Customer Reviews

A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Arguably the most eventful decade in English history, the first years of the Restoration witnessed the Great Fire of London, the last major outbreak of plague, the birth of science and the Royal Society, the greatest flowering of English theater between the Elizabethans and modern times, the last age of epic poetry (Paradise Lost) and the first simple English prose (Pilgrim's Progess), and the foundation of a stable constitutional monarchy after a century of absolutism followed by two decades of civil war, dictatorship and near-anarchy. At the center of it all stood Charles II: "loved by his parents, brought up as the adored eldest son in a luxurious court until jolt after jolt shattered the idyll. At twelve he stood by his father [at] the unthinkable turning of subjects against their king. At [the battle of] Edgehill a cannonball narrowly missed him. At fifteen he was sent west as general of the Western Army; at sixteen he fled to France. He was nineteen when his father was executed. In the years that followed he scoured foreign courts for aid, broke and hopeless." Yet at 30, he returned triumphantly and peacefully to England, and reigned until his death in bed twenty five years later. His brother and successor James ruled less than three years before losing the throne to revolution.

How did Charles succeed where his father and brother failed miserably, and more than succeed as a ruler, savor life to the fullest? "In exile, he devised a strategy based on charm, outward compliance and private evasion," writes author Jenny Uglow. "It is a challenge for someone like me, whose sympathy lies with the radicals and artisans protesting against abuse of power, to venture into the center, the heart of that power. Yet it is alluring."

Skillfully mixing the best-known contemporary sources (diarists like Pepys and Evelyn, biographers like Aubrey) with the obscure, Uglow relies on a crystal-clear prose style and an eye for the amusing anecdote, the telling detail, to bring the age alive. This is the best general introduction to a fascinating time, whether your interests lie with Charles himself--his court intrigue, his women, his wit--or in the science, art, diplomacy, great public events and private debauchery that marked his Age.

Charles II (reigned from 1660-1685) was the son of Charles I who had been executed by the Cromwellians on January 30, 1649. After the regicide of his father
the young Charles fled to the Continent after many exciting escapes from Roundhead forces. After the death of Oliver Cromwell his son Richard proved to be an incompetent ruler. The Parliament and people clamoured for Charles to return from exile. He became the King and the Restoration era was begun.
There were many momentous events during the reign of the merry monarch including:
1. The Plague which devastated London in 1665.
2. The Great Fire of London which in 1666 destroyed five/sixth of the city.
3. Three naval wars against the Dutch. The issue was trade and control of the seas.
4. Higher taxation of the populace needed to fight Charles' wars.
5. Continued religious controversy and persecution. Dissenters and Quakers were imprisoned. The Church of England was the official religion. Charles converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed following the faith of his brother James II (who short inglorious reign was from 1685-1688).
6. The founding of the Royal Society and the growing interest in science. Men like Sir Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren the architect of St. Paul's flourished during this reign.
7. Charles became unpopular when it was learned he had received a hefty bribe from Louis XIV of France. Despite being a member of the Triple Alliance of Holland, Sweden and England which was Protestant, Charles was a crypto-Roman Catholic.
The personality of Charles II? He was a rake. Charles sired countless illegitimate children and had a whole cadre of willing mistresses. Among the most famous were the actress Nell Gwynn and the notorious Barbara Villiers Lady Castlemaine. Charles was wed to the plain Catherine of Braganza from Portugal.
Charles loved sex, racing at Newmarket Track, gambling, hunting and playing tennis.
He was a non-intellectual whose reign never fulfilled its promise for the British people of greater religious stability and peace. Charles was a charming cavalier who was personally kind and endearing to his family and friends.
Jenny Uglow is a veteran British biographer. This long book covers the first ten years of Charles II reign taking the story from its beginning in 1660 to 1670. The book is lavishly illustrated with colored plates and period drawings making it an attractive volume. Along with the much earlier book on Charles II by Lady Antonia Fraser this is the one to read on the cavalier king and his exciting times.,

.. than Charles II.'

On 25 May 1660, Charles II arrived at Dover, disembarking in front of cheering crowds. On his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660, he entered London. Charles had been invited home to England by parliament, thus beginning the `restoration' of the monarchy after eleven years of republican rule. In this book, Jenny Uglow focuses on the first ten years of his reign, until the signing of the secret Treaty of Dover in 1670.

