CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Mrs Carwell

‘I should do myself wrong if I told you that I love you better than all the world besides, for that were making a comparison where ’tis impossible to express the true passion and kindness I have for my dearest, dearest fubs’

Charles II to Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth

LOUISE SWIFTLY ATTAINED a status akin to that of a queen consort. Charles II adored her, finding comfort in her apparent pliability, her desire to please, her French good taste and even her increasing girth. ‘Fubs’ was an old English word for someone who was plump and the king used it as a term of endearment. He underlined his devotion by naming a new royal yacht The Fubs. If Louise was less than flattered by this very public reference to her expanding figure, she knew better than to protest. She had what amounted to her own court in Whitehall. English politicians scuttled to find favour while the French ambassadors smiled in satisfaction at the rising power of one of their countrywomen. Charles II’s financial generosity to Louise made her wealthy, though it was not until the autumn of 1676, five years after her arrival in England, that she was given a regular pension, amounting to £8,600 a year. This sum was later increased and, by the end of the reign, her overall pension and additional payments came to £20,000 per annum, or £59 million today. This is an astonishing figure given the permanent difficulties in raising money for the Crown that the king faced. And while it gave Louise security and a great deal of perceived influence, it also made her a target for sustained and vicious criticism. The English people detested her. Their hatred and scorn were made public in satire and scurrilous verse, in mock dialogues with Nell Gwyn and in accusations that the baby-faced Bretonne was nothing more than a very expensive French spy. They insulted her pride by anglicizing her surname. To her many detractors, in raucous hostelries and the coffee houses Charles II would eventually ban as hotbeds of sedition, she was always ‘Mrs Carwell’.

Piqued by this torrent of vituperation, Louise strove mightily to be accepted. She reached an early accommodation with her conscience about her role. Nell Gwyn may have been content with the knowledge that she was a royal whore but Louise was far too precious about her status to accept such an appellation. We do not need to accept the ridiculous story that she is alleged to have said, in pantomime English, ‘Me no bad woman. If me thought me was one bad woman, me would cut my own throat,’ to understand the aggravation caused by lines pinned to the door of her apartments which read, ‘Within this place a bed’s appointed for a French bitch and God’s anointed.’1 At a court full of jealous, preening ladies, the duchess of Portsmouth had more to contend with than a clever comic actress’s scathing wit. Two noblewomen, in particular, frowned on Louise de Kéroualle. Elizabeth, duchess of Ormond, the wife of the leading Irish aristocrat and one of the key supporters of Charles II during his exile in the 1650s, was the most implacable of these ladies. The duchess was now over sixty years old and had consistently made her disapproval of the king’s mistresses known. She had pointedly never visited Lady Castlemaine, to Barbara’s great annoyance, and when Louise tried to call on this elderly guardian of court morals, she was permitted an interview, though none of the duchess’s female relations were allowed to be present.

More dramatic was a confrontation between Louise and Mary, marchioness of Worcester, which took place in Tunbridge Wells in the summer of 1674. This went beyond personal slights in private to a very public and, according to one source, physical altercation. The dispute was over rooms that Lady Worcester had rented from under Louise’s nose. The duchess of Portsmouth, pulling rank, told the marchioness that she should give way. By now Louise was accustomed to getting what she wanted but she had met her match in Mary. ‘The marchioness told her she had better blood in her veins than e’er a French bitch in the world and that the English nobility would not be affronted by her, calling her tall bitch. There might you have seen their towers [headdresses] and hair flying about the room, as the miserable spoils of so fierce an encounter. The Marchioness beat her upon the face, got her down and kicked her, and finally forced her out of doors.’ Her husband had stood by during this fight and threatened anyone who tried to part the struggling women. Lady Worcester, emerging victorious, defiantly ‘bid the said Portsmouth go to Windsor and tell the King what she had said and done.’2 The incident does not seem to have done the Worcesters any harm. The marquis was later created first duke of Beaufort and his wife is remembered as a keen gardener and botanist, though a domestic tyrant to her servants.

