The New Yorker:

Just as the former Prince Andrew will always be royal, so will the trafficking of African people.

By Sam Knight

Early on the morning of May 29, 1660, flanked by twenty thousand armed men, King Charles II arrived in London to retake the throne. Bells rang out and ships fired their guns to mark the occasion. It was Charles’s thirtieth birthday. England had been without a king for eleven years, after Charles’s father was beheaded, on a temporary wooden platform outside Banqueting House, part of the palace of Whitehall. But the country’s experiment as a republic was over. King Charles II was welcomed warmly. Bonfires were lit. Fountains flowed with wine and “Divers maidens,” dressed in “white waistcoats and crimson petticoats, and other ornaments of triumph and rejoicing,” asked the permission of the Lord Mayor to join the royal procession. Dusk was falling when the King finally entered the Banqueting House and received the formal offer of the throne.

Charles’s retinue included his twenty-six-year-old brother, James, the Duke of York. During the Civil War, James had been captured by Parliament. Aged fourteen, he escaped, from St. James’s Palace, during a game of hide-and-seek and fled to mainland Europe, where he became a soldier. James was brave but blunt. “He was not dull; but he was cut off. His mind was isolated,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, in a sympathetic character study, in 1928. “Complexity did not bewilder him, rather he missed it altogether.”

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