Unlike the Cromwellian protectorate before him, Charles was prepared to establish good relationship with France because the king, Louis the XIV was Charles’s cousin, and Charles both admired him and wanted to emulate him. Louis was the true absolute monarch, and it is thus unsurprisingly that Charles wanted a similar situation in England to what his cousin had in France.
French intervention in the Dutch war of 1666 resulted in some concessions, such as handing over Nova Scotia to Louis, though he did managed to regain the territories that had previously been lost to them in the West Indies.
Charles’s readiness to throw in his lot with Louis was not received well by many of the political elite, since they were almost all Protestants, and Louis represented the threat of Catholic absolutism that they so greatly feared would come to England.
Relations with the Dutch were strained, and the economic rivalry that they shared made the situation even worse. England pursued a very aggressive policy with the Navigation Act of 1660 and the Staple Act of 1663, which in part led to the Second Dutch war in 1665. Though James Duke of York had some successes in this, ultimately it was a defeat, signified when the Dutch sailed up the Thames and towed away the Royal Navy Flagship, the Royal Charles. Opinion swiftly turned against the war, particularly with the trading companies who did not appreciate the profits they were losing.
Though peace talks had begun, there was nothing more symbolic of Charles’s failures than the capture of his flagship. As the historian Harris observed, the foreign policy under Charles was absolutely disastrous in comparison with that under Cromwell.
The failure of this foreign policy was perceived by many as being the displeasure of God with England. Further strengthening this assumption was the spread of the bubonic plague in the autumn of 1665, which devastated many parts of the country including London. Some villages suffered as much as an eighty percent casualty rate.
Given the chaos and economic collapse that was happening in London along with the plague, Charles moved to Oxford with his court, but in the year of 1666 a fire broke out in London, and lasted for five days before it was put out. This is known as the Great Fire of London, and though Charles did his best to protect London and personally helped with the fire fighting, it appeared to many that God was continuing to place judgement on England.
Some Historians, such as Paul Seaward, view this moment as the turning point in Charles’s reign, since 1667 saw economic and agricultural chaos, a situation where both those who had fought for the king and those who had fought for Parliament being incensed, and the gentry felt that the royal court was determined to insult and ignore them.
The English Civil War (And Its Long-Term Effects) 