Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685) was the King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
According to royalists, Charles II became king when his father Charles I was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, the climax of the Second English Civil War. The English Parliament did not proclaim Charles II king at this time, however, and England entered the period known to history as the English Interregnum. The Parliament of Scotland, on the other hand, proclaimed Charles II King of Scots on 5 February 1649 in Edinburgh. He was crowned King of Scots at Scone on 1 January 1651. Following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, Charles fled to the continent and spent the next nine years in exile in France and the United Provinces.
After the Protectorate collapsed under Richard Cromwell in 1659, General George Monck invited Charles to come to England and assume the throne. Charles II arrived on English soil on 23 May 1660 and entered London on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660. Charles II's return to England in 1660 is known to English history as the Restoration. The Convention Parliament declared Charles II King of England and Ireland at this point and declared that, for legal purposes, his reign had begun on 30 January 1649. Charles II was crowned King of England and Ireland at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661.
Charles was popularly known as the Merrie Monarch, in reference to both the liveliness and hedonism of his court and the general relief at the return to normalcy after over a decade of rule by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. Charles' wife, Catherine of Braganza was barren, but Charles fathered at least 14 illegitimate children by various mistresses.
Charles' parliament, the Cavalier Parliament (1661-79), enacted harsh anti-Puritan laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England in English society. Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code even though he himself favored a policy of religious toleration. The major foreign policy issue of the early part of Charles' reign was the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67). In 1670, Charles entered into the secret treaty of Dover, an alliance with Louis XIV under the terms of which France agreed to aide England in the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74) and Charles received a pension from Louis, and promised to restore Roman Catholicism in England at an unspecified future date. Charles attempted to introduce religious freedom for Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence, but parliament forced him to withdraw it. In 1679, Titus Oates' revelations of a supposed "Popish Plot" sparked the Exclusion Crisis after it was revealed that Charles' brother and heir (the future James II) was a Roman Catholic. This crisis saw the birth of the Whig and Tory parties. Charles sided with the Tories in this fight, and many Whig leaders were killed or forced into exile, especially following the discovery of the Rye House Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683. Following the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament in 1679, Charles ruled without parliament until his death on 6 February 1685. Charles converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed.