Behind the Palace Doors (18 page)

Monarchs have always kept mistresses, but the reign of Charles II is often remembered as being far more licentious than most, perhaps because after a decade of repressive Puritan rule, the vigor with which Charles pursued his affairs offered such a vivid contrast to the dour days of Cromwell.

The king simply loved the ladies—lots of them—and did so with unabashed enthusiasm. In the process he sired scads of bastards, a dozen or so, by seven or eight women, prompting the Duke of Buckingham to quip, “A king is supposed to be the father of his people, and Charles certainly was father to a good many of them.”

Charles II set the tone for his colorful court, and was often the target of the irreverent wits who thrived there. In one bit of verse, for example, the Earl of Rochester made reference to the equipment with which the Merry Monarch satisfied his fleet of paramours:

The affable king added to the chorus by making fun of himself. He had been given the nickname Old Rowley, after a famous stallion renowned for having sired an impressive progeny. One day, upon hearing a maid of the court singing a bawdy ballad comparing the king to the stud horse, Charles knocked on her door. “Who’s there?” the startled woman asked. With that the king popped his head in and cheerfully announced, “Old Rowley himself, madam, at your service.”

King Charles valued the women in his life and treated them well—too well, in fact, heaping upon them riches he could hardly afford. Yet despite the serious drain on his finances, the king considered his mistresses a worthy investment. “He enjoyed their company,” wrote biographer Antonia Fraser, “not only for the purposes of making love to them, but to talk to them, to have supper with them, to be entertained by and to entertain them.”

Women were essential to Charles II, and he started with them quite young. The Earl of Clarendon wrote disapprovingly of Charles’s saucy nurse, Mrs. Wyndham,
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who took her charge’s virginity when he was fourteen and celebrated the conquest with untoward familiarity. She was “a woman of great rudeness and a country pride,” Clarendon wrote snappishly,
who “valued herself much upon the power and familiarity which her neighbours might see she had with the Prince of Wales [Charles’s rank at the time], and therefore upon all occasions in company, and when the concourse of the people was greatest, would use great boldness towards him.” Her greatest crime, according to Clarendon, was racing across a crowded room and planting a sloppy wet kiss on the young prince.

Even during the darkest days of his exile, Charles sought female companionship. In fact, the very year his father was executed, his Welsh mistress, Lucy Walter—a “brown, beautiful, bold but insipid creature,” as the diarist John Evelyn described her—delivered the first of Charles’s many illegitimate children, a boy named James.
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Unfortunately, Lucy became a little too loose with her favors, which was thus an embarrassment to Charles—a double standard indeed. “Advise her, both for her sake and mine, that she goes to some place more private than the Hague [where Charles spent some time in exile at the court of his sister and brother-in-law, the prince and princess of Orange],” Charles instructed his friend Lord Taaffe, who had also slept with Lucy, “for her stay there is very prejudicial to us both.”

Lucy left for England with her son and was promptly arrested upon her arrival. Eager to humiliate the king-in-exile, Cromwell soon released Charles’s “lady of pleasure and the young heir,” as he derisively called them, and had them shipped back to the Continent. There Lucy continued her sexual adventures and proved herself an entirely unfit mother. “He [James] cannot be safe from his mother’s intrigues wheresoever he is,” reported Charles’s servant Daniel O’Neale. “It is a great pity so pretty a child should be in such hands as hitherto have
neglected to teach him to read or to tell twenty, though he hath a great deal of wit and a great desire to learn.”

Charles was determined to wrest control of his son away from his estranged mistress, though this would prove difficult while he remained in exile without much money and even less power. In one mortifying scene, an agent of the king’s tried to snatch the boy away from his mother, who ran screaming into the streets of Brussels and nearly caused a diplomatic incident.

Eventually, Lucy was forced to give up young James. The boy was sent to Paris, where, under the watch of Charles’s mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, the egregious gaps in his education would be filled. Lucy Walter followed her son but died shortly afterward, reportedly of venereal disease.

