‘Scorn me not Fair because you see
My hairs are white; what if they be?
Think not ‘cause in your Cheeks appear
Fresh springs of Roses all the year,
And mine, like Winter, wan and old,
My love like Winter should be cold:
See in the Garland which you wear
How the sweet blushing Roses there
With pale-hu’d Lilies do combine?
Be taught by them; so let us join.’
‘An Old Shepherd to a Young Nymph’, Edward Sherburne (1659)
Rupert’s romantic history is one of the most frustrating strands of his life to unravel, because he was extremely discreet and was a very lazy letter writer. It is hard to imagine that a tall, handsome, dashing prince would ever have wanted for female admirers: Sir John Southcote, who served under Rupert in the Civil War, told his son that the prince was: ‘the greatest beau’ and ‘the greatest hero’.[fn1] Rupert never espoused celibacy and lifelong bachelorhood provided a succession of relationships, many of whose details remain obscure. In attempting to construct a true picture of Rupert’s love life, we have to rely to a large extent on the observations of his contemporaries.
Samuel Pepys, Rupert’s great critic, assumed the prince to have been promiscuous into middle age. In 1666, before the two trepanning operations brought relief, Pepys wrote with relish of discharge from the prince’s head wound and speculated on its causes: ‘It seems, as Dr Clerke also tells me, it is a clap of the pox which he got about twelve years ago, and hath eaten to his head and come up through his skull.’[fn2]
Although we know Pepys’s diagnosis to be flawed, this regurgitated gossip suggests Rupert had a reputation as a ladies’ man. However, we are aware of few of his lovers’ identities. We know of the gaoler’s daughter, during his imprisonment after Vlotho. There is also the possible union with the Duc de Rohan’s daughter — ‘The Mirror of Virtue’. Then there is the alleged affair with the Duchess of Richmond, during the Civil War. Otherwise, there are hints of flirtations, some of which may have become sexual encounters: John Evelyn recorded in his diary, in 1663, ‘Sir George Carteret, Treasurer of the Navy, had now married his daughter Caroline to Sir Thomas Scot, of Scottshall, in Kent. This gent: was thought to be the son of Prince Rupert.’[fn3] If Scot was Rupert’s illegitimate child, he was never acknowledged as such by the prince.
Dudley Bard was openly recognised as Rupert’s son. He was born during the Second Anglo-Dutch War — probably in 1666 — and educated at Eton, across the Thames from his father’s quarters in Windsor Castle. He was commonly referred to as ‘Dudley Rupert’ and, after he followed his father into the military, as ‘Captain Rupert’. His mother was Frances Bard, the daughter of one of Charles I’s most loyal and exotic supporters.
Frances’s father, Henry Bard, was the academically gifted son of a priest. A Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Henry’s passion was foreign travel: as a young man he walked through France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Palestine, before reaching Egypt, where he stole a copy of the Koran from a mosque. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Henrietta Maria secured his appointment as a lieutenant colonel of infantry. Bard justified this patronage: he proved an effective recruiting officer in Ireland and performed with initiative and courage at the battle of Cheriton Down, in March 1644, before his men were cut to ribbons in a powerful Parliamentary cavalry charge. He lost an arm there and was taken prisoner. On his release, he rejoined the Royalist army and was given the Irish title of Viscount Bellamont. When Rupert stormed Leicester in 1645, the one-armed peer was the first Royalist up the scaling ladders. He was next seen with the prince at Naseby.
Towards the end of the Civil War, Henry was captured once more and was given the choice of an indefinite spell in gaol or permanent exile. He joined the Prince of Wales’s court on the Continent and continued to make waves: he was arrested as a suspect in the murder of Isaac Dorislaus, a Dutchman who had coordinated the prosecution at Charles I’s trial. For want of evidence, the case against Bellamont was dropped and he was released.
