even at a cost to what were regarded as English national interest (and who in fact received a secret subsidy from Louis.
Yet Charles II had never faced any serious challenge to his rule. In the early years of his reign, it is true, he had benefited from the reaction against Cromwell and the oppressive atmosphere of Puritan rule, but in the course of twenty-five years on the throne, a new generation came of age with few direct memories of the Puritan era and the Restoration. It is also true that in Charles's later years on the throne many of the issues and divisions were emerging that would lead to crisis under James.
None the less, Charles II never pushed matters to the breaking point through a quarter-century of rule, whereas James II did so in little more than three years. The difference was evidently a matter of personal character. Charles II was a political realist. Even more fundamentally, perhaps, he was rather lazy; at the time of Charles's death, John Evelyn wrote in his diary of his "too easy nature." But the combination of the
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