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AMBITIOUS POLITICIANS VIEWED the duchess of Portsmouth very differently, though it took some time for her to establish her credit with them. By the mid-1670s, they accepted that she was a conduit to Charles II and made sure that they frequented her apartments, where they could enjoy exquisite soirées, tasteful musical entertainment and fine dining while socializing with the king in a relaxed atmosphere. The true extent of Louise’s political influence on her royal lover may well have been considerably less than his ministers imagined, but that did not matter. Her importance lay in the fact that they believed her to have his ear. Certainly, Louise saw herself as a political player, entering the fray with a confidence that was far from justified, given her unfamiliarity with English politics. The attentions of Charles II’s ministers flattered her sense of self-importance and buoyed up her confidence through bouts of recurring illness and Charles’s dalliances with other women. She wanted these men who sought high office to understand that she had her own kind of power. There is no way of knowing whether Louise generally initiated discussions with the king about appointments, or if he ever directly sought her views on such matters, but there was a widespread belief that the duchess of Portsmouth was such an indispensable part of his life that the best route to advancement was to gain her goodwill.

One politician who soon discovered that Louise de Kéroualle’s support could be fickle was the man who is credited with having pushed her into Charles II’s bed, Arlington himself. She dropped the earl in 1674, when he was the chief victim of a concerted campaign against the king’s ministers, prompted by England’s failure in the third Anglo-Dutch War. Charles II never seemed to be overly concerned by the abject (and very expensive) foreign-policy mistakes made during his reign, but blood was up in the House of Commons and they wanted a scapegoat. In mid-January 1674, Arlington was impeached after Buckingham laid the blame for the regime’s policies squarely at his door. He defended himself successfully in what was acknowledged to be a brilliant piece of oratory, something for which he was not known, but his period in high political office was over. He chose to leave government for the post of lord chamberlain in the king’s household, a role which still allowed him considerable influence as well as the opportunity to develop the royal image of power and magnificence along the lines of the French monarchy. He remained close to Charles II and retained the king’s friendship but Louise no longer saw him as a useful ally. Her failure to realize the extent of Arlington’s power in his new role, or how it might be used to the advantage of the French, is an indication of the brittle nature of her political understanding. Instead, Louise chose to bestow her friendship on the coming man, Thomas Osborne, the recently created earl of Danby.

Like Arlington, Danby is a name largely forgotten to English history, though he played a significant part in the politics of four reigns. He was a hard-headed Yorkshireman who had served a long apprenticeship in local politics as a client of the duke of Buckingham. Proud and ambitious, he had entered the national arena as member of Parliament for York in 1665. He soon became aware that the duke’s capacity to stir up trouble was greater than his reliability as a patron and that it would be prudent to develop other links, as well as ensuring that he had areas of his own expertise to offer. Accordingly, he attached himself to the duke of York and the Navy Office, where he learned a great deal about foreign policy, as well as demonstrating a talent for accounting and financial management in the role of joint treasurer to the navy. By 1673, he was in the important government post of Lord Treasurer for the country as a whole and had to make some hard decisions about national finances based on his understanding of the damage caused by the Dutch Wars. A convinced Protestant, he was committed to steadying and improving the country’s badly damaged finances and weaning Charles II away from his support of the French. Danby was concerned that the king’s own inclinations put him in danger of losing the support of his subjects, at least as these were represented in the House of Commons. He wrote:

Nothing is more necessary than to let the world see he [Charles II] will reward and punish and that no longer time must be lost therein, for that people begin already to think he will do neither. Nothing can spoil his affairs at home but unsteadiness of resolution in those steps he has begun and want of vigour to discountenance all such as pretend to others . . . Till he can fall into the humour of the people [the king] can never be great nor rich and while differences continue prerogative must suffer, unless he can live without Parliament.

