CHAPTER FIVE
The Royal Whore
‘It was beyond the compass of art to give this lady her due, as to her sweetness and exquisite beauty’
Sir Peter Lely, portrait painter, on Barbara Villiers
THE KING RODE into London with his two brothers, the duke of York and the duke of Gloucester, on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660. Huge crowds had greeted him along the way with a mixture of cheerfulness and curiosity, since few had ever seen him before and they knew little about him. Charles himself was wryly amused by his reception, remarking that it must have been his own fault he had stayed away so long, since he was evidently very popular with the English people. A Kentish gentleman, Sir Edward Dering, voiced the general delight of long-suffering royalists when he claimed, ‘there never was in any nation so much joy both inwardly felt and outwardly expressed as was in this kingdom from the day of his majesty’s landing at Dover to his coming to London.’1 The earl of Leicester, disgruntled with both sides during the Civil Wars, hurried from his Penshurst Place estate in Kent to wait on the king, though he sounded a less effusive note than Dering in his diary: ‘The king, Charles II, made his entry into London and passed to Whitehall, where the House of Peers and House of Commons severally met and saluted his majesty and welcomed him with orations by the Speakers . . . I saluted his majesty among the rest and kissed his hand, but there was so great disorder and confusion that the king scarce knew or took particular notice of anybody.’ The lack of organization and sheer unfamiliarity with many of those present clearly distracted the king. He wanted to be seen and his grasp of the importance of public display was acute, but despite the aura of bonhomie that he sought to exude as his reign progressed, he was never truly a man of the people. The pushing and shoving of his first official function in his capital was not forgotten. In the future, such events would be handled in a way that preserved his majesty in a more fitting manner.
Not everyone shared Sir Edward Dering’s rosy view of the king’s restoration. ‘There is none that love him but drunk whores and whoremongers’, claimed Margaret Dixon of Newcastle upon Tyne. Margaret’s outburst encompassed detrimental remarks about Charles II’s Scottish heritage as well as his morals. She demanded to know whether there was ‘not some Englishman more fit to make a king than a Scot?’ She did not think much of the Stuart dynasty and feared that the new monarch would ‘set on fire the three kingdoms as his father before him has done.’2 The Civil Wars could not so easily be forgotten for Margaret or a considerable number of others, both Puritan and Catholic. They had, as yet, nothing specific to fear, since the king’s promises in the Declaration of Breda, signed shortly before he left the Netherlands for England, were so vague that no firm political or religious direction could be read into them. It is hard to avoid the impression that, on his restoration, neither Charles II nor his country had much idea what to expect of the other. His reputation, when it came to women, preceded him. Pretty much everything else was a blank canvas.
Though not obvious to his subjects, the experience of exile had profoundly affected him. Charles left England as a handsome boy in 1646, to be thrown on the mercy of quarrelsome courtiers and an interfering mother. For the next fourteen years, he had wandered around Europe, living on the grace and favour of other rulers, chronically short of money, clinging to the rites of kingship without the reality and keeping his views – if, indeed, he had any – very much to himself. The Restoration changed his physical circumstances but not his personality. He returned as a man no longer in the first flush of youth, swarthy but still impressive in appearance, full of superficial goodwill, relieved to have finally regained his throne. He was weary, cynical and apparently without an agenda, apart from enjoying the benefits of luxury and power. His pursuit of these related goals would define his reign, yet he could not escape their concomitants – the need for money, managing the competing ambitions of advisers in whom he actually had little confidence, the relationship between the Crown and Parliament, and the vexed questions of religion and the succession.
In the summer of 1660, he seemed generally well intentioned, though not towards the men who had been responsible for his father’s execution, whom he was determined to pursue to the grisly end that the law meted out to traitors. Beyond that, he was giving little away. Marriage was, of course, an inevitability, but he could afford to wait to find the most advantageous bride, and why would he hurry, when there was such easy access between his Whitehall Palace and Mrs Palmer’s house on King Street? It has been said that Charles II’s approach to kingship was ‘the politics of pleasure’, that he deliberately set out to undermine conventional morals, to demonstrate his power and virility through the number of his mistresses and illegitimate children while presiding over a court famed for its debauchery.3 He could, perhaps, have eventually justified his behaviour in this way, but as a deliberate policy it seems unconvincing. It would make him one of the most wayward, even anarchic monarchs in British history, a man who was trying to destroy the established order rather than restore it. Charles was certainly careless of his own and his country’s reputation but time would show that he held fast to the idea of legitimate dynastic descent and that he concealed a deep-seated preference for the Roman Catholic religion of his French predecessors and also of the brave men and women who helped him escape from England after the disastrous defeat at Worcester in 1651.
History has Charles II confidently treading his first steps on the primrose path of pleasure at the start of his reign, the ravishing Barbara Palmer on his arm. She may have offered sexual distraction but it was also a time of intense personal sorrow. The king lost his beloved younger brother, Henry, duke of Gloucester, and Mary, the Princess Royal, his nearest sibling and frequent companion in exile, to smallpox within three months of each other. Charles was not the sort of man to be told what to do by anyone but their influence was missed and he mourned them greatly. Their deaths may have strengthened Charles’s need for Barbara because, though pregnant, she provided diversion at a difficult time. The king’s relations with his surviving brother, James, duke of York, were never easy and were complicated in 1660 by the fact that James was obliged to marry Anne Hyde, daughter of the chancellor, who was carrying his child. The baby was a boy and the existence of what was, in effect, an alternative royal family, complete with male heir, was not lost on commentators at the time. Charles’s other surviving sister, Princess Henrietta, had been brought up in France by her mother and was soon to marry Louis XIV’s younger brother, the duke of Orléans. Barbara, always keen to the threat posed by rivals, must have soon realized that Minette, as Charles called his sister, was the woman he cared for most in all the world and that her influence on him was considerable. But she lived in Paris and only came to England twice during her brother’s reign, so in all practical respects she was not to be feared.
What, then, was the nature of the relationship between Charles and Barbara? Politically and culturally, their affair was an important underlying element of the first decade of the Restoration and it took place against a backdrop of plague, fire, political upheaval and war. These were tempestuous times for Britain, and the character and behaviour of Barbara Palmer reflected them to perfection. From the teenage angst of being one among many of the earl of Chesterfield’s lovers, she found herself, at the age of twenty, the mistress of an unmarried king. Untroubled by the fact that she herself had a husband, she saw clearly the advantages that could be derived from this situation. The world was at her feet. Money, jewels, titles were all things she could and did expect, as well as patronage, rewards for her wider family (the Villiers did not forget their own) and, above all else, fame. Barbara knew the importance of visibility and how it was fundamental to keeping her position. Other famous royal mistresses, from Rosamond de Clifford to Alice Perrers and Anne Boleyn, had all sought to exploit their success but Barbara Palmer made it an art – quite literally – through her love of public display and the portraits of herself she commissioned. Her desire for celebrity and defiant flouting of convention make her a recognizably modern woman. That she was heartily disliked by almost everyone who had dealings with her seems to have scarcely bothered her but even today’s celebrities, accustomed to the viciousness of Twitter, might be shocked by the obscene verses and pamphlets aimed at Barbara. Few women can have had their genitals and sexual proclivities referred to quite so often in print and in such disgusting ways. A poem attributed to George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the most highly born of her relatives but with whom she eventually fell out, reveals the level of contempt that male courtiers felt for the royal whore. She had been, according to him, a nymphomaniac while still in her mother’s womb:
She was so exquisite a whore
That in the belly of her mother
Her c—t she placed so right before,
Her father f–cked them both together.
Had she been male as female, without doubt
She’d acted incest at her coming out,
And least her Daddy shou’d not f–ck it home
She frigged his pintle in her mother’s womb4
For though women had found a voice and a role during the English Revolution, it was not necessarily one that Restoration society, still at root patriarchal, wanted to hear too loudly. Sexual liberation was viewed as acceptable for men but not for any respectable female. Barbara became, very quickly, the royal whore and a natural target for condemnation. Determined as she was to be her own woman, Barbara knew that her future depended on the king. She would need to get as much as she could from him because only then could she become self-reliant.
The affair was often stormy because Barbara was strong willed and passionate, prone to outbursts and threats. Clearly, she was not afraid of Charles and she knew her power over him. Others knew it, too. The historian and churchman, Gilbert Burnet, described Barbara as ‘a woman of great beauty but most enormously vicious and ravenous; foolish but imperious, very uneasy to the king and always carrying on intrigues with other men, while yet she pretended she was jealous of him. His passion for her and her strange behaviour towards him did so disorder him that often he was not master of himself, nor capable of minding business, which at so critical a time required great application.’5 But knuckling down to governmental business was never going to be Charles II’s strong point, though the rest of Burnet’s characterization is almost that of an abusive relationship in which the king, and not his mistress, was the victim.
They were both naturally highly sexed and were drawn to each other by lust as much as love. Yet there must have been at least a degree of underlying affection. None of Barbara’s letters from this period survive, but one written much later, in 1678, when Barbara’s eldest child, Anne (then countess of Sussex), was causing her mother a great deal of trouble, does reveal a deep and long-lasting affection. Referring to the wayward Anne, Barbara wrote, ‘Your majesty may be confident that as she is yours I shall always have some remains of that kindness I had formerly, for I can hate nothing that is yours.’6 In the early years, before their mutual infidelities and Barbara’s moods began to undermine the relationship, the besotted king complied with most of his mistress’s demands. At the end of 1661, she and her husband were granted the title of earl and countess of Castlemaine, in County Kerry, in Ireland. His ennoblement, and the knighting of his elder half-brother, Philip Palmer, brought the unhappy Roger little comfort. The warrant describing his title heaped humiliation on him, made out, as it was, ‘for Mr Roger Palmer to be an Irish Earl, to him and the heirs of his body gotten on Barbara Palmer his now wife.’ Pepys observed in his diary that everybody knew the reason that only Barbara’s heirs were to be honoured. The reference to ‘his now wife’ was an unsubtle indication that the marriage was unlikely to last. Roger Palmer did not want this insulting ennoblement, the final proof, though he did not acknowledge it immediately, that his marriage was a disaster. He never took his seat in the Irish parliament but he found solace in conversion to Catholicism, the faith of his mother. His new religious zeal would, the following year, prove the final straw in his relationship with his wife.
Barbara’s first son with the king was born at Roger’s King Street house in June 1662, at a time when the court was celebrating the king’s recent marriage and anyone of any significance was at Hampton Court with the royal party.7 By this time, the brazen mistress was so confident of her position that she continued to attend the theatre until a few weeks before her delivery and Charles spent every night with her, though she was eight and a half months pregnant. Barbara even let it be known that she would give birth at Hampton Court, where the royal honeymoon was to take place. Whether her husband or her lover commanded otherwise is not clear but she did not leave London. The king attended an Anglican christening ceremony for the baby at St Margaret’s, Westminster on 18 June, in which the question of the child’s parentage was conveniently fudged and he was named Charles Palmer, Lord Limerick. What the king did not know, as he stood sponsor with Barbara’s aunt, Lady Suffolk, for his bastard child, was that Roger Palmer, preserving the fiction that the baby was his, had already had him baptized into the Catholic faith.
When Barbara found out, a tremendous row ensued and she left their home to go to her uncle, Colonel Villiers, at Richmond Palace. Barbara was good at creating scenes and this one had been a long time coming. According to Pepys, ‘she left her lord, carrying away everything in the house; so much as every dish and cloth and servant but the porter. He [Roger] is gone discontent into France, they say to enter a monastery.’8 As a reversal of the time-honoured trope of an errant wife entering a nunnery, it was rich that the blameless Roger Palmer should be thought a candidate for the religious life. Barbara did return to her husband’s house, but their marriage was over. Roger did, indeed, leave for Europe, where he travelled widely, honing his linguistic skills and deepening in his Catholic faith. In England he was pitied and laughed at but in Europe he could give full rein to his interests and abilities. He took service with the Venetian republic and sailed with the admiral of its fleet to the Middle East. Though the couple did not formally separate for another two years, Roger was prudent enough to ensure that he would no longer be held responsible for Barbara’s excessive spending. Before he left England, his wife’s uncle, the third Viscount Grandison, and her uncle by marriage, the earl of Suffolk, signed an indemnity which made them responsible for debts up to £10,000 contracted by Barbara. The pair remained in control of her financial affairs for many years.
Though she could no longer spend his money, Barbara continued to be an embarrassment to her husband. When he returned to England in 1664, he found that she had given birth to two more children using his surname – a son, Henry, and a daughter, Charlotte – though they were both fathered by the king. This impudence prompted Roger to seek a formal separation. For much of the rest of the decade of the 1660s, while his wife’s star was firmly in the ascendant at Charles II’s court, he continued to travel, going as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem. He also began a new career, as a writer and Catholic apologist, his lucid and elegant style earning him many admirers. His wife also converted to Catholicism in 1663, the result, it was said, of a brush with death rather than a close reading of the works of the man whose good character she had so flagrantly betrayed.
*
HER POSITION AS the king’s mistress made Barbara an important public figure and she understood the need to enhance her visibility as much as possible. Her talents in this respect were outstanding. The hedonism of Charles II’s court gave her a platform for display that she exploited to great effect. At court balls, in masques, in theatrical productions and in the royal box, seated between the king and the duke of York, Lady Castlemaine was an almost constant presence, her occasional absences caused only by the demands of childbirth, and from that she always seemed to make a swift recovery, her figure scarcely altered, still radiant and enchanting. Pepys spotted that she partnered the young duke of Monmouth (by now a fixture at court and high in his indulgent father’s favour) at a ball on New Year’s Eve, 1662, at which the king, very aptly, called for the dance ‘Cuckolds All a Row’.9 Naturally, Barbara had to dress the part for these appearances. When she acted in a performance of Corneille’s Horace at Whitehall, the jewels she wore, which had been taken from the crown jewels in the Tower of London, were said by John Evelyn to be worth more than £40,000.10 Some estimates put their value much higher and she was said to have far outshone the new queen, Catherine of Braganza, whom Charles had married in May 1662. This ostentatious dazzling was repeated later in the same year at the queen’s birthday ball, where Barbara ‘appeared so glorious in jewels that she was the wonder of all that saw her’, in stones estimated to be worth £50,000.11 Her dresses were equally admired and all of this was provided by the king to show her off to his courtiers and to satisfy her own determination that she would eclipse any other woman who might attract his attention. The admiration of the news reports was shared by other commentators. Pepys, somewhat creepily, was driven into raptures by the mere sight of her underwear hanging on a washing line: ‘in the privy garden [of Whitehall] saw the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine’s, edged with rich lace at the bottoms, that I ever saw; and did me good to look upon them.’12
These high-profile appearances were very much of the moment but Barbara was determined that her beauty and social prominence should be celebrated for posterity. She was an important patron of the arts and particularly of Sir Peter Lely, the leading court painter of the Restoration. Lely, a Dutchman by birth, was official painter to the court, as his countryman Anthony van Dyck had been to that of the king’s father, Charles I. Arriving in England at the start of the Civil Wars, he was favoured by grandees who supported Parliament, notably Algernon Percy, earl of Northumberland, who commissioned portraits of the younger royal children and the double portrait of Charles I with the duke of York. Despite Lely having painted Oliver Cromwell (the face probably based on a miniature by another artist, Samuel Cooper), the duke of York did not forget him, and York and his first wife, Anne Hyde, were Lely’s chief patrons during the 1660s. Lady Castlemaine was not far behind. And while Anne Hyde was commissioning a series of portraits of the leading ladies of the court (Barbara was included but was only one of eleven sitters), known collectively as the Windsor Beauties,13 the countess herself was keeping Lely and his studio busy with four portraits of herself, in classic and religious depictions. Barbara chose to have herself painted as Minerva, complete with elaborate feathered headdress, in a gold silk dress, staff in hand. As Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom and warfare, this was a bold statement. Barbara was undoubtedly intelligent and cunning but her intellect was not wide-ranging. The association with warfare, however, certainly sent a message that she was a lady whom rivals challenged at their peril.
It is the religious connotations of the other key Lely portraits that still have the power to shock. He painted Barbara as the saint for whom she was named, an early Christian martyr from the Middle East, supposedly executed by her own father and who may never have really existed. Untroubled by such questions of historical accuracy, Barbara was also painted as St Catherine, another popular female saint of the time. Most dramatically of all, she posed as St Mary Magdalene and as the Madonna. These two paintings have been described as audacious, scandalous and blasphemous. They still have the power to shock with their mixture of witty defiance of accepted standards and the mirror they hold up to how one woman personified a court glorifying in its own corruption. In the Magdalene portrait, a casually sexy Lady Castlemaine, her head tilted to one side, cheek resting on her right hand, hair loose and flowing, gazes sleepily at the viewer through those arresting come-to-bed eyes. The folds of her rich bronze dress hint at a trim but voluptuous figure, unchanged by pregnancy, while the stole carelessly draped around her shoulder is suggestively pulled across her groin, in a reminder that this is where her true power lies. It was probably painted around 1662, when she was an unstoppable force and her hold over the recently married king was absolute. It has been noted that ‘what the symbolic portraiture also capitalizes on, outrageously, is the notion that the history of this whore and her royal lord might properly call to mind the story of Mary Magdalene and her Lord and Redeemer.’14 Two years later, Barbara and Lely went one step further in mocking the idea of good taste when she posed with her son, Charles Fitzroy, the baby her angry husband had hastily christened as a Catholic, in the guise of Madonna and Child.15
Barbara sits in the classic Renaissance pose for this subject, on the edge of a chair, with her little son, notably more like a real child than in many other depictions, on her left, leaning towards her while perched on a wooden bench. His chubby, handsome little face and red lips give him the air of a cherub. But Barbara is looking ahead, not at him, though one hand is on his waist, more to balance him in an otherwise awkward position rather than in any great show of maternal love. Her gaze is not devoid of tenderness but there is calculation behind it and a hint of triumphalism. She is dressed in red and blue, the colours often associated with Italian portraits of the Madonna and Child, her hair caught up in a carefully draped veil, which sets off its dark auburn colour. Nothing is left to chance in this picture and its lack of spontaneity makes it look rather stilted. Yet it is easy to tell that Barbara was very pleased with it. The heavy-lidded, almond-shaped eyes and long nose so admired by Lely are prominent features and the mouth has just a hint of a smile. She does not seem to have minded showing the world that she was already putting on weight, as her face at this angle cannot hide the beginnings of a double chin. The Restoration favoured plump women and it is unlikely that Barbara was concerned by a little broadening of her figure. And she was also, at the same time, broadening her interests. A woman as conscious of her status as Lady Castlemaine was always bound to take a lively interest in politics and to use her influence as effectively as she could.
*
THE POLITICIAN WHO suffered most from Barbara’s relationship with Charles II was the king’s veteran councillor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The return of the king in 1660 vindicated all that Hyde (who was made earl of Clarendon in 1662) had endured and struggled for in the years of exile, and his position at first seemed inviolable. Believing that the rule of law and justice within a monarchical framework, together with the restoration of the Church of England, were the keystones of the English constitution, Hyde received the office of lord chancellor almost as if he was divinely ordained for it. His capacity for hard work, exceptional powers of drafting and incisive legal mind gave him the edge over potential rivals at the outset of Charles II’s reign. His political acumen, however, was less highly developed. Believing that dedication to office would raise him above court faction was a vain hope and his experience of the squabbles of the royalists during and after the Civil Wars should have better prepared him for what might follow when the world had turned again. Yet he could be excused for not anticipating the one development of 1660, affecting his own family, which would complicate and even compromise his position within months of the Restoration. Hyde was almost the last to learn that his daughter, Anne, had become pregnant by the duke of York and was so appalled by the news that he initially opposed the idea that James should marry her and, in a notable display of paternal rejection, suggested she be put in the Tower of London and even executed. The elevation of Princess Mary Stuart’s maid of honour to become a member of the royal family was genuinely not what her father desired. It laid him open, at a difficult time, to charges of seeking to enhance his role in an underhand way and even that he might be aiming, through Anne, to put his own descendants on the throne. Charles II was in good health but it would only take an accident or an unpredictable illness, such as the smallpox that had carried off Princess Mary and Prince Henry, for the duke of York to become king and his offspring with the new duchess to inherit in the future. Though the son born to Anne Hyde, given the title of duke of Cambridge, died as a child, her daughters, Mary and Anne, would both become queens regnant.
Clarendon’s enemies, notably the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, and two of the duke of York’s servants, Charles Berkeley and Henry Jermyn, cast aspersions on Anne’s good name while James, who had married her secretly in September 1660, dithered over whether to repudiate her. His brother informed him that he must honour his commitments and so the chancellor’s daughter entered into the highest echelons of the royal family, a role which she took to with aplomb, though her husband never entertained the idea of being faithful to her and seemed to wish to emulate Charles as much as he could in this respect. All of this the countess of Castlemaine, whose name would soon be linked with that of Henry Jermyn, watched with interest. She does not seem to have felt threatened in any way by Anne and later in the 1660s she would ally herself closely with the Yorks, but she soon became an enemy of Hyde’s for other reasons.
The truth of the matter was that Clarendon and the earl of Southampton, his chief ally on Charles II’s council, disapproved of Barbara from the outset of her liaison with the king. He refused to let his wife visit her and certainly never tried to get her to influence Charles on his behalf. She reciprocated his hostility in the dramatic way that was so typical of her. In September 1662, it was reported to the duke of Ormond that she had publicly stated she hoped to see Clarendon’s head on a stake outside Westminster.16 Ill feeling between the pair inevitably seeped into the sphere of court appointments. Barbara, recognizing that the best way to remain prominent at court was to have an official role of her own, was well aware of the chancellor’s reluctance to support her appointment as lady of the bedchamber to the queen in the same year.17 Her obvious course was to continue to side with Clarendon’s opponents, who included the rising politician Sir Henry Bennet, soon to be ennobled as the earl of Arlington, a supple operator who had ingratiated himself with Charles II during the royalist exile. Bennet was working with Berkeley to isolate Clarendon and remove the old advisers who had given so much to the king in the previous decade. Sir Kenelm Digby and Sir Edward Nicholas were both removed from office. Barbara did not always succeed in her political machinations. Her support of the earl of Bristol, who tried to get Clarendon impeached in 1663, nearly caused a rift between the countess and the king, who was also jealous of Bristol’s frequent visits to Barbara’s house. Undeterred, Barbara continued to let her home be used as a meeting place for the chancellor’s opponents. The French ambassador believed that the ‘debauches’, as he called them, which took place there every evening, were part of a concerted plan to destroy Clarendon.18 Whatever really happened at these rowdy dinners, frequented by the louche duke of Lauderdale, Charles II’s enforcer in Scotland, and Anthony Ashley Cooper (later earl of Shaftesbury), we do not know, but dislike of Clarendon was common to those who attended.
The chancellor survived until 1667, when the king asked him to resign. Pepys wrote that his downfall ‘was certainly designed in my lady Castlemaine’s chamber.’19 The king’s surgeon told Pepys that ‘when he went from the king . . . she was in bed (although about 12 o’clock) and ran out in her smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall garden, and thither her woman brought her nightgown and [she] stood joying herself at the old man’s going away. And several of the gallants of Whitehall (of which there were many staying to see the Chancellor’s return) did talk to her . . . telling her she was the Bird of Paradise.’ Clarendon himself told the story rather differently. He recalled that, as he left Whitehall, he saw Barbara, Arlington and Baptist May, who had been appointed keeper of the privy purse at Barbara’s suggestion, looking ‘out of her open window with great gaiety and triumph, which all people observed.’20 He did not add the observation, attributed to him by Nathaniel Crew, that, on looking up and seeing this leering trio, he said, ‘O, Madam, is it you? Pray remember that if you live, you will grow old.’21
Clarendon intended, at first, to fight on and he had the support of the duke of York. Charles II, tired of his faithful supporter, easily swayed by the ill-intentioned clique with which he surrounded himself, wanted him gone. Impeachment proceedings were begun in Parliament, where an unexpected degree of support for this great servant of the Crown surprised his enemies and led to a procedural stand-off with the House of Lords, who brought in a charge of high treason. Deserted by the king, the fifty-eight-year-old Clarendon left England in November 1667. He hoped to return from his banishment in France but he never did, dying in Rouen in 1674, but not before he had written his Life, a more personal version of the History of the Great Rebellion, which he had begun on the Isles of Scilly in 1646. The History is the first great narrative history of its kind in the English language, still one of the major primary sources on the Civil Wars despite its inevitable partiality for the royalist side.
Barbara had seen off the most distinguished of her enemies but the unreliable Arlington soon deserted her for good. Nor would she recover the support of her cousin, Buckingham, with whom she had a volatile relationship throughout the 1660s.
*
BUCKINGHAM WAS ONE of the great wits of Charles II’s court but his personality and beliefs made him a dangerous ally. He shared many personality traits with his Villiers cousin; they were both flamboyant, even outrageous, keen to be at the centre of power and not afraid to speak out. He believed that his birth warranted the highest office but was often at odds with other politicians, who were suspicious of his motives and uncomfortably aware of his powers of oratory as well as the effectiveness of his writings. Though the king laughed heartily at Buckingham’s side-splitting mimicry – no figure in public life or at the court was safe from the duke’s wicked ability to depict them, always to their disadvantage – Charles II never entirely trusted him and Buckingham had, in the past, been as contemptuous of him as he was of many others, remarking that, after the Battle of Worcester, the king was probably ‘lying hid with some gent and lying with his wife more happy than if he were on his throne.’22 His sneering may be partly explained by the king’s refusal to appoint him as commander-in-chief of the royalist army in 1651. There were questions over his return to England in the 1650s, his connections with the Protectorate and his marriage to Mary Fairfax. Buckingham courted Mary with all the zeal of a Cavalier poet. If even Bishop Burnet found Buckingham ‘a man of noble presence and that has an air that at first strikes all that see him; he has a flame in his wit that is inimitable’,23 it is hardly surprising that the rather plain Mary Fairfax, educated by Andrew Marvell and brought up in a pious Presbyterian household, was eager to give him her hand. The first years of their marriage, in which Buckingham was a dutiful son-in-law and affectionate husband, gave no indication of how his subsequent behaviour would break her heart.
The duke was a complex man. Naturally tolerant in religious matters, some people thought him a crypto-Catholic while others described him as being part of a ‘Presbyterian gang’. He quelled a rising in Yorkshire, where he was lord-lieutenant of the West Riding, in 1662 with minimum retribution and he was always popular with his men. He believed it was his birthright to be at the centre of affairs and was active on the Privy Council, yet he wished to serve as a volunteer on the duke of York’s flagship in the Dutch War of 1665 and was furious when he was given a ship of his own because York, perhaps anxious about the distraction Buckingham might cause, did not want him so close. His relations with the king’s heir remained awkward thereafter. While Londoners died in their thousands from the worst ever outbreak of bubonic plague and the seamen Buckingham had disdained to join starved through lack of pay, the duke was keeping the king, Lady Castlemaine and the court (removed to Hampton Court, at a safe distance from the epidemic) in stitches with his impressions. ‘His special talent,’ wrote Anthony Hamilton, ‘was for catching hold of and imitating in their presence anything that happened to be absurd in other people’s behaviour or any peculiarity of speech they had, without letting them notice it. In short, he was apt at counterfeiting so many different parts, and with so much grace and humour, that when he wished to make himself agreeable, it was difficult to dispense with his company.’24
After the Great Fire of 1666, Buckingham turned on those he had consorted with at Hampton Court the previous summer. In Parliament, he spearheaded opposition to the government, criticizing its management of the recent Dutch War, which had led to the destruction of the English fleet in the Medway and national humiliation, attacking its handling of finance and supporting the introduction of a bill to ban the import of Irish cattle, which he believed would be detrimental to his tenants in the north of England. In so doing, he managed to insult the Irish so badly that the duke of Ormond’s son, Lord Ossory, challenged him to a duel. Both men ended up spending time in the Tower of London. This episode caused a furious row between the king and Lady Castlemaine, who only the year previously had fallen out spectacularly with her cousin. It was described as ‘a mortal quarrel’. Yet better relations were swiftly established and Barbara pleaded Buckingham’s cause so persistently that the king grew angry, calling her ‘a whore and a jade’. He soon relented and was reconciled with Buckingham in Barbara’s apartments.25 But Buckingham’s reconciliation with his kinswoman was to prove only temporary and his assessment of her depravity would make Charles II’s outburst seem mild by comparison. Their alliance over Clarendon lasted only a few months. Buckingham did not necessarily view Barbara’s hold over the king as wholly advantageous to his interests and was keen to encourage the king’s enthusiasm for the theatre, and especially his monarch’s growing fascination with the actresses Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis.26 They were not the first alternatives to the monopoly of his cousin that he had sponsored, and his final judgement of her is made abundantly plain in the poem quoted earlier.
Soon Buckingham was involved in a scandal to match anything that Barbara had done. He began an affair in 1666 with Anna-Maria Brudenell, countess of Shrewsbury, a court beauty who had, like Barbara, made a career as a temptress and was perfectly accustomed to the adoration of men and their compulsion to fight over her favours. Her husband challenged Buckingham at the beginning of 1668 and, in the melee surrounding this winter duel, with three men fighting on each side, one person was killed and Shrewsbury himself seriously wounded. He later died of his injuries. Unabashed, the duke moved his mistress into his London residence, Wallingford House. When his wife objected that she could not live under the same roof as his mistress, Pepys reported that Buckingham replied, with casual cruelty, ‘Why, Madam, I did think so, and therefore have ordered your coach to be ready, to carry you to your father’s.’27 The affair damaged Buckingham’s standing and his decision to bury his illegitimate son by Anna-Maria in Westminster Abbey outraged public opinion. It would, in the end, contribute significantly to the collapse of his political hopes.
*
BY THE LATE 1660s, Barbara’s relationship with the king was beginning to fade, though it was not yet completely over. She had seen off criticism from female courtiers such as Lady Gerard and Lady Harvey, both of whom had felt the king’s keen displeasure at their temerity in attacking his maîtresse-en-titre. This unpleasantness was more than women’s squabbles since both ladies, whatever their personal disapproval of Barbara, were the mouthpieces of political factions at odds with the king and court. And on occasion Barbara’s opponents resorted to more sinister methods. Not long after giving birth to Charlotte Fitzroy, her second daughter with the king, Lady Castlemaine was returning one evening to her apartments in Whitehall through St James’s Park, with only a maid and a page in attendance, when she was accosted by three masked noblemen who verbally abused her and threatened her with the same fate as Jane Shore, the unpopular mistress of Edward IV, whose body was said to have ended up on a dunghill. This was not the first such comparison, and it struck home. Normally so thick skinned, the countess was sufficiently shaken by the incident to pass out when she got back to her rooms and Charles II rushed to support her. His presence seems to have restored her equilibrium quickly, though the men who had menaced her were never caught, despite St James’s Park being swiftly sealed off.28
By now, the future of her children was a prime consideration for Barbara. She was confident that her bastards with the king would be acknowledged and given titles and lands. Her maternal instincts in this respect were strong, though whether she was a loving mother is another matter. When Charles questioned the paternity of her last child with him while she was still pregnant, she threatened to dash the baby’s brains out if he would not acknowledge it. Her other quarrels with Charles were about their mutual infidelities. Barbara’s name had long been associated with that of Henry Jermyn and she took other lovers, including the acrobat Jacob Hall and the actor Charles Hart. The king, meanwhile, had casual liaisons with Jane Roberts and Winifred Wells, though neither was a threat to Barbara. He was also, throughout this period, pursuing Frances Teresa Stuart, another of his wife’s ladies, and Barbara seems to have regarded her, at least initially, as a much more serious rival.29 For most of the first decade of Charles II’s reign, Barbara was dominant, using all her skills of networking (she did have female supporters, most notably her aunt, Lady Suffolk, and, towards the end of the decade, the duchess of York), sexual allure and self-promotion to maintain an unrivalled position at court. Her fame – or infamy, as others saw it – was hard won and came at a price, for the one court that Barbara never managed to capture was that of public opinion.
It could, of course, be argued that she cared nothing for what the population at large thought about her but the London crowd was a force that those in power ignored at their peril. The full extent of Barbara’s unpopularity and the popular criticism of the court and its decadent lifestyle became apparent in March 1668, in the Bawdy House Riots, several days of unrest in London, when apprentices, fed up with their conditions, attacked the brothels whose prices they could not afford and held pitched battles with the city’s militias who were trying to disperse them. There was a long history of riots on Shrove Tuesdays, with prostitutes being a common target, but the level of disaffection in 1668 amounted to something more serious. At first, the authorities tried to make light of this mob violence. Pepys reported that ‘the Duke of York and all with him this morning were full of the talk of the prentices . . . some blood hath been spilt but a great many houses pulled down . . . the Duke of York was mighty merry at that of Damaris Page’s, the great bawd of the seamen.’ The duke was less amused to have lost £15 a year in wine licences as the result of attacks on his property and Pepys himself sounded a more sombre note when he remarked, ‘it was said here that these idle fellows have had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses and did not go and pull down the great bawdy-house at Whitehall . . . this doth make the courtiers ill at ease to see this spirit among people . . . and then they do say that there are men of understanding among them, that have been of Cromwell’s army . . .’30 This last comment is a telling indication of the insecurity of England more than a decade after Cromwell’s death as well as reminding us that the enduring image of Charles II as a clever and popular monarch, whose peccadilloes were viewed as endearing by his subjects, is at considerable variance with reality.
The riots provided an opportunity for wider condemnation of the court and a full-scale onslaught on Lady Castlemaine herself. The Poor Whores Petition, addressed ‘To the most splendid, illustrious, serene and eminent lady of pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine’ and purported to come from ‘the undone company of poor distressed whores, bawds, pimps and panders’, is a satirical libel written by an unknown author. It may well have been sponsored by the two most wealthy and important bawds in London, Madam Cresswell and Damaris Page, but its underlying anti-Catholicism is significant and suggests the involvement of one of Cresswell’s influential clients in the City of London. It is a short document of just one page but effectively written. The petitioners begin by noting that they have ‘been for a long time connived at and countenanced in the practice of our venereal pleasures (a trade wherein your ladyship hath great experience and for your diligence therein have arrived to a high and eminent advancement for these last years.’ Proceeding to note that the loss of their trade might impede their ability to purchase medical help to recover from the various sexually transmitted diseases that went with their trade (a nasty hint that Castlemaine might suffer such inconveniences herself), they issued a veiled threat to Barbara’s safety, ‘For should your eminency but once fall into these rough hands, you may expect no more favour than they have shown unto us poor inferior whores.’31
However vexed Barbara might have been by the Poor Whores Petition, she must have been even more aggrieved by the equally satirical response, attributed to her, entitled ‘The gracious answer of the most illustrious lady of pleasure the Countess of Castel’. The writer, who evidently knew the countess well, wreaked further damage on her reputation by depicting her as greedy, ‘wonderfully decked with jewels and diamonds which the subjects of this kingdom have paid for’, sexually promiscuous and nepotistic. Frequently using the royal ‘we’, the countess is made to acknowledge that ‘we have always (without our husband) satisfied ourself with the delights of Venus; and in our husband’s absence have had numerous offspring (who are bountifully and nobly provided for).’ Moreover, and much more overtly than in the Poor Whores Petition, Lady Castlemaine’s supposed reply viciously attacked the Protestant sects while promising to give full support to the Catholic Church, whose ‘venereal pleasure, accompanied with looseness, debauchery and prophaneness are not such heinous crimes and crying sins’.32 Finally, the writer urged the poor whores not to worry because the French would come and deal with the apprentices – a comment likely to feed xenophobia.
The king’s response to this embarrassment was to buy a property for Barbara, Berkshire House, which backed on to St James’s Park, and grant her a pension of £4,700 a year, paid out of post office funds and managed by her uncles, Viscount Grandison and Colonel Villiers. This looks like complete royal defiance of public opinion but it was also a way of drawing a line in their relationship. Their affair had cooled. Charles II understood very well his mistress’s rapaciousness. If things were to end without tantrums and further public disaffection, he needed to let her down gently. He had one last gift to bestow.