In 1656, Bellamont was sent as ambassador to Persia (a country he loved — he named one of his daughters Persiana) and India, to trawl for funds for the Royalist cause. His mission failed and, soon after seeing the Taj Mahal nearing completion, he died — accounts say either of heat stroke or in a sandstorm. He left behind a penniless wife and four children. His only son was called Charles Rupert: he was a godson of Charles I, which explains the first name, while the second is testimony to his close friendship with the prince. Certainly, Rupert remained in contact with Bellamont’s children after their father’s death: he began his affair with Frances, the eldest of the three daughters, soon after she reached womanhood.
Frances has left only a faint historical footprint — a great frustration, since we know she was one of Rupert’s two great loves. Indeed, she claimed to be his wife. This is certainly possible, but since the prince continuously and vigorously denied the union, one of them was lying. Supporters of Frances’s claim point to a scrap of paper that reads:
July the 30th 1664
These are to certifie whom it may concerne that Prince Rupert and the Lady ffrances Bard were Lawfully married at petersham in Surry by me
Henry Bignell
minister [fn4]
Bignell was not Petersham’s priest in 1664, but served there both beforehand and afterwards. It therefore seems probable that — if genuine — this affidavit was written at a later date, perhaps at the request of Frances or of one of her supporters, to give retrospective evidence of the event. The parish’s official register of births, deaths, and marriages is unfortunately incomplete, the relevant pages for 1664 among several passages that have been torn out and lost.
It is equally plausible that Frances was never married to Rupert. Perhaps she was embarrassed by her years as a mistress and chose to deny them by falsely claiming a more respectable status. She had a reputation for integrity later in life, which Rupert’s sister Sophie thought exceptional: ‘She is an upright, good and virtuous woman. There are few like her; we all love her!’[fn5] It is impossible to judge whether this uprightness was a feature throughout Frances’s life or whether it developed after a spell as a prince’s paramour.
The piece of paper allegedly signed by the priest is the only tangible evidence to suggest that Rupert and Frances were married. If they were, it must have been secretly, for there are no contemporary references to their wedding. The couple spent three years together, before their relationship ended in bitterness. ‘She cannot be very good-natured,’ Sophie consoled her brother at the time of the break-up, ‘if she has offended you.’[fn6] However, Frances had every right to feel bitter, for it seems likely that she was spurned by Rupert for another woman, and a glamorous one, at that.
*
In the autumn of 1667, Rupert suffered further complications to his unrelenting head wound. The Duke of York immediately despatched his French surgeon to assist, before writing with concern:
My dear Cousin,
As soon as Will Legge showed me your letter of the accident in your head, I immediately sent Choqueux to you in so much haste as I had not time to write by him; but now I conjure you, if you have any kindness for me, have a care of your health, and do not neglect yourself, for which I am not so much concerned … I write to you without ceremony, and pray do the like to me, for we are too good friends to use any. I must again beg of you to have a care of your health; and assure you that I am yours,
J.Y.[fn7]
The following summer Rupert was persuaded to accompany Catharine of Braganza and the court on their annual descent on Tunbridge Wells. The queen had first taken the waters there in 1664, to convalesce from a life-threatening illness. She found it a comfortable summer retreat — a rural escape from the heat and dirt of the capital: it was to London what Fontainebleau was to Paris. Writing in 1771, Richard Oneley described a landscape that would have altered little since Rupert’s visit a century before: ‘The town and castle of Tunbridge, the navigable river Medway, and the rich meadows, through which it runs, finely diversified with corn-fields, pasturage, hop-gardens and orchards … form a most beautiful scene.’[fn8]
The town was famed for its spa water, which was viewed as a cure-all. While Rupert drank it to purge his blood, the queen hoped it might boost her fertility: she remained childless and was desperate for a remedy. The seasonal influx included many aristocrats whose only maladies were chronic sycophancy and rampant hedonism, and who wanted to be near the royal family at play. The queen insisted that Tunbridge relax the formalities that were her everyday lot elsewhere. Grandees played at the simple life, renting small houses and relying on skeleton staffs. Each day began with a general congregation around the wells. Cups of water were consumed before strolls in the shade of the trees, games of bowls, or dancing in the queen’s apartments. Catharine’s physician encouraged dancing, believing it would jiggle the queen’s reproductive system and help her to conceive. Fruit, game, and flowers were available from market stalls run by ‘young, fair, fresh-coloured country girls, with clean linen, small straw hats, and neat shoes and stockings.’[fn9]
