Fascinating people,

Fascinating Places.

G'd Aye and welcome to the Dan Mainwearing podcast.

This is where we talk to and about the famous and the infamous,

the celebrated and the obscure, the well-known and the undiscovered, interviews, articles

and discussion from around the globe. On the 30th of January, 1649, the large crowd gathered beneath a hastily erected scaffold at the palace of Whitehall.

At the stroke of 2 p.m. a nameless masked man delivered a single blow to sever the head of King Charles.

Seven hundred years after Alfred the Great sought to establish the Kingdom of England.

The English monarchy was no more.

A commoner and Pururetor named Oliver Cromwell, is now the country's

defactored dictator. As Cromwell's parliamentarian celebrated an end to the violent civil war, the King's 19 year old son was determined to avenge his laying and to restore the monarchy.

A decade later, the young pretender would assume his father's throne.

In this episode, I examine the life of King Charles II, from his earliest days, through his exile, his triumphant return

and the remainder of his trouble praying. On the 29th of May, 1630, Charles was born as the second son of King Charles I and his French

Queen Henrietta Maria. He enjoyed an affluent upbringing befitting of a king.

His major challenge being convincing his tutors to let him pursue

his interest in science. But beyond the leafy confines of the family estates, his father was sitting on a powder kick of religious and national conflicts.

Three decades earlier, Elizabeth I of England had died without leaving a natural born heir.

After the bloody purges that followed her Catholic Sister Mary's stint on the throne,

both Elizabeth and Parliament had been keen to avoid further conflict by finding an eligible royal to succeed

the Queen. James the 6th, already King of Scotland, was the ideal man for the job or so it seemed. His great-grandmother was the sister of Elizabeth's

father Henry VIII. More importantly he was a Protestant. The problem was that while Catholic versus Protestant violence

...