Abstract.

Question: Did Charles II use the English navy to boost his domestic and international power?

This thesis presents a set of revolutionary aspects that addresses a paucity in the study of the navy in the period 1659-1668 (the period from the first manoeuvres to restore Charles II, to the period immediately following the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War). Outside key works by J.D.Davies and Bernard Capp, there has been little sustained study of the topic, and certainly nothing denoting how the navy supported Charles’s power. So, we have missed crucial dimensions of the navy's role in political, diplomatic, and economic history. In contrast to the general scholarly neglect, this thesis demonstrates how essential the English navy was to Charles II in a plethora of ways. Throughout the seven chapters a large number of major, new contributions are made to the academic body of knowledge regarding Charles’s use of the navy to support his power. However, the main themes show that the navy played the most important part in returning the King to power in 1660, in contrast to the historic assertion that this role belonged to the army, and how the navy was central to aiding the restored monarchy retain power using symbolism, propaganda and display of massive power, reaching an apex at the April 1661 coronation. It progresses to reveal a new interpretation of the ruling ethos that drove the Sovereign’s policies thereafter. In essence, these constituted a covert desire to use the navy to establish as much of a domestic absolute monarchy as the context would allow, achieve pre-eminence internationally among his fellow heads of state, and to maximise trade with the attendant Customs duties to pay for all of this. It then explains why he planned to go to war with the Dutch, concocting a step-by-step plan to use the navy in achieving this. He commenced with the construction of a powerful international persona for himself, underwent a widespread propaganda campaign to prepare domestic and overseas opinions, erecting diplomatic alliances to isolate the Dutch with the Portuguese marriage playing a vital central role, and a covert plan to extract huge additional taxes from Parliament to pay for the hostilities. It ends with an analysis of why his plans were doomed, his mismanagement of the economy and government finances and their disastrous effect on navy funding, as well as his martial incompetence as a commander-in-chief leading to the inevitability of defeat at the Medway in June 1667. In total, this thesis shows that Charles II was unsuited to the crown he had strived for when in exile, failing to recognise that the country he ruled didn’t have the ability to support his personal political desires, wasting vast amounts of treasure and lives in the process, leaving him humbled, weaker and more reliant on Parliament than when he came to the throne.