The gentle, rural idyll gave way to more sophisticated evening entertainment. Al fresco dancing took place on the bowling green, ‘a turf more soft and smooth than the finest carpet in the world’.[fn10] In the holiday atmosphere, flirtation was common and affairs were rife. The prince, renowned for his sternness and eccentricity, must have cut a strange figure in such heady, frivolous company. Lord Orford, a great admirer of Rupert’s scientific abilities, wrote that the Prince ‘could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, [but] was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits’.[fn11]
These ‘wits’ were a new generation, who entertained the king and helped shape history’s perception of his rule as a time of loose living and superficial pleasure-seeking. Their time had come, now Clarendon and his sensible, disapproving manner had been condemned to exile. They viewed Rupert as a curmudgeon, a relic from a distant age: ‘He was brave and courageous, even to rashness,’ Count Grammont conceded, ‘but cross-grained and incorrigibly obstinate: his genius was fertile in mathematical experiments, and he possessed some knowledge of chemistry: he was polite, even to excess, unseasonably; but haughty, and even brutal, when he ought to have been gentle and courteous: he was tall, and his manners were ungracious: he had a dry hard-favoured visage, and a stern look, even when he wished to please; but, when he was out of humour, he was the true picture of reproof.’[fn12] It is a sharp but cruel portrait of a bruised old warrior. The prince was not yet 50, but he appeared older, his manner and appearance prematurely aged by the demands and exertions of a life in the front line. Prince Rupert seemed to have been around forever, and to have no place in the new, lax atmosphere of Charles II’s court.
The talk of Tunbridge Wells in 1668 was Charles II’s lust for the ravishing but chaste Frances Stewart. The more she denied him, the more vigorously he pursued her. Catharine of Braganza, seeing the state into which ‘la belle Stewart’ had whipped her husband, decided to unsettle her rival by importing further competition. She summoned a company of actors to Tunbridge Wells, one of whom was Nell Gwynn, the daughter of a brothel-keeper who had drowned in a ditch while drunk. Nell had progressed from selling herring in the street and then oranges in the theatre, to becoming one of the liveliest and best-known actresses in the land. Bawdy, sexy, and witty, she was to be Charles II’s most famous mistress. Within two years she had added to the king’s illegitimate tribe, producing a boy who was called Charles, Duke of St Albans — living proof of her light-hearted boast that she was a ‘sleeping partner in the ship of state’.[fn13] Rupert’s eyes, however, were not on the captivating Nell. As Count Grammont recorded with glee, they were fixed elsewhere:
The Queen had sent for the players, either that there might be no intermission in the diversions of the place, or, perhaps, to retort upon Miss Stewart, by the presence of Miss Gwynn, part of the uneasiness she felt from her’s: Prince Rupert found charms in the person of another player, called Hughes, who brought down, and greatly subdued his natural fierceness. From this time, adieu alembics, crucibles, furnaces, and all the black furniture of the forges: a complete farewell to all mathematical instruments and chemical speculations: sweet powder and essences were now the only ingredients that occupied any share of his attention. The impertinent gypsy chose to be attacked in form; and proudly refusing money, that, in the end, she might sell her favours at a dearer rate, she caused the poor prince to act a part so unnatural, that he no longer appeared like the same person. The King was greatly pleased with this event, for which great rejoicings were made at Tunbridge; but nobody was bold enough to make it the subject of satire, though the same constraint was not observed with other ridiculous personages.[fn14]
Margaret Hughes, known as ‘Peg’, was from a thespian family and was one of the first generation of professional English actresses. Stage plays had been banned by Parliament in 1642. However, Charles II greatly enjoyed the theatre — he had been weaned on it, receiving his own troupe (‘Prince Charles’s Players’) at the age of one — and three months after the Restoration he granted patents to two playwrights, Sir Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant, which permitted them to open theatres and to put on plays for profit. These were coveted awards, given to two Royalists, in the face of intense competition. Killigrew had served as a page to Charles I and had followed the court into continental exile. He founded the King’s Company, which was initially more prestigious than its rival, gleaning the more accomplished actors and specialising in the established texts. Killigrew’s troupe was based at the Royal Theatre, Drury Lane, from 1663. Davenant had been the Marquess of Newcastle’s senior artillery officer at Marston Moor. He later spent two years imprisoned in the Tower of London. Now, in happier times, he formed the Duke’s Company and began to build a theatre in a converted real tennis court at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was noted for its innovative use of moving scenery. Both men were to benefit from a revolution to their art, which sprung from the monarch’s permissiveness.
