The queen mother’s court is now the greatest of all.110
Thus Pepys recorded the political reality in February 1663. Now that the opposition to Clarendon and his colleagues had a respected figurehead and a place where its members could meet without hindrance it coalesced into an active faction. Ormonde called it, ‘the junto at Somerset House’ and its leading members were Henrietta Maria, Bennet, Berkeley, Bristol, St Albans, the French ambassador, Godfroi, comte d’Estrades and, sporadically, Lady Castlemaine. The Louvre party had simply relocated. The queen mother and Henry Jermyn, Lord St Albans, attempted to steer policy in a pro-French direction and maintained close contact with Paris. Their agents continually passed to and fro across the Channel and Henrietta, duchesse d’Orléans, was their main contact. Although her correspondence with Charles throughout the 1660s has been carefully collected and analysed it is important not to isolate it from the constant flow of family communication of which it formed a part and most of which has not survived. It was to her mother that Minette often wrote detailed letters about Anglo-French affairs. On 19 December 1664 she casually told her brother, ‘I send the queen all the news from here, which I am sure she will give you,’111 Two months later she urges him, in connection with the French negotiations with Holland, ‘Do not fail to answer me concerning what the queen and my Lord Fitzharding [Charles Berkeley] will ask of you for they are only waiting for that.’112
The queen mother’s clique was rendered more powerful by the king’s lackadaisical attitude to everyday affairs. Charles was so easily distracted from the tedious business of ruling his country that Lady Castlemaine had only to send word that she wished to see him for him to leave the council table and wait upon her. There was nothing discussed between Charles and his senior advisers that did not reach the ears of the schemers at Somerset House. Their first objective was to increase the wealth and influence of themselves and their clients and to replace the ‘old guard’ of royal councillors. This would involve a pro-French foreign policy and the easing of restrictions against Roman Catholics at home. Henrietta Maria’s religious zeal had not abated and she scored a notable success in 1663, when Barbara Villiers was received into the Catholic faith. It is difficult to imagine that anything other than calculation lay behind this conversion and Barbara was able to get much closer to the pious Queen Catherine thereafter. Bennet was generally believed to be a covert papist who concealed his allegiance because it would debar him from holding office. He lacked the arrogant bravado of Lord Bristol, who made no attempt to disguise his faith.
The routine of government seems to have been very loose. In addition to council meetings there were ad hoc gatherings at Somerset House, to which Clarendon was only occasionally summoned. In addition the king came every day to Lady Castlemaine’s table attended by councillors and leading courtiers. Ambassadors vied with each other to be invited to these meals or to discover afterwards the subjects that had been discussed. These foreign representatives also paid private court to both Barbara and Henrietta Maria to gather information and to put their own gloss on international events in the hope that their opinions would reach Charles’ ears. By keeping open all these lines of communication the king was able to be fully informed of events and to keep his own counsel. Outsiders (and often insiders) speculated about how decisions were actually made. The council took care of the dull day-to-day business and inaugurated policy but it only took a comment at the inner table, a suggestion from the queen mother or a word murmured in Charles’ ear across the bedtime pillow to bring about shifts in the direction of policy.
Throughout the autumn and winter of 1662–3 Henrietta Maria’s entourage was engaged in vigorous intrigue for government offices. St Albans made an unsuccessful bid for the treasurership and Bennet’s importunity knew no bounds. As well as his attempt to secure the office of postmaster-general, he had applied to be sent as ambassador to the court of Louis XIV. Charles agreed, but the French king declined to accept the nominee. Now the favourite and his friends lifted their sights to focus on those offices held by the conciliar triumvirate of Clarendon, Ormonde and Nicholas. They all shared a sense of frustration that their ambitions were being blocked by those who controlled the mechanism for ratifying grants and releasing money but in Lady Castlemaine’s case impatience was spiced up by sheer vindictive fury. She was now on the very brink of being deranged by power. While she usually had the subtlety to use flattery, sulks or sexual improvisation to obtain her own way with the king or others who could be useful to her, she sometimes gave in to bouts of temper which starkly revealed her passionate hatred for those who thwarted her, as when she shouted out that she longed to see Clarendon’s head on a spike alongside those of the regicides. It was obvious to all those who frequented the squalidly cramped apartments of Westminster that Barbara was a lead player in what Lord Sandwich called the ‘high game’ of the Somerset House gang.
