 29 May 1630. During 1631, however, Henrietta Maria commented of the prince: ‘He is so serious in all that he does’. Before long, he was also ‘musing’. It’s quite clear that Charles the toddler, while letting a great sense of fun develop, was inclined towards observation and assessment.

In this, plus his swarthy complexion, he bore little resemblance to his somewhat imperceptive father King Charles I, but that loving patriarch was pleased to see him display such mature traits. A 1636 portrait of the prince and his little siblings Mary and James shows the future Charles II leaning casually with a sense of calm control while needy-looking James clings onto him. From other evidence, it’s easy to imagine Charles so adult-like in practice, too. There’s nevertheless little doubt that Anthony van Dyck, who painted the work, made it his duty to portray Charles that way. Charles I had been miffed by a Van Dyck painting of the three youngsters in children’s clothing the previous year, but both an air of seniority and a pair of manly breeches adorn Prince Charles in the 1636 example.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The aim of looking grown-up involved work as well, and the heir was already used to that. For instance, possibly before his fifth birthday, he handled the role of sponsor when the king himself baptised Charlotta Wyndham, third daughter of the prince’s favourite nurse Christabella Wyndham. Interestingly though, women were a department Charles was not progressing away from very much. In the mid-1630s, courtiers worried that he had been surrounded by female influences for too long, but young Charles kept talking ‘very affectionately’ about Christabella once she’d been moved on, and winter opportunities to see her again were ‘most welcome’ in his eyes.

His tutor, Brian Duppa, the new Bishop of Chichester, communicated this in a letter in September 1639, but the letter doesn’t exactly infer the 9-year-old was still at nursery level. ‘He hastens apace out of his childhood, and is likely to be a man betimes’, Duppa wrote of Charles here.

Conversation with the boy definitely gave this impression. On Good Friday 1640, he received an exquisitely decorated book as a gift and, offering thanks in the form of ‘a handful of twenty shilling pieces of gold’, reportedly told the gift-bearer: ‘I do not give you this as any reward in recompense of your book, for I esteem it every way above much gold … . Only you shall take this as a present testimony of my acceptance of it, and my esteem of you’.

With a pen in his hand, Charles didn’t appear so good with words, but he was physically active and rarely relished sitting at a desk. By contrast, fencing and equestrianism thrilled him, and that’s largely thanks to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, who had occupied the position of governor to the child since mid-1638, the time this child became Prince of Wales officially. Newcastle’s internationally renowned expertise in horsemanship meant the rapidly growing Charles, after only around two years of training, would ‘ride leaping horses’ and excel in many techniques useful for cavalry service.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles I, meanwhile, was taking cavalrymen into combat. In the 1630s, he had tried to force the Church of Scotland to adopt Catholic-like practices in line with the Church of England, and his entire approach centred on episcopacy. Outraged, thousands upon thousands of Scots were consequently now Covenanters, devotees of Scotland’s 1638 National Covenant opposing non-Presbyterian reform. In fact they were so devoted to Presbyterianism that they had an army to fight the king’s troops in the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640. These conflicts were the first of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and in essence, they turned out to be the beginning of the end. To fund the military efforts to uphold what he deemed his divine rights, Charles I had a Westminster parliament called in early 1640, after ruling without one for eleven years. This, however, lasted a mere three weeks before he dissolved it. Precisely what the Prince of Wales knew of the anger and ‘invectives scatter’d about the streetes’ is debatable. Quite remarkably, though, he foresaw the Stuart kingdoms falling from Stuart possession.

He revealed these fears just before his tenth birthday, struggling through an unusual confrontation between him and his father. After this, with Bishops’ Wars peace terms requiring £850 per day to be paid to the victorious Covenanters, Charles I called a parliament again, and into Westminster in late 1640 stepped the angry MPs who went on to force in republicanism in early 1649.

The two Royalist–Parliamentarian civil wars that tore England apart in the intervening years heavily involved the king-to-be, leaving his education neglected by the time fighting broke out in 1642. His daily attendance on show to hundreds at the monumental trial of the Earl of Strafford is an example of why his time with tutors was reduced before he even reached what’s now secondary-school age. If you look at the clever, often crafty methods Charles used in navigating the issues thrown at him in the Restoration era, it’s obvious that his experiences of diverse people, places and predicaments nevertheless taught him pivotal lessons in the 1640s–50s, not least through the twelve months in which he exercised command over fiery-tempered army officers in the West Country, and those twelve months started when he was 14.

He’d already witnessed siege warfare and horrific battlefield bloodshed, from risky vantage points. At the 1642 Battle of Edgehill, Parliament’s Roundheads posed an immediate threat ‘within half musket shott’. The 12-year-old rebuffed prompting to move him to safety though, determined to charge instead. This doesn’t seem pure juvenile folly. After all, he dived into combat at Worcester and Mardyke during his 20s. However, at 14, he accepted his assigned responsibilities in Bristol and further south-west would be somewhat managerial, off the field, and he embraced more than the military side. He worked with local officials and addressed public issues. Along the way, he also appeared publicly, in many of the spots he dashed to and from while towns around him blazed and fell to the enemy’s New Model Army, the new force the Puritan future lord protector Oliver Cromwell was on the rise within.

The (outwardly) Anglican Charles here had advisers the king instructed him to listen to while father and son communicated via letters deploying cipher, and the adolescent obeyed, though failed to appreciate advisers in April 1645 when they separated him from a certain woman he was enjoying amours with. She exacerbated already problematic animosity between some of these men, through scheming interference, but teenaged Charles was perfecting his highly impressive people skills. Writings by his adviser Edward Hyde tell us the boy ‘with great ingenuity applied himself’ to the lead role in constant meetings with his squabbling council members, and this helped preparation for the job of king, in which Charles would preside over a Privy Council for guidance.

 

Charles’s departure from the Royalist capital Oxford in March 1645 is akin to the experience of leaving home for university as many older teens of today do. In fact part of the reason for sending the 14-year-old away was ‘to unboy him’ – to make him grow up. His mother may not have treated the prince like an adult for much of the two years he lived with her during exile in France from the summer of 1646, but the population of Jersey seemed to think him marvellously mature by April 1646, when Parliamentarian attempts to seize him meant he took up residence at the island’s Elizabeth Castle and utterly charmed the visitors who flocked. The ‘affability with which he gave them audience’ was a key to his success then, as it always would be. This, like many other qualities that kept him in power after 1660, had nevertheless long been with him.

Author bio:

Claire Hobson established a freelance career in proofreading in 2007 and branched into copywriting over the next few years, often for the Icelandic tourism industry. However, pursuing writing as a hobby in the 2010s, she embarked on historical fiction and quickly developed a big interest in Stuart history. This drew her to research and nonfiction. As a fundraiser for mental health charity Mind, Claire has organised and promoted Restoration-themed events involving leading historians. Through these, she produced regular history content on social media and scripted features for talks, but she now devotes more time to books, delving deeper into the seventeenth century. She is also an avid fan of British comedy.

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