![]() While the Merry Monarch proved that living well can be the best revenge, his martyred father proved that it can also be true of dying well. Charles I would not have been amused, but Charles II almost certainly would have been. Like his royal ancestor, the 13th duke had spent some of his lifetime abroad, though much more comfortably as a tax exile in Monte Carlo. Albans and a direct descendant of the illegitimate son that pretty Nell Gwyn, a lady of the night turned actress, had borne Charles II - 13 generations earlier. The dapper old gent was Charles, Duke of St. The resemblance to the portrait turned out to be more than coincidental. In 1984, while visiting London and staying at the Reform Club, a friend introduced me to a tall, jauntily mustachioed old aristocrat who reminded me of one of the portraits I had written about in a piece on Restoration England a few years earlier. ![]()
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