The end of the English republic coincided with the end of the Stuart dynasty’s exile. Charles II, recalled by the Convention Parliament and acknowledged king before arriving in Britain, was welcomed with unrestrained public rejoicing as he returned to London in triumph. It had been a long journey home for the son of an executed potentate. After his father’s beheading in 1649, Charles was crowned at Scone by the Scots and proclaimed king of Ireland. In 1651, just twenty-one, he invaded England at the head of a Scottish army, but lost to Cromwell’s forces at Worcester. Disguised by supporters, Charles luckily escaped detection and fled to the continent, where he lived for nine years in exile. He dwelled for a while in Paris, Cologne, The Hague, Brussels, and Bruges, in the last-mentioned location as a pensioner of Spain. He hoped to foment a Royalist rising on his behalf and contemplated invading England, but as time passed and Spanish funds dwindled, that hope diminished, too. When a restoration of the monarchy became possible, Charles and his advisers made contact with those in power, negotiated wisely, and produced the Declaration of Breda, a document containing the concessions that smoothed the way for Charles’s return to England. Two medical men mediated with Charles as agents for General Monck: Samuel Barrow, a physician and advocate general to the army, and Thomas Clarges, an apothecary. Charles enjoyed a raucous reception in England in late May 1660. Taking up residence in Whitehall Palace, he spent the next two months accepting the congratulations of foreign ambassadors, local government representatives, and individual aristocrats. The king rewarded Barrow in August 1660 with an appointment as physician-in-ordinary at £100 per annum, the customary twelve shillings a day in board wages, and one horse-livery a year. Before long, however, the unsettled constitutional and religious issues reemerged to bedevil the Stuarts.

Charles II, a stranger to most of the country, astutely revived the royal touching ceremony, thrilling his subjects and reminding skeptics of the ineffable privilege of a king. Presumably, he assumed that he had the marvelous ability to heal from the moment of his father’s death, as his subjects indubitably believed. Preachers, writers, even physicians and scientists touted the amazing potency of the imperial gift. Some even thought that the king, the nation’s first physician, could cure diseases like the French pox, scurvy, rickets, and strumas.