Portal:Anglicanism/Selected biography/3
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Charles II (Charles Stuart; 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. After the Protectorate collapsed under Richard Cromwell in 1659, General George Monck invited Charles to return and assume the thrones in what became known as the Restoration. Charles's English parliament enacted harsh anti-Puritan laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England. Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code even though he himself favoured a policy of religious toleration. In 1670, Charles entered into the secret treaty of Dover, an alliance with Louis XIV under the terms of which Louis agreed to aide Charles in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay Charles a pension, and Charles promised to convert to Roman Catholicism at an unspecified future date. In 1679, Titus Oates's revelations of a supposed "Popish Plot" sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it was revealed that Charles's brother and heir (the future James II) was a Roman Catholic. This crisis saw the birth of the pro-exclusion Whig and anti-exclusion Tory parties. Charles sided with the Tories, and dissolved the English Parliament in 1679, and ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685.
