Hey! For Charles

MERRY MONARCH: THE LIFE AND LIKENESS OF CHARLES II (274 pp.)--Hesketh Pearson--Harper ($5).

On the night of Nov. 4, 1677, a few hours after he had, for certain umbrous reasons of state, brought about a marriage between William of Orange and the Duke of York's daughter, Charles II of England proceeded to the newlyweds' suite, threw back the curtains of their bed and roared patriotic encouragement: "Now nephew. Hey! St. George for England." This is the sort of behavior that caused Charles to be misunderstood by many of his contemporaries and a sizable share of his biographers. His mistresses, whom he kept in oriental profusion, thought that they governed him, and Parliament agreed. Political adversaries and friends alike thought him a libertine, which he was, and a fool, which he was not. His sober adviser, Lord Halifax, grumbled that "the wit of a gentleman and that of a crowned head ought to be two different things."

Biographer Hesketh Pearson (Dizzy, Oscar Wilde) argues persuasively for the opposite view. The Charles he describes in a witty and partisan book was a tall, swarthy man who played a powerful game of tennis, made handsome settlements on his numerous bastards, encouraged science and literature, and left England a happier and more prosperous nation than he found it. Amid religious fanaticism, he remained tolerant and humane, and his chief fault was that he forgave anybody anything. He gained his political ends by letting himself be persuaded to do what he wished. "He had a sense of reality shared by no statesman of his time," says Pearson, "and knew in an instant what to do in any given situation (usually nothing) and how far he could go."

Palace Irregulars. The bones of the story are familiar enough. When that most energetic and terrifying of wowsers, Oliver Cromwell, was fighting the first civil war, Charles was a 16-year-old exile whose doltish father was soon to be be headed. At 21, Charles invaded England at the head of a Scots army, but his Presbyterian soldiers were more concerned, Pearson notes, with religion and robbery than fighting, and Cromwell crushed them easily. For six weeks, before he made his way to France, Charles hid out in various guises, including that of "Will Jackson," a farmer's son. In 1660, after Cromwell had died and the protectorate of his son Richard had fizzled, Charles returned.

The people threw off Puritanism like a corset, and expressed their relief in "dancing, singing, eating, drinking, swearing, gambling, blaspheming, whoring, cockfighting, dogfighting, bearbaiting, bull-baiting, horse-baiting bonfire-burning, gunpowder-exploding." At Charles's coronation, his health was drunk so often that the streets were full of vomiting citizens, and Diarist Samuel Pepys wrote that he was never so "foxed" in his life.

It was time for Charles to marry. He chose the Portuguese infanta, Catherine of Braganza, and settled down to a long and happy life with her, and with Lady Castlemaine, Moll Davis, Margaret Hughes, Jane Roberts, Mary Knight.

Winifred Wells, Lady Falmouth, the Countess of Kildare, Frances Stuart, Lou ise de Keroualle, Hortense Mancini and Nell Gwynn. "God would not damn a man for a little irregular pleasure," Charles said happily to a friend. Dignity sometimes demanded that he send John Wilmot, the licentious second Earl of Rochester, to the Tower of London for writing obscene satires. But the King always let him out.

Dismal Jimmy. Charles played his international affairs, as Pearson sees it, with the skill of a chess master. He captured New Amsterdam, and thereby, as it turned out, consolidated England's hold in the New World. Deftly, he outdistanced The Netherlands as a maritime power. Whenever he needed cash, he allowed Louis XIV to bribe him, but contrived to give little value for money. In 1670 Louis agreed to pay Charles -L-160,000 to become a Catholic, but--knowing well that open conversion would cause civil war and wreck an Anglo-French alliance--he asked Charles to defer his avowal until "the state of his country's affairs" permitted. While Louis simmered, Charles deferred it for 15 years, until he was on his deathbed.

The worst temblor of the early Restoration was a delirium of anti-Catholic hatred. Although the frenzy was started by a supposed plot to murder the King, Charles tempered the witch hunt when he could, signed death warrants when he had to, and eventually restored order. Pearson tells the famed story of how, at the furor's height, a boisterous mob stopped a gilded carriage, thinking that Charles's French mistress, Louise de Keroualle, was inside. Nell Gwynn saved matters by sticking her head out and saying, "Pray, good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore."

Charles could yield to Parliament or thunder at it, and gain his ends by either device. His lack of vindictiveness was astonishing; of the calumnies of Lord Shaftesbury, the Whig leader who had hoped to execute him, the King remarked merely that "at doomsday we shall see whose arse is blackest." The monarch died in 1685, surrounded at first by musicians and concubines, and at the end by clerics and physicians. He was succeeded by his brother, James II, whom Nell called "dismal Jimmy," and of whom Charles had observed that his mistresses were so ugly that his priest had no doubt prescribed them for penance.

Biographer Pearson leaves Charles with a balanced assessment that recalls one of Shaw's prose arias: "His imaginative nature made him gentle, but also weak. His intelligence made him tolerant, but also indifferent. His rational disposition made him considerate, but also negligent. His sense of loyalty made him generous, but also extravagant. His mental balance gave him humour as well as irresponsibility. His natural charity brought indolence as well as callousness." Withal, concludes Pearson, he was "the sanest, most human and civilised of monarchs."

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