Royal Charms

CHARLES II OF ENGLAND wasn't good-looking, but Antonia Fraser makes him very attractive. It's not a difficult task. In Fraser's new biography, Royal Charles, she points out that even so sedate a lady as Queen Victoria found Charles II the most appealing of her predecessors. Despite the permanent scowl that marks all his surviving portraits, Charles II, immensely popular in his own day, had a romantic allure that has lasted to our own century. A dashing young prince and then a recklessly debauched monarch, he remains great fun to read about.

Educational fun, though. Royal Charles has no pretensions to profound historical interpretation, but, with clear exposition of many tangled situations and with careful research, Fraser reliably guides the reader through 17th-century politics. Biography can be the best history for the layman--with a clear chronology and a well-defined cast of characters, events become easier to follow.

Nevertheless, Fraser emphasizes the personal character of Charles II over political events--a justifiable technique in recounting 17th-century history, where the idiosyncrasies of reigning monarchs deeply influenced national policy. The psychological portrait is not sophisticated. Fraser argues that deep melancholy lay behind Charles's self-indulgence--hardly a new or clinical insight. She says she wants to strip away the layers of romantic gloss, but Fraser's left enough to make this an entertaining, if overly adulatory biography.

She can't strip away the excitement of the story. Charles II's father was at war with his own subjects by the time Charles was nine. When Charles was 11, he was sent to the House of Lords to plead for the life of the Earl of Strafford, the King's friend and servant. Parliament condemned Strafford anyway, and he was executed for high treason. At 12, he saw his first battle. At it, he left his father, who was soon captured by the Parliamentary troops, and never saw him again. When he was 19, his father was executed for high treason against the people of England.

Charles II spent the next 11 years skulking about European capitals, with one disastrous attempt to claim his rightful crown. Parliament abolished the monarchy, and then General Oliver Cromwell declared himself the nation's Lord Protector. King Charles II, as he styled himself, though uncrowned, lived dependent on the charity of others. Fraser quite rightly emphasizes the humiliation and the poverty of these years. Charles II, unlike any other monarch of 17th-century Europe, learned about hunger and cold at first hand.

He also learned diplomacy, a much less interesting topic. The tortuous negotiation of his years in exile are tedious, particularly since--as the book jacket warns--none of these promises of help from the King of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of Spain materialized. Charles II was finally restored to his father's throne in 1660 by his own subjects. Oliver Cromwell had died of natural causes, his son couldn't control the country, and the army called Charles II back from exile, amid popular rejoicing.

Fraser doesn't explain this amazing reversal of public opinion. "The tide of revolution had run out," she says, feebly. That doesn't explain much. She's bored us with details of unsuccessful intrigues for a hundred pages; giving us at least a chapter on this final, successful intrigue would seem only fair. She's chosen to emphasize the drama and the inexplicability of the Restoration. It surprises us, as she wants it to, but we're just a little too astonished to be pleased.

In the second half of the book Fraser comes into her own. Charles II, once crowned King of England, spent money lavishly, on art, theater, palaces, women. Fraser, while delighting in details of court life, argues strenuously that we mustn't blame Charles for spending too much--he did it to maintain the prestige of the monarchy. Her affection for Charles leads her astray here: surely there was no need to have three royal mistresses at once on the royal payroll, and his nephew William, acceding to the throne in equally shaky circumstances, spent in his first year only slightly over half what Charles did.

Wasteful as it may have been, his prodigality and womanizing proclivities entertain. For the latter he was notorious. Father of a dozen bastards and no legitimate children, he was never faithful to his barren wife, but always kind, angrily rejecting suggestions that he divorce her. Charles told censorious Bishop Burnet that he was convinced God would never damn a man "for allowing himself a little pleasure." A modern point of view, and an appealing one; we find it difficult to condemn the indolent hedonism of Charles II's later years, even though it seems he allowed himself more than a little pleasure.

And Charles, like most famed debauches, repented at the end. He converted on his deathbed to Catholicism. His father had died to maintain the Anglican Church, and his successor, his brother James, would lose his throne because of his Catholicism. Charles II, unlike his brother, had realized that his public reception into the Church of Rome would be disastrous for the monarchy, England being rabidly anti-Catholic. Charles has subordinated his own religious convictions to the good of the state, until it was too late for anyone to care. Fraser's description of his deathbed conversion is the most moving chapter in the book. She abandons the contrived dramaticism of the earlier chapters; here she calmly tells us what happened and reconstructs what must have been in Charles's mind. From his point of view, this conversion was the most important decision of Charles II's life. It provides a splendid end to Fraser's not quite so splendid biography.

SHE OVERWRITES frequently: one-sentence paragraphs dot the book. By the seventh or eighth time, they don't seem dramatic, just disconcerting. And she's far too fond of inserting quotations. Not quotations from contemporary sources--no one can object to those-but quotations drawn from the great literature of Western Europe. To cite Alexander Pope's description of the court of Charles II, written 50 years after Charles's death, is barely acceptable; quoting Dante on poverty to describe what Charles went through in years of exile is not. She has at least the grace to translate the Italian, which she does not do for the French scattered through the text.

This is a much better book, though, than her earlier biographies. The scholarship is considerable, but she doesn't let it impede the narrative, and though her sympathy for her subject is discernible on very page, Fraser doesn't sentimentalize the story as she did in Mary, Queen of Scots. The difference between her treatment of Mary and her great-grandson may be that Fraser identified with Mary. The earlier biography is glorificatory and sickeningly sweet. Fraser doesn't identify with Charles. She's a little bit in love with him, that's all.