What follows is occasioned by the accession of King Charles III and his mother’s choice of name. All my life, I’ve hated the fact that I didn’t get a nickname. Men named “John” get nicknames because there are too many johns in America. Men named Humbert or Earl do not. As such, I’ve been fascinated by onomastics (the subject, not the Kossack) since I was a wee weirdo.

As for the contents, I’ll say it for you: “tl;dr.” I promise it’s longish and digression-free. Sometimes, it’s just a big cake. To make up for the density of the cake, I’ll throw in borders, pictures, and really predictable 20th century jokes.

I hope it’s enjoyable.

I get tired of cable news when it has one story, and only one story, a story that does not and can not change, but which the cable channels cannot stop reporting. Cue Chevvy Chase in 1975 opening “Weekend Update” with “This just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and I mean nothing sed bonum, but CNN spent 24 hours of television time, once, speculating on where a hearse with Michael Jackson’s body would be.

The fact of “King Charles III” tells us something. It tells us what Queen Elizabeth II was thinking when her son was born. It signals intention and hopes. It represents a sort of magic spell cast upon the baby by the parent.

I. As the bear licks the cub into shape, so the name fashions the child

Long before I had a class in 18th century novel, I had come to the conclusion that a first name has to have an effect on the sort of person one becomes. I do not mean this in a primitive, magical way, although plenty of societies have had that thought, but, rather, that your name makes people treat you a particular way.

The skilled attorney Brandon Van Grack had no chance, as a child, of being treated like a Bob or a Louie. Everywhere he went, people were going to react to him as if he were a Brandon or a Brandon Van Grack. No wonder he became a counter-intelligence prosecutor.

I thought it would be good if, while we formed our personalities, we carried a sort of blank name tag, or one that we could fill in each day as our moods strike us, and then have two or three big days when we would declare our name for the next several decades. In grad school, I got a box of

adhesive badges, and, when I was feeling light hearted or mordant, I’d slap a different one on my shirt each day. I made sure to pick obscure jokes, of course. “Hello My Name Is __Sans Loi__” or “_Becky Sharp_” or “_Stately Plump Buck Mulligan_.”

Walter Shandy, father of Trismegisthus Tristram Shandy, had serious thoughts on names. He thought that the sounds of the vowels and consonants would make a man a blockhead or great simply by hearing them impressed upon his mind day after day. (Laurence Sterne is partly satirizing John Locke’s theory of education, here. The idea that our brains are completely empty and are shaped entirely by our sensory impressions would lead to a theory like Walter’s.) Here’s a very long quote, but it’s funny [read Tristram Shandy! I gave you a link to a text for free! of course you really want the U. Florida edition, if you’ve got the $ to buy a used copy of all 3 vol.):

All that I maintain here, is, that in this one, of the influence of Christian names. . . he was serious; — he was all uniformity; — he was systematical, and, like all systematic,k reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis.

. . . he would lose all kind of patience whenever he saw people, especially of condition, who should have known better,, — as careless and as indifferent about the name they imposed upon their child, — or more so, than in the choice of Poto or Cupid for their puppy dog.

. . . when once a vile name was wrongfully or injudiciously given, ‘twas not like the case of a man’s character, which, when wrong’d, might hereafter be clear’d; — and, possibly, sometime or other, if not in the man’s life, at least after his death, — be somehow or other, set to rights with the world: But the injury of this, he would say, could never be undone; — nay, he doubted even whether an act of plarliament could reach it: — He knew as well as you, that the legislature assum’d a power over surnames; — but for very strong reasons, which he could give, it had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a step further.

— Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy I xx

What Sterne says in jest others have said more seriously. We shouldn’t take the joke too far, but surely there is an effect of hearing a name’s associations, whatever they may be, and however consciously they may be taken in, over and over again.

If hearing yourself called “a girl” when you’re an adult female has an effect on you, then imagine the effect of hearing “Petunia” every day.

It’s not that surprising that women’s first names don’t get the same scrutiny that men’s do. For good as much as ill, they don’t have the same prejudice in them. A child pinned to “Adolf” will struggle to get free of it; a boy given “Hubert” will be given particular treatment by peers, superiors, and dependents. On the other hand, a girl named “Flora” usually has options for altering the name herself or simply redefining it.

Personally, I have suffered from an uncommon first name, so I’ve never been called anything but it (not many ogres about). I always felt that I had to fit the name, because the name was never going to fit me. I envied the Catholic kids who got to pick a saint’s name at confirmation.

Then I heard about the Old Norse and their by-names (“Lief the Lucky” and “Harald Blue Tooth” and “Ivar the Boneless”). They lived in societies with very few men’s and women’s names, and so, simply to avoid confusion in an era before surnames, they got by-names. (Women got them, too, by the way, but they’re not as often recorded in the sagas.)

Sadly, people never knew their own by-names. After all, why should they? Bertel the Fertile was just Bertel to his weary wives. It was other people who would say, “Go see Bertel.” “You mean Bertel the White Hand or Bertel the Lame or who?” “No, nott Bertel the White Hand. Bertel the Fertile.”

II. Naming the Heir Charles as a Wish as Strong as Her Own Parents’

When Elizabeth named Charles, in 1948, she probably had Charles II in mind. She likely wanted her son to be as much a recasting of an illustrious ruler as she might be of Elizabeth. There were good reasons to have that particular desire.

If you are wondering, yes, she was the heir by the time she got pregnant with Charles. She knew then that she would rule and that her baby would take over from her.

While it is mandatory copy for news readers in the US today to say that Elizabeth presided over or watched the British Empire disappear, the truth is that it had fairly well disappeared by the time she came to the throne, and she, as a girl with “duty” drilled into her, had the nation at home to worry about more than where the sun might set. In that sense, she had a new heir to the throne and a nation bleeding from war wounds, crippled by war debts, and trying at the same time to come to a moral and financial accounting after the loss of the “crown jewel” of the empire, India. Charles III was born in November of 1948. At that point, Pakistan and India were busy fighting each other, and the Arab-Israeli War took place that year. Anyone teary over “the empire” would already be instead adapting to anxiety attacks over the post-colonial world with colonial debits, and such a person would likely be looking to Enoch Powell soon enough (or Oswald Mosley).

If she was Elizabeth again, then she wanted her son to be Charles II again.

III. James, Charles // Charles, James: the complicated history

Charles II would have been a fairly natural, and optimistic, thought for Elizabeth and the Duke, and he’s my favorite English king. Whereas his father (decapitated in the English Civil Wars) was constantly deprived of money by an increasingly Puritan and Independents-dominated Parliament, Charles II learned what we today would call branding and how to sell the image of the crown (see below).

James I and Charles I ruled when the “Geneva church” (Calvinism) was extending its theological innovations throughout the British Isles — mainly from north to south. Scotland came under Calvinist (“Puritan”) control during Elizabeth I’s time. The bloody tightrope the population walked of Mary/Elizabeth/James was about religion and about newly rising economic powers.

I will not apologize for the fact that the causes of the English Civil Wars are complex and not agreed upon. The causes of the American Civil War are debated, and it took place in the middle of the age of the telegraph and the railroad.

The emerging and dominant powers of the day could, and did, assert themselves in the democratic House of Commons. Raymond Williams, the British Marxist historian, suggests (Marxism and Literature) that every epoch has three forces: the emergent, the resistant, and the archaic [neat link there ←], and so, too, we can see in the approach to the English Civil Wars (or today), there was a Roman Catholic archaism, a dominant state economic and religious mode, and there was an emergent Presbyterian/dissenter and proto-capitalist form.

These three forces remained in interplay until “revolution” occurred twice. (I won’t engage Steve Pincus here, but I’m not in love with his recent book. (I’m fine with the idea that “political revolutions” are the “modern” ones, but that prompts the question of what medieval revolutions were, what Classical revolutions were, and what revolution is. Isn’t it better to suggest that a preponderance of cultural and cognitive capital (which is to say “ideology”) shifts sufficiently to create stability in front of a structure for wealth formation that we say “hey, things is different now?”))

The Puritans expected the Scottish James I (accession 1603) to deliver a Calvinist prayer book and persecution of Catholics. He did neither. He, and his allies in Lords, saw their path to independence from Commons and to greater power through control of colonies, still, and military advances, so a Parliament increasingly afraid of Catholics and unhappy with. . . oh. . . take your pick. . . reduced funding to the King. As Puritans began preaching more democracy, the court ministers countered with a counter-dominant ideology as close to divine right of kings as England would get.

Charles I (Son of James I, father of Charles II) acceded in 1625 and essentially inherited his father’s problems and positions, but not his personality. Charles I was less dogmatic, readier to negotiate, and far less corrupted by a . . . particularly, um, handsome and charismatic courtier. . . but he was more sincerely religious, more Established Church, and more inclined to believe that he owed God and was protected by God’s will than James I had been.

He was starved of capital exactly as the wealth of the nation shifted more to a mercantile class that was growing wealthy through international trade goods. Robert Filmer (whom you may know as the punching bag in John Locke’s Treatises of Government) wrote his divine right of kings piece for Charles I. This set up the conveyor belt of the Civil Wars, but it took a lot of demagoguery and a lot of ultimatum issuing/prerogative declaring.

The “sides” in the run-up to Civil War were not Puritan/Established Church nor Lords/Commons. Any temptation to see the history as a series of binaries is a mistake. They were three sided reactions of radical Protestant (mainly urban and Scottish, mainly mercantile and small holding), Established Protestant (Church of England) (mainly countryside, peasants and large holding squires), and Roman Catholic (mainly rural nobility, isolated towns, mainly very wealthy, but not always liquid, Lords whose wealth was derived from overseas rents). Any time one element wanted to gain, it would push at another, and the others would inevitably use fears of the hated Other to give themselves a boost.

They could always play at the hidden Pope or the ravening mob or the screaming, frenetic prophets, to scare voters in elections or gather a mob.

The Stuart kings, starved of gold, borrowed money domestically. James I and Charles I would borrow from nobles and merchants, fall into arrears, and then tell the people they owed that they should feel honored to do business with the crown.

The result was a sort of financial martyrdom to the holy crown for the conservative lenders or an inexorably growing resentment of the rapacious/tyrant crown for those English and Scottish persons who read the Bible as rejecting secular authority and for those who saw the Stuarts as illegitimate.

The pressure built and built until it expressed itself in cutting off the King’s revenues more and more. This was at a time when nobles spent .33 of their income on clothes to look like the court, and the court spent uncounted sums to look divine. No wonder ship money happened. The crown wanted revenue not for household expenses (although there was a certain amount of that) but to fund the annual conquest of Ireland.

IV. Why Was Charles II a “Good” King (esp. when he was so bad)?

The “Whig history” that Elizabeth II would have heard/read as a little girl would have told her that Charles II was a very bad king, even if he was a good king. The line from Macaulay on was that Charles Stuart II was wicked, drunken, duplicitous, and morally incontinent. It was just shocking that he kept making smart moves that made Britain an empire.

Charles II was smart. He didn’t just hate the men who killed his father, and he hated them plenty, but he studied them. He had Edward Hyde (Earl of Clarendon) as his advisor during the interregnum (the period of Charles’s exile in Spain (his wife being a big deal in Portugal) and France). If you want to know what happened in the English Civil Wars, you can read The History of the Rebellion by Hyde. The man was. . . voluble. . . on the subject. Prolix even. Wordy, one might say. Would not shut up, in fact. The point is, he would have ensured that Charles II knew all the financial wrangling, each personality, the constituencies, and what is almost a modern analysis of the currents that led to the violence.

When, therefore, Charles II came to the throne, he knew the mood of the nation (good spies while Richard Cromwell stumbled around as the Lord Protector), and he knew the Commons (and the pinch-faced men who moved “phrenzy” among the religious extremists). (Charles’s handling of Titus Oates and Judge Jeffreys in the Bloody Assizes either illustrate a sure hand at managing a demagogue or a failure to control mobs. Argue in the space provided below.)

Not reactionary, but a carefully aimed slap in the jowls: Charles II ran an anti-Puritan court. They forbade playing cards (made the manufacture or import illegal), so Charles II’s entire court ran up gambling debts that even Donald Trump couldn’t manage. They were afraid of dancing and were scandalized by lady bits, so Charles II had John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester as his friend (see THIS for a hilarious satire on a load of “contraband” from France that had to be burned at the London docks and the sadness the pyre inspired), and actresses were on stage for the first time in English history. The play houses were notorious as places where the girls who sold “orange slices” would sell a bit more for an extra fee, and where an “orange wench” could become an actress and a star and the King’s mistress.

They broke the stained glass windows in churches. They wanted no music played in church. They would have paintings that were hyper-realistic (Oliver Cromwell’s official portrait included, per his instruction, “warts and all” in order to defeat vanity). Charles sponsored Purcell! Heroic drama portrayed great heroes that even a comic book would find unrealistic. And, most notably, after the Great Fire, he rebuilt — and how he rebuilt. They were disdainful of “Rome” and “France” for being “Papist,” so Charles II’s England was glorious with Palladianism, with the latest from Rome and Paris. The Christopher Wrenn London you go to admire today, the very bit that King Charles III wants to preserve, was built by deficit spending by Charles II.

He was also a highly political king. He had a brother who was very much of Billy Carter (married a Roman Catholic and converted to the faith himself in order to raise money). What did he do with his “problem?” He gave James II, the brother, the slave trade. That was exceptionally lucrative for the crown, and James got to keep some of the money. James was also given the task of running/strengthening the navy, as the two were related. For us, this political decision is a moral stain never to be sufficiently repented of.

It was a political decision, though. First, Charles II was practicing financial self-defense. No more ship money fights. Second, the Dutch were his eternal enemy, and the Dutch were trading slaves at a furious pace (the 1619 Project marks the year that a Dutch ship first brought enslaved Africans to the English colonies by mistake). Charles’s propagandist, Aphra Behn, didn’t have to lie when she wrote about the Dutch treatment of Africans in Oroonoko. She only had to lie by omission when she implied that the English were benevolent enslavers.

Charles II was clever enough for the Treaty of Breda, which swapped the Central American possession of “Surinam” for the Dutch possession of “New Amsterdam” and a massive amount of land around it.

He threw the most lavish parties, with the prettiest women of the loosest morals, the best music, the funniest comedies, the best tragedies, the cleverest wits, and made it profitable to lend to the King.

Charles II, when he didn’t pay his bills, left the people with value.

There were very dark days in his reign. For one thing, there was the plague of 1664. (Daniel Defoe’s novel, A Journal of the Plague Year is positively grim.) Then there was the Great Fire (which ended future plague threats). There were military losses to the Dutch that were humiliating. Then there were the rebellions. The Monmouth Rebellion was quite serious, led, as it was, by one of Charles’s many bastards and tapping into the public’s fears of James II (another play for the Puritans and anti-Catholicism). Throughout his reign, Puritans would invoke Papists as a big Roman threat and generate violence/uprisings.

Even in old age, though, he made sure to keep up the feeling of good times and the display of imperturbability. He also had excellent propagandists, however, they aided a king who was himself quite deft.

V. Charles III: a Propitious Star to Tote

When our Charles was born, the UK was in Austerity. Indeed, the Olympics that were held were the first to be called “the Austerity Games” (the most recent London Olympics were a call back, and I’m convinced that The Hunger Games is an allusion as well). It was assembling the Commonwealth to replace the Empire, and Elizabeth, not yet Queen, could certainly feel a need for a royal house that would be conscious of finance, of branding, of building, and of joyfulness. The spirit of Restoration England would be an antidote to the dour realities of post-war United Kingdom.

What’s more, our Charles has actually lived up to his namesake. Folks may not remember it very well, but, in the 1970’s he was known to be every bit the happy playboy that Charles II was, and he cares about what might be called neo-Classicism, or at least the principles of reason.

He is coming to the throne at an advanced age, which is probably something he doesn’t regret, but all of the “scandals” people want to toss at him are feathers in a hail storm. It is only when a King is expected to be a sheet of alabaster that he cannot bear a blemish.

Sheets of alabaster are  lovely in museums, but they don’t do much good for living people in lives of tumult. Kings with flings, and even ones with weird malapropisms, are far more useful in giving the people a center of discussion, if not political life any more.

As a democrat who doesn’t believe in kings, I do wish him well, although he’s probably past his Nell Gwyn and Earl of Rochester years.