By this time, Charles had taken up with a new love, a dazzling companion who accompanied the king back to England in 1660 to finally claim his crown, and who would become the most powerful of all his mistresses. Her name was Barbara Villiers Palmer, a tall, voluptuous beauty, with violet-blue eyes and a sensuous mouth that practically begged to be kissed. Beneath that magnificent exterior, though, was a greedy, ruthlessly ambitious virago—the “curse of our nation,” as John Evelyn called her. Barbara absolutely controlled the enchanted king, and, in so doing, drained his treasury.

Samuel Pepys lamented in his diary how blinded Charles was by lust (even while the diarist himself harbored a secret passion for Barbara, “whom I do heartily adore”)
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and defied all wise counsel if it interfered with his carnal desires:
“Cazzo dritto non vuolt consiglio,”
Pepys wrote, citing the Italian proverb: A man with an erection heeds no advice.

Barbara, who became Countess of Castlemaine,
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was the uncrowned queen of Charles’s court, housed in sumptuous apartments at Whitehall Palace and indulged in every desire by the captivated king, whom she ruled with a potent mixture of hedonism and a violently explosive temper.

Given how much she loved power, the countess was not at all pleased when Charles married his real queen, Catherine of Braganza, in 1662. Her determination to retain her hold over the king provoked what became known as the Bedchamber Crisis.

Poor Catherine had no idea what awaited her when she arrived from Portugal. The twenty-three-year-old bride had been exceedingly sheltered at her father’s Catholic court, spoke no English, and had little to recommend her to Charles except for a fat dowry. She was, wrote Evelyn, “low of stature, pretty shaped, languishing and excellent eyes, her teeth wronging her mouth by sticking a little too far out, for the rest sweet and lovely enough.”

All seemed well, at first. Catherine found her new husband reasonably attentive (although, in a rare instance for Old Rowley, he was unable to consummate the marriage the first night, “for I was so sleepy”). And the king appeared happy with his new bride, writing to the Earl of Clarendon shortly after her arrival, “I cannot easily tell you how happy I think myself, and must be the worst man living (which I think I am not) if I am not a good husband.”

Alas, the good husband had a mean mistress. Just as the king and queen settled into Hampton Court for their extended honeymoon, Barbara swooped into the palace to deliver her latest child by Charles. Even worse, she bullied the king into
appointing her a lady of the queen’s bedchamber. It was a monstrous insult to Catherine, who, sheltered though she was, knew exactly who the Countess of Castlemaine was. She angrily scratched the mistress’s name off her list of ladies. Then, after actually meeting Barbara, she went into a rage so intense that it left her nose bleeding. “It is said here that she is grieved beyond measure,” Charles’s sister Henrietta Anne (known as Minette) wrote from France, “and to speak frankly I think it is with reason.”

Confronted with either an unhappy wife or an unhappy mistress, Charles chose Barbara, which began an ugly quarrel with the queen. Catherine threatened to leave England, only to be told she needed the king’s permission to do so. She was isolated at court, her Portuguese retinue sent away. When the king’s chief minister, Clarendon, tried to intervene on the queen’s behalf, Charles rebuked him: “Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise on my word to be his enemy as long as I live.”

Harmony was eventually restored when Queen Catherine realized that the hysterics were best left to Barbara. She learned to graciously accept the king’s infidelities, and he came to honor her genuine goodness. Indeed, Catherine did what few women were able: She won Charles’s heart. His devotion to her was evident when she became dangerously ill in 1663 and the king went into a frenzy of anxiety—even if he did manage to steal away from the queen’s sickbed to sleep with Barbara.

Catherine of Braganza prevailed with what Charles praised as her “simplicity, gentleness and prudence,” while Barbara was soon confronted with a rival more formidable than the queen. Her name was Frances Stewart, and she was one of Catherine’s
ladies-in-waiting and, according to Charles’s sister Minette, “the prettiest girl in the world and the most fitted to adorn a court.” She was not only younger and more beautiful than Barbara
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but infinitely more virtuous, unwilling to trade her chastity for reward or advancement. This made La Belle Stewart, as she came to be called, a rare creature in the Restoration court. Her guileless unavailability drove King Charles crazy with desire, his incessant pining documented in some (rather clunky) verse he wrote:

Barbara was made frantic by the king’s diverted attentions and tried to refocus him by using the innocent young Frances as erotic lure. On one occasion she arranged a mock marriage between herself and the younger woman, ostensibly for fun. That night, as the unwitting Frances slept, Barbara set up a lesbian tableau for the king’s pleasure. But the king only had eyes for La Belle Stewart, whose virtue remained unassailable despite her sovereign’s single-minded pursuit. So desperate was the chase that Charles’s friends formed the “Committee for the Getting of Mistress Stewart for the King,” while he had his unobtainable love immortalized in an engraving as Britannia. It was with this image, adorned with helmet and trident, that Frances Stewart came to preside over British coinage for the next three centuries.

The king’s relentless pursuit ended abruptly, not because he finally captured his elusive quarry but because Frances Stewart did the unthinkable and eloped with someone else. Charles was livid. “You may think me ill-natured,” he wrote to his sister
Minette, “but if you consider how hard a thing ’tis to swallow an injury done by a person I had so much tenderness for, you will in some degree [understand] the resentment I use toward her.” Charles did manage to emerge from his petulant snit and, after Frances recovered unscarred from smallpox, was big enough to write, “I cannot hinder myself from wishing her very well.”

The removal of Frances Stewart as a rival did little to revive Barbara’s diminishing status as the king’s favorite mistress. Her epic tantrums and relentless greed had grown intolerable, and Charles was ready to be rid of her. “Madame,” he said as he dismissed her, “all that I ask of you for your own sake is, live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.” As parting gifts Barbara was given the title Duchess of Cleveland as well as Henry VIII’s magnificent palace Nonsuch, which she promptly ordered dismantled and sold for scrap.
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There was one last ferocious scene as Barbara tried to have the king acknowledge a sixth child she claimed was his. Charles had already accepted paternity of five of Barbara’s children, but this latest, a girl, he refused to recognize as his. The child appeared to be the result of one of Barbara’s other liaisons, perhaps with John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough.

“God damn me, but you shall own it!” Barbara screeched. “I will have it christened in the Chapel at Whitehall and owned as yours … or I will bring it into Whitehall Gallery and dash its brains out before your face!”

“I did not get this child,” Charles calmly replied.

“Whoever did get it,” Barbara cried, “you shall own it.”

He never did.

Barbara was replaced by a bawdy actress, plump and dimpled,
named Nell Gwynn—“a bold merry slut,” as Pepys called her—who thoroughly charmed the king. Though she lacked the social standing and education of some of the other royal mistresses, Nell’s earthy sensuality and quick wit made her one of Charles’s most treasured companions. She would remain so for nearly two decades, until his death in 1685.

Nell called the king “My Charles the Third,” as she had already been with two lovers bearing the name, and in her utterly unaffected way, she would call out to him, “Charles, I hope I shall have your company tonight, shall I not?” And in contrast to Barbara, she was refreshingly free of a political agenda—a fact celebrated in a bit of popular verse:

Politics may have meant little to Nell, but money was another matter. Like Barbara, she spent it lavishly. She also resented her lack of rank. Charles adored her, but he never deigned give her a title (with its many accompanying perks) as he had some of his other mistresses. Still, Nell did manage to obtain for her son by Charles a proper title. According to one account, she called out to the boy in front of the king, “Come here, you little bastard, and say hello to your father.” When Charles objected to the child’s being referred to as such, Nell quickly responded, “Why, Your Majesty has given me no other name to call him by.” Soon enough, the boy was made Baron Headington and Earl of Burford, as well as Duke of St. Albans sometime later.

Nell reserved some of her most scorching wit for one of her rival mistresses, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, whose pretense just begged to be punctured. When, for
example, Louise went into mourning for the death of some supposedly grand relation, Nell did the same in honor of her own imaginary relative, whom she called “the Great Cham of Tartary.” In any exchange of barbs, Louise was always left sputtering and looking stupid. Once, when Nell was dressed in an uncharacteristically lavish dress and dripping with jewelry, the duchess cracked, “Nelly, you are grown rich, I believe, by your dress. Why, woman, you are fine enough to be a queen.”