Book Review - A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, by Jenny Uglow

Charles II faced some hefty challenges when he officially become King in 1660. The country had just spent ten years ruled by parliament without any royal authority, the memory (and threat) of civil war was still fresh and Charles himself was returning from ten years of exile with a court keen for revenge and a restoration of their former lands and privilege.

After the execution of his father, King Charles I, in 1649, Charles II was more aware than most of our kings that ruling a nation is a balancing act between different parties. Push one of them too far, or refuse to give way enough, and the whole system can erupt in your face. Charles I found this to his cost, when parliament tried and executed him for crimes against his people. The idea of a king entering into a contract with his people, a two-way agreement, became current and much more accepted – there was currency in the idea that a king only ruled with the permission of his people, as represented by parliament, and after 1649 a king had increasingly limited power without his parliament.



This balancing act is explored by Jenny Uglow in her book covering the first decade of Charles II's reign (1660-1670), A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. The infamous Merry Monarch of folk legend is shown as a human being, made wary of others by his years traipsing around European courts. Uglow shows him as an expert poker player; inscrutable, calculating and forever keeping cards close to his chest despite his outward shows of merriment. It's a concept running through the book's design, with the six sections named The Deal, Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades and The Clearance.

It is this gambler's calculation that Uglow strives to bring to the fore, highlighting Charles' secret deals or risk-taking again and again. In this story, the court's habit of gambling vast sums begins to look like a symptom of following an easygoing, faintly irresponsible king, and not the other way around. For all of Uglow's striving, though, her Charles never quite comes across as a consummate gambler; it's an interpretation that is valuable, certainly, but seems to be missing something.

That's not to say that Uglow makes Charles look carefree; quite the opposite. His merry-making and pleasure-taking is merely a diversion from the many hours he puts into the work of state. Uglow's Merry Monarch is a man seriously engaged and concerned with the running of his country, a genuine public servant, aware of the new importance of the parliament – and constantly feeling its purse strings like a noose. But he can also enjoy his life and can be seen to enjoy it (special attention is paid to several of Charles' mistresses, and the eldest of his illegitimate children, the Duke of Monmouth). He works hard and plays hard, sometimes using his play as a means to arrange secret treaties and affairs of state.

Charles' method of rule – that balancing act – was in contrast with that of his cousin, Louis XIV, who, during the course of this book, manages to establish an absolute monarchy over France and becomes the dominant power in Europe. Louis acts as a weight in the grand scales of Europe, to be weighed against Holland (including the future William III) and England, but also as an example of what the people and parliament of England fear – a tyrant on the throne, with no representatives of popular opinion. It's what the people fear, but also a leadership style preferred by Charles I, and Charles II's struggles with parliament (mostly over funding his costly wars with the Dutch) indicate how attractive the concept must also have been to him.

Louis XIV wouldn't have tolerated the scheming and factionalism that is rife in Charles II's court. But this courtly intrigue, and its overspill into the parliament, makes A Gambling Man that much more fascinating – not only is this a biography of a king's reign, it's an insight into the politics of a decade, delving into the birth of modern party politics and the gradual demise of individual royal authority.

Uglow's book colourfully illustrates the the first decade of Charles II's reign, balancing the risks taken by a monarch holding onto power with documenting the rise of parliamentary politics and the gradual transfer of power.

Hard Times: For These Hard Times - my Charles Dickens 12in12

Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens

More commonly known simply as Hard Times, Charles Dickens' shortest novel, Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), seems an especially fitting novel for Britain in 2012. The themes and ideas of Dickens' most socially-aware work resonate with a nation in the grip of austerity measures and tough economic decisions, knowing that the times ahead are likely to be even harder.



If you've read or seen Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), you won't be surprised that both novels were published in weekly installments in Household Words – a serial edited by our own Charles Dickens – before being published in novel format. Hard Times came from earlier in the year (April to August), while Gaskell's story ran through the later months (September – January 1855). Both are set in fictional northern English towns; grime-smeared and smoke-obscured, heaving with the belches of industrial productivity, busy with the bustle of faceless hordes of generic workers. The one, Gaskell's Milton-Northern, probably based on Manchester; the other, Dickens' Coketown, most likely to be Preston – both with names indicating their lack of individual character, functional natures and industrial purposes.

Hard Times is very much about that functional nature and the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working people. From the very opening, the reader is accosted with the educational system (you'd call it a 'life philosophy', except that sounds a bit too fluffy and friendly) of Thomas Gradgrind Snr. This is a system he applies to his own children's upbringing, and to the children attending the school he pays for – a system perfectly suited to a town whose every movement is geared toward industrial manufacture and commerce, where people are expected to buy for the lowest price and sell elsewhere at the highest. It's a society that knows the price of everything, but has lost sight of the value of anything (sound familiar?): Gradgrind is ever-ready to 'weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to'.

Gradgrind's 'system' relies on fact: 'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but facts!', a schoolboy is told. Fancy, imagination, wonder and other 'nonsense' are to be excluded from thought. Hard Times charts the failure of this system in two of Gradgrind's children – I say 'children', to him they're 'models of his system', but to anyone else they're his eldest son and daughter: Tom (Jnr) and Louisa.

Bustling around these children, and equally deprived of imagination, wonder and fancy, are the workers of Coketown. In referring to these people as 'Hands', Dickens simply highlights both the way the workers are regarded by their masters and the idea that the workers have lost any sense of individuality. In losing fancy (the sworn enemy of fact) to join the horde of workers, forced to work in order to live and scraping by on a wage thought too generous by their wealthy masters, they have lost that which made them human.

In writing Hard Times, Dickens didn't try very hard to make his point subtle or well-hidden. The cry for social reform and better treatment of the poor calls from every page, and readers should be left in no doubt as to the sorry state of the working class of Coketown. This is Dickens' sledgehammer to the dehumanising rock face of industrialisation and capitalism. Unlike the poor, the wealthy are individuals and their seemingly unbreakable influence over events (and the lives of the poor) is similarly under attack in Hard Times.

That's not to say Hard Times is unrelentingly bleak or, er, hard. Many of the characters have become hardened by circumstances, but humanity is not without redemption. There is at least one Hand, Rachel, who shines as a beacon of compassion and love – along with Sissy, one of the children from Gradgrind's school, she serves as the impossibly good-natured and loving women in an otherwise harsh, masculine world.

Josiah Bounderby - bully of humility and self-made man

On top of that, never let it be said that Dickens isn't funny. Hard Times has some wonderful moments of light and dry humour. Josiah Bounderby, the 'bully of humility', owner of banks and factories, is a case in point. He is the book's self-made man, a much-vaunted claim which Bounderby spends most of Hard Times vaunting, his pride at having improved himself from a situation far worse than that of the Hands is palpable and unbounded. It's also hilariously exposed as a lie, displaying and enhancing the disgraceful hypocrisy of the wealthy masters of industrialised Britain (and who says that ends in 1854?).

Hard Times is a plea for the human spirit, a warning against crushing the innate and vital spark of human existence. Even though it was written nearly 160 years ago, Hard Times: For These Hard Times is still pertinent, and has a perennial relevance to all post-Industrial Revolution societies.

The image of Josiah Bounderby comes from this site, which features a few comic extracts from Dickens' work.