The condition of English society at the coming of Charles II. explains somewhat the tremendous outburst of popular enthusiasm with which that event was greeted. The people on the village green received him with morris dances to the music of pipe and tabor, and with other rustic festivities which for so long a time had been banished as sinful engagements. At some of the towns through which the triumphal procession passed, young damsels to the number of hundreds lined the way and strewed flowers in the path of the king. The women were especially noticeable for their active participation in all the popular demonstrations. It was as if they had felt so heavily the repression of the rigorous theocracy of Cromwell that they were ready to accept to the fullest the pledge of better times which the return of Charles gave them, and to pass from fuller liberty into the wildest license. The king himself, by his own example, lost no time in establishing the new standards of conduct. Even the reckless spirit of the Londoners was somewhat surprised when it was bruited abroad that the king, who was received as a Divine dispensation to a waiting people, had slunk out of the palace the first night after his return, under cover of darkness, in the furtherance of one of the unsavory intrigues which made his life and his court notorious in the annals of English history. The sensibilities of the English people were not seriously shocked, however,--we are speaking of the Royalist following and not of the Puritans,--and in the rebound from the first amazement at the revelation they received of the kingly character, they were ready to follow his lead; and so English social life during the reign of Charles was greatly corrupted. As the key to the times is to be sought in the tone of the court, the unwelcome task must be fulfilled in the interests of history, as it relates to woman, of setting forth the actual conditions which were instituted and prevailed at the court of Charles II.
The king came to England fresh from the court of Louis XIV., and tainted by all the vices which made that court infamous. For the first time, England became widely affected by the gross iniquities which had for a long while been a familiar fact of the noble circles of French society. So long as England imported from France only its dress goods, jewelry, and novelties, the influence exerted upon it by its continental neighbor touched society in only a superficial way; but when England's "Merrie Monarch" brought over with him the low standard of French morals, England paid tribute to France in a more serious way and modelled its conduct after that of the more frivolous people. The reign of Charles brings to view as the principal fact of the times the personality of the monarch himself, not because he was a strong man, but because he was so thoroughly weak in his character and abandoned in his conduct. We have nothing to do with political or constitutional measures, but, in passing judgment upon the state of society, we are constrained to say that the reign of King Charles marked a distinct retrogression, and, in its effect upon the status of woman, is notable for the distinction it bestowed upon the courtesan class. The honoring of such characters discounted greatly the gain for the higher ideals of womanhood which had been secured by the Puritans.