Charles had seen his mother and her ladies-in-waiting act in the privacy of the court from an early age — indeed, the first time the word ‘actress’ was used in its modern context, to describe a female stage performer, was when it was applied to the queen by the pen of an admiring courtier. During his travels on the Continent, Charles had seen the ready acceptance of actresses: they had been permitted in France, Italy, and Spain in the late sixteenth century, and in parts of Germany in the early seventeenth.
Out of Protestant prudery, which held that flaunted female flesh would corrupt morals, women’s roles on the English stage were played by boys and effeminate men — the most famous of whom, Ned Kynaston, was judged by Pepys, during one performance, to be ‘the prettiest woman in the whole house’.[fn15] The king — sexually adventurous and a keen appreciator of all things feminine — did away with gender discrimination. From 1660, both Killigrew’s and Davenant’s companies employed women. In 1662 Charles issued a royal warrant that declared that women were to play all female parts: this, he was sure, would guard against ‘unnatural vice’.
Actresses in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England were a source of prurient fascination: they were, in a sense, the nation’s first celebrities. Playwrights titillated theatre-goers with plotlines that included blatant flirtation, feminine guiles, and rough sexual domination. The women were similarly used backstage: deprived of privacy, members of the public could access them there. Samuel Pepys enjoyed watching them in various stages of preparation, particularly undressing. He recalled, with a frisson, a visit ‘into the [at-] tiring rooms and to the women’s shift where Nell [Gwynn] was dressing herself and was all unready’.[fn16] The playwright Shadwell suggested that a few guineas would ease a man’s admittance to the actresses when off duty, while some of them might grant ‘free ingress and egress too’. In popular culture, actresses were viewed as little better than whores.
To the wealthy male, theatre-going provided an opportunity to scout for a mistress. Given the insecurity of their jobs and the inferiority of pay (experienced actresses would receive 30 shillings per week; an actor 50 shillings), there was a financial vulnerability to exploit. In general, these were women who had only escaped domestic service because of their looks. ‘Tis as hard a matter for a pretty woman to keep herself honest in a theatre,’ one observer wrote, ‘as ‘tis for an apothecary to keep his treacle from the flies in hot weather; for every libertine in the audience will be buzzing about her honey-pot.’[fn17]
The first time a woman took a major role in a play in England was 8 December 1660, when the King’s Company employed a female as Desdemona. This was such a novelty that Killigrew thought an explanation necessary. He commissioned the poet Thomas Jordan to write a special introduction, which included the advice:
The Woman plays today, mistake me not.
No Man in gown, or Page in petticoat.
Jordan stressed that this innovation must be greeted with an open mind:
Do you not twitter, Gentlemen? I know
You will be censuring, do’t fairly though;
‘Tis possible a virtuous woman may
Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet play;
Play on the stage, where all eyes are upon her,
Shall we count that a crime France calls an honour?[fn18]
Peg Hughes’s name was long associated with this groundbreaking performance, but more recent research points to the distinction being Anne Marshall’s. It seems likely, rather, that Peg was with the King’s Company from soon after its 1663 beginnings: the prompter John Downes, writing forty-five years later, remembered Hughes as one of the first women employed by Killigrew. There is also a reference to ‘Hews’ in a 1661 or 1662 cast-list for The Royal King, which suggests Peg’s earlier involvement. She was certainly one of the first women to play Desdemona and was the first Theodosia in Evening Love, Dryden’s play of 1668. Also in the 1668-9 season, she played Angellina in The Sisters. It is possible that she was playing one of these roles when she captivated the prince.
