A Time of Disillusion

The middle of the seventeenth century must have been a bewildering time in which to live in England. An autocratic king brooked no interference from parliament or from anyone else. He had been anointed by God - therefore he needed no help, guidance, or advice from any other mortal. Those who had been elected to sit in parliament, finding that their services were surplus to the requirements of Charles I, set about forcing the king to recognise their ’rights’.

And so began the Civil War (not the first of these in England by any means). Parliament raised the New Model Army, completely destroyed the royalist forces, brought Charles to trial, then lopped off his head. Then followed a decade of rule by a decidedly Puritan parliament. That was, in many parts of the country, as unwelcome as had been the autocratic rule of a king hovering on the edge of Roman Catholicism. The Republic, labelled The Commonwealth, simply petered out after the death of Cromwell. His son Richard (a dismal failure), then General Lambert (who tried martial law), both came to nothing as General Monck settled things by recalling the remains of parliament (The famous Rump Parliament).

To much rejoicing, back came the Stuarts in the form of Charles II. He very quickly became known as the Merry Monarch. Merry he may well have been; lecherous and self-indulgent he most certainly was. His illegitimate offspring were scattered far and wide, and from a very wide selection of women. This fact alone alienated a goodly proportion of the population who had become used to the Puritanical strictures of the Commonwealth. Hence the reason for this story being labelled ’Disillusion’. Many were distinctly disillusioned with this hedonistic king.

The eldest of Charles’ bastards was James Scott. Born in The Netherlands of a lady named Lucy Walter, Charles lost no time in creating the lad Duke of Monmouth - and more of him in Book 6! Bewildering? It must have been very odd to the ordinary citizen lurching from Puritanical ’correctness’ to open debauchery and licentiousness in the space of just a few years.