Claim: Charles II of England had a Catholic brother named James.

Charles II -LRB- 29 May 1630 -- 6 February 1685 -RRB- was king of England , Scotland and Ireland . He was king of Scotland from 1649 until his deposition in 1651 , and king of England , Scotland and Ireland from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 until his death .   Charles II 's father , Charles I , was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649 , at the climax of the English Civil War . Although the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on 5 February 1649 , England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth , and the country was a de facto republic , led by Oliver Cromwell . Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651 , and Charles fled to mainland Europe . Cromwell became virtual dictator of England , Scotland and Ireland , and Charles spent the next nine years in exile in France , the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands . A political crisis that followed the death of Cromwell in 1658 resulted in the restoration of the monarchy , and Charles was invited to return to Britain . On 29 May 1660 , his 30th birthday , he was received in London to public acclaim . After 1660 , all legal documents were dated as if he had succeeded his father as king in 1649 .   Charles 's English parliament enacted laws known as the Clarendon Code , designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England . Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code even though he favoured a policy of religious tolerance . The major foreign policy issue of his early reign was the Second Anglo-Dutch War . In 1670 , he entered into the secret treaty of Dover , an alliance with his first cousin King Louis XIV of France . Louis agreed to aid him in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay him a pension , and Charles secretly promised to convert to Catholicism at an unspecified future date . Charles attempted to introduce religious freedom for Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence , but the English Parliament forced him to withdraw it . In 1679 , Titus Oates 's revelations of a supposed `` Popish Plot '' sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it was revealed that Charles 's brother and heir -LRB- James , Duke of York -RRB- was a Catholic . The crisis saw the birth of the pro-exclusion Whig and anti-exclusion Tory parties . Charles sided with the Tories , and , following the discovery of the Rye House Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683 , some Whig leaders were executed or forced into exile . Charles dissolved the English Parliament in 1681 , and ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685 . He was received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed .   Charles was popularly known as the Merry Monarch , in reference to both the liveliness and hedonism of his court and the general relief at the return to normality after over a decade of rule by Cromwell and the Puritans . Charles 's wife , Catherine of Braganza , bore no live children , but Charles acknowledged at least twelve illegitimate children by various mistresses . He was succeeded by his brother James .