The Children of Charles the Second: The Merry Monarch's Fourteen Bastards

A biography exploring the dramatic, scandal-tinged lives of King Charles II’s illegitimate children and their legacy.

King Charles II was the father of fourteen illegitimate children (if not more) by seven mistresses. Ironically, his marriage to Queen Catherine, a Portuguese princess, proved childless. The eldest and most notable of his children, James, duke of Monmouth, was effectively excluded from the line of succession. After his father’s death the duke launched an armed challenge for the crown against his uncle, then James II, but was defeated at the battle of Sedgemoor and executed. Some of Charles's other sons, notably Henry, duke of Grafton, Charles, duke of St Albans, and the youngest, Charles, duke of Richmond, took part in military and naval campaigns at home and overseas. Some of his daughters married into various branches of the British aristocracy—though not without occasional scandal—while one married a composer and another took holy orders. In the context of the relaxed morals of the Restoration court, this biography examines the sometimes poorly documented lives of each of Charles’s children, their personal relations with each other, their places in English history, their love affairs, and the lines of descent through which several key figures of the modern British royal family can trace their lineage.