And he went on to note that, ‘the condition of his revenue will not permit that.’3 This advice, some of the soundest Charles II ever received, had uncomfortable overtones of the difficulties that had beset the king’s father, Charles I, before the Civil Wars.

Given Danby’s support of the Church of England, which he saw as a vital ally in achieving his aims, and his antipathy to the French, it is, on the face of it, somewhat extraordinary that Louise should have shown any interest in working with him. Whatever their personal dissimilarities – Danby, as a faithful, loving husband and devoted father to a large family, must have found more than a little to dislike in the king’s simpering French Catholic mistress – they managed to forge a relationship of mutual benefit. There was little real friendship in it, as time would tell, but much of Louise’s attitude towards someone that she recognized was set to become a powerful politician was based on her need for money. Despite his concern for the king’s finances, Danby did not question Louise’s increasingly generous pensions.

They also cooperated in a dispute over the government of Ireland when an attempt was made to remove the earl of Essex as Charles II’s lord lieutenant there. Essex, the brother of the belligerent marchioness of Worcester, was a conscientious and moderate man, who found, as many had before him, that trying to govern Ireland was a thankless task. His attempts to improve the rotten state of Irish finances brought him into conflict with leading Irish politicians, who feared Essex would undo the lucrative practice of tax farming that made a few of them very rich. Among those who benefited from Irish monetary grants was Louise herself, so her support of Essex was far from altruistic. Essex realized that the support of someone like the duchess of Portsmouth was a double-edged sword, writing to his secretary, William Harbord, who had remained in England to protect his employer’s interests:

For my own part I cannot desire the friendship of any of that sort. To keep fair with them and all the world I shall be glad to do but to make any such friends so as to be useful, or a support to me, will necessarily oblige me to be assistant to them in finding out money . . . and if once I should begin there would be no end to it . . . as for what you write concerning the duchess of Portsmouth . . . I conceive the only use to be made [of her] is to learn a little of what is doing, but by no means will I fix my reliance upon little people.4

Louise would have been mortified by this scathing dismissal of her true value. Had she known, she would certainly not have spoken up for Essex to the king, telling Charles II that she heard he was a very good man ‘and serves you well.’ It does not seem to have occurred to the king to wonder what on earth Louise actually knew about Irish affairs but, as neither of them had ever set foot in the country, perhaps he thought her views were as good as anybody’s. By 1677, Louise had turned against Essex and was championing the duke of Monmouth as his replacement. If true, her efforts proved fruitless, for it was the time-worn Ormond, ever faithful to the Crown, who returned to his native Ireland and survived in charge of its seething tensions and political rivalries until Charles II’s death in 1685.

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AS WELL AS latching on to English politicians, Louise also had to manage her relationship with the country of her birth. Four successive ambassadors from the court of Louis XIV were her major contacts with France. Charles Colbert de Croissy, a younger brother of the Sun King’s chief finance minister, was in the post when Louise arrived. It was Colbert de Croissy who reported her seduction by Charles II at Euston Hall and though he thought this gave France an undoubted hold over the English king, his view of Louise herself was not always favourable. He lacked confidence in her staying power, given Charles II’s roving eye, and was irritated by Louise’s interference in the choice of a second wife for the duke of York after the death of Anne Hyde. Louise tried to interest the heir to the throne in one of the beautiful Elboeuf sisters, whereas the French court favoured the widowed duchess of Guise. In the end, neither party was successful. James chose the fifteen-year-old Italian noblewoman, Mary Beatrice d’Este, who became known as Mary of Modena. But Louise’s matchmaking efforts soured her already uncertain relations with Colbert de Croissy and threatened the respectability she sought in France as well as Britain. Louise had set her heart on a French title and estate and her pretensions offended the French ambassador. His family were renowned for their brusqueness and Colbert did not mince his words in reporting the duchess of Portsmouth’s vaulting ambition: ‘I own I find her on all occasions so ill-disposed for the service of the king [Louis XIV], and showing such ill-humour against France (whether because she feels herself despised there, or whether from an effect of caprice), that I really think she deserves no favour of his Majesty.’ However, he tempered this criticism with a realistic analysis of the lady’s hold over Charles II, acknowledging that the king’s likely reaction to the acceptance or refusal of Louise’s request must be taken into account: ‘But as the King of England shows her much love and so visibly likes to please her, his Majesty can judge whether it is best not to treat her according to her merits. An attention paid to her will be taken by the King of England as one paid to himself.’5