Their easiest prey was the seventy-year-old Sir Edward Nicholas. For almost two decades the queen mother had nursed a bitter hatred for the secretary of state ‘for a service he did the old king against her mind and her favourites’.113 Bristol also bore a grudge against Nicholas which dated from the tumultuous days of the Civil War, when the two men had been joint secretaries and had frequently given Charles I conflicting advice. Now the moment for revenge had come. Acting in concert, Henrietta Maria and Barbara persuaded the king to get rid of his old servant. Charles offered Nicholas £10,000 and a barony to resign the secretaryship. When Nicholas turned for advice to the chancellor, Clarendon was deeply distressed but realised that Sir Edward had been outmanoeuvred; the king was determined to please the Somerset House junto. All he could do was advise his old friend to stick out for a high price. Eventually, Nicholas retired with a golden handshake of £20,000. Bennet immediately took on the secretaryship, was soon afterwards created Baron Arlington and his position as keeper of the privy purse passed to Berkeley.
It was indicative of the changed style of government that Bennet turned the secretaryship into a more intimate, courtly role than an administrative one. He rarely addressed parliament or bothered much with the council, preferring to work in secret with the king. One of his first acts was to have a privy door made which gave him access to his master’s chambers. Burnet best identified his core talent when he described Bennet as having ‘the art of observing the king’s temper and managing it beyond all the men of that time’.114 He was the kind of opportunist politician who says, ‘These are my principles but, if you don’t like them, I have some others I can show you.’ This flexibility, so much at variance with Clarendon’s tunnel-visioned attitude to politics, perfectly fitted the king’s inclination to work as covertly as possible, avoiding confrontation, declining to explain himself and not hesitating to go behind the backs of his ministers and parliaments. The ‘most vicious’ Berkeley, who, Burnet thought, was ‘without any visible merit, unless it was the managing the king’s amours’,115 was the closest of Charles’ favourites and soon to be created Viscount Fitzharding and, later, Earl of Falmouth.
In the spring of 1663 the fall of the chancellor and his supporters was confidently expected. Lord Sandwich told the secretary to the admiralty that the old minister was ‘irrecoverably lost’ and when the diarist went to sit by the sickbed of Sir Thomas Crew he heard much the same: the king was ruled by Lady Castlemaine and those who frequented her apartments.
If any of the sober counsellors give him good advice and move him in anything that is to his good and honour, the other part, which are his counsellors of pleasure, take him when he is with my Lady Castlemaine and in a humour of delight and then persuade him that he ought not to hear or listen to the advice of those old dotards or counsellors that were heretofore his enemies, when, God knows, it is they that nowadays do most study his honour.116
However, a few weeks later, Lord Bristol, ever the loose cannon in the Somerset House artillery, ruined everything. He made wild allegations against the chancellor in parliament in an attempt to have him indicted for treason. All he succeeded in doing was casting aspersions on the king’s government and rousing Charles to angry reprisals. The charges were quashed and their author forced into hiding and political obscurity.
The Somerset House faction continued to pile every possible humiliation on Clarendon. They monopolised the king to such an extent that the chancellor was obliged to wait in anterooms with ordinary supplicants when he desired an audience. They may well have hoped that their relentless pressure, coupled with his own indifferent health (Clarendon was often incapacitated for weeks at a time by gout), would persuade him to follow Nicholas into retirement. The chancellor certainly found life difficult, as he confided to his friends. ‘Since your departure,’ he wrote to Ormonde,
I have had so unpleasant a life as that, for my own ease and content, I rather wish myself at Breda … Sir Henry Bennet and his friends have more credit, which I do not envy them, except for our poor master’s sake, for he doth every day so weak and unskilful things as he will never have the reputation of a good minister …117
But Clarendon refused to submit to bullying. He took every opportunity, not only to influence the king in private, but publicly to return his enemies’ fire. Speaking in parliament in February 1663, he vigorously attacked Henrietta Maria’s chaplain, Stephen Goffe, who was still an energetic Catholic proselytiser. Clarendon survived, not because he was stronger than his opponents, but because Bristol’s impetuosity forced the king to stand squarely, and publicly, behind his established ministers. But the backstairs intrigue continued. The queen mother and Lady Castlemaine both tried to persuade Charles to lift Bristol’s banishment and the king did relent so far as to meet Digby in private but he refused to restore him openly to favour.
A similar struggle was taking place within the royal household. Although most courtiers saw clearly which way the wind was blowing and allied themselves with the reigning favourites, Queen Catherine had her supporters and, as long as there were places in her entourage to be filled (the list was not finally approved until June 1663), she exercised considerable power of patronage. Few were prepared to stand up for their mistress against the awesome combined power of the king’s mother and his whore but one who was was Jane Gerard, wife of Lord Brandon. Jane was French and had been one of Henrietta Maria’s ladies in Paris when she met Charles Gerard, a royalist soldier in exile. Now they were both firmly ensconced in the court, Charles as a gentleman of the bedchamber and Jane as one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. Appalled at the way the queen was being deliberately elbowed out of her husband’s life, Lady Gerard resolved to do what lay in her power to strengthen the royal marriage.
In January the Gerards hosted a dinner party to which the king and queen were invited and Lady Castlemaine, very pointedly, was not. Before the company sat down to eat Charles realised the hidden agenda. He excused himself and went straight to Barbara’s lodgings, where he spent the night. The humiliated hostess was so upset that a few days later she grasped the opportunity to pass on to the queen some of the worst gossip about the countess. There was a great deal to choose from. Only a few weeks before, Harry Jermyn had been banished from the court for dalliance and Charles Berkeley was confidently reported to be a frequent visitor to her bedchamber, and they were not the only men with whom Barbara amused herself. Charles was not ignorant of her infidelities (he could hardly fail to be in the swarming, busy anthill of Whitehall Palace and its adjacent park and streets) but, while it was one thing to know, it was quite another to be told. Told he was, probably by Catherine, and that annoyed him. He decided on a public punishment. At a court ball in February, he led Jane on to the floor and there confronted her with her offence, adding that she was forthwith dismissed from her position in the queen’s household. This was a metaphorical slap in the face not only for Jane but also for her mistress. Once again Catherine was being dictated to by her husband on the subject of who might and who might not wait upon her.
Barbara Villiers was by now a fixture at court, having achieved that most sought after public mark of recognition – allocated lodgings at Whitehall. Early in 1663 she was assigned a suite of upper-storey rooms in and around Henry VIII’s Holbein Gate, which spanned King Street, the main thoroughfare between Westminster and Charing Cross. Her apartments overlooked and provided access on the one side to St James’s Park and on the other to the privy garden, beyond which lay the residential waterside block where the king and queen had their separate establishments. To appreciate the full significance of Barbara’s lavish palace quarters it is important to understand the changes that were taking place in the royal household at this very time. Charles had returned determined to establish a magnificent residential/governmental centre à la Louvre in which all his extended family, officials, attendants and servants could be housed in suitable style. He planned a complete rebuilding of the century-old chaotic warren of structures in the style of Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House. Economic reality soon poured cold water on these grand designs. Not only was the new palace never built, but the staffing of the existing one was drastically cut. For example, the lord steward, one of the three great household officers, despite his protests, saw his personnel reduced from 350 to 147. This, however, did not create more space, because an extensive official and unofficial family clamoured for housing within the palace walls. Suitably lavish chambers had to be found for the Duke and Duchess of York, Prince Rupert, James Crofts (created Duke of Monmouth in February 1663) – and the Countess of Castlemaine. Thus, Barbara’s move to Whitehall (which set a precedent for later mistresses) established her among the king’s ‘kindred’.
Her quarters, where she delighted to entertain the king, members of her faction and those whom she wished to impress in a style which rivalled that pertaining in the royal chambers, were luxurious – but, apparently, not luxurious enough for milady. In 1666–7, at a time when it might have been thought that all available capital and labour would have been directed towards rebuilding the city of London and providing for those rendered homeless by the Great Fire, the Office of Works undertook a complete refurbishment of Lady Castlemaine’s rooms. She was provided with a carved and painted oratory, a panelled bathroom, a splendid bedchamber with an adjacent smaller chamber, presumably for her children, a library lined with seven-foot-high, glass-fronted bookcases, a grand staircase to the privy garden which provided an impressive entrance, and even an aviary.118
‘Her principal business was to get an estate for herself and her children.’ That fact, blatantly obvious to Clarendon, to everyone in the court and to most beyond the walls of Whitehall who listened to rumour, can scarcely have been lost on the king. He allowed Barbara to wheedle out of him anything it was in his power to give. He paid her gambling debts. She ordered jewellery and he picked up the tab. With Berkeley’s aid she siphoned off money from the privy purse. Together the lovers devised plans to go behind Clarendon’s back and obtain land grants in Ireland, several of which were made out to Barbara’s relatives but were destined for her. On one occasion Charles handed over to his mistress all the New Year gifts that had been given him by his wealthier subjects. The manipulation of royal patronage was a lucrative source of income. When there were posts to be filled the advocacy of Lady Castlemaine and her friends worked wonders, and it was readily available – at a price. Barbara worked to accumulate every penny with the feverish assiduousness of a woman who had come from nothing and knew that her physical charms were not eternal. She was determined, not only to enrich herself, but to impress upon the world just how wealthy and powerful she was. It was important to her to be seen at balls and banquets more heavily bejewelled than any other woman present. Her carriage and her barge had to surpass in splendour those of her rivals. Whenever the king demurred at her importunity she fell back upon one of two techniques. Either she flew into a shrill rage or she flounced off to her uncle’s house in Richmond, knowing that within hours Charles would follow, humbly begging her forgiveness.
