A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration
By Jenny Uglow
Faber £25, 580 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

The restoration of Charles II to his father’s throne in May 1660 was widely welcomed by an English nation weary of the search for political settlement after civil war and the rule of Cromwell. That it was so deftly accomplished says much for Charles’s skill – his gambler’s sense of timing, to catch this book’s title. That he bequeathed a secure throne to his brother James in 1685 shows that he was indeed “a great master of king-craft”, as the Earl of Ailesbury labelled him.

He weathered a series of storms – political, diplomatic, military and religious – that might have sunk a more headstrong or obdurate monarch and, indeed, so quickly wrecked his royal brother James, deposed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution.

It is easy enough to love Charles – the Merry Monarch – for his affability, accessibility and wit. And it’s easy to hate him for his casual ability to sacrifice the innocent – 24 men died a traitor’s gruesome death for alleged involvement in the Popish Plot of 1678.

One of the many virtues of Jenny Uglow’s book is its author’s acute judgment. She recognises Charles’s skill in political manoeuvre in that “supreme balancing act, ruling a divided people for 25 years”. Only on his deathbed was he at last reconciled to the Catholic church, though he had assured his royal cousin Louis XIV, in return for a substantial subsidy, that he would announce his Catholicism when the time was right. He took the money but left it very late to play that particular card.

Uglow already has a number of distinguished biographies to her credit, most notably Nature’s Engraver, her life of Thomas Bewick. It is no surprise that she carries off her task here with triumphant bravura. We will probably never have a better description of the Restoration court, elegant, libidinous and lethal by turns.

A Gambling Man paints brilliant portraits of the creatures that inhabited that court – indulged by their master, she tells us, like pet animals. They included Barbara Castlemaine, for so long Charles’s strong-willed mistress; the irascible philosopher Thomas Hobbes, (“Here comes the Beare to be baited,” Charles would announce as the old man appeared to do battle with the court wits); the Earl of Rochester, drunk for five whole years; and the Duke of Buckingham, who brawled with fellow peers and eventually, so it was said, stabbed the Earl of Shrewsbury and then made love to the earl’s wife in a shirt stained with his blood.

The narrative rises to embrace the momentous events it describes. I could almost smell the Great Fire of 1666, roaring, surging and leaping across old London like some great malicious ogre. Uglow shows us Charles moving easily through his world; experimenting in his Whitehall laboratory; going to the theatre (if he laughed the play was a hit, if he yawned it was doomed); playing vigorous tennis; and walking, smoke-blackened and tired, through his burning capital.

Yet there are times when the book does not secure that broad isthmus that connects history to biography. It sets out to provide “a portrait of Charles II in the first decade of the Restoration”. Yet much of Charles’s behaviour is explained by his early life, which is only summarised here.

More seriously, though, the analysis proper stops at 1670, although its author concludes that Charles’s gambling skills ultimately failed in overestimating his brother James and underestimating his nephew, William of Orange. These both largely reflected the second half of his reign, not catalogued in these pages. There is a sense of incompleteness that even the quality of Uglow’s writing cannot quite expunge. One of the attractions of biography is its sense of life as a trajectory; the difficulty of focusing on a limited period is the risk of presenting so many sweetmeats that even the heartiest appetite begins to pall.

These are irritations, not fundamental flaws, though I fear that the book’s truncation means that it will never quite attain the status of Uglow’s biography of Bewick. But it is an unrivalled pen-picture of this bold, charming and supremely cynical royal gambler at the very height of his unprincipled powers.

Richard Holmes is author of ‘Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General’ (HarperCollins)