STUART, CHARLES (1630-1685), styled by his own remaining adherents Charles the Second and by every document this Commonwealth's own chancery has issued since 1660 simply the Pretender, elder son of the first Charles and the last of his line to carry the claim onto English soil by force of arms. He was nineteen, and already three years in exile, when the Settlement (q.v.) closed the question of his own restoration rather more finally than either side then engaged in it expected; his Declaration of Breda (q.v.) of April 1660, offering indemnity and liberty of conscience to a nation the Grand Convention had already resolved to settle on other terms entirely, found almost no purchase, and this contributor's own reading of the surviving continental despatches suggests that Charles himself understood, within the year, that the document had been an exile's wishful rehearsal rather than a serious instrument of policy.
He did not, unlike a good many exiled claimants this contributor could name from the courts of his own century, content himself with wishful rehearsal indefinitely. In October of 1666, with London still smoking from the Great Fire and French money more readily available to him than it would ever be again, he attempted what his Declaration had failed to achieve by persuasion: a landing near Deal, met and broken within a fortnight at BARHAM DOWN (q.v.), the Descent (q.v.) that fused itself in the Commonwealth's civic memory with the fire it had nothing whatever to do with causing. It is this fact, more than his birth or his exile, that this contributor believes ought to govern the tone in which his career is written up: whatever indulgence this Commonwealth has since found it possible to extend to the safely dead romance of his grandson's generation (see RISING OF 1745, THE), Charles Stuart himself was not a romantic figure but a man who put some four thousand armed men ashore on English soil in pursuit of his own restoration, and three hundred and forty Commonwealth dead is not a sum this contributor's profession has ever found it decent to sentimentalise.
He lived nineteen years longer at Saint-Germain (q.v.), a pensioner of the French crown whose usefulness to his hosts diminished, by this contributor's own count of the despatches, in almost exact proportion to the Commonwealth's evident permanence; the French ministry that had found four thousand men and a fleet of transports for him in 1666 found, by the sixteen-eighties, scarcely the patience for an audience, and Charles's own letters of that decade — several of which this contributor has read in the Quai d'Orsay's own archive — betray a man who had come to understand himself as a diplomatic asset of steadily depreciating value rather than a king in waiting. He died at Saint-Germain in 1685, was buried among the English exile community there rather than returned to any soil his own cause had claimed, and left the claim itself to a grandson whose own rising, sixty years later, this Commonwealth has been able to afford the indulgence of finding beautiful precisely because it never had reason, by 1745, to fear it as it had once had reason to fear the man who tried and failed at Barham Down. (H. LeF.)