Rupert had slept with actresses before, his name appearing in a list of shame composed by the pious John Evelyn in October 1666: ‘This night was acted my Lord Brahal’s tragedy called Mustapha before their Majesties &c. at Court: at which I was present, very seldom at any time, going to the public theatres, for many reasons, now as they were abused, to an atheistical liberty, foul and indecent; women now (& never ‘til now) permitted to appear & act, which inflaming several young noblemen & gallants, became their whores, & to some their wives, witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Pr: Rupert, the E[arl] of Dorset, & another greater person than any of these [the King], who fell into their snares, to the reproach of their noble families, & ruin both of body and soul.’[fn19] However, no other actress had an effect on Rupert to match that of Miss Hughes.
Although Peg’s name is not as famous as those of half a dozen Restoration leading ladies, she caused a stir during the mid 1660s. An anonymous admirer found her in many ways more captivating than her more celebrated contemporaries:
Who must not be partial
To pretty Nan Marshall?
Though I think, be it known,
She too much doth de-moan,
But that in the Moor
May be right, to be sure,
Since her part & her name
Do tell her the same
But none can refuse
To say Mistress Hughes
Her rival out-does.[fn20]
Rupert’s transformation from lugubrious, frightening, bloodied warrior to skittish lover caused hilarity among Charles’s court. Peg Hughes was a great beauty, with dark ringletted hair, a fine figure, and particularly good legs. However, she had a past: when Pepys met her, he wrote that she was ‘a mighty pretty woman, and seems, but is not, modest’.[fn21] The diarist recorded that she had been the mistress of the poet and playwright Sir Charles Sedley. Sedley, twenty years Rupert’s junior, was a favourite of Charles II and one of his ‘wits’. It also seems likely that Peg had a child with an earlier lover, a boy called Arthur who would write a play called The Frolics in 1681. For a man as feared and respected as Rupert to fall so hopelessly in love with a common actress, the cast-off of one of the court wags and the former plaything of others, somewhat reduced his stature.
However, Rupert was sincere in his love and Peg proved not to be the passing fancy of an older man hankering after young flesh. Even if Grammont was right and Peg initially resisted the prince’s advances in order to up her price, the couple seems to have come quickly to a happy accommodation. She continued to act for a while and in October 1669 was listed by the Lord Chamberlain as a member of the King’s Company. This provided her with some status: actresses registered with the Lord Chamberlain were considered to be servants of the monarch and enjoyed privileges, such as being immune from arrest for debt.
Being the mistress of the third most important man in the royal family brought Peg immediate and dramatic social elevation. Sir Peter Lely, Charles II’s principal painter, completed her portrait soon afterwards, and it is as a lady rather than an actress or mistress that she is shown. She holds a lemon in one hand and a scallop shell in the other. The lemon symbolises purification and love, while the shell represents resurrection, a reference to how Peg has been rescued from a life of immorality by Rupert’s love. Behind her, water cascades from a dolphin’s mouth, while two cherubs attend the dolphin: the theme remains love, purity, and deliverance from a dark alternative.
In the portrait, Peg wears a rich silk nightdress, common to the court’s tastes at the time, together with a fine pearl necklace and bulbous pearl earrings. The prince gave generously to his lover: he was in his late middle age, besotted by a young beauty who made him genuinely happy. ‘I am obliged to her for many things,’[fn22] he acknowledged to his youngest sister. In turn, Sophie wrote to Charles Louis in January 1674: ‘George William [of Brunswick-Luneburg — Sophie’s brother-in-law] said, that Prince Rupert ought to get married.’[fn23]
Peg had given birth the previous year, causing Rupert’s affection and generosity to redouble. He proudly claimed the illegitimate girl as his daughter: her name was Ruperta. Ruperta inherited feistiness from both sides, which was soon evident, her father delightedly writing to his sister Sophie: ‘She already rules the whole house and sometimes argues with her mother, which makes us all laugh.’[fn24]
Never a wealthy man, the prince denied his small family nothing. Peg proved expensive: in particular, she liked to gamble and she loved jewels. It has been estimated that Rupert gave his lover £20,000 worth of jewellery in a decade. Some have claimed the real figure was ten times that. It was probably somewhere in between.
