CHAPTER SIX

The Duchess

‘Paint Castlemaine in colours that will hold

(Her, not her picture, for she now grows old)’

Andrew Marvell, ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’, 1667

WHEN MARVELL WROTE these and the excoriating lines that follow, Barbara was, in fact, only twenty-seven years old and many thought her beauty undimmed. But she knew that she had never had a complete monopoly of the king’s affections. She was well aware of the other women he pursued or who were dangled in front of him by courtiers jealous of her hold on the monarch. Expectations of exclusivity were not part of her calculations, nor, indeed, of his. The thing that bothered Charles II most about Barbara’s behaviour was not her infidelity but her lack of discretion. ‘Madam,’ he told her, ‘all I ask of you for your own sake is, live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.’1 He could have put it more crudely (and perhaps did, in person), for Barbara had not really been in love since her affair with Chesterfield and that was more teenage infatuation than genuine devotion. What Barbara wanted from her royal lover, as the new decade of the 1670s approached, was assurance that her future outside his bed would be generously funded and that her status in society acknowledged by a title greater than that of a mere countess. She was rewarded in August 1670 by being made Duchess of Cleveland in her own right. In the same year, Barbara’s financial situation was improved through the award of a series of grants, including the office of keeper of Hampton Court and the ownership of one of Henry VIII’s favourite palaces, Nonsuch in Surrey. Though this did not completely mark the end of her influence, or her appearances at court, her physical relationship with the king had run its course.

As for Charles II himself, it is easy to think that sex was always his major preoccupation because this is how the ‘Merrie Monarch’ is remembered. The reality, as the king contemplated the second decade of his reign, was much more complicated. He had survived plague, fire, war, riots and the occasional uprising. By 1670, his stock abroad, which had plummeted, was recovering, and the scruffy duke of Lauderdale, his near-tyrannical lieutenant in Scotland, had reduced this troublesome kingdom to complete subjugation. Even relations between the king and the House of Commons were improving. Yet his finances remained inadequate, his politicians corrupt and quarrelsome, and his subjects, not to mention his own immediate family, divided over religion. His hopes of having a legitimate heir had disappeared and the issue of the succession would haunt him till his death. The ability to manage people was perhaps his greatest asset, while keeping his own counsel was, by now, second nature. His most recent biographer called him a gambling man and Charles certainly knew how to keep his cards close to his chest.2 If he examined them closely, he must have realized that they were not very good ones. He would be obliged to improvise and, essentially, to make policy himself while encouraging his politicians to think that they were influential by playing them off against one another. But most of all he needed money. The Dutch Wars of the 1660s had bankrupted the exchequer and, since Parliament could never be relied upon to vote for taxation without attaching strings, the king had no scruples about obtaining it from other sources. Unlike his father, who had resurrected ancient laws to fund himself in the 1630s, Charles II decided to look elsewhere for financial backing.

France, home to his beloved sister, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, and ruled by his cousin, Louis XIV, was rich and always in search of allies in its struggles with other European powers. It seemed the most promising source of funds and Louis had made the first approach. French support would, though, come at a price and that price would need to be kept secret from all but a very few trusted advisers at home. It might also bring him into conflict once more with the United Provinces of the Netherlands, where his nephew, William III of Orange, was recovering the power of the hereditary office of stadtholder in a carefully choreographed dance with his country’s commitment to republicanism. Charles, mindful of his promise in 1660 to his dying sister, Mary, that he would look out for his nephew’s interests, always tried to separate his policy towards the Dutch government from professions of personal regard for the young man. This convenient distinction was often lost on William, who increasingly saw himself as a figurehead for the Protestant cause against the might of Catholic France. He would have been even more disenchanted had he known of the secret treaty concluded between England and France on 22 May 1670, which committed the English to support France in a war against the Dutch, with the sole objective of destroying the republic. Given the fraught nature of Anglo-Dutch relations for much of the mid-seventeenth century and the Sun King’s overweening ambition, this stipulation was predictable. England was also to provide 4,000 infantry and sixty ships to bolster the French military capacity.

Much more shocking was Charles’s agreement that he would declare his conversion to Catholicism and return his country to the old religion. Though this undoubtedly pleased his brother, the duke of York, who was not immediately in the king’s confidence about the preliminary negotiations for the treaty, and Charles’s Catholic secretary, Sir Thomas Clifford, who played a major part in the discussions, it would have been political dynamite if even a hint of it had slipped into the public domain.3 Neither realized that it was a piece of breathtaking cynicism. Charles, whatever his private inclinations, had no intention of ever making such a claim, which would have endangered his hold on the throne. Though he seems to have favoured greater toleration for both Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists, he knew that any public pronouncement of conversion to a form of worship abandoned more than a century before would be at best unwise and at worst catastrophic. It was not worth the risk. What he really wanted was the subsidy Louis XIV offered him, his insurance that he could continue to rule without a recalcitrant Parliament, should the need arise. The subsidy amounted to £230,000 a year (about £34 million today), plus an extra £160,000 (£24 million) when Charles’s change of faith was announced.

While Charles was sorting out his settlement with the new duchess of Cleveland, the duchess of Orléans, or Madame, as the second lady of France was officially known, arrived at Dover for the signing of the treaty. There was to be a much more bland official version but it was the secret one that had involved her most. Brought up as a Catholic by Queen Henrietta Maria, in defiance of her father’s commands, Charles I’s youngest child was a committed Catholic who shared the desire of her brother-in-law, Louis XIV, to see the Dutch state annihilated and France triumphant in Europe. Though historical novelists and salacious television series have characterized her as an empty-headed flirt, Madame was an intelligent young woman, trapped in a ghastly marriage, who found her métier in undertaking a difficult diplomatic mission in which she hoped to please both the brother she had adored since she was a child and the French king, with whom she was rumoured to have earlier enjoyed a passionate affair. Louis was as fond of women as Charles, and the beauty of some of his mistresses was legendary, but it is unlikely that the reed-thin Minette was among them. Charles II could console himself for the fading of his affair with Barbara Palmer in the arms of actresses and other passing ladies but it was his sister he really wanted to see in the summer of 1670. Their reunion was to prove bittersweet. Minette was never healthy and the stress of her marriage to Louis XIV’s bisexual brother had been compounded by successive pregnancies that weakened her still further. She survived the journey back to France by barely a month, dying in agony, claiming that she had been poisoned, though an autopsy showed that an ulcer had perforated, leading to peritonitis. Charles was inconsolable. He and James were now the only two survivors of the six children that Charles I left behind when he was executed in 1649.

His grief did not, however, entirely overcome his baser urges. Minette had brought with her to Dover a lady-in-waiting who was the daughter of an impoverished family from the lower ranks of the nobility in Brittany. Though the duchess of Cleveland did not know it yet, this young woman, whose name was Louise de Kéroualle, would soon replace her as maîtresse-en-titre, and her greed, ambition and meddling in politics would far outweigh any kind of political influence Barbara had exercised.4

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BARBARA’S OWN RELATIONS with French ambassadors had been cordial and she had received presents of money and finery, including an expensive pair of gloves. In order to keep in with Madame, she had sent the king’s sister an expensive jewel, an action which seems as impertinent, given their difference in rank, as it was unnecessary, for Henrietta hardly had need of extra gems. It does, however, illustrate the quasi-regal status that Barbara had assumed during her affair with the king. But she had always been too volatile a person for the French to view her as being reliably on their side and, indeed, she seems not to have taken much interest in foreign policy. In the difficult last years of the 1670s, she stayed close to the duke and duchess of York, whose household offered something approaching an alternative court to that of the king’s. It is easy to overlook the importance of the Yorks at this time, but their favour was eagerly sought and it was from their sphere that Barbara found a new lover soon after the king ended their affair.

John Churchill had been born in east Devon in 1650, the son of a royalist army officer who had lost everything in the service of the king during the Civil Wars. His father’s situation began to improve after the Restoration and, by the middle of the 1660s, John had followed his elder sister, Arabella, into the household of the duke of York, as a page. Both of these appointments had been made with the help of Lady Castlemaine, who was a distant cousin, further evidence of Barbara’s far-reaching networks and her desire to help her kin. Young Churchill’s prospects in the Yorks’ service were undoubtedly improved by the fact that Arabella had become the duke’s mistress (James, like his brother, viewed his wife’s ladies as extracurricular sport). Tall, ungainly and un-attractive, Arabella only came to the duke’s attention when she fell off a horse and was discovered stunned and with her skirts up around her waist, revealing a pair of legs so beautiful that the duke was instantly smitten. It was not a temporary fixation as they went on to have five children together, much to the anguish of the duchess of York. Meanwhile, the duke was instrumental in starting John Churchill out on a military career that would see him become one of Britain’s most famous military leaders and bring him and Britain great prestige in the early eighteenth century.

Barbara was also smitten by her relative, who was as handsome as his sister was plain. His future wife, Sarah Jennings, said he was ‘as beautiful as an angel.’ Contemporaries remembered in glowing terms his personal attractions and charm: ‘Of all the men that I ever knew in my life (and I knew him extremely well),’ wrote the earl of Chesterfield’s grandson, ‘the late duke of Marlborough possessed all the graces in the highest degree.’5 The ten-year age gap between them was irrelevant to a woman of Barbara’s confidence and sexuality. John Churchill was just what she needed after her affair with the king had cooled. Charles does not seem to have taken well to being replaced by a much younger man and he disapproved of the generous gifts of money that Barbara lavished on her lover. Though Charles could not stop the affair, he did, for a time, block further military promotion for Churchill, which had been sought by the duke of York, and he opposed his brother’s wish to appoint him as gentleman of the bedchamber. The court was alive with gossip and it was believed the liaison between Churchill and the duchess of Cleveland was the root of the king’s displeasure but, as Charles always thought little of his brother’s judgement, this may also have been a factor. When Barbara gave birth to her final child, a daughter to whom she gave her own name, in the summer of 1672, it was generally assumed that Churchill was the father. Barbara never claimed that the child was the king’s but she did not publicly acknowledge who the father was and Churchill himself never came forward to accept responsibility for the infant. His critics at the time, of whom there were plenty, believed that he cared little for Barbara and less for their child, but that, cash-strapped as he always seemed to be at this time, his primary interest was in the duchess of Cleveland’s money.

Churchill must also have been aware that he did not have a monopoly of the duchess’s affections. Within months of giving birth to Barbara, she began an affair with the handsome and witty playwright William Wycherley, who dedicated his first play, Love in a Wood, to her. The duchess enjoyed verbal sparring, often of a very coarse kind, and Wycherley was a good match for her in this. He was also renowned for his sexual prowess. He benefited from her patronage and she from the spice he added to her life. It may also have been her way of demonstrating to the king that he was not the only one who had an interest in the stage. Charles had been consorting with actresses for several years.

The arrival of her new daughter and the fact that Nell Gwyn, an actress who became the king’s mistress in 1669, had recently given birth to a son, spurred Barbara into taking action. She determined to ensure the future of her own children with Charles. They must make advantageous marriages and this would require the king’s support. The idea of arranging marriages for children under twelve is offensive to modern sensibilities but it was seen as an essential aspect of parental responsibility among the upper classes in those days. Although Charles II did not acknowledge Barbara’s second son, Henry, as his until the summer of 1672 (a busy time for the duchess), he made up for his lingering doubts about the boy’s paternity by giving him the title of earl of Euston and the surname Fitzroy, which became the surname of all Barbara’s children by the king. Shortly afterwards, the nine-year-old Henry was married to five-year-old Isabella Bennet, daughter of Charles II’s leading minister, the earl of Arlington. Arlington was said to be exceedingly fond of his daughter and concerned for her future, but not sufficiently to wonder if marrying her at the age of five might be an outrage. Thus the duchess of Cleveland tied her son’s future to a man whose political influence she thought would last. It did not, but, however shocking the age of the children concerned in this transaction of self-interest might seem, Henry and Isabella stayed married, became the duke and duchess of Grafton and eventually produced a family.

Henry had married before his elder brother, Charles, because Arlington was less precious about child marriage than the father of Mary Wood, the rich heiress chosen by Barbara for her eldest son by the king. The contract, signed shortly before the death of Mary Wood’s father, stipulated that the marriage would not actually take place until Mary was sixteen. She went to live with her aunt, Lady Chester, but was removed by the duchess of Cleveland in what amounted to an abduction. Barbara wanted the girl brought up with her own daughters and dismissed Lady Chester’s protests with all the venom that her detractors associated with her: ‘The duchess,’ she announced, grandly referring to herself in the third person, ‘hath her and will keep her and the duchess wonders that so inconsiderable person as the Lady Chester will contend with a person of her quality.’6

Nor were her daughters forgotten. The eldest, Anne, was married at the age of thirteen to yet another distant relative, Thomas Lennard, who became earl of Sussex. But, unlike her brothers, Anne’s marriage was not happy. She became infatuated with the king’s final mistress, Hortense Mancini, and was removed to France by her mother, where further, even more serious problems arose. There was much less difficulty with Charlotte Fitzroy, the king’s outright favourite among his illegitimate children. Renowned for possessing her mother’s beauty but not her nature or proclivities, Charlotte was married in 1674 to Edward Lee, created earl of Lichfield on the occasion of his marriage. Shrewdly balancing her political bets, Barbara favoured Lee because of his connection to Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, the Lord Treasurer. Danby was originally a client of the duke of Buckingham’s but was now seeking to become the king’s chief minister in his own right, at the expense of Arlington, who survived impeachment proceedings brought against him in Parliament in the year of Anne Fitzroy’s marriage.

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NO ONE KNEW better than the duchess of Cleveland that times were changing. She owed her gradual, well-managed eclipse to recognition of the mutability of influence and power. But by 1676 she also had to accept that, however impressive her pensions might sound in theory, collecting them in full remained a challenge and she had consistently lived beyond her means. It would be necessary to economize and consider her options. At the end of 1672, as a result of the restrictions on Catholics holding office that would form part of the Test Acts, Barbara lost her place as lady of the bedchamber to the queen. A period of time abroad, in a more congenial religious and social environment, beckoned. Never one to brood, the duchess of Cleveland packed up her household and left for France with her eldest and youngest daughters, to take up residence in Paris.

Scandal followed Barbara wherever she went. Her daughters were to be educated at the English convent of the Order of the Immaculate Conception of our Blessed Lady, on the Rue de Charenton in the Faubourg St Antoine. Barbara donated £1,000 to the convent, eager to demonstrate both her commitment to the Catholic religion and her generosity. This action does not seem to have made her any more acceptable to the ladies of Parisian society, whose reluctance to visit her she was reported to find aggravating. Barbara did not like being snubbed. Reservations about the duchess’s colourful reputation were not, however, shared by gentlemen in the French capital. Soon there were rumours of an affair with the archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon, duc de Saint Cloud, whose own private life was certainly not beyond reproach. The celebrated French lady of letters, Madame de Sévigné, would remark, in connection with the funeral oration delivered at his funeral, that there were only two trifles that made it difficult – his life and his death. Barbara also had an affair with the marquis de Châtillon, a gentleman of the bedchamber to Louis XIV, who sent her a number of love letters. If this relationship had the underlying intention of gaining access to useful information about the Sun King himself, it backfired spectacularly when some of the letters were intercepted by the English ambassador in Paris, Ralph Montagu, and sent back to Charles II in an attempt to discredit the duchess.7 Nor were the ambassador’s motives entirely patriotic, for he had been Barbara’s lover himself.

Ralph Montagu was typical of the ambitious, self-serving men of the period. The reign of Charles II is littered with politicians like Ralph, who saw in the hollowness of politics, the moral vacuum at the very centre of the regime, a means to self-advancement. He was, even so, a larger-than-life figure. Montagu came from a family whose loyalties were bitterly divided during the Civil Wars but the Restoration brought him office, first with the duchess of York and then as master of the horse to the queen. He had undertaken a mission to France early in Charles II’s reign and was gratified to receive the much more important posting of ambassador in 1669. His official entry to Paris was said to have been the most impressive by any diplomat but his first period of residence there ended after three years. Although he got wind of the negotiations surrounding the Secret Treaty of Dover, the king did not trust him to have any hand in them and Ralph was soon angling for higher office back at home. Ensuring that he had a wife whose fortune would underpin his longer-term goals, he married in 1673 Elizabeth Wriothesley, the widowed countess of Northumberland. This lady’s own hopes of a more glorious future as the second wife of James, duke of York, following the death of Anne Hyde, were dashed by the duke’s marriage to the Italian Catholic noblewoman, Mary of Modena. Ralph and Elizabeth’s union was uneasy and its early months saw Ralph briefly confined to the Tower of London for challenging the duke of Buckingham to a duel when Buckingham shoved him in the queen’s presence chamber. But though made a privy councillor and finding the funds to purchase the office of master of the great wardrobe, Montagu was sent back to Paris the same year that the duchess of Cleveland took up residence. It is not clear how well she knew Montagu before they both found themselves in what they saw as a kind of exile in France but it would have been natural for them to socialize. Both were philanderers by nature and so their mutual attraction is understandable.

Ralph Montagu’s reputation as a ladies’ man preceded him to Paris though it is far from obvious in his portrait. A thickset, heavy-jowled man under the fashionable enormous wig of the times, he looks more like a satiated judge than a nimble lover. And though quick of wit, mentally agile and an indefatigable correspondent, being gossipy and often full of inconsequential information, he certainly realized the importance of representing Louis XIV to Charles II as full of vanity and unloved by his subjects. Though never entirely satisfied with his lot, and still hoping for a position as secretary of state in England, he might have survived politically if he had not fallen foul of the duchess of Cleveland. For Ralph was to find that the old adage that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned was epitomized in the attitude of a formidable woman whom, it turned out, he had badly misjudged.

When Barbara returned briefly to England in the spring of 1678, she discovered that some of the love letters between herself and Châtillon had ended up in the possession of Charles II. It is not clear whether they were intercepted or opened and copies made, which were then sent across the English Channel. Either way, Barbara thought she knew who had betrayed her and her suspicions were correct. Ralph Montagu was responsible. His motives remain mysterious. Was he jealous or merely trying to be mischievous, hoping that he could curry favour with the king? Perhaps he had taken it upon himself to keep an eye on a woman known for her promiscuity and lack of discretion, in which case he might have been able to justify sleeping with her himself, in order to find out more about her life in Paris. It is much more likely, however, that he had another motive and it was one that Barbara found out about while in England. Never one to hang around, Ralph had taken advantage of her absence by starting an affair with her daughter, Anne.

The revelation left Barbara cold with fury and, while not confirming or denying the affair with Châtillon to Charles II while still in England, she determined to have her revenge on Ralph Montagu as soon as she returned to France. It was not merely that she had been replaced in the arms of the ambassador by her own eldest child but that he had so evidently played on Anne’s insecurities and unhappiness. Originally placed by her mother in a convent outside Paris, the wayward Anne had moved back into the centre of the French capital, ostensibly to a convent in Saint Germain. Most of her time was in fact spent with Montagu, ‘he being always with her till five o’clock in the morning, they two shut up together alone’, as Barbara informed the king in the first of two lengthy letters. She found the relationship between the ambassador and her daughter the talk of the town. ‘I am so much afflicted that I can hardly write this for crying, to see that a child that I doted on as I did on her, should make so ill a return and join with the worst of men to ruin me.’ And why had this happened? Because, she told Charles, she had spurned Ralph Montagu’s advances. She pleaded with her former lover not to let her be ruined by this ‘most abominable man.’ Deciding that it was time to confess, at least a little, she owned up to the fact ‘that I did write a foolish letter to the Chevalier de Chatillon’, which she excused on the grounds that love could make one do silly things.

Now that she had justified herself, Barbara went on an all-out attack on Montagu. She was determined to ruin him. ‘Nor will you, I hope, follow the advice of this ill man, who in his heart I know hates you, and were it for his interest would ruin you too if he could. For he has neither conscience nor honour and has several times told me that in his heart he despised you and your brother; and that for his part, he wished with all his heart that the parliament would send you both to travel, for you were a dull governable fool, and the duke a willful fool.’8 Even worse than Ralph’s unguarded comments about the king was the duchess’s assertion that he had found an astrologer through whom he hoped to influence Charles II, a reminder that the king, despite his interest in science, was still believed to be susceptible to more primitive forces. Ralph cheerfully acknowledged that his underlying aim in all this was to become Lord Treasurer. Then he could control the purse strings, supply the king with all the money and women that he wanted, and lead him, in Ralph’s own words, by the nose.

Aware that his career was on the line, though he seems to have felt that Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, was the main enemy, Ralph returned without permission to London, to plead his case personally with Charles. He did not get far into his explanation when the king interrupted him, demanding to know what could be so important that he had deserted his post. For Ralph, it was too late; he had been trumped by Barbara. He was removed from the ambassadorship in France, where he was replaced by the earl of Sunderland, and lost his place on the Privy Council. His political career, however, was far from over; he was elected as a member of Parliament and the French ambassador, Barrillon, soon recruited him as a source of information in return for a pension.

The affair was Barbara’s last foray into court politics. She had brought Montagu low, but the problem with Anne, her daughter, was not so conveniently solved. Anne seems, not unnaturally, to have resented her mother, and though she did go on to have children with her husband, to whom she returned, the marriage was never a success and the earl of Sussex and his wife separated in 1688. Though the king had acknowledged her, Roger Palmer still regarded her as his daughter and her relationship with him was better than that with her mother.

Roger’s life remained unpredictable. While abroad he had to deal not just with the difficulties of a self-imposed exile but also the constant importuning of his half-brother, Philip Palmer, and Philip’s equally desperate wife. To their frequent requests for monetary help, Roger responded with frigid politeness, saying, ‘I confess no letters can be more ungrateful to me than those that press me beyond my power; I thought your ladyship had known that I had disposed of my estate and consequently that it lay not now as much in my power to serve you as formerly, for though my brother is near to me yet I have those that are in blood nearer.’9 Barbara’s husband returned to England in 1677 and, as an active writer and Catholic apologist, found himself caught up in the Popish Plot. James II’s accession in 1685 saw him recognized for his loyalty to the Catholic religion and his diplomatic skills. He was despatched to Rome with considerable pomp as the new king’s ambassador extraordinary. James’s downfall meant that Roger was once again on the wrong side and he found himself in the Tower of London on suspicion of Jacobite sympathies, which he undoubtedly had. His quiet death in the Welsh Marches in 1705 finally released Barbara from her marriage of forty years. It was not quite the end of her story, as we shall see.

Barbara was a remarkable woman. Self-possessed and confident, she saw clearly how to derive the maximum advantage for herself and her children. It was not in her nature to be embarrassed, indeed she gloried in her role as the king’s mistress, determined that the telling combination of her beauty, connections and business sense would triumph over anyone who stood in her path. Her unabashed sexuality was unusual, even at a court renowned for its lack of any conventional morality. She had a mind that was both daring and calculating. Several ladies of the court, including Montagu’s sister, Lady Harvey, who challenged her behaviour and criticized her openly, came off worse in their struggle with the woman who had risen from the fringes of the aristocracy and genteel poverty to become a duchess in her own right. But the woman she wronged most, and whose life was forever changed by Barbara’s very existence, was the Portuguese princess whom Charles II married with notable lack of enthusiasm in 1662.