Item: i80368

Authentic Coin of:

Great Britain under Charles II - King: 1660-1685
1675 Farthing 22mm (5.79 grams)
Reference: KM# 436.1
CAROLVS·A· CAROLO, Laureate and cuirassed bust of King Charles II facing left, legend around.
BRITAN NIA· 1673, Seated figure of Britannia facing left, holding spear in left hand, olive branch in raised right hand, shield with Union flag resting at left, legend around, date in exergue.

Notes: The original standard weight for these pieces was 80 to the pound avoirdupois (1/5 ounce or 87.5 grains each). Following is an excerpt from the Department of Special Collections at the University of Notre Dame Libraries: "Charles II (1660-1685) first produced copper halfpence and farthings in 1672. Minting began on August 5th with the production of farthings on four presses. Interestingly, Charles displayed a bust right (that is, a right profile) on all his gold and silver coins but used a bust left on his coppers. He produced copper halfpence dated 1672, 1673 and 1675 and copper farthings dated 1672-1675 and 1679. In order to produce these coins the mint needed blank planchets of the proper size and weight. However they did not have the capability of producing the rolled sheets of copper from which the blanks would be cut out. Therefore the mint was forced to import finished planchets, which they contracted with Abraham Cronstrom of Stockholm, Sweden. The initial run of coppers was produced at 40 halfpence to the pound (175 grains), with farthings proportional. However, Cronstrom had contracted to provide the copper metal at 14.5d per pound but he discovered there was a Swedish export tarrif of 2.5d per pound, raising the price to 17d a pound. The Mint would not revise the contracted price for the first shipment but they did agree to pay the increase for subsequent shipments. To offset this added cost the weight of the coins was reduced slightly during this first year of production (1672) so that halfpence were made at 44 to the pound avoirdupois or about 159.1 grains each."

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Charles II (29 May 1630 - 6 February 1685) 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. 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 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, James, Duke of York, 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 Catholic Church on his deathbed.

Charles was one of the most popular and beloved kings of England, 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.

Great Britain, also known as Britain, is an island in the North Atlantic off the north-west coast of continental Europe. With an area of 209,331 km² (80,823 sq mi), it is the largest island in Europe and the ninth-largest in the world. In 2011 the island had a population of about 61 million people, making it the third-most populous island in the world, after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan. The island is the largest in the British Isles archipelago, which also includes the island of Ireland to its west and over 1,000 smaller surrounding islands.

The island is dominated by an oceanic climate with quite narrow temperature differences between seasons. Politically, the island is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, constituting most of its territory: most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island, with their respective capital cities, London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff. The term Great Britain often extends to include surrounding islands that form part of England, Scotland, and Wales.

A single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the Union of Scotland and England (which already comprised the present-day countries of England and Wales) in 1707. More than a hundred years before, in 1603, King James VI, King of Scots, had inherited the throne of England, but it was not until 1707 that the Parliaments of the two countries agreed to form a unified state. In 1801, Great Britain united with the neighboring Kingdom of Ireland, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the Irish Free State seceded in 1922.