CHAPTER THREE
Marking Time
‘For I cannot choose but say she is the worthiest to be loved of all the sex’
Charles II reveals his admiration for Princess
Henrietta Catherine of Orange, 1658
THE EXILED KING had readily found a succession of ladies willing to succumb to his considerable charms by the time Lucy Walter met her cheerless end in Paris. Nor was young James Crofts his only child, though it is unlikely that Lucy’s son knew he had, by 1658, three half-siblings: two sisters and a brother. The first of these, Charlotte Fitzroy, was born in 1651 to Elizabeth Killigrew. Known as Betty, Elizabeth Killigrew was a member of Henrietta Maria’s household in Paris and the sister of playwright Thomas Killigrew. The Killigrews were a well-connected royalist family (Thomas acted as a diplomat for Charles II in northern Italy during the 1650s) and Betty had been married to the Irishman Francis Boyle, later made Viscount Shannon, since before the outbreak of the Civil Wars. She was eight years older than Charles, which has sometimes been taken as an indication of his weakness for older women, though the king’s very varied taste in women does not really support this interpretation. Her marriage appears to have survived this affair and her daughter was the first of Charles’s illegitimate children to be given the surname Fitzroy in acknowledgement of her parentage. Charlotte was not, however, one of Charles’s favourite children.1 Her existence was kept quiet for almost twenty years.
Betty Killigrew was not Charles’s only conquest in Paris. Eleanor Needham, the widowed Lady Byron, also shared the young king’s bed. The 1664 portrait of her by Sir Peter Lely in the Royal Collection shows a dark-haired, good-looking woman, who was then in her late thirties but looks younger. There were no children of this liaison but Eleanor was, nevertheless, determined to get a pension out of the king in recognition for having slept with him. She doggedly pursued the collection of the considerable monies promised her but received very little.
During his time in Bruges, the king formed a relationship over several years with Catherine Pegge, the daughter of royalist exile Thomas Pegge of Yeldersley near Ashbourne in Derbyshire. She was said to be a great beauty but little is known of her beyond the fact that she bore Charles a son and a daughter, in 1657 and 1658. The son, Charles FitzCharles, was nicknamed Don Carlos, either because he was born in the Spanish Netherlands or because of his dark good looks. It took fourteen years for his father to acknowledge him formally and he had to wait until 1675 to be given a title, when he was made earl of Plymouth. His sister, named Catherine after her mother, died young. The complete opposite of Lucy Walter, Catherine Pegge obligingly stayed in the shadows. It is not clear what, if any, financial support Charles gave her. She was eventually married to Sir Edward Greene of Great Sampford in Essex, in 1667, and they had one daughter. It has been said that Catherine died a year after her marriage but her father’s will, made in 1676, clearly shows that she was still alive then, as she and her sister are named as his main beneficiaries.2
Attempts to justify Charles II’s sexual adventures during the period of his exile as being unremarkable for a young aristocrat in the mid-seventeenth century overlook the fact that his behaviour was in stark contrast to that of his own father, whose example he was clearly not inclined to follow. His lifestyle was also grist to the very productive mill of Cromwellian propaganda, playing into the hands of his enemies in England by allowing them to represent him as a sleazy playboy, unfit to rule. Edward Hyde and other advisers were seriously worried about the effect this would have on Charles’s chances of regaining the throne. The king was certainly aware of how he was being represented in the English news-sheets. Referring to reports of his amours in England, Charles noted, with an air of wearied amusement, ‘they have done me too much honour in assigning me so many fair ladies as if I were able to satisfy the half.’3 But after Cromwell’s death in 1658, he began to think seriously of the advantages that a marriage might bring. His choice fell on a girl he had known for some time. She had the right credentials of both birth and religion and he was also fond of her. The young lady in question was the twenty-one-year-old Princess Henrietta Catherine of Orange Nassau, sister-in-law of Mary Stuart, the Princess Royal.
Charles had got to know Henrietta Catherine during his time in the United Provinces and may have genuinely believed himself in love for a while. Letters exchanged between the king and the ever-obliging Viscount Taaffe refer to a young lady that Charles was keen to woo. They gave her the code name ‘the infanta’, and some historians believe that this mysterious but evidently desirable lady was, indeed, the Dutch princess.4 At the beginning of 1658, Charles reported a meeting between himself and ‘his friend, where he was very well satisfied and finds that absence hath wrought no ill effects, there passed many kind expressions between them, and I think I know him so well [Charles was here referring to himself in the third person] that I may say he loves her if it were possible every day more than any other and truly I find he has reason for I cannot choose but say she is the worthiest to be loved of the sex.’5
His enthusiasm is understandable. The Dutch princess was an attractive and spirited girl, who had raised eyebrows by refusing point-blank to marry the stolid Friesian cousin picked out for her in childhood, on the grounds that she found him physically repellent. At a time when the voicing of such attitudes by female aristocrats was almost unheard of, Henrietta Catherine was clearly not afraid to speak her mind. This combination of a pleasant appearance, independence of outlook, and suitability made Henrietta Catherine an appealing prospect as a bride. But whatever the couple’s feelings for each other, the match was not to be. The ambassador of the English republic at The Hague, Sir George Downing, soon stepped in to inform the Dutch States-General that such a marriage would offend the regime in London. Nor was the formidable Amalia von Solms, Henrietta Catherine’s German mother, convinced by the idea. Charles had earlier expressed an interest in another of her daughters and nothing had come of it. She did not believe that the alliance of Orange and Stuart had been of any benefit to her family. Having taken against the Princess Royal almost from the moment Mary had arrived at the Dutch court as a bewildered child bride in 1642, the relationship between the two as Mary grew to womanhood had become utterly poisonous. Amalia had no wish to cast one of her own daughters into the arms of a libidinous (and penniless) Stuart, a family that she despised. Whether the marriage, had it taken place, would have been a success, no one can say. Charles had already much too much of a wandering eye and could not change his essential nature. It seems unlikely that Henrietta Catherine would have accepted his serial infidelities. She would, though, have given him children; she had ten with the husband she married in 1659, the count of Anhalt-Dessau, seven of whom survived childhood. The restored Charles II would have given much to have such a fertile wife. For the present, his prospects looked as bleak as ever.
And then, as the year 1659 drew to a close, there came the first glimmer of hope in England. Richard Cromwell’s protectorate had not survived its first year and his fall brought into the open the long-running differences between the army’s leaders and republicans who favoured what they called the Good Old Cause and the supremacy of Parliament. Deprived of a strong leader, the republic looked unsteady. Hopes of a restoration of the Stuarts had been raised frequently during the 1650s but every ill-considered attempt at a royalist rising had been put down. When, on 1 January 1660, General George Monck, who commanded the army that effectively occupied Scotland, made the fateful gamble to march his men south, ostensibly to support Parliamentarians expelled by the army grandees, the course of history changed.
Monck was probably playing a longer game, even at this stage, than he dared acknowledge but he had always been an opportunist and he needed to wait before his true motives became apparent. While presenting himself as Parliament’s saviour, he had been receiving letters from Charles II for some time, and his ultimate goal, if Parliament would go along with his call for new elections, was to restore the Stuarts. By the end of March 1660, it was apparent to the amazed and delighted Charles and his two brothers that they would, at last, be returning home. In the Declaration of Breda, issued on 4 April, Charles noted, ‘If the general distraction and confusion, which is spread over the whole kingdom, doth not awaken all men to a desire and longing that those wounds which have so many years together been kept bleeding may be bound up, all we can say will be to no purpose.’6 His hopes were never to be entirely realized during the twenty-five years of an increasingly fraught reign but, in the spring of 1660, they were easily understood and accepted by many, but not all. Charles’s restoration was not greeted with the universal rejoicing that royalist sympathizers claimed.7 But there was a general feeling of relief and widespread rejoicing. A new era of light-heartedness seemed to beckon.
Yet even with the rumours and scurrilous tales that had been spread by his enemies while he languished in exile, it is unlikely that England was prepared for the extent of debauchery that would all too soon come to characterize the court and the monarch. John Evelyn, the diarist, wrote after the king’s death that he was ‘addicted to women’. And by the time of his restoration, Charles was involved with one woman in particular who would dominate both him and his court for the first decade of his reign. She was Barbara Palmer, née Villiers, and her extraordinary boldness, extravagance and beauty made her one of the most famous – and reviled – royal mistresses of all time.