Royal Harlot (51 page)

“A letter?” I asked, surprised, as I took it from his hand.

“I could not send it through the ordinary messengers, Your Grace,” he said heavily. “It didn’t seem right to do that to you.”

My uneasiness building, I swiftly cracked the letter’s seal and read the contents for myself. The message was simple enough, signed and endorsed by some Whitehall functionary whose name I didn’t recognize. Because I’d refused to abide by the Test Act, I’d lost my place as Lady of the Bedchamber. And because I’d lost my place at court, I was asked to vacate my lodgings in the palace as soon as such removal could be arranged.

“It’s because of Parliament, Your Grace,” May said, his insistence hollow to my ears. “It’s their doing entirely.”

Evenly I met his gaze, creasing fresh folds into the letter with my fingers. “So you would tell me that His Majesty knows nothing of this? That he does not wish my rooms for the Duchess of Portsmouth, or some other favorite?”

He shrugged his shoulders, all I needed to see. “I’m sorry, Your Grace,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Ah, sir,” I said softly, tossing the letter into the fire. “You’ll never be more sorry than the king himself.”

 
For the final time, I walked across my bedchamber in the front of Cleveland House, to the tall window overlooking the park, and the canal, and Whitehall itself beyond that. It was a gray, chill February day, with the few people on the pathways moving swiftly with their heads down and shoulders hunched, and a skim of dull ice across the surface of the canal. Nothing to see, I thought. Nothing at all, and I closed and latched the window’s shutters.

My footsteps echoed through the empty rooms. The grates were cold and swept clean, the curtains drawn and the windows shuttered, the furnishings shrouded with ghostly cloths and the paintings and looking-glasses draped against dust and damp. It was my decision to leave England now, and it would be my decision when, if ever, I returned.

Everything that was coming with us had been long ago packed and sent ahead. We required two coaches and as many wagons to carry me, my four youngest children, our servants, and our trunks and chests to Dover. From there we’d make the crossing to Calais, into France, and then to Paris. At least the sky was clear if muffled, so I’d dare hope the roads would be, too.

I’d spent the last fortnight settling my affairs. I’d made sure the incomes from my manors, six in all, pensions, revenues, and other sources would be forwarded to me. I’d let the house in King Street, now grandly known as Villiers House. I’d proven to have my share of Bayning blood from the counting house after all, and had husbanded my investments and properties so well that there was more than enough for me, my family, and my family’s families into the future to live with great ease and comfort.

I’d already changed into my traveling clothes, a quilted petticoat and a fur-lined cloak, and stout shoes fit for cold weather. Safe in my pocket were the instructions written by the French ambassador for the customs house, excusing our party from tariffs and delays as we journeyed through France.

I’d taken much care and deliberation with these preparations, risking nothing to chance. I wanted no one to say I’d gone in haste, or been forced from London. I was leaving of my own choice, in my own manner, and I’d go with my head high. I’d made sure there’d be no place for me on poor Jane Shore’s dunghill.

Yet there was only one task remaining for me before we left, and as I walked across the park this last time, I knew it would be the most difficult one of all.

I found Charles in his chambers, as I knew he’d be at this time of day, drinking his coffee and reading the newssheet, wigless, in his red silk dressing gown. In this he was like any other gentleman, and it was like this that I wanted last to see him before I left, without any pomp or spectacle or others around us to gawk and comment.

“Barbara,” he said, his face lighting with pleasure and surprise as I walked across the black-and-white marble floor. He rose and came forward to take my hands in his. “Here, sit with me, and we’ll break our fast together like old times.”

My hands were cold inside my gloves, his so warm and familiar around them. Yet I did not turn my face to kiss him, or to be kissed, for that wasn’t why I’d come.

“I cannot, Your Majesty,” I said, determined to be steadfast. “I’m here to say farewell, and that is all.”

“Farewell?” he repeated, his smile turning crooked and his voice too hearty. “How can you say farewell, eh?”

