How Charles II sought to obliterate a decade of British history

When the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, in the person of that ‘lovely black boy’ Charles II, was announced in May 1660 it was with a flourish of public amnesia. Charles had, it was declared, already been king for 11 years, from the moment in January 1649 when his father had been unlawfully executed.

Such acts of contrived forgetting were not unprecedented in English history. William the Conqueror effaced Harold’s short reign from the records and Henry VII did much the same for Richard III. But 11 years was ambitious. And this forgetting would be expected not of people on whose daily lives the great affairs of state barely impinged, as might have been the case for many in the Middle Ages when a royal bloodletting substituted one crowned head for another. Hardly anyone was left untouched by the seismic events of the 1640s and ’50s in Britain. War, regicide and the abolition of the monarchy, lords and bishops were all accompanied and amplified by a vigorous and intermittently free press which ensured that tidings became truly public.

In fact, if there was a gap in public knowledge, it was of the new/old king. That arresting description of him as a ‘lovely black boy’, quoted by Anna Keay in her compelling history of these ‘forgotten’ years, was given by a friend of Anne Monck, the wife of General Monck, the man who became instrumental in restoring the king. Anne had had a dream in which a black-haired man lifted a crown from a dungheap, and she had turned to the friend, who had seen Charles as a boy, for confirmation that the figure could be him. In other words, even the people bringing Charles II ‘back’ were so unfamiliar with him that they didn’t know what he looked like.

As the years of ‘Britain without a crown’ have receded further into the past, however, the Restoration sleight of hand looks as if it has worked.