CHAPTER 5

His Present Deplorable Condition

The prelude to Charles’ next eight and a half years was succinctly written by Hyde:

Though this wonderful deliverance and preservation of the person of the king was an argument of general joy and comfort to all his good subjects, and a new seed of hope for future blessings, yet his present condition was very deplorable.²

The political situation in those countries to which he looked for succour had deteriorated sharply in his absence. In the Netherlands the States-General had celebrated the death of William of Orange by striking a medal whose legend ran, ‘The last hour of the prince is the beginning of freedom’. They refused to allow his posthumously born son to inherit his offices. The stadtholdership was left vacant and the posts of admiral and captain-general abolished. They refused to allow Mary to exercise guardianship of the boy, establishing instead a council of which she was only one member. The Princess of Orange, or, as she insisted on being called, the Princess Royal of England, thus became the latest of the Stuarts to be deprived of political power. But she had too much of her mother in her to allow herself to become a cipher. She continued to fight for what she considered her son’s inalienable rights and she became more determined than ever to give all the assistance in her power to her benighted family. Mary deliberately cultivated all things French at her own court and lost no opportunity to let the Dutch leaders know that she held them and their countrymen in contempt as uncivilised boors. This was, to say the least, a somewhat sweeping condemnation to make of ‘Golden Age’ Holland. Riding through the streets of the Hague the princess can hardly have been unaware that the city was undergoing an architectural rebirth, or that it was famed for its printers, silversmiths and potters. It was the capital of a nation which boasted geniuses in every branch of human endeavour and which rivalled the states of Italy in devotion to painting. A foreign visitor to the land of Rembrandt, Hals, Terborch, Teniers, van Goyen, de Hooch and Ruisdael commented on the democratisation of art: ‘All in general … adorn their houses … with costly pieces; butchers and bakers … blacksmiths and cobblers, etc., will have some pictures or other’.³

Mary’s consuming interest was the wellbeing of her Stuart relatives. Though her relationship with her mother went through some stormy passages she was devoted to her and she was prepared to spend and be spent in the service of her exiled siblings. This had repercussions on the political life of the Netherlands. The States-General wanted to normalise relations with the de facto government of England. Part of the price exacted for fraternalism between the two Protestant states was that the Dutch republic should not provide a refuge for the sons of the traitor Charles Stuart. This made for very difficult negotiations between London and the Hague, a city which pursued an open door policy to the persecuted of all nations. Mary’s contribution to the process of international understanding was to parade every day past the English ambassador’s residence with her entire suite and her brother James at her side. She was encouraged in her haughty demeanour by her aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, an embittered old woman who constantly lamented her poverty and managed to fall out with almost all her many children.

France was in chaos. The Second Fronde had erupted in 1650 and was much more devastating than the first. It was led by Louis, Prince de Condé, one of the most talented generals of the Thirty Years War, and other powerful magnates who, by raising their tenantry, spread revolt and misery in several parts of the country. Once discontent with centralised government had been manifested there was no controlling its expression. Provincial agents were murdered, churches pillaged, mobs swarmed through city streets, soldiers ravaged the countryside. In terms of sheer spontaneous, unorganised devastation it was worse than anything that had occurred in England during a decade of civil war. France was marked, in the words of one historian, by ‘gangsterdom above, anarchy below and humiliation without’.⁴

In February 1651 the Frondeurs had forced the hated Mazarin into exile and, in July of the following year, Condé took possession of Paris. This event had direct implications for Charles in that it demonstrated yet again that he was nothing more than a sideshow in the fairground of European politics. Henrietta Maria had revived her plan to marry her son off to Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Charles was no longer the tongue-tied youth of five years before and now welcomed with cold calculation a scheme which would whisk him out of the poverty trap. As for the lady in question, she was still in want of a prestigious husband, and Charles was a king, if only in name. It seemed that, this time, there might really be an outside chance of pulling off a matrimonial coup. Then, La Grande Mademoiselle decided to become a player in the political game. She threw in her lot with Conde and was actually to be seen in soldier’s garb, manning the barricades. This made her the enemy of the queen regent, upon whose meagre bounty the Stuarts were dependent.

That formidable matriarch, Anne of Austria, now proved herself a mistress of Machiavellian political calculation. She patronised division among the Frondeurs by the simple expedient of bribing some of the leaders to turn against Condé. Her agents fomented disaffection among the Parisian bourgeoisie, who now turned their resentment away from Mazarin, who had fled the capital, and directed it against the swaggering princelings and their indisciplined followers, who looted shops and disrupted trade with the provinces. What the Frondes demonstrated was that the diverse parties, united in their position to absolute monarchy, could not sustain their cohesion. ‘Divide and rule’, the age-old technique employed by determined and politically acute dictators, was still the most effective means of dealing with rebellion. In October 1652, it was Condé’s turn to retreat from a capital whose citizenry had turned against him. The thirteen-year-old Louis XIV and his mother were cheered as they returned to their palace and, weeks later, Mazarin joined them. By the autumn of 1653 royal troops had mopped up the last pockets of resistance and ‘The Great Condé’ had fled to Spain with a price on his head. Seven years later the French king showed how much he had learned from his tutor, Mazarin. He stripped the arrogant and headstrong prince of any possibility of remaining a potential opposition figurehead by the simple expedient of forgiving him. Condé was embraced by his sovereign and given an honoured place at court – where the king could keep an eye on him.

The conduct of French politics in the 1650s provided Charles with an object lesson. The cardinal and his royal charge set about laying the foundation of a centralised and powerful state. They did so in a calmly calculated way which made no concessions to sentiment, ethics, principle or religious allegiance. In foreign affairs they did not hesitate to sponsor rebellions in the territories of their enemies nor to make a defensive/offensive alliance with Cromwell’s England, one of the terms of which was the expulsion of the Stuarts from their French sanctuary. However, Louis’ government did not hurry to fulfil this treaty obligation and for the moment the Stuart court had a home. Charles welcomed the triumph of his French cousin in 1653. The restoration of the royal court brought him and his mother once more into the centre of Parisian social life. The round of balls and banquets was resumed, the Stuarts being obliged to borrow wherever they could money to spend on court clothes so as not to be embarrassed in the sight of French high society. It was all very gay but Charles quickly learned that any sense of security was an illusion.

Meanwhile, he had his own political affairs to set in order. Once more this involved strenuous efforts to keep his domineering mother at arm’s length. His first task was to set up his own council. He sent for Hyde, who was at Antwerp, but Henrietta Maria could not prevent her old animosity from coming to the surface. She despatched her messenger with instructions, as from the king, to order all royal servants not to come to Paris since Charles was undecided how long to stay there. Hyde was not taken in by this ruse and reached his master’s court in time to celebrate Christmas. The queen dowager was obliged to give way with as good a grace as possible but she made plain her animosity towards the man she considered her most influential opponent. She refused to receive Hyde and snubbed him whenever they met by chance. Encountering him at a court masque, she asked loudly of those around her, ‘Who is that fat man?’ Nor did she lessen her efforts to minimise his influence. She tried to neutralise him by placing more of her own men on the council. Charles accepted Jermyn, her creature, because he was an invaluable intermediary with the French court but he put his foot down when she pressed him to add the name of Jermyn’s kinsman, Sir John Berkeley, to the list of advisers. Berkeley, a devoted but not notably effective intriguer, was, according to Burnet, ‘a very weak man and corrupt, without shame or decency’ and an example of the phenomenon of ‘with how little true judgement courts distribute favours and honours’. Sir Edmund Wyndham thought him ‘the greatest vapourer^fn1 in the world’ and Pepys later discovered him to be ‘the most hot, fiery man in discourse, without any cause, that ever I saw’.⁵ He was certainly incandescent at having his advancement balked and swore eternal enmity to Hyde.

The atmosphere in the impoverished and increasingly disillusioned household of the exiled king was poisonous, as the tortuous biography of Sir Robert Long well illustrates. This able Stuart servant was appointed secretary to the prince’s council in 1644 and occupied that position almost continuously throughout the difficult years that followed. He enjoyed the patronage of Henrietta Maria and was considered as belonging to her faction. However, there seems to have been a falling-out between the secretary and his friends and, in 1652, the queen dowager’s agents tried to prise him out of office. They backed a spurious accusation by a certain Colonel Wogan that Long was a traitor who had earlier been in secret correspondence with the parliamentary general, Henry Ireton, and, specifically, that he had betrayed Great Torrington into the hands of the enemy. Long was summarily dismissed. In his anger he suspected (or was informed) that Hyde was behind the conspiracy. Now the Louvre party (as Henrietta Maria’s faction was called) realised that they could use the exsecretary’s resentment. They concocted a story that it was, in fact, Edward Hyde who was in the pay of the hated republicans. A serving woman, they affirmed, would give evidence of a clandestine meeting between Hyde and Cromwell. Long was uncertain how this story would be received by the king and waited over a year before passing it on to Charles via an intermediary, who was sworn not to reveal his source. Charles, however, insisted on getting to the bottom of the affair, which quickly evaporated in the glare of accurate scrutiny, though not before Long had petulantly passed on a complaint made by Hyde of how difficult it was to get the king to attend to business. Hyde was exonerated and Long remained for the time being in limbo.

The struggle for influence with the king was unremitting and the efforts to displace his most trusted advisers produced some bizarre alliances. While the Louvre party wanted Charles to look towards Catholics at home and Catholic princes abroad as his surest hope, a group of Presbyterian Scots in Paris were equally adamant that their fellow countrymen still constituted the most effective potential force for helping Charles regain his throne. The two religious factions had nothing in common, save their hatred of Hyde and the other councillors who continually impressed upon the king that any deviation from the theological and liturgical settlement represented by the Church of England would be fatal to his chances of restoration. Charles knew very well that they were right. He had had enough experience of ordinary English men and women to realise that they would never return to the Roman fold or embrace the religious fervour of the Scots. The party enthusiasts, however, were blind to these realities. They combined to agree a common policy: they would present petitions to the king asking for the dismissal of Hyde. This improbable scheme only failed when a member of the whispering gallery that was the Stuart court sneaked details of it to the king. Charles thought it a huge joke and ‘made himself very merry with the design, and spake of it sometimes at dinner when the queen was present, and asked pleasantly when the two petitions would be brought’.⁶ These petty intrigues were among the few things which did give him genuine amusement in these grey days when past, present and future coalesced in a blur of meaninglessness. Like a boy watching the antics of insects in a jar, he liked to consider himself above the jealousies and animosities of his companions. Shortly after the petitions fiasco he restored Long to his office – after extracting from him an apology to Hyde. It was, Charles discovered, always more pleasurable and less stressful to be forgiving, agreeable and easygoing.

But the malice was real and manifested on a daily basis. In council meetings Hyde and Ormonde were opposed almost as a matter of course by Jermyn and Wilmot. Moreover, the queen dowager’s supporters constantly humiliated their opponents. While Hyde and Ormonde were on exceedingly short commons, living in cheap accommodation and obliged to walk the streets of the capital, Jermyn kept an ostentatiously lavish table and went everywhere in a carriage put at his disposal by his French backers. Henrietta Maria was pursuing an active proselytising policy among prominent exiles, her main agent being Stephen Goffe, the Anglican priest who had brought Charles the news of his father’s death. Converted to Catholicism in 1651, he was now an ideal lieutenant in the queen dowager’s religious campaign. In her designs she made the best possible use of her French family. She continued her quest for suitable brides for both of her sons and she could always rely on the emotional support of Anne of Austria. The French queen also knew what it was to have to hold her own in a man’s world and could sympathise when Henrietta Maria complained of Englishmen who tried to come between her and her firstborn.

When Hyde commented on his master’s lack of enthusiasm for business he was not being pernickety. Charles grew daily more despondent about his ability to make any impression on the course of events. The attempt to regain his throne by military means had been a fiasco. Nothing had come of various schemes to make a financially advantageous marriage. Even a plan to recover the Scottish royal regalia had to be abandoned. The treasure was held in one of the last royalist coastal strongholds. In the spring of 1652, Princess Mary fitted out a ship and put it at her brother’s disposal for a quick raid. In the event, there was nothing quick about it. Arguments and changes of plan delayed the expedition long enough for news of it to reach London and for Commonwealth troops to be deployed. A brief sortie into European statesmanship had, similarly, ended in humiliation. In the summer of 1652 Queen Anne’s government found a job for him. The Duke of Lorraine was an adventurer with a private army available to the highest bidder. Currently he was supporting Condé, and Anne wanted to bribe him into changing sides. Charles was sent as a negotiator whose royal status would, it was hoped, impress the duke. It did not. Lorraine asked the king to arrange for Lord Jermyn to come instead because he carried more weight in the French court. By the time Charles got back to Paris it had fallen to Condé. The prince offered him another snub by packing him off ignominiously to Saint-Germain, from where he could only watch while the royal general, Henri, vicomte de Turenne, regained control of the capital.

What made matters worse for Charles was that his brother, James, was serving, and serving rather effectively, in Turenne’s army. While the king had been absent in Scotland and England, the Duke of York had conceived a strong passion for a military career and been encouraged in this by some of his advisers. Henrietta Maria was not enthusiastic to see her son put his life at risk and no decision could be made while Charles was, himself, fighting across the water. Should any misfortune befall him, all Stuart hopes would be concentrated on the heir apparent. So James had to chafe at the bit until his brother’s safe return. Early in 1652 Charles summoned the duke and their mother to a council meeting to discuss James’ possible enlistment. As they all sat round the table the king called for comments. There was silence and a distinct lack of eye contact. No one was privy to Charles’ thoughts and feelings on the matter and no one was ready to commit himself in what was essentially a family issue. The relations between both brothers and their domineering mother were uneasy and Charles was finding the headstrong and stubborn James something of a handful. The king, himself, was undecided. There would be a definite financial advantage in allowing the duke to earn his own living but letting him disport himself on the field of honour would carry a double risk. One was that he might get himself killed and thus weaken the Stuart hold upon their throne. The other was that he might cover himself in glory and so outshine his brother and sovereign. Charles may well also have asked himself why he should permit James to escape the claustrophobia and penury of Paris which he was doomed to endure once more. In the end it was the financial argument that carried the day, supported by the urgings of the Louvre party that the king would find his brother’s military skills valuable in any future attempt to regain the throne. Thus, in April, James went off to join Turenne. He rapidly showed himself to be, if not a brilliant, certainly a brave and dedicated soldier of above average skill in battlefield tactics. He had discovered his métier and loved it. Charles had not and did not.

The repeated blows to Charles’ self-respect could not fail to influence his character. Here he was in Paris, an unwelcome guest, living on handouts from his mother’s family, from sacrificial donations which came to him from fellow exiles who had hitched their stars to his cumbrous wagon and from the offerings of well-wishers at home which were collected by agents who risked their own lives to support a monarch who spent his income trying vainly to keep up with the continental royal Joneses. As month gave way to hopeless month the trickle of funds dwindled. More and more royalist families were coming to terms with reality and making their peace with the new regime in London. It was a matter of sheer survival. Their estates had been confiscated. They lived as long as they could on whatever liquid capital they had managed to escape with. As that dried up they were obliged to return, make grovelling submission and compound for their property. They were doing no more than their political superiors. Mazarin, the Dutch States-General and other European rulers had accepted the English fait accompli and were doing business with the republican government in London. There was an element of resigned pragmatism in James’ choice of a military career. It grew progressively harder for Charles to sustain self-belief and commitment to the righteousness of his cause. The burden of expectation placed upon him by his family and the little coterie of devoted followers who expected him to defend his birthright to the last drop of Stuart blood as long as there remained any hope of a reversal of fortune was oppressive. To stay sane was to live for the day and not to brood on the morrow.

One possible source of substantial income for the court in exile was piracy. Royalist privateers were commissioned to scour the nearer seas for English merchant vessels to plunder. The leading maritime scavenger in Stuart service was Prince Rupert, who, from the autumn of 1650 to the spring of 1653 prowled the Atlantic and Mediterranean and captured several prizes. Unfortunately, he also lost many of his own vessels and had to deploy most of his loot in keeping the rest of his fleet in seaworthy condition. News of Rupert’s safe return to France filled Charles and his entourage with joy and eager expectation. The king sent his own coach to meet his cousin and greeted him warmly on his arrival at court. However, the atmosphere cooled when Rupert made his report on the subject of the profits of the voyage. There were none.

… what treasure had been gotten together (which he confessed had amounted to great value) had been all lost in the ship in which he himself was, that sprung a plank in the Indies, when his highness was miraculously preserved and in the boat carried to another ship … [and] with all the men and all that had been gotten sunk in the sea … much of their other purchase had been likewise cast away in the ship in which his brother [Prince Maurice] perished … so that all that was brought into Nantes would scarce pay off the seamen and discharge some debts at Toulon …⁷

When Rupert was pressed for detailed accounts he flew into a rage, claimed that the king and his councillors were all against him and that his arduous service was poorly repaid. He left the court in high dudgeon and Charles was more than content to let him go. The king, forced by circumstance into unheroic idleness, found the company of men of action disagreeable, especially when they were as unmanageable as Rupert, whom he privately described as ‘mad’.

Someone else with whom the king parted company at about the same time was Thomas Hobbes. The witty ex-tutor published Leviathan in 1651 and, on Charles’ return to Paris, the author presented him with a beautiful copy on vellum. The result was not what he had hoped. His majesty,

being afterward informed by some of his priests that the book did not only contain many principles of atheism and gross impiety … but also such as were prejudicial to the Church and reflected dangerously upon the majesty of sovereign princes … when Mr Hobbes came to make a tender of his services to him in person, he was rejected and word brought to him by the Marquis of Ormonde that the king would not admit him … by which means Mr Hobbes declines in credit with his friends there of the royal stamp …⁸

Hobbes hastily returned to England and made his peace with the republic. It is extremely unlikely that Charles read the treatise and formed his own judgement but he was influenced by people from all parties in the royal entourage. This is not surprising. Hobbes was too independent and original a thinker not to be a challenge to men with blinkered vision on matters of monarchical or ecclesiastical authority. Though he believed in strong government, the philosopher had no romantic attachment to the Stuart cause and was not prepared to dissemble in order to win favours. There has seldom been room for honest and outspoken men in the courts of kings and there certainly was none in that of Charles II in exile. When Charles came into his own he once more extended royal favour to Hobbes – a characteristic, patronising gesture, based not upon any attempt to understand the man’s observations about human relationships, but simply to enjoy his stimulating company. ‘Here is the bear, come to be baited,’ he would say to his companions as the aged philosopher approached.

When Sir Robert Long ‘blabbed’ about Hyde’s complaining that the king neglected business and sought diversion in pleasure, he spoke no more than the truth. The king’s longest-serving councillor had always experienced a degree of frustration with his master’s lack of enthusiasm for desk work but the problem grew worse after Worcester. In June 1653 he confided to his colleague, Sir Edward Nicholas,

When anything is to be done by the king’s own hand we must sometimes be content to wait, he being brought very unwillingly to the work, which vexes me exceedingly … if I did not serve the king for God’s sake, I would not stay here a day longer …⁹

What particularly annoyed Hyde was that the king was no empty-headed voluptuary, incapable of attending to state affairs. On the contrary: ‘he hath more judgement and understanding by many degrees than many who pretend it and that is the only thing that breaks my heart, that he makes no more use of it’.¹⁰ Charles’ disinclination to the more tedious aspects of kingship was born of his earlier lack of training and his current depression. Everything was going wrong for him and the future looked bleak. There was little incentive for an active young man to bury himself in reports and policy discussions which seemed irrelevant to the destiny of his country and his dynasty. And he was a young man, with all that that implied, as Hyde openly, if ruefully, acknowledged:

… there are and always will be some actions of appetite and affection committed which cannot be separated nor banished from the age of twenty-one and which we must all labour by good counsel to prevent and divert … kings are of the same mould and composition as other men and must have the same time to be made perfect …¹¹

Mademoiselle de Montpensier was more curt in her memoirs. Remarking that Charles inclined to his French rather than to his English genetic inheritance, she explained, ‘car les Bourbons sont gens fort appliqués aux bagatelles et peu aux solides’.¹²

Both these observations are discreet and tell us nothing about how Charles actually was filling his days. It would be tempting, as many historians have done, to go along with the high Victorian S.R. Gardiner’s sweeping analysis that Charles’ mood on his return from England was such that he consoled himself ‘in low debauchery for the kingdoms he had lost’,¹³ but that verdict oversimplifies the king’s reaction to his fate. Cromwellian spies delighted to send home salacious reports about the king’s circle and to note that ‘fornication, drunkenness and adultery are not considered sins’ in the Stuart court.¹⁴ But even among these hostile, prudish witnesses there were those who acknowledged that the king distanced himself to some degree from the carousings of his companions. Charles was fully aware that his behaviour was under daily scrutiny by his enemies and he was far too streetwise to provide them with gratuitous ammunition they could use to further jeopardise his prospects of a return to England. It amused him to have witty and raffish companions who cared little for convention but he did not allow them to set the tone for his own behaviour. Hobbes was not the only person to be swiftly removed from his presence for fear of contagion with ideas or actions that might defile the royal image. The entertainments an impoverished, peregrinatory prince could afford to indulge, according to Commonwealth newsbooks, were no more scandalous than ‘hunting, dancing, balls and masking’ and other sources tell us that Charles also enjoyed gambling, billiards, swimming and brisk walks. His sins were those prompted by ennui, despair and laziness rather than unrestrained hedonism and he always exercised refinement and discretion.

This certainly applied to his sexual liaisons. John Evelyn commented sourly to Samuel Pepys in 1667 that Lady Byron, whom Charles bedded in 1652, was ‘the king’s seventeenth whore abroad’,¹⁵ but it is an assertion that cannot be taken at face value. Who kept such an exact tally? If there were that many royal mistresses how is it that only the names of four (five if we include Jane Lane) are known? And if the king’s bed was seldom empty why were there not more resulting Stuart bastards (Charles was never reticent about acknowledging his offspring)? The conclusion that must be drawn is that, at this stage of his life, the exiled King of England was no more promiscuous than other contemporary rulers, including his relatives, the King of France and the Prince of Orange. He certainly was not much of a catch for women who looked for a sound return on the investment of their physical charms. (Courtesans were nothing if not calculating.)

But there was always the delectable Lucy. Theirs was an intense relationship, as passionate in its beginning as it was coldly rancorous in its ending. We do not stray beyond the bounds of historical accuracy if we imagine Charles, during his womanless days in Scotland, his campaigning months before Worcester and the fugitive weeks that followed, longing to be reunited with his bold, brown mistress and their son. On his return to Paris he was in for a surprise. It is possible but perhaps unlikely that news of Lucy’s infidelity would have reached him while he was involved in the military struggle for his kingdom. When they met the evidence was irrefutable: Lucy had a baby daughter. The father, or so it has usually been believed, was Lord Taaffe, the very man entrusted with oversight of the young woman’s wellbeing. This casual alliance was taken as further evidence by those opposed to the king’s relationship with Lucy that she was no more than a common strumpet.

Most historians who have attempted to untangle the Lucy Walter mystery have been concerned either to endorse this verdict or to whiten Lucy’s reputation. Feeling a way through the tortuous maze of accusation, counter-accusation and conspiracy is a task verging on the impossible. Lucy Walter’s story has all the drama and convolutions of romantic fiction, and truth might be as well served by a novelist as by a historian. Two facts are beyond doubt: Lucy did have a daughter, christened Mary, and Charles was not the father. Whether or not Taaffe indulged his desires with Lucy, he betrayed the trust that his king had, seemingly, imposed upon him. But that is not how seventeenth-century social morality would have judged the matter. In sexual misdemeanours 75 per cent of the blame was always attributed to the woman. It need not therefore surprise us that Taaffe did not forfeit his master’s favour and that relations between Charles and Lucy suffered a blow from which they did not recover. This was certainly unfair by any objective standard. ‘Mrs Barlow’s’ lover had gone off to the wars. During the sixteen months of their separation rumours concerning Charles’ fate were rife on the continent and one very strong story told of his death in battle. This cannot fail to have devastated Lucy. She and her son were faced with destitution in a foreign land. She could not look to the Stuart family for succour. On Charles’ presumed death all their hopes were focused on his heir, James. Lucy and her offspring no longer had any place in the scheme of things. They might even be regarded as a potential threat to the tranquil transition of the Crown from Charles to his brother. Lucy was desperately in need of a new protector and had only one way of attracting one.

It goes without saying that, while Charles considered himself free to engage in a variety of amours, he expected Lucy to keep herself for him. However, there was no immediate estrangement. Hyde recorded, with infuriating vagueness, that Lucy ‘lived afterwards for some years in France in the king’s sight’.¹⁶ From his exceedingly slender means Charles made provision for her and the boy. He managed to find £400 a year. In 1655, a much increased pension of 5,000 livres was authorised by royal warrant. This figure, so vastly in excess of anything the king or his ministers could lay their hands on, was never paid. It was offered as hush money after the relationship had disintegrated to the point at which Lucy was threatening to make a nuisance of herself.

But the magic had gone out of the affair long before matters came to that pass. It may be that Lucy was making unrealistic demands, attempting to cling to her privileged position as her lover’s ardour cooled. She began to be an embarrassment to those who had previously looked kindly upon her for the king’s sake. The time arrived when Henrietta Maria asked Hyde’s help in having removed from her court a woman whose behaviour had become insufferable and it seems almost certain that this was Lucy Walter, driven by insecurity to assert her ‘rights’ with increasing desperation as her position grew steadily more untenable.

Other women, with less justification though no less determination, looked for financial support to the impoverished king. One such was Eleanor, Lady Byron. She was the young second wife of the much older John, first Baron Byron, one of the staunchest adherents to the Stuart cause. John was a soldier by profession, who had learned his craft in the Low Countries and had served his king with courage and dedication on most of the major Civil War battlefields. Only when hope of military success was abandoned had he escaped to Paris to place his services at the disposal of his late master’s queen. Subsequently he was appointed superintendent of the Duke of York’s household and did all in his power to stir a longing for military valour in James and to secure for him a place in the French army. Byron was one of the seven leading royalists specifically exempted from any possibility of pardon by the parliament in London. He was a man of the camp and not of the court, uncomfortable with the fripperies of Parisian life and the claustrophobic intrigues of the royal council. Both his marriages were childless and it may be that his wives saw little of him in more senses than one. Whatever attraction there was between Charles and Eleanor, it would have been unthinkable for the king to have cuckolded a man who had spent himself and his fortune to the uttermost in the royal cause. It was not until after Byron’s death in August 1652 that he and the widow became lovers.

We know nothing of their relationship apart from the scathing reminiscences of Evelyn and Pepys. According to them the ‘whore’ tried to squeeze money from the impoverished monarch during his exile and successfully extorted a promise of £4,000 worth of plate after the Restoration (though, ‘thanks be to God, she died before she had it’).¹⁷ There must be another side to the story alluded to by these censorious gossips. Eleanor was one more female victim of her menfolk’s wars. Married to an absentee husband, she had been conveyed abroad, probably with little or no say in the matter, and been obliged to share his uncomfortable exile. There could be no question of returning to England. The Byron estates had been sequestered and her own family were deeply embroiled in royalist intrigue. Her brother, Charles, Viscount Kilmorey, died in prison a few years later after a failed uprising. As to the family of her first husband, the Warburtons, she could look for no succour there, for they were high in favour with the new regime. Therefore, it was only reasonable for her to seek support from the king for whom she had sacrificed home, comfort, social standing and the prospect of a peaceful and respected life.

The shadowy women who were part of Charles’ life in Fronde-torn Paris and the subsequent disturbed years form a distinct category. The king’s sexual relationships during his wanderings were quite different from those he indulged after his return to the throne. He and his mistresses were living in a house of cards, grabbing what pleasures and comforts were available to them in the knowledge that they probably had nothing better to look forward to. They were comrades in misfortune, sharing a precarious lifestyle to which the constraints of conventional morality, while demanding the employment of discretion, may have seemed irrelevant. What they all needed was comfort in the midst of misfortune. Daily entertainments took their minds off their predicament. Nightly trysts encouraged the women to hope that their lover would look after their interests and boosted Charles’ fragile self-confidence.

Charles’ close relationship with Lucy Walter seems to have petered out by the end of 1653, for the next sighting we have of her is the following year in Brussels, where she had found a new protector. Trouble was just around the corner for her and the king but, meanwhile, Charles had his hands full sorting out dissension among his female relatives. Henrietta Maria was still trying to control the lives of her children and they still resented it. She took every opportunity to drive a wedge between them and Sir Edward Hyde. In 1652 there arose a complaint that she was using Princess Mary’s closest confidante, Lady Stanhope, to thwart the policies of the king’s ministers. This lady, whose second husband, John Kirkhoven, Lord of Heenvliet, was the superintendent of Mary’s household, had been at the princess’s side ever since her arrival in the Low Countries. She enjoyed her mistress’s complete trust and after the death of William the two women were inseparable. Because Lady Stanhope had always been a favourite of the queen dowager, Hyde, genuinely fearing her influence at the Orange court which was so vital to the king’s interests, urged Charles to remonstrate with his sister. The reply of high-spirited Mary might have been predicted. She flew into a rage, informing her brother that she would choose her own attendants and would thank him not to interfere.

The unpleasantness passed like a summer storm. Not so another threesided conflict a couple of years later. Once again mother and daughter fell out over Edward Hyde. Mary provided the harassed minister and his wife with a house at Breda and also offered their daughter, Anne, a position as one of her ladies-in-waiting. Henrietta Maria was furious at this display of affection for a family she considered as her sworn enemies. She insisted that Anne be dismissed. Once again Mary dug her heels in. Even when Hyde, via Lady Stanhope, tactfully suggested that it might be as well in the interests of family harmony to accede to the matriarch’s wishes, the princess would not give way. Anne stayed and became one of the liveliest members of the Orange court. She even won the approval of the hard-to-please Queen of Bohemia. More significantly, within a few years, she had captivated the Duke of York. The couple’s marriage, in 1660, was to have dire consequences for all concerned.

But what most lethally poisoned relationships within the royal family was Henrietta Maria’s behaviour towards her youngest son. Having largely failed to dominate Charles and James, she was determined to keep the teenage Henry, Duke of Gloucester, tied to her apron strings and to her Bourbon interests. More specifically, she considered it her duty to engineer his conversion to Catholicism. In February 1653, ‘Harry Stuart’, as he was referred to by the government, was allowed to leave his confinement in Carisbrooke Castle and be reunited with his family. He arrived at the Hague to be smothered by the affection of his sister, his aunt and his female cousins. Mary wanted to keep him in the United Netherlands, the States-General were prepared to turn a blind eye to his residence and Charles happily gave his consent. Henrietta Maria, however, demanded that her son be sent on to Paris. The other members of the family were not happy about this but Charles felt that he could not refuse a reunion between Henry and his mother. He sanctioned a visit to Paris which, he stipulated, should be of no more than a few months’ duration. He also made it clear that the Duke of Gloucester was to be placed under no duress in matters of religion. The queen dowager accepted these conditions – with no intention whatsoever of abiding by them.

Nothing untoward could happen while Charles remained in Paris but, in the following summer, he was virtually forced out. Cromwell commanded Europe’s best navy, recently triumphant over the Dutch, and was a major player in international affairs, courted by both France and Spain. The triumph of Protestant republicanism across La Manche was a fait accompli and most observers in Paris, including, even, Henrietta Maria, regarded the restoration of the Stuarts as a pipe dream. The continued presence of the sponging Charles II could now only be an encumbrance to Mazarin’s foreign policy. He offered the impoverished king a considerable financial bribe to leave the country within ten days. The council had for some time been exploring the possibility of alternative residences. Despite Mary’s urgings, the government of the United Netherlands would have none of her brother. Charles could not openly appeal to Spain, France’s enemy. What he did was send mendicants to all the other princely courts which might lend him some support. He was quite unscrupulous in his approaches: he appealed to Lutheran and Calvinist monarchs on the basis of their shared Protestantism while to Catholic rulers he promised toleration for their co-religionists.

His most successful emissary was Wilmot, recently elevated to the peerage at his own request as Earl of Rochester. He made a favourable impression on the emperor and several of the German princes. They voted him a grant of £45,000 at the imperial diet at Ratisbon and the Elector of Cologne offered the Stuart court asylum in his territory. Thus it was that, with a lighter heart and an embellished entourage, Charles set out from Paris in July 1654. He looked upon the immediate weeks ahead as something of a holiday. Mary was to join him and together they would take in the sights and be sumptuously entertained by fellow royals.

The weeks of late summer and early autumn were a relaxed interlude in the king’s harassed and unsatisfactory life. He and Mary met up at Spa and moved in a leisurely progress to Aachen and Cologne. Everywhere there were sights to be seen and new friends to be made. The Stuart siblings were lodged palatially and welcomed by local worthies who tried to outdo each other with banquets and balls and hunting expeditions. But the idyll did not last. Charles could not totally escape anxiety about the situation back in France. He had left precise instructions with James to keep an eye on their mother, in whose word he had very little trust:

I have told you what the queen hath promised me concerning my brother Harry in point of religion, and I have given him charge to inform you if any attempt shall be made upon him to the contrary; in which case you will take the best care you can to prevent his being wrought upon, since you cannot but know how much you and I are concerned in it.¹⁸

Those last words are a give-away. They tell us what lay at the root of Charles’ fears. He was not concerned about his brother’s religion per se. It was his own raison d’être that was at stake. To wink at Henry’s conversion would be to admit that he no longer believed in the cause of a restored Stuart monarchy. Once that message circulated throughout Britain and Europe the trickle of funds from royalists at home and well-wishers abroad would dry up. He would become plain Charles Stuart, a man of little talent, no training and no fortune.

His anxieties were only too well founded. As soon as he was out of the way Henrietta Maria began her mischief. She sent the boy off to join his brother James in Turenne’s camp. On his return the fourteen-year-old, who had a generous share of Stuart arrogance and stubbornness, was not disposed to settle to his studies. This was all the excuse his grandmother needed to discharge the tutor appointed by the king and to establish in his place one of her priests, who whisked the boy off to a Jesuit seminary. James, as he had been ordered, rushed to Paris and he was far from being the only one to address urgent letters to Charles.

Sir, no minute must be lost for prevention and no middle way will do it. Certain it is the queen did lately tell the Duke of Gloucester that the return to England was laid out of her thoughts and all wise men’s and that there was no way left him to rise but his book and the Church.¹⁹

The news arrived in Cologne soon after Mary had returned home and it shattered Charles’ newfound sense of wellbeing. The normally imperturbable king was roused to a great fury. Hyde reported he had never seen his master so impassioned. He despatched a flurry of letters, which was, in itself, unusual, urging everyone who had any influence in Paris to intervene. To his mother he wrote in a tone which just managed to be respectful:

I must confess that this news does trouble me so much that I cannot say all that I could at another time … I must conclude that if your Majesty does continue to proceed in the change of my brother’s religion, I cannot expect your Majesty does either believe or wish my return into England … if your Majesty has the least kindness for me I beg you not to press him further in it … remember the last words of my dead father (whose memory I doubt not will work upon you) which were to charge him upon his blessing never to change his religion …²⁰

Charles informed Jermyn that if his ministers in Paris did not use all their endeavours to thwart the queen dowager’s plans he would have nothing more to do with them and he sent Ormonde to escort Henry to the safety of his sister’s court at the Hague. Relations between Charles’ entourage and the Louvre party plummeted to their lowest level.

Charles won this particular battle and Henrietta Maria was obliged to yield. She did so with an exceedingly bad grace. When Henry came to take his leave of her she ranted at him, refused her blessing and screamed that he was no longer her son. One might have supposed that this episode would have caused a final breach between Charles and his mother but within a couple of years family harmony had been restored. Mary acted as an intermediary. She and Charles made another royal tour in the late summer of 1655, visiting Aix, Frankfurt and Cologne. Mary picked up the bill for most of their incidental expenses, as she had done the previous year. A few months later the princess travelled to Paris for a long stay with her mother after which she was able to express to Charles the hope that there would henceforth be a good understanding among them all in spite of ‘hot heads’. Charles was more than ready for such a reconciliation. He treated the queen dowager with affectionate respect while taking no notice of her wishes on all matters political.

This reveals to us something of how his character was developing under the pressures of his exile. His way of dealing with unpleasantness was simply to sidestep it whenever possible. Just as he dealt with poverty by not paying his bills and with unpalatable policy decisions by procrastination, so he refused to allow his equanimity to be ruffled by personal conflict. Over and again he restored to his good graces servants who had in one way or another betrayed his trust. For the most part he held aloof from the squabbles of rival ministers and factions. When mistresses and companions plagued him for favours he made promises that his slender means made it impossible for him to keep.

Had this been a calculated attitude, a demonstration of royal mysterium, designed to indicate that a gracious king was above the sordid emotions and prosaic reactions of ordinary mortals, it would have impressed more people. Without doubt there were those who were so dazzled by the aura that they were genuinely blinded to the man within it. For those who knew him better, however, Charles’ consorting with companions of low rank and lower morals somewhat tarnished the sacred image. Insofar as the king consciously developed an easygoing personality he had two very good reasons for doing so. His very survival depended upon his being agreeable to men and women of all estates – to princes who admitted him to the royal ‘club’, to ministers and attendants who supported his lifestyle and political pretensions for very meagre reward, to agents who maintained vital contact with activists in Britain, to humble royalists who had helped him escape or shared his exile or simply clung to an inherited conviction that ‘the breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord’. The other reason was his father’s commitment to that very doctrine. The signpost that had pointed Charles I along the inevitable road to the scaffold had been his commitment to the concept of semi-divine kingship. He had told the crowd on that frosty January afternoon that ‘a subject and a sovereign are clear different things’ and that he stood before them as a ‘martyr of the people’. Not only did his son shy away from such fatal inflexibility, he did not hold the principles which underlay it. Whatever ideas he did have about his inherited role totally lacked the theological underpinning that had sustained his father through the years of warfare, tortuous negotiation and imprisonment.

Charles’ open, friendly and forgiving nature was the despair of his ministers. Not only did the king damage his own image by surrounding himself with worthless companions, he also made it easy for Cromwell’s industrious spymaster, John Thurloe, to keep himself well informed of the king’s plans. In January 1655, a well-set-up young man bearing the scars of active service in the royalist cause arrived at Cologne. His name was Henry Manning, a relative and attendant of the Marquis of Worcester, a ferocious Catholic, who had served Charles I in Ireland, suffered the sequestration of his estates, lived in exile until shortage of funds obliged him to return home, and had until recently been a prisoner in the Tower. Manning’s father had been killed at the battle of Cheriton in 1644 and the young man had, himself, been wounded in the same engagement. He arrived with letters of commendation to Dr Earle, the king’s faithful tutor and companion, from friends of impeccable trustworthiness, and declared that he wished to place himself and the funds he had been able to salvage at his sovereign’s disposal. He brought with him, or so he claimed, information about secret royalist plans being hatched at the very highest levels in England. Manning was so plausible that the Earl of Rochester fell for his story hook, line and sinker and introduced him to the king. Hyde was dubious but Charles was won over by Wilmot’s persuasion and the young man’s charm.

Posing as a vital intermediary with English agents, Manning tried to make himself privy to the court’s plans regarding the encouragement of disaffected elements in Britain. He then passed the information on to Thurloe. However, Hyde was using his own intelligence network to check on Master Manning. This led to the spy’s correspondence being intercepted at Antwerp and his treachery exposed. Manning was arrested, interrogated and tried by a private court. On 15 December 1655, he was taken to a wood just outside Cologne and shot.

Seventeen months of political idleness had been forced on Charles because the republican government in London was strong, royalist opposition was disorganised and ineffective, and the international situation offered no circumstance of which the king might take advantage. There was nothing he could do, except, in Hyde’s words, ‘sit still and expect God’s own time’.²¹ But now, at last, in the closing weeks of 1655, a sudden window of opportunity opened. Cromwell, having made peace with the Dutch, re-invigorated that popular, anti-Spanish sentiment that had lingered ever since the days of Elizabeth. Asserting that Spain’s maritime activities were a threat to England’s commercial interests and a means of spreading Catholicism around the globe, he began an onslaught on Spanish transatlantic shipping and established a new Caribbean stronghold by capturing the island of Jamaica. Mazarin was not slow to cash in on the changed situation. He offered Cromwell a new treaty, one of the terms of which was to be the continued exclusion of Charles and his brothers from French territory.

If the Stuarts were an embarrassment to France, they had now become a potential asset to Spain, or so some of Philip IV’s ministers believed. It would do no harm, they reasoned, to support, at modest cost, English royalists whose activities might distract the Lord Protector’s government from the war effort. They gave little thought to the possibility of Charles actually regaining his throne, but if he were to do so, with Spanish help, then he would have a profound debt to repay to his Most Catholic Majesty. Peace with England would be restored and the threat to Spain’s vital colonial supply lines halted.

A new understanding between the exiles and the world’s leading colonial power which, from Madrid, looked like nothing more than a possibility worth exploring was much more attractive from Charles’ point of view. He and his advisers worked enthusiastically to make it a reality. That meant negotiating with the Archduke Don Juan-José, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands and Philip’s bastard son by an actress. Charles sent a succession of emissaries to Brussels to prepare the ground for substantive talks but Don Juan-José was not convinced that an impoverished, dispossessed, playboy king whose supporters were notoriously disorganised could serve any useful purpose in the scheme of Spanish statecraft, nor was he prepared to take any initiative without specific instructions from Madrid. Charles and his council were desperate to gain the effective backing of a major power. Therefore, everything that could be done to impress their desired allies had to be done. Among other things, that meant revisiting the Lucy Walter problem.

The erstwhile mistress was becoming more and more of an encumbrance and it was not entirely her fault. She and her children could not live on promises of royal handouts that materialised at best sporadically. From time to time she travelled to the royal court, wherever it might happen to be, seeking further aid from the father of her son, only to have Charles fob her off with trifles or with yet more promises. She had become an irritant and the king’s response was always to get rid of her as quickly and easily as possible. When, in 1655, he made out a warrant for the payment of a pension, he stipulated that the instalments were to be paid in Antwerp – far away from where he was living. By any standards this was shabby, cowardly treatment. Rather than tell Lucy that their relationship was at an end, he strung her along with expressions of affection and petty gifts. She had no alternative but to find other men to whom she could sell herself. Since everyone knew of her relationship with the king this could only cause tongues to wag. Such gossip was harmful to Charles and an annoyance to royal ministers who were trying to create the impression that he was a serious-minded monarch worthy of restoring to his father’s throne. They were especially alarmed when, in Brussels, capital of the Spanish Netherlands, Lucy began an affair with the king’s personal representative, Sir Henry De Vic. Salacious rumour was not the only problem. Lucy was a magnet for Cromwellian spies. She knew intimate details about the life of Charles and his companions that could be used to his discredit and the more desperate she became, the more likely she was to sell her secrets.

By the beginning of 1656, when Charles was trying to impress the representatives of Philip IV, Lucy was at the Hague, living with Thomas Howard, a member of the Princess of Orange’s entourage. But this brother of the Duke of Suffolk had other employment; he was in the pay of John Thurloe, head of Cromwell’s intelligence service. Mary had by now turned against her brother’s ex-lover. Having made her peace with Henrietta Maria, she was once again under the Stuart matriarch’s sway and both women regarded Lucy as an encumbrance to the king. From his sister Charles learned that Mrs Barlow was living a life of open depravity and bringing discredit on all who were associated with her. Presuming upon her royal connections, and encouraged by affectionate letters sent to her by Charles, via Taaffe, she was dragging the king’s name through the Dutch mud. How much of this was truth and how much vicious gossip is impossible to say but if Lucy had become wildly promiscuous it is likely to have been more from necessity than lust. Charles and members of his circle could not make the same claim. And if this bold creature relied on emotional blackmail to back her continual demands for money, she certainly had more claim than most on the king’s generosity. Anyway, as Hyde was constantly urging, this was a critical time in which projecting a good image was more than ever vital for the Stuart cause. Enquiries had to be made into Lucy’s conduct.

The man Charles used as his eyes and ears was one of the most trusted servants of the royal family, Daniel O’Neill. This soldier-courtier had proved his loyalty on the battlefield and his usefulness in several private intrigues. Hyde described him as ‘a great observer and discerner of men’s natures and humours … very dextrous in compliance where he found it useful’.²² In modern parlance we might call O’Neill ‘streetwise’. He was a frequent go-between for Mary and her brother and the obvious choice to investigate Lucy’s behaviour. O’Neill’s reports did not make pleasant reading. He pointed out as bluntly as he considered seemly that his master’s weak attitude of giving in to Lucy’s demands simply encouraged her. She would only mend her ways if she was ‘necessitated’, i.e. starved into submission.

But what ways was she supposed to mend? O’Neill’s vivid picture of Mrs Barlow’s lifestyle presents an alarming image of a woman driven by circumstance or character defect close to the brink of insanity. He writes of bribery, prostitution, abortion, murder and blackmail and he warns the king, ‘I am much troubled to see the prejudice her being here does your Majesty; for every idle action of hers brings your Majesty upon the stage.’ O’Neill recounted that only by paying off Lucy’s maid had he managed to avoid the latest appalling incidents becoming the talk of the town:

I had the opportunity to save her from public scandal … Her maid, whom she would have killed by thrusting a bodkin into her ear as she was asleep, would have accused her of … miscarrying of two children by physic and of the infamous manner of her living with Mr Howard but I have prevented the mischief, partly with threats, but more with 100 guilders I am to give her maid. Her last miscarriage was since Mr Howard went … Though I have saved her for this time, it’s not likely she’ll escape when I am gone; for only the consideration of your Majesty has held Monsieur Heenvliet and Monsieur Niertwick not to have her banished from this town and country for an infamous person and by sound of drum.²³

O’Neill urged the king to take a tough line with this unruly wanton. He should make any further aid conditional upon Lucy mending her ways and upon conceding custody of her six-year-old son to some responsible guardian.

This was expecting too much of Charles. He would not add to Lucy’s distress if some less confrontational way could be found of dealing with the problem. His more immediate concerns were bringing the Spanish to commit themselves to a treaty and finding lodgings for his court. In March he travelled incognito to Brussels and sought permission to establish residence there. This alarmed Don Juan-José. Having the English king and his household in the capital would make far too definite a diplomatic statement. After weeks of awkward negotiation, Charles agreed to establish his headquarters at Bruges. Some time during this period of toing and froing he seems to have paid a flying visit to Lucy and, according to her maid, spent a day and a night with her. It may have been then that Charles put forward an easy compromise that would appeal to Lucy, that would remove her from the Hague and that would get her out of his hair. Funds were found to despatch her and the children back to England. Thither they went at the beginning of June. They were supposed to be travelling anonymously but since Thomas Howard was a member of the party there was no possibility of their remaining unrecognised. Cromwell’s men soon had Lucy whisked into the Tower for interrogation.

There was little she could tell them of any political significance but she did have propaganda value for the republican regime. Details of her life and liaisons were widely published and the lesson hammered home that it was on such creatures as this that Charles Stuart chose to spend the money sacrificially provided by misguided English well-wishers. Having made as much salacious capital as possible from the story, the government cleverly crowned the achievement by sending Mrs Barlow and her offspring back to the Low Countries so that she could continue to be an embarrassment to the Stuart family.

The policy worked. Lucy elected to make her home in Brussels which, from Charles’ point of view, was the most inconvenient location possible. The twisted threads of her emotional life, tangled as they were with those of Stuart politics, continued to attract attention and were more than a mere irritant to Charles and his advisers. Hyde, who never referred to the king’s mistresses by name, must have been alluding to Lucy when he reported to Ormonde in the summer of 1657, ‘There is much talk here of a certain lady who is at Brussels and, I assure you, very shrewd discourses of it, which will quickly get into England. I pray you let her go to some other place.’²⁴ The scandal he was referring to concerned Lucy’s falling out with Thomas Howard. Their affair having ended acrimoniously, she sent a friend or relative after her ex-lover with a knife. There was a brawl in the streets of the capital in which Howard was injured but the unseemly brouhaha did not end there. Shortly afterwards Howard instigated legal proceedings, not for personal injury, but theft. He charged Lucy with appropriating certain papers which were important to him and could prove harmful if they fell into the wrong hands. Bearing in mind Howard’s shady life, it is not difficult to guess at the contents of these documents. Blackmail can scarcely have been a novel inspiration to the discarded woman but she certainly now turned to it. She possessed the means to obtain money by force from unfaithful lovers when appeals to their better nature failed. Later she used this tactic on the king and she may already have been letting it be known that she would stop at nothing in her desperation.

There can be little doubt that, had he been in a position to do so, Charles would have taken the line of least resistance and met her demands. That was no longer possible. He was financially worse off than ever before. He had pawned everything pawnable. The wages of his household officers were eighteen months in arrears. The Spanish subsidy, when it was paid, was quite inadequate to meet his needs. His situation was painfully brought home to him every time he sat to meals at the royal table: he and his companions had to slake their appetites with just one course. The leading citizens of Bruges were hospitable to the new celebrity in their midst and laid on banquets and other entertainments but there was a limit to their generosity and as the flow of invitations dwindled to a trickle Charles became bored with the life of what he referred to as this ‘dead’ provincial town whose people were too ready to complain at the outrageous antics of his more boisterous followers.

Reports of Charles’ behaviour at this time present a double image. He was active in numerous ways to make the Spanish alliance work in his favour. Rather than sit in idleness while others were taking up arms, he volunteered to serve in the Spanish army (a request which was declined). He despatched representatives to Brussels and Madrid requesting – at times demanding – the provision of funds and men for the invasion of England. He sent other emissaries across the Channel to activate his scattered bands of supporters. He was prepared to discuss terms with anyone who might support what must have seemed his last chance of making a bid for a return to power. Messages were sent to groups opposed to the Cromwellian regime, as diverse as Scottish Presbyterians and ultrarepublican Levellers. The king even backed a scheme to assassinate the Lord Protector. None of these initiatives came to anything. As well as the old problem of lack of cohesion among royalists in Britain, Charles was bedevilled by the half-heartedness of the Spanish. Whereas he wanted money and materiel up front for his invasion attempt, they expected him to set the military campaign in motion before they would commit any resources. The only thing the king did achieve was the assembly of a royal army. Recruits from home arrived to swell the ranks of fellow countrymen who had hitherto served as mercenaries in France and, by the middle of 1657, 2,500 men had gathered to the Stuart standard and were fighting for Spain on the southern border of the Netherlands.

Yet the inspiring image of an industrious, majestic, intellectually astute leader was not the one recognised by many of those close to the king. He was petulant. A fresh round of quarrels broke out within the royal family. James, who resented being ordered to give up his command under Turenne and enlist with the forces of France’s enemy, stormed out of Bruges after one heated argument with his brother, and even Mary, who spent all her time travelling between Breda and Charles’ court to minister to her siblings’ needs, was again alienated for a few months. Hyde’s admonitions did not cease. He was appalled at his master’s refusal to stick to clear principles: instead he would promise anything to anyone to gain some perceived advantage. The minister was now receiving frequent letters expressing the growing disillusionment people felt with Oliver Cromwell. ‘This audacious hypocrite,’ one such correspondent inveighed,

has, by the unsearchable wisdom of his deep-laid counsels, lighted such a candle into the dark dungeon of his soul that there is none so blind who does not plainly read treachery, tyranny, perfidiousness, dissimulation, atheism, hypocrisy and all manner of villainy written in large characters on his heart.²⁵

Never had there been a better opportunity for the king to project himself as an attractive alternative. ‘The eyes of all men are upon you,’ Hyde urged. He pointed out that most people had no idea what kind of an adult the boy prince had grown into over the last decade. ‘It is that which men are most solicitous and inquisitive to understand, and upon the manifestation whereof most of your good or ill fortune will be founded.’²⁶ To his intense frustration, Hyde realised that Charles II presented to the world an image that bore very little relationship to that of his sainted father. He found himself having to agree with Ormonde who opined that Charles’ desire to quit Bruges had little to do with his proclaimed desire to be nearer the centre of the action and much to do with his pursuit of pleasure. The king would need sterling qualities, the earl suggested, to unite all his friends and confound all his enemies,

but I fear his immoderate delight in empty, effeminate and vulgar conversation is become an irresistible part of his nature and will never suffer him to animate his own designs and others’ actions with that spirit which is requisite for his quality and much more to his fortune.²⁷

‘Effeminate’ is the key word and Ormonde was not alone in applying it to the king. We need to understand its implications because in the seventeenth century the term had different nuances than it has today. No one ever accused Charles II of speech and mannerisms verging on the homosexual. On the contrary, outraged Puritans dubbed him a lusty womaniser and the label has stuck. What Ormonde was objecting to was certainly not prissy affectation but neither was it libidinousness. The minister was a man of the world who would certainly not have been shocked by the king’s bedroom antics. When Ormonde mentioned effeminacy he meant, quite literally, unmanliness, and in his mind it was a quality that made a king unfit to rule. Fundamental to his thinking and to the thinking of all educated Christendom for a thousand years and more was the divine ordering of human society. Women had been created physically, intellectually, emotionally (and some would say spiritually) inferior to men. This appeared to be a glaringly self-evident truism which scarcely needed proving. Nevertheless, philosophers had demonstrated the logic behind the assumption. Thus, the contemporary Dutch thinker, Baruch Spinoza:

Surely among so many different nations some would be found where both sexes ruled on equal terms, and others where the men were ruled by the women … But since this has nowhere happened, I am fully entitled to assert that women have not the same right as men by nature, but are necessarily inferior to them.²⁸

Equally obviously, all men were not equal. Some were born to rule and some to be ruled. It followed then that kings stood at the apex of society. James I had admonished his son ever to give thanks to his Maker, ‘first for that he made you a man and next for that he made you a little god to sit on his throne’. Therefore, for a monarch to indulge excessively in female company and to display those traits associated with women was doubly scandalous. Kit Marlowe’s Tamburlaine had observed sneeringly,

How unseemly is it for my sex,

My discipline of arms and chivalry,

My nature and the terror of my name,

To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!²⁹

In a man’s world a king should be the most manly of men.

When it came to his relationship with women this meant that he should use them for his purposes. The opposite sex had very few legal rights. Princesses were given in marriage to cement international treaties. Queens had the primary function of bringing royal sons into the world. Heiresses were bought and sold in the interests of building up or maintaining territorial holdings. Since these conventions left little room for affection, men resorted to a variety of irregular liaisons to meet their physical and emotional needs or, simply, to express their male dominance. That was the hard reality of seventeenth-century life. If adultery and fornication were denounced by Christian preachers, as they were, and if the principles of monogamy and restraint were, in theory, accepted throughout society, as they were, and if the demands of the Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in every British church, as they were, this was not out of respect for women or consideration of their feelings. Proscription rested upon divine fiat and the practical consideration that loose sexual morals led to the appearance of bastards whose claims frequently frustrated the smooth working of inheritance laws. Kings and princes of the blood were not exempt from the precepts of the Bible but neither were they oblivious to the basic assumptions about the relative status of men and women. Whether they maintained private harems or, like Charles I, upheld the sanctity of marriage, they accepted that men, and especially monarchs, should exercise control over their womenfolk.

It was Charles II’s departure from this norm that earned the censure of Ormonde and Hyde. His ‘unseemly’ behaviour consisted in surrounding himself with attractive women and putting himself under obligation to them. By ‘effeminate conversation’ the writer meant that Charles spent his time playing love games when he should have been attending to more serious affairs. He and his companions danced and played cards and sang the latest songs and flirted and gossiped about one another’s amours.

We can obtain a flavour of this lighthearted, women-dominated world from the letters exchanged between the king and Theobald Taaffe, which are couched in terms of self-conscious naughtiness, use code names for the principal characters and hint at romantic indiscretions. Charles entrusts his collaborator with a secret note for ‘Terese’ with the strict instruction that it is for her eyes only.³⁰ He urges Taaffe to enlist the aid of a female coconspirator in his latest pursuit: ‘encourage her in the doing of me all good offices and assure her in the end qu ’elle ne repentira pas de l’amitié qu’elle m’a temoignes en cette affaire là’.³¹ The same correspondence reveals that Thomas Howard, the erstwhile spy and reprobate, came to be accepted among the king’s intimates. Charles stated that he had written to Taaffe’s friend Tom Howard and only regretted that he could not aid him with money. This alarmed even Hyde who, by now, was very familiar with his master’s bewildering choice of unsuitable companions. ‘I cannot believe it possible,’ he told Ormonde, ‘that the king, who hath evidence more than enough would say any such thing to please Lord Taaffe.’³² Even when he was involved in March 1660 with negotiating his triumphant return to England he was casting roving eyes around: ‘Pray send this enclosed à la petite souris. There is here a very pretty souris but the devil on’t is the dame is so jealous that it must be a very good mouser that can take it.’³³

Charles was in his element in this kind of society. It was what he had been used to intermittently since his earliest days in his mother’s chambers at Whitehall. The continental courts where he had spent most of his time since 1646 had been governed by female rulers. He could relax in the company of women and courtiers who amused him with witty conversation and scurrilous tales. Retreating from the failures, disappointments and frustrations of the political arena, he could have his self-confidence boosted by the ladies who fawned upon him, laughed at his jokes, listened to his stories and assured him in the privacy of the bedchamber that he was a wonderful lover. From the point of view of his senior advisers, all that would have been tolerable in moderation. If the king had adopted the habit of clapping his hands to dismiss the royal playmates when there was serious work to be attended to his hard-pressed ministers would have been happy to allow him his diversions. But permitting his women to have first call upon his time, his emotional resources and even his slender purse meant that he was handing them power over the King of England. He was displaying feminine weakness. That was what his worried minders objected to.

