London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Friday, February 6th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Let’s begin at the end.
Because with Charles II, the end tells you everything.
Whitehall Palace.
That sprawling riverside behemoth.
Corridors like draughty canyons. Bedchambers thick with candle smoke and fear.
Physicians everywhere. Whispering courtiers.
The Thames sliding past outside, dark and implacable.
It’s the early hours of February 6th, 1685.
The king is dying.
Not quietly. Not decorously.
This is a seventeenth-century death and it’s a full-contact sport.
They bleed him. They blister him. They purge him. They dose him. They throw the entire pharmacopoeia of the age at a failing body.
Charles endures it all with patience, stoicism and – because this is Charles – jokes.
By now the body is done.
Not ruined. Not grotesque.
Just world-wearied flesh.
Flesh that has known flight and hiding.
Hunger and exile.
Sermons and sabbaths.
Flesh that has laughed its way through catastrophe and lain down only when there is nothing left to prove.
At some point, exhausted,
he turns to his brother James and says the line that London will never forget:
“Pray let not poor Nelly starve.”
There it is.
Strip away crown, sceptre, and succession,
and that sentence still fits him perfectly.
Not God.
Not posterity.
Not politics.
Nell.
London hears that line and nods.
Yes. That’s our man.
Because Charles II was, above all else, London’s king.
Born at St James’s Palace. Baptised in London.
Proclaimed in London.
Restored through London.
Ruled from London.
Died in London.
Buried in Westminster Abbey with a ceremony so modest some contemporaries sniffed.
His life runs through the city like a tide.
He had known exile – trudging across Europe,
broke and dependent,
tolerated rather than welcomed.
He had known terror – hunted after Worcester,
disguised as a servant,
betrayed,
hidden in an oak tree like a fox.
He had known trauma – his father’s execution,
monarchy abolished,
England declared a republic.
So when he came back in 1660, London went mad.
Bells pealed. Bonfires blazed.
Ale flowed.
Streets were dressed in greenery and tapestries.
When Charles rode into the city
on May 29th, his birthday,
it felt as if colour had returned to the world.
The theatres reopened.
Music poured out again.
Sunday stopped being frightening.
London had its king back.
And London liked him.
Now. The nickname.
Old Rowley.
Not a pamphleteer’s sneer.
Not poetic licence. A horse.
Old Rowley was a celebrated stallion kept in the royal mews at Whitehall.
Big. Powerful. Tireless.
Noted for his enthusiasm for the mares.
Charles admired him enormously. Rode him. Took pride in him.
London, being London,
joined the dots.
The king, after all,
showed much the same qualities.
The nickname stuck.
And here’s the thing that matters: Charles didn’t punish it.
He didn’t bridle. He laughed.
He liked it.
He accepted being teased by his city.
That alone tells you everything you need to know about the Restoration.
This was a monarch close enough to his people to be ribbed. Nicknamed after a randy stallion. Louis XIV would have had you clapped in irons for less.
Charles II let the joke breathe.
And the joke had evidence.
Because Charles II didn’t just enjoy women.
He excelled at enjoying women.
The official, acknowledged total
is at least 14 illegitimate children, by 7 or 8
different women,
depending on how you count.
And that’s only the ones he owned up to.
The ones he ennobled,
provided for,
and occasionally showed off with a sort of amused paternal pride.
Monmouth. Richmond.
Grafton. St Albans. Cleveland. Northumberland.
A roll-call of ducal titles that read like footnotes to the king’s libido.
There were almost certainly more. London whispered.
Parish registers hinted.
Faces in the street invited speculation.
A bright-eyed boy with the king’s nose,
the king’s walk,
the king’s charm?
People smiled and nudged.
“The king’s boy, maybe.”
Which is why the other nickname mattered just as much:
“The Father of His People.”
Not pious.
Not solemn.
A London joke.
Half affectionate. Half outrageous. Charles had no legitimate heir.
No prince of Wales.
But he had children everywhere. Flesh-and-blood proof that
after the grey years of the Commonwealth, England was alive again.
Old Rowley had put the country back in foal.
Don’t mistake charm for softness.
This was a man shaped by catastrophe.
He distrusted zealots.
Loathed certainty.
Had seen what men with
absolute conviction could do.
So he trimmed. He delayed.
He fudged.
He lied if lying bought peace.
He hated being boxed in.
Critics called him lazy.
Others called him wise.
Gilbert Burnet said he hated business.
Halifax said he loved his down-bed of ease.
But those beds of ease mattered. England did not fall back into civil war on his watch.
London noticed other things too.
In the plague year of 1665,
Charles sensibly left the city.
In the Great Fire of 1666,
he stayed. Worked the fire-lines. Ordered demolitions.
Encouraged exhausted men.
That counted.
He loved ships.
Navigation.
Practical science.
Whitehall housed laboratories as well as mistresses.
He could talk naval architecture with professionals and hold his own.
Pepys noticed.
That matters.
Religion, though, always hovered.
Charles had Catholic sympathies. His mother was Catholic.
Europe was Catholic.
His brother James was Catholic. On February 5th, 1685, the day before he died,
Charles quietly took the Catholic sacrament in his bedchamber at Whitehall, attended by
Father John Huddleston – a priest he had known while hiding after Worcester.
It was private.
It was personal.
Not theatre.
And yet for 25 years he had ruled as a Protestant king,
promising moderation,
breathing space,
coexistence.
His own indifference to theology made him tolerant.
His memories of Scotland made him detest Presbyterian rigidity. “Not a religion for gentlemen,”
he once said.
London, pragmatic and flexible, suited him perfectly.
When he died, early on the morning of February 6th, the palace fell quiet.
No grand lying in state.
No vast ceremonial display.
He was buried in
Westminster Abbey with
surprising simplicity.
Some thought it shabby.
Others thought it right.
Because Charles II had never been a grand monarch in the French style.
He walked.
He joked.
He listened.
He mixed. He roistered.
He made merry, certainly in the bedroom.
He let London speak to him almost as an equal.
Which is why the oak tree mattered.
Why Nell mattered.
Why Old Rowley mattered.
And now – behold.
Out of the palace of dim light he comes.
Past shuttered rooms and extinguished candles.
Past the echo of jokes and whispered bargains.
Past the ghost of a stallion stamping in the mews.
Past Nell’s laughter, still ringing somewhere downriver.
Out into history.
Out into legend.
Out into London.
Charles II. Old Rowley.
Dead this day, February 6, 1685 – and still, somehow, walking the streets of his city.
You’ve been listening to
This… is London.
The London Walks podcast.
Emanating from www.walks.com.
Home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company. London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company. And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret. London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £25 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides, let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science. You get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968, when we got started, we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question. Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money, you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world, you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London. You want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating. The way we’re structured, a guides’ cooperative, is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards. It’s the reason people who know go with London Walks. It’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following. Quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able, uniquely, to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals.
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor and subsequently CEO of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat. Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated. Napoleon didn’t feel a thing, if thing’s the mot juste. He was dead.
Stewart and Lisa, both of them CBEs, are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Jack the Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian. Donald is emeritus now, but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains and mentors our guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks aristocracy of talent includes a former London Mayor. The former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. The Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. The former Chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster. It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator, and a former Time Out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors, one of them an eminent Cambridge University palaeontologist.
It includes Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors. Two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top-flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners, people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award.
As that travel writer famously put it, if this were a golf tournament, every name on the leaderboard would be a London Walks guide.
And as we put it: London Walks guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail.
That’s the difference.
And on that agreeable note, come then. Let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
Good walking.
And good Londoning.
See you next time.