If you read this column regularly, you’ll probably recall that the early culture of colonial Charles Town in many ways reflected the personality of its namesake, England’s King Charles II. Given ...

For the Anglophiles among us, how splendid was the recent coronation of King Charles III? All that royal pomp and circumstance calls to mind that the last time a King Charles sat on the English throne ...

Born at the end of a long line of inbreeding, Charles II suffered ill-health for his entire, albeit short, life. Badly disfigured, he was believed unfit to rule and during his life, most of the power ...

MERRY MONARCH: THE LIFE AND LIKENESS OF CHARLES II (274 pp.)—Hesketh Pearson—Harper ($5). On the night of Nov. 4, 1677, a few hours after he had, for certain umbrous reasons of state, brought about a ...