Her love of the stage persisted. In 1676, six years after retiring, she briefly resurrected her career, this time for the Duke’s Company, which was by then considered superior to its rival. She appeared in at least eight plays that season, her credits ranging from Octavia in The Wrangling Lovers to Charmion in Sedley’s Antony and Cleopatra. These were her last performances, for in 1677 Rupert built a home for her and Ruperta in Hammersmith, on the site of a house he bought from Sir Nicholas Crispe. It was a grand building, which cost £25,000 to construct. Those who remembered Peg’s humble beginnings were jealous of her ever-increasing grandeur. Captain Alexander Radcliff mocked her in a ditty:
Had I been hang’d I could not choose
But laugh at whores that drop’s from slues
Seeing that Mrs Margaret Hughes so fine is.[fn25]
Rupert’s generosity was a reflection of his happiness and gratitude for this late chance to sample the pleasures of family life. However, relationships such as his were increasingly satirised on stage. Lustful, rich, old men falling in love with pretty, scheming, young women became a favourite theme of Restoration comedy. Crown’s The Countrey Wit, of 1675, even seems to contain references to Rupert’s various trading ventures and to his past battles with the Dutch. The prince may well have been in the playwright’s mind when constructing the character Lord Drybone and Peg could have been the prototype of his greedy mistress, Betty Frisque:
DRYBONE: Go, go, hussey, you are an unkind naughty girl, to make me pay thus dear for every smile and smirk I get from you; I dare safely say, not a dimple you make, when you smile, that does not cost me, one with another, forty pounds a dimple.
BETTY: ‘Tis your own fault, my dear Lord, you will be chiding o’one, and quarrelling with one.
DRYBONE: Chiding o’one, and quarrelling with one; ay, and I had better quarrel on, I am a fool to buy Peace so dear, considering what a poor trade I have, and how little I get by it.
BETTY: People that cannot barter commodity for commodity, must spend money in specie, you know they do it all the world over.
DRYBONE: But that’s a very ruinous trade, one had better war with such a country, and forbid all traffic with it, my dear Frisky.[fn26]
There is also an echo of Rupert in Squire Oldsapp, the lascivious old dupe in Thomas Durfey’s The Night-Adventurers, a romantic farce of 1678. Rupert was famous for his love of science, and some of his experiments were popularly believed to be attempts at alchemy and other scientific trickery. Before meeting the pert Madam Tricklove, the aged Oldsapp engages in crude magic spells:
Draw near ye Spirits, that dispense
Your Pow’rs o’er Concupiscence;
Bring all your Spells and come along,
To make an amorous Old Man young!
Whose frozen joints, long since have cool’d his passion,
But now he sighs, and blows, and puffs, for generation;
Come, come away; your assistance confer,
And then I shall be the happiest Old Cur,
The happiest Old Cur in the Nation.[fn27]
The relationship between the prince and the showgirl was touched by tragedy in the summer of 1670. Peg’s brother, who was employed in Rupert’s household, was furious to hear one of Charles II’s retinue belittle his sister’s beauty and claim Nell Gwynn the prettier of the two actresses. On 20 June, six weeks after Nell had given birth to her royal bastard, Lady Chaworth wrote to Lord Roos that ‘one of the K[ing]’s servants bath killed Mr Hues, Peg Hue’s brother, servant to P. Robert upon a dispute whether Miss Nelly or she was the handsomer now at Windsor.’[fn28]
The duel happened at Windsor, because the castle was now one of Rupert’s homes.