The estate on which Louise had set her hopes was the manor of Aubigny-sur-Nère, in the Berry region of central France. It was in the heart of the countryside, in what the French today call la France profonde, and it had a long association with foreign, rather than French, ownership, having originally been granted to John Stuart, the head of a branch of the Scottish royal family, who had made a career as a soldier and courtier in fifteenth-century France. Today, this pretty town with its half-timbered houses is still known as ‘the city of the Scots’ and proudly displays its historic associations with the Auld Alliance. In 1673, the dukedom was vacant following the death of Frances Teresa Stuart’s husband, the duke of Richmond, and the estate had, in theory, reverted to Charles II himself, as Richmond’s nearest male relative. He wanted to gift it to Louise for the rest of her life, with the additional assurance from Louis XIV that she could dispose of it freely. This proved something of a stumbling block. Louis took his cousin’s request to mean that the estate would eventually pass to Louise’s son by the king, but as little Charles was illegitimate and Charles II had no legally recognized male heirs apart from his brother, Louis’s first thought was that the lands and title should revert to the French Crown. Encouraged by Colbert de Croissy, and perhaps by his own lack of inclination towards a woman he viewed as potentially useful, but still something of an unknown quantity, with pretensions well above her place in society, Louis was not minded at first to meet Charles II’s request. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby it was agreed that Louise should have the estate during her lifetime but would not become a French duchess in her own right. The final arrangement did include a provision for Aubigny to pass to the male descendants of Louise’s son and only in default of them would it revert to the French Crown. Charles II was not actually granted the duchy of Aubigny by Louis XIV until March 1684, at the end of his reign.6

It seems that Louise was emboldened by the success over Aubigny to ask for further favours for her relations in France. Through the new French ambassador, Ruvigny, a Protestant, who kept his feelings about Louise to himself, she asked Louis XIV for a position as abbess for her aunt and the office of procurer-general of the Estates of Brittany for a male relative. Both requests were refused, though the blow to Louise’s self-esteem was somewhat offset by the present of an expensive pair of earrings from the French king. But while the duchess of Portsmouth’s place in the king’s affections was recognized in England soon after her arrival, it was not until 1675 that Louis, his ministers and ambassadors demonstrated any belief that she might have tangible political influence in England. They wanted Charles II to dissolve his strongly anti-French Parliament and hoped that Louise could encourage him to do so. In fact, Parliament was prorogued for fifteen months but the impetus – apart from Charles’s consistently fraught relationship with his legislators – is more likely to have come from the grant of 100,000 crowns that he accepted from the French than from any blandishments coming from Louise de Kéroualle. His paymasters insisted that he make formal acknowledgement of such payments in writing and kept his receipts in the records of their Ministry for Foreign Affairs. ‘I have received,’ he wrote, in his own hand, in September 1676, ‘from his most Christian Majesty, by the hands of M. Courtin, the sum of a hundred thousand crowns, French money . . . to be deducted from the four hundred thousand crowns payable at the end of this year.’7

The Monsieur Courtin referred to in Charles II’s businesslike note was the ambassador who replaced Ruvigny in 1676. Honoré Courtin was a genial and cultured man from a prominent Parisian family. He was an experienced diplomat who had already spent time in England and he knew Louise from her time at the French court. But though Louise had been in England for six years, Courtin was the first French diplomat whose instructions explicitly mentioned Louise and the service that might be expected of her. Distrust of her motives and dislike of her pretensions had made Louis XIV and his foreign ministers, Louvois and Pomponne, slow to realize Louise’s potential. Now they considered that she could, in effect, become a spy, passing on information and representing French interests in her day-to-day relations with Charles II.

The belated recognition of Louise’s usefulness may seem like an oversight but it should be remembered that Charles II was not the focus of Louis XIV’s attention. England could be useful to him but his schemes were on a grand European scale and the situation of his cousin, in a country known for its internal restiveness, did not necessarily inspire confidence. He was happy to send Charles financial sweeteners, since they had little impact on his own exchequer, and to take British military aid in his endless wars, but it was not an alliance of equals. In this respect, the relationship between Charles II and Louis XIV has parallels with that of Henry VIII and the emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century, and Charles II’s disastrous foreign policy is a salutary reminder that, while Frances Teresa Stuart may have sat for the portrait of Britannia that graced British coinage, it would be a long time before Britannia ruled the waves.

Despite her friendship with the strongly anti-French Danby, there were clearly advantages in encouraging Louise. She had been shown kindness by Louis XIV and was expected to repay it. It was time to profit from the English king’s known weakness for women. Yet though Louise evidently did form a working relationship with Courtin, who pointed out to Louis XIV the advantages of his twice-daily access to Louise’s apartments, where the king was often to be found, their influence over Charles II’s actions was minimal. He listened but then made up his own mind. And in 1677, Courtin was replaced by Paul Barrillon d’Armoncourt, marquis de Branges. His instructions, as regards Louise, reiterated the usefulness of her access to the English king while still refusing her continued requests for positions for her relatives in France.

Barrillon arrived in London in August 1677 and was immediately faced with a delicate situation. James, duke of York had given his permission for his elder daughter, Mary (the second in line to the British throne), to marry her cousin, William of Orange, the son of James and Charles II’s sister, Princess Mary Stuart. This development dismayed the French, since William himself had a claim to the throne of Britain via his mother, and the possibility that the union might upset the balance of power in northern Europe was something that Louis XIV and his advisers correctly anticipated, though eleven years would pass before their fears were realized. Charles II appears to have used Louise to convey soothing words to the French about his nephew’s marriage but he was prepared to risk their displeasure because he was well aware of William’s popularity in England. That popularity did not extend to the distraught bride herself. Fifteen-year-old Mary was ripening into a great beauty but her education was patchy; she lacked the Greek and Latin of Queen Elizabeth I, though her French was fluent and she was more widely read than some of her biographers have supposed. But she had lived quietly at Richmond Palace during her girlhood and was now to have her entire existence changed in ways that would have challenged someone of considerably greater maturity. Her chief pastimes were playing cards, gardening and writing impassioned letters to female friends. She had in abundance the looks her much shorter husband obviously lacked (her sister, Princess Anne, called him Caliban, after the monster on Prospero’s island in The Tempest), and Mary found the idea of marrying him so repellent that she is said to have wept solidly for eighteen hours when told of her forthcoming nuptials.

Louise had known William of Orange since she arrived in England and he was often in her apartments during his visits to his uncle. While this is indicative of the widely accepted realization that anyone who wanted more informal access to Charles II would find him with his French mistress, it should not necessarily be interpreted as demonstrating any warmth between Louise and William themselves. Indeed, if such feeling had ever existed, it was soon to be snuffed out, overtaken by events. The political landscape was changing. In January 1679, the Cavalier Parliament was dissolved after twenty-eight difficult years. The king hoped for a more accommodating House of Commons but he had disastrously miscalculated. The general election the following month returned a House that favoured the opposition by a margin of two to one. The great crisis of Charles II’s troubled reign was approaching. In its swirling currents, not just Louise but the restored Stuart dynasty itself would be nearly swept away.