Following the execution of his father in 1649, Charles was invited to Scotland to be crowned king of that nation, the Scottish Covenanters under Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl of Argyll, having fallen out with the English Parliamentarians. He was crowned at Scone in 1650, but was soon chafing under the restrictions placed upon him by his new "subjects." A Scottish invasion of England in 1651, led by the new King, ended disastrously at Worcester, where the combined Scottish-English Royalist forces were routed by Oliver Cromwell; Charles, after a brief but gallant attempt to rally his troops, fled, finally finding refuge on the Continent after a series of harrowing adventures which were later to become an integral part of his "legend." He spent the next 9 years in exile, surviving mostly upon the charity of foreign monarchs, and apparently with little chance of regaining his birthright.
In 1665, he committed England to a war with the Dutch which began promisingly, but ended disastrously in 1667; the price of this failure was the political existence of Clarendon, whom Charles seems to have been quite willing to scapegoat for the defeat. Clarendon fled into exile in France, where he spent the remainder of his life preparing his History of the Great Rebellion for publication. Charles, meanwhile, appointed a new administration headed by Henry Bennet, the Earl of Arlington; this was often referred to as the "Cabal" ministry by contemporaries, a reference both to the initials of the administration's chief ministers, and to the supposedly sinister and secretive nature of their policies. In fact, Charles himself was very much in command, and, in 1670, signed the Treaty of Dover with the French which included a secret parallel treaty that was kept hidden even from Arlington. The secret portions of the treaty made provision for clandestine financial support from Louis XIV, in return for which Charles was to convert to Roman Catholicism, and prepare for the conversion of England in the future. Charles gladly accepted the money; he showed little sign, however, of either changing faiths himself, or of leading England back into the Popish fold.
Ideologically, Charles probably tended towards the absolutism so characteristic of all of the Stuarts, but he was not so foolish as to pursue royal power nakedly. Where his father and brother might insist publicly upon the Crown's absolute independence with regard to Parliament and nation, Charles worked clandestinely, finally achieving this independence by means of a series of secret deals and under-the-table payments from the French king, Louis XIV. His apparently complete victory over the Whig Exclusionists after 1682 was the fruit of opportunism rather than of careful planning or the single-minded pursuit of an idealized conception of monarchy. Samuel Pepys's comment in 1667 on attempts to establish a standing army that would help enforce the Royal will is telling if not perhaps entirely fair: "the design is, and the Duke of York [i.e., Charles's brother James] is hot for it, to have a land army and so make the government like that of France: but our princes have not brains, or at least care and forecast, enough to do that."
Indeed, Charles's competence as both a political manager and national leader are very much open to debate. Some have seen him as a wily and astute, if unscrupulous, manipulator both of public opinion and of the political scene; others have characterized him as one who merely staggered from crisis to crisis, succeeding, ultimately, more by dint of good luck than by ability. Certainly his policies, both domestic and foreign, through the later 1660s and 1670s were fairly disastrous: England fared poorly in two wars against the Dutch, and found its foreign policy increasingly dictated by France. On the domestic front, resentment against the apparently arbitrary and pro-Catholic policies of his governments simmered for nearly two decades before finally exploding into a real threat against his rule with the Popish Plot crisis that erupted in 1678. Mismanagement of finances, and of Parliament, also forced Charles, in 1672, to issue a Stop on the Exchequer – a de facto declaration of government bankruptcy.
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