The king undoubtedly knew what a vain, vengeful, grasping creature his mistress was, just as he knew that she was unpopular and that public ill-will towards her reflected on himself. It was not just the chancellor and his supporters or his wife’s tiny band of sympathisers or prudish bishops or tut-tutting diarists who were offended by his relationship with his whore. In news-sheets, ballads and every organ which influenced public opinion Lady Castlemaine was identified as the great hate figure. An anonymous ballad, typical of many in the 1660s, catalogued the royal crew who were ruining the state:
Good people, draw near
If a ballad you’d hear,
It will teach you the new way of thriving.
Ne’er trouble your heads
With your books and your beads:
The world’s ruled by cheating and swiving.
Ne’er prattle nor prate
Of the miscarriages of state,
It will not avail you a button.
He that sticks to the church
Shall be left in the lurch,
With never a tatter to put on.
The author then mocks the leaders of the government who are bleeding the nation for their own gain but his culminating and most biting ire is reserved for the royal mistress:
Next comes Castlemaine,
That prerogative quean;
If I had such a bitch I would spay her.
She swives like a stoat,
Goes to’t leg and foot,
When Barbara was with the court at Oxford in 1665 the king offered a £1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever pinned the following lines in Latin and English to the door of her lodging:
Hanc Caesare pressam a fluctu defendit onus.
The reason why she is not ducked?
The previous autumn she had been accosted while walking across St James’s Park at night by three masked men in court dress who shouted obscenities at her and chased her back to her quarters.
In this blazing hostility the question has to be asked: why did Charles persist for a decade or more in a relationship which was so obviously damaging his reputation? The first point that needs to be made in any attempt at an answer is that in the seventeenth century, just as in the twenty-first, salacious headlines oversimplified political realities. Today the sex lives of pop stars, cabinet ministers, presidents and members of the royal family are fervidly pried into because they sell newspapers. In the 1660s the equivalent scandals were just as tenaciously worried out by balladeers and Grub Street hacks for the same reason of profit.
There’s nothing done in all the world,
From monarch to the mouse,
But every day or night ’tis hurled
Into the coffee house.121
And the most eagerly read stories concerned men and women in the public eye: theatre actors and actresses, courtiers, courtesans – and members of the royal family. But they do need to be read and evaluated with caution. Just as we would be unwise to regard the more sensational revelations of the tabloid press as more important than the day-to-day workings of local, national and international politics, which have a far greater impact on our lives, so we should be careful to keep a sense of proportion about the lurid exposés of misbehaviour in the Stuart court.
There were issues which loomed larger in the minds of the nation’s leaders and of ordinary citizens. As early as 1662 there was a common proverb in circulation: ‘The bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the king neglects all, and the devils take all.’ The same ballad which inveighed against Lady Castlemaine, the ‘prerogative quean’, was just as insulting about Lord Clarendon:
Old fatguts himself,
With his tripes and his pelf,
With a purse as full as his paunch is.122
The chancellor came under just as much popular condemnation as his enemy, the mistress, for pride, greed and peculation. Between 1664 and 1667 he built, at a cost of £50,000, a large house (Evelyn called it a ‘palace’) on an extensive site given him by the king on the north side of Piccadilly. Inevitably this aroused angry comment, particularly after the ravages of the Great Fire. That is just one example of the conduct of national leaders that was pounced on by the writers of ballads, newspapers and pamphlets. These potentially