All the King's Women: Love, Sex and Politics in the Life of Charles II - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2003

Derek Wilson. Hutchinson. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 408 pages. ISBN 0-09-179379-3. The difficulty in writing anything on Charles II is that so much has already been written. A writer needs an 'angle' and in this study, the author has given it an early twenty-first-century feminist slant. Mr Wilson sees Charles II not so much as a womaniser but as a proto-feminist who enjoyed the company of women and who regarded women as equal thereby endorsing the greater role women were playing.

(This in turn was a legacy of the Civil Wars, the extent of which the author greatly exaggerates.) This royal attitude 'makes Charles' relationships with the opposite sex so fascinating and ... helps us to take in more facets of his character and reign'. With this approach the author then looks at the King's relationship with twelve women. Sometimes the feminist gloss is rather hard to take as is the view that Charles II was 'a man in many ways at odds with the conventions of his age--conventions which demanded the complete subordination of women'. (A.G.N.)