Despite what has just been suggested, there is no evidence that Charles was massively promiscuous at this stage. Much of his confidential talk and letters were sheer bravado. He knew well that his sexual athleticism was enormously exaggerated by scurrilous or envious tittle-tattle and he acknowledged the truth of Hyde’s admonitions that this could only harm his cause. As he pointed out to Taaffe, there were not enough hours in the day for him to have achieved the number of assignations attributed to him. He did not litter Bruges with royal bastards and he did seem to prefer fairly longstanding relationships. One such was with Catherine Pegge, the daughter of yet another loyal royalist in exile, Thomas Pegge of Yeldersley, Derbyshire. He sired two children by her – Charles Fitzcharles, commonly known as ‘Don Carlos’, and Catherine. The boy was later ennobled as the Earl of Plymouth but of the girl nothing is known and the likelihood is that she died in infancy. Charles enjoyed playing the father with his new family but when he tired of the role Catherine was wise enough to accept the fact. After the Restoration, Charles provided for her and her kin, and, although she never occupied an important position at court, she did have her own house in Pall Mall. In 1668 she married a much older man, Sir Edward Greene. The very absence of any more details about Catherine Pegge suggests that she knew how to accept the subservient role which was the lot of her sex. Perhaps there were others of whom we know nothing for precisely the same reason. But Charles’ indulgence encouraged other mistresses to adopt a very different attitude.

Lucy Walter clearly came into this category. Because he had long been captivated by her and had yielded to her demands over and again Charles was in large measure responsible for the scandalous situation which had developed by the late 1650s. He had protested his love for her, long after his ardour had cooled. He had strung her along with tokens of affection and made her extravagant promises he was unable to fulfil. Whose fault was it that now she was threatening to publish his letters to her as the only way of extracting money from the king and keeping her and her children from penury? Of course, she had to be stopped. Charles’ advisers pressed him repeatedly to deal firmly with the wayward woman before the damage she was doing to his reputation became irreparable. Charles, characteristically, declined to act personally. He went off to the front line in the autumn of 1657 and obtained permission from the archduke to be present at the defence of Mardyke. This was no token viewing of the carnage from a safe distance; while he was riding forth to examine the outworks with Ormonde the marquis had his horse shot from under him. Meanwhile, the other ‘campaign’ – against Lucy – he assigned to George Digby, Earl of Bristol. Digby, after a frenzied and controversial career as soldier and diplomat, had fetched up in the French army, fallen out with Mazarin and recently appeared in Bruges. He was exactly the kind of handsome, well-educated, witty and entertaining man that the king liked. Hyde tells us that Digby was

of great eloquence and becomingness in his discourse … and of so universal a knowledge that he never wanted subject for a discourse. He was equal to a very good part in the greatest affair, but the unfittest man alive to conduct it, having an ambition and vanity superior to all his other parts and a confidence peculiar to himself which sometimes intoxicated and transported and exposed him.³⁴

Charles soon admitted Digby to the royal council. But almost as soon he discharged him, for the earl debarred himself by announcing his conversion to Roman Catholicism. However, Bristol still had his uses and the king sent him to the archduke’s camp where he rapidly ingratiated himself with Don Juan-Jose. (Among Digby’s gifts he numbered fluency in Spanish.) To Charles this smooth-talking adventurer seemed to be the ideal person to persuade Mrs Barlow to see reason. But Digby was to demonstrate the accuracy of Hyde’s assessment of him.

The first plan was ill-conceived and ludicrously bungled. The object was to get Lucy into prison so that she would have to agree to whatever conditions Charles imposed to regain her freedom. The executant chosen for this malevolent charade was Bristol’s secretary, Colonel Arthur Slingsby, who, for his compliance, extracted a baronetcy from the king. Slingsby was newly married and had a house in Brussels. On 1 December Charles personally validated Slingsby’s mission in a letter of introduction to Taaffe: ‘This bearer, Sir A Slingsby, returns as plenipotentiary in the matter of the child. If you can contribute anything to it by your good counsel, I pray do it.’³⁵ Slingsby befriended Lucy and persuaded her to take lodgings with him. After a few weeks he confronted her one night with an unpaid bill for bed and board and tried to have her removed to the local jail. If he had supposed that the ‘beautiful, brown and bold’ woman would go quietly, he vastly underestimated her. She set up such a hollering that all the neighbours threw open their shutters or ventured out on to the darkened street to see what all the commotion was about. All that could be seen in the confusion was that a defenceless lady and her infant children were being attacked by a bunch of foreign ruffians. One of those whose nocturnal peace was disturbed was Don Alonso de Cardenas, the ex-Spanish ambassador to England. He took it upon himself to restore order. Lucy he sent to the safe haven of another house, and the prison cell that should have received her became the temporary lodging of the officer who had tried to arrest her.

The next day Cardenas lost no time in complaining to the king and he also instructed his secretary, Egidio Mottet, to pursue the matter with Ormonde. Mottet did not mince his words.

My Lord, I am so much ashamed of the proceeding of Monsieur Slingsby and all his family against Madame Barlow and her child that I am loath to relate the particulars thereof to your excellency … My Lord Ambassador hath written to the king about it being forced thereunto by the clamour of the people, who found this action most barbarous, abominable and most unnatural. The worst of all is that Sir Arthur doth report and say to all that the king hath given him order for it. But out of my obligation and respect to the king, I do endeavour to disabuse all of it …³⁶

Tactfully worded replies were soon on their way back to Brussels. In his response to the secretary, Ormonde thanked him for his care and expressed his master’s regret for the fracas. To clarify the situation he pointed out that the king had indeed issued instructions to Slingsby, ‘in a quiet and silent way, if it could be, to get the child out of the mother’s hands, with purposes of advantage to them both, but he never understood it should be attempted with the noise and scandal that hath happened’. But now followed thinly veiled threats in the king’s name. Ormonde asks for help in detaching young James from his mother. This, he represented, would be,

a great charity to the child and in the conclusion to the mother, if she shall now at length retire herself to such a way of living as may redeem in some measure the reproach her past ways have brought upon her. If she consents not to this she will add to all her former follies a most unnatural one in reference to her child, who by her obstinacy will be exposed to all the misery and reproach that will attend her when neither of them is any further cared for or owned by his majesty; but that, on the contrary he will take any good office done to her as an injury to him and as a supporting of her in mad disobedience to his pleasure.

The letter concluded with a reiteration of what, Ormonde insisted, was the king’s determination in the event of Lucy continuing obdurate: ‘he will free himself the best way he may from any further trouble or scandal and leave her to her fortune’.³⁷

These harsh words represented a gloss on Charles’ actual sentiments. If he could have bought Lucy off, there can be little doubt that he would have done so, but he did not have the means to buy her silence. Therefore, she became the victim of the king’s impecuniousness, her own obstinacy in refusing to be parted from her son, and that change in the political climate which made it imperative for Charles not to lose face internationally. The king simply gave his ministers carte blanche to do whatever was necessary while he looked the other way. Now the full force of the Stuart establishment could be unleashed upon the wretched ex-mistress. Ormonde and Bristol brought pressure to bear upon Don Juan-José, whose attitude towards the English had changed because he now needed their help in the military conflict. He, in turn, instructed Cardenas to abandon his protection of Lucy. Her belongings were searched and any damaging documents removed. She did not give up her son without a fight. She insisted that she would only grant custody to someone she trusted. Eventually, little James was taken from her by a trick. Asked to produce a paper that had some bearing on her relationship with the king, she went to a trunk to find it. While her back was turned the boy was hurried out of the house. Some time during the next few months he was taken to Paris, where his grandmother took charge of his upbringing.

In the following autumn two deaths occurred which altered the course of Charles Stuart’s life. On 3 September 1658, the anniversary of the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, Oliver Cromwell breathed his last. A few weeks later, on a date which has gone unrecorded, Lucy Walter alias Barlow died in Paris where she had gone, presumably, to be near her son. It was typical of the Stuart attitude towards Monmouth’s mother that James II should record in his memoirs that Lucy had succumbed to a ‘disease incident to her profession’. Charles’ treatment of the woman he had once loved was ultimately callous. Yet he cannot be accused of simply casting her aside when he had lost interest in her. If he allowed her to impose on him over and again it was because he felt some responsibility for her and her situation. Where he failed was in his insensitivity. Emotionally stunted himself, he simply could not understand how she felt – about him and about their son. Had Lucy entered his life at a later stage when he was secure on his throne, he would have paid her off handsomely and thought that that discharged his duty towards her. It was his inability to do that and her inability to live modestly and quietly away from the ‘bright lights’ which had dazzled her that caused her tragic downfall. Lucy Walter was of a type with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, an unsophisticated child who could not cope with life inside the walls of Camelot – or outside them.

^fn1 Vapourer: a bragging, grandiloquent and fantastical talker’ – OED.