Charles II and the Meanings of Exile

Before the restoration of Stuart rule in 1660, Charles II spent the best part of a decade in exile at the mostly Catholic courts of Europe. When he did return briefly to England, he found himself a fugitive in his own realms, a kind of internal exile, before escaping again overseas. This chapter examines how the royal experience of exile became an especially fraught issue in the many printed works produced by Charles’s friends and enemies in the months surrounding the Restoration. Charles’s enemies argued that his time abroad had fatally compromised his Protestantism and fitness to rule, whereas his friends presented his exile as a positive formative experience. In building their cases, however, both sides relied on a discourse of exile that by the second half of the seventeenth century was associated with an English Catholic narrative of religious persecution. Thus, especially for Charles’s Protestant supporters, the terms available for representing his exile rendered problematic his reputation as a resolute Anglican.