Initially, I found it disconcerting to consider only the first ten years of Charles II's 25 year reign. Certainly, the first ten years saw a number of momentous events including the Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 which led to the substantial rebuilding of the city of London. Charles was also a patron of science: the Royal Society was founded in November 1660. On the foreign policy front, England was at war with the Dutch (the Second Anglo-Dutch War) between 1665 and 1667. This war ended in a Dutch victory and also, some years later, in Charles's secret treaty with Louis XIV of France. Charles undertook to support the French against the Dutch in return for which he received subsidies from France, thereby providing some room in his relationship with parliament. Charles also undertook to convert to Catholicism at a time of his choosing. More broadly, Charles's reign saw the rise of colonisation and trade in India, the East Indies and America - New York was captured from the Dutch in 1664.

But was he a gambling man? Certainly the stakes were high, especially when his reign is compared with that of his father (Charles I was beheaded in 1649) and his brother (James II was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution in 1688). But Charles was not reckless. He calculated some risks, and was pragmatic in most situations. While much of his private life was public, his ability to play to an audience was unparalleled.

I enjoyed this book, and while I don't fully accept the image of Charles II as a gambling man, I came to like the image of his first decade bracketed by his triumphal public entry into London, and his secret treaty with France. I see Charles as a pragmatic survivor, rather than as a gambler. Regardless of whether a reader accepts Ms Uglow's `gambling man' principle, this book is well worth reading.

`There is all the reason in the world to join profit with honour, when it may be done honestly.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Jenny Unglow tells the story of the first 10 years of England's return to monarchy after the Cromwell regime. These years were as improbable as the Restoration monarch himself.

Unglow shows how monarchial and parliamentarian interests were not always aligned and how Charles II used what prerogatives he had and tried to expand them. He charts his own course, for instance, to decrease his reliance on Parliament for funds, he makes a treaty with is cousin, the King of France, that brings him a pension. The book shows the public, private and at all times cryptic life of Charles. While his reign had mixed success, he managed to hold the monarchy for over 25 years, something neither his brother or father could do.

The "Gambling Man" theme is carried out by dividing the book into the 4 suits of a deck of cards. I didn't understand the reasoning behind the topics selected for these groupings, nor did I understand the gambling metaphor (I think Charles was pushing the envelope more than gambling) but this didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book, nor in my appreciation for the skill of the author.

There is a lot going on in these years. Just the wrangling over property - the connivances used to switch land and titles from republicans back to monarchists - would be sufficient to shake up the status quo in fortune, status and power for a generation. Results were not always predictable or fair. Some Cromwell supporters managed to keep their land and power, not all monarchists, no matter how loyal or brave, re-obtained their former possessions. Some who got their lands back stayed deeply in debt for the re-acquisition costs.

On top of the changes in fortune there were new religious laws. One law stripped "non-conforming" clergymen of their parishes and required their removal to a minimum of 5 miles outside their former parishes. This reduced thousands to poverty and required countless parishioners to adopt new beliefs and modes of worship.

The religious and political turmoil included persecution, torture and/or beheadings for some. Death also came by way the plague, the Great Fire of London that burned for 3 days and the wars with Holland.

Relief came in the form of new and exciting drama and new thinking and for Charles, in acquiring mistresses and children. The whole thing is dizzying.

Unglow does an excellent job of bringing this all into one readable story. She does an excellent job of presenting scholarship in a way that non-academics (as well as academics) can learn from and enjoy.

Following a rather glum period in which England was under the sway of joyless religious bigots, King Charles II ascended the throne and began his career as the "merry monarch." How he manage to survive one of the most tumultuous reigns in English history that included religious strife, a failed war with the Dutch, the rise of France under Louis XIV and cynical factionalism by the nobility is what Jenny Uglow attempts to address in her book, "A Gambling Man."

It is her thesis that Charles was able to negotiate matters over the first ten years of his reign through a combination of bravado and political innovation. This should have been enough to ensure the security of the Stuart line and in a sense it was, it just wasn't the branch, that of his brother James, which Charles had hoped for. In the end it was his nephew, William of Orange and his two nieces, William's wife Mary and her sister Anne who survived. What Charles did do was to put the monarchy on a more firm ground that it was during his father's period and made the institution, not necessarily the person holding it, vital to fabric of society.

