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The Maid Who Restored Charles II

n 1659 the restoration of the exiled Charles II seemed impossible. It might not have occurred at all but for the forgotten intervention of a blacksmith’s daughter.

While Monck resisted his wife’s entreaties, making ‘hard faces, and seem[ing] to be uneasie in hearing her’, he would begin to admit misgivings about the treatment of Charles I and concerns about the ungovernability of the army. London erupted, bonfires blazing on street corners and in market places, as ‘the sudden news rane like wild fier’ that Monck ‘should stand by them and they should have a free parliament’. The flinty humour and outspoken style that had helped her guide her husband added to her unpopularity, and her position as a ‘lady of low origin’ who had once sold cloth at the New Exchange was dredged up with evident delight.

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