“I can say it, sir, because it’s true.” Without thinking I curled my fingers into his, the old fondness. Of course he knew I was leaving. I’d made no secret of it, and by now I doubted there was a single person left in London who wasn’t aware that the Duchess of Cleveland was sailing for France. “Farewell, sir.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

That made me smile. “But, sir, you know I always say yes.”

“Then I’ll say no,” he said firmly, “and force you to stay.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t weaken, not now. In countless ways, large and small, he’d let me know I’d lost the power I’d once had over him and the rest of the court. At heart Charles was too kind to break entirely with me, but it wasn’t in my nature to fade away as a graceful shade of the past. Better to end it like this, now.

“Even the worst gamester realizes when it’s time to leave the table, sir,” I said softly, “and I’m far from the worst. It’s time I was gone, and you know it as well as I.”

I reached up to kiss him for the last time, quickly, so I wouldn’t falter and change my mind.

“Farewell, sir,” I whispered, “and may God keep you always.”

Then before he could try to stop me again, I slipped free, and away, and did not look back.

The end of Barbara’s reign as Charles’s mistress had been predicted for so long that when she finally left for France in 1676, most people at court believed she’d be back within a few weeks. To their surprise, she stayed abroad for the next three years, and when she did at last return to England in 1679, it was for the second wedding of her son Henry, Duke of Grafton (now sixteen) to Lady Isabella Bennet (twelve), now considered suitably of age for a “real” marriage. Though Barbara and Charles sat side by side at the wedding supper at Whitehall (the diarist John Evelyn, never a fan of Barbara’s, cruelly described her as “the incontinent Duchess,” as opposed to Isabella, “the sweet Duchess the bride”), Barbara afterward kept clear of the court and the king.

The rest of her life was markedly less flamboyant than her glory days. In Paris she reconciled with her husband, Roger Palmer, and their relationship seems to have been surprisingly cordial and centered around Barbara’s children. Those same children also kept Charles in touch with Barbara. There were many letters back and forth between them that sound like those of any other parents concerned with their children’s welfare.

Barbara left the court an extremely wealthy woman, and was able to lead the rest of her life without the penury that often plagues former mistresses. Yet she did have her share of money woes. Constant gambling for high stakes ate away at her fortune (one night of legendary bad luck was said to have cost her twenty thousand pounds in money and jewels), and while the Duke of York continued to pay her allowances and pensions after he became James II, his successor, William of Orange, ended all payments to her and the rest of his late uncle’s mistresses as soon as he came to the throne.

After Roger’s death in 1704, she made an unfortunate second marriage to a notorious womanizer named Beau Fielding, who spent a good deal of her money before she discovered he already had another wife, and charged him with bigamy in a much-publicized trial. Her children, now grown, were there at her side in support. She spent her last days living with her favorite grandson. She died in 1709 at sixty-eight, of complications from dropsy, that old-fashioned word for edema. Modern medical historians suspect it was only a symptom of long-standing venereal disease.

Charles II lived until 1685, dying of complications from a stroke at fifty-five. On his deathbed, he was granted last rites by a Catholic priest invited by Louise de Keroualle and his brother; no one is certain whether it was Charles’s final wish to convert to Catholicism, or theirs. While his legacy includes the restoration of the English monarchy as well as parliamentary reform, he is today best remembered for ruling at the time of momentous events like the plague and the Great Fire, and for earning the label of “the merry monarch” on account of his lighthearted, immoral court—a reputation that Barbara certainly helped him to build.

He was succeeded by his brother the Duke of York, who became James II. With no regard for the doctrines of tolerance that were so dear to Charles, James’s three-year reign was oppressive, disastrous, and mercifully short. He was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a bloodless coup led in part by John Churchill and his wife, Sarah. He lived the rest of his life in exile in France, while William of Orange and his wife, James’s older daughter Mary, assumed the English throne as William and Mary.

Though Charles is credited with siring at least fifteen children, none of them were legitimate. The most famous of these was the first, James, Duke of Monmouth. Though handsome and charming, Monmouth was easily led by others, and ended up as the figurehead of a rebellion against his uncle James. He tried to claim the crown for himself as Charles’s true Protestant heir, maintaining (fancifully) that Charles had in fact wed his mother, Lucy Walter. Instead the rebellion failed, and Monmouth was bloodily beheaded; among those who helped capture him were his old friend John Churchill, and Barbara’s son, Henry, Duke of Grafton.

Barbara’s first known lover, Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, was also a fixture of the Restoration court, but more for the immoral antics of his second wife than his own. In a wry twist of fate, she was reputed to have had so many lovers, including the Duke of York, that Philip finally had to banish her to his remote country estate to keep her from mischief. When she died early in their brief marriage, he was rumored to have poisoned her in desperation. His third wife proved to be the charm, and with her he retreated to a quiet life in the country.

Barbara’s children turned out much better than many with more traditional upbringings. They all survived to adulthood, and all but one were married in the matches that Barbara arranged for them, with surprising success. None of them had the celebrity or charisma of either of their famous parents, but they were quietly happy, which is probably worth more in the long run.

The first, Anne Palmer, though recognized by Roger and his family as his daughter and heir, was nonetheless given away by Charles in a splendid wedding at Hampton Court, and like her sister, granted a dowry of twenty thousand pounds. (Her title of Countess of Sussex was another example of Barbara’s long memory for slights; it had been carefully chosen by Barbara to spite her stepfather, who’d left his entire estate not to her but to his sister, an earlier Countess of Sussex.)

Her son Charles, the least promising of Barbara’s children, inherited her titles at her death and became the Duke of Cleveland. Despite Barbara’s own money woes later in life, she’d scrupulously provided and invested well for her children; by the middle of the eighteenth century, her grandson’s annual income from interest alone was over one hundred thousand pounds.

Charles’s favorite among the children, Charlotte, Countess of Litchfield, was a model of the virtuous English lady, happily wed for forty-two years, and even more happily the mother to twenty children of her own. Only Barbara’s last daughter, Barbara Fitzroy, was truly scandalous: she had a brief, intense affair that resulted in an illegitimate child of her own, and then promptly retreated for the rest of her life to a French convent.

In the small world of the seventeenth century, Barbara’s favorite son, Henry, Duke of Grafton, rose through the ranks of the navy, taking part in the Glorious Revolution and serving with John Churchill in James II’s campaigns. He died at twenty-six of wounds sustained while fighting alongside Churchill at the Siege of Cork in 1689.

Her third son, George, Duke of Northumberland, was the child who most physically resembled the king. Even the ever-critical diarist John Evelyn praised George as “civil, well-bred, and modest” (adjectives he’d never use with Barbara), and the “most accomplished and worth the owning” of all of Charles’s children.

John Churchill married Sarah Jennings. With money given to him by Barbara rumored to be as much as one hundred thousand pounds, he embarked on a political and military career that made him one of the greatest generals in English history, his wife the most powerful woman at the court of Queen Anne, and the two of them together the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and the wealthiest couple in Europe.

More than three hundred years after her death, Barbara Villiers continues to be one of the more reviled women in English history. A glance through the Internet message boards on the many sites devoted to the Restoration proves that whenever her name appears, the controversy does, too. The standard openings to such posts seem to be: “The Duchess of Cleveland was an ugly, greedy, stupid whore.” And that’s only the beginning.

Barbara has consistently been painted through history in the darkest colors imaginable. She is always the villainess, the evil woman of horrifying appetites, even, in the words of John Evelyn, “the curse of the nation.” Because she was regarded as a genuine threat to the king and to England’s stability during her own lifetime, a great deal was written about her, much of it patently false in the glorious tradition of tabloid celebrity bashing. Yet many modern historians who should know better accept these stories and perpetuate them to the point that, over the centuries, it’s hard to tell fact from slander.

It’s also impossible to feel the power of her much-lauded beauty. Tastes have changed, and modern eyes look at her famous portraits by Sir Peter Lely and wonder what the fuss was about. Beauty and sexual attractiveness are among the most transient and fleeting of qualities, yet even Barbara’s harshest critics admitted she was the most stunningly beautiful woman of her day. Wherever she went, crowds would gather for a glimpse of her.