Expectations of the monarch were somewhat different in the 17th century and it boggles the mind what present day Britains would think were any member of the royal family to engage in the kinds of amorous antics that Charles did. The people were more merciful in the peccadillos of their leaders and Londoners followed the comings and goings of Barbara Castlemaine, Francis Stuart, Moll Davis, Louise de Keroualle and the irrepressible Nell Gwynn with a great deal of interest.

Less obvious to the masses, as always, were the comings and goings on the political arena. Dealing with the implications of jockying for office by members of the restored Cavaliers took up much of Charles's time and probably explains all the mistresses. It was also the time in which the two great parties British history, the Whigs and the Tories became established.

At the heart of the origins of these two groups were questions involving religion. The Anglican Church was an important component, but there were also dissenters of both the Protestant and Catholic variety and religion was very much a political act, rather than one of conscience. Catholics since the gunpowder plot were as highly regarded as Communists in the US during the Cold War and viewed as foreign agents. Dissenting Protestants were, if anything, worse in several respects.

Charles was able to preserve the state of the monarchy by playing off these various factions to his own advantage despite rarely receiving sufficient funds to conduct the affairs of state and to pay for his own pleasures.

He was, by bringing into office men such as Clarendon, Buckingham, Danby, and Shaftsbury, probably a kind of political genius. He would throughout his reign make use of these individuals and their followers and then drop them whenever it was convenient. Charles was very much a man of a single big idea (and only one) and that was the preservation of the monarchy as an institution, regardless of his personal feelings. Though successful after a fashion, this adherence to a single idea led him to become less realistic when considering the succession, a point well made by Uglow. His queen was incapable of heirs, a shortcoming not shared by Charles, and his brother was a crypto Catholic who would become completely intolerable to both the Whigs and the Tories. Charles would neither divorce his wife nor disinherit his brother. Whereas he was completely lacking in sentiment where political collaborators were concerned, he was too sentimental when it came to members of his own family.

Uglow's treatment of these events is good. I did feel however that the last 13 years of Charles's reign was somewhat rushed. While Charles was certainly able to consolidate power during the first 10 years of his reign, the battles with the factions in parliament, the Titus Oates plot and other features of his reign are given short shift. Perhaps this is due to a conscious decision to limit the scope of the book and not produce a history of the entire reign

The book does have several strengths however. I thought Uglow was very good on her examination of the political aspects of the theatre and how courtiers would commission plays to smash or embarrass rivals. The theatre was the equivalent of the mindless attack ads that are an embarrassing feature of the electoral process. The plays that make up the cannon of Restoration comedy are far superior and were certainly directed to an audience that had a greater appreciation for wit and invective.

While this book has one defect in that it rushes through the last 13 years of King Charles II's reign, it has a number of other strengths to recommend it. Any book that demonstrates how cut throat politics for the sake of power contributes to the development of a national theatre is certainly well worth a read.

Charles II is, in many ways, both too easy and too difficult a subject for a biography. He is one of those great defining characters of the British monarchy - like Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Victoria - whose reigns stand out in our collective memory for one or two well-known events, and about whom most people think they know plenty.

So Jenny Uglow takes a different approach in `A Gambling Man'. The book is indeed a biography of the Merry Monarch, but it focuses on the crucial first ten years of his reign, and on Charles's many gambles to stabilise his three kingdoms during this period.

Her task is helped by the events of the period - restoration, war, plague, fire and constant sexual intrigue - which in themselves make for a rollicking good read. It is further illuminated by Pepys, whose voice, through his diary, offers us a ringside seat. (It's astonishing how much he managed to witness first hand).

Given these ingredients, the greatest risk is that the author will over-simplify for the sake of populism. The greatest strength of `A Gambling Man' is that Mrs. Uglow does not do this. She presents the politics, society, religion and intellectual life of 1660s England as a rich tapestry - complex, often paradoxical, sometimes frayed at the edges. And she is a meticulous chronicler of that complexity, whether it is the political manoeuvring of the King's ministers or mistresses; the fine balancing act that Charles was forced to play between Royalists and former Cromwellian sympathisers; or above all the religious factionalism that threatened to destabilise the Kingdom from the moment Charles landed at Dover.

This last, so crucial to an understanding of the period, yet so often over-simplified or marginalized by historians (the worst example perhaps being Edward Dolnick's The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World), is handled with particular thoroughness and insight. Freedom of religion was, of course, one of the first things offered by Charles on his return to power in 1660; his Declaration of Breda promised `liberty to tender consciences'. It was Parliament, and not the King, who forced religious conformity on the nation, outlawing both Catholics and nonconformist Protestants from worshipping in public and from holding public office. The effects would be felt for another 150 years or more; some would argue they are still in evidence today.

Also very much in evidence today, not just in Britain but throughout western democracy, is another and more profound legacy of Charles's reign. Uglow reveals the very foundation of the relationship between government, parliament and private enterprise. (She even traces the origins of the two-party system, which crystallised in the later part of Charles's reign.)

Government in the seventeenth century was still in the King's personal control, but this King had been invited to rule by Parliament - by the common consent of the governed - and Parliament was his paymaster. The idea of monarchical rule by the explicit consent of the governed would, of course, be dramatically underscored by the events of 1688 - the enforced abdication of James II, the accession of William and Mary, the Glorious Revolution. It's hereditary monarchy, Jim, but not as we know it - or not as we'd known it up to that point.

We see too the birth of commerce as a political force. The wars with the Dutch and the French were not fundamentally about political or dynastic control, nor about religion and ideology, but about control over trade routes. The City and her merchants, the generators of the nation's wealth and prosperity, emerge as a political force in their own right.

(Niall Ferguson, in his recent book Civilization: The West and the Rest, identifies private property rights as one of the six `killer apps' which have allowed the West to dominate global civilisation for the last 500 years. 1660s London was that `killer app' in action; the City would dominate world trade for the best part of the next three centuries.)

The book is structured broadly chronologically, but with a sensible thematic sub-structure. Thus politics, economics, foreign affairs, society and scientific innovation are depicted as separate, parallel strands of the tapestry, making for a whole that is coherent and digestible. Wisely, Uglow does not over-reach: it is a biography of Charles II, not a study of 1660s society. Equally wisely, she focuses on England, although she regularly refers to domestic events in Charles's other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland.

This is serious history, full of names and events and facts, but it is by no means po-faced. We get to have a lot of fun. The intrigues of Charles's various mistresses make today's headline-chasing celebrities look like unimaginative amateurs. It is amusing, too, to discover that the property speculator Nicholas Barbon, who rebuilt areas of London after the Great Fire, was in fact christened If-Jesus-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Had'st-Been-Damned Barebones. (His father, the preacher Praise-God Barebones, had a walk-on part in Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle No. 1).)

But towering above all the ministers and mistresses and merchants, above the scientists and the architects and the playwrights and poets, his loyal subjects and strident critics, is the character of Charles himself - the dazzling monarch with the popular touch, the man who gambled everything to hold his nation together at this time of tumult.

Uglow has obviously done alot of research and background reading but this portrait of Charles II was frustratingly lacking in a cohesive thread and fell short of a real understanding of the subject. Uglow covered alot of events and people but this made for a disjoint and uneven read. Charles II may have been an enigma and covering only the period from 1660 to 1670 meant that the reader only got a sketchy background to what made Charles act and behave the way he did. For example his tolerance of the behaviour and actions of Buckingham. The period was obviously full of drama and scandal and intrigue but I feel for all the period detail, the over 500 pages of reading was not rewarded by any useful insight.

As an eyewitness account of the events in England during the late 1600s nothing compares to Samuel Pepys' diary. This biography of Charles II covers much of the same ground but focuses more intimately on the KIng and the people around him at court. These were remarkable times and many facets of life were rapidly changing. Jenny Uglow has organized her book well to allow glimpses of the religious, political and social changes that were impacting England and Europe without sacrificing the entertaining aspects of Charles' personal life. The result is a gossipy, well told and highly entertaining history. From the scientific inquiries of the Royal Society to the Restoration theater, it's all here and the level of detail is just right for the general reader.
The chapters dealing with the Plague, The great Fire and the Dutch Wars are particularly well done.

A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game is not light reading. Carefully researched and written with much detail, it gives a vivid picture of the Restoration. Good read.

My Wife was the first to complete this. It is a well-written and well-reviewed history of an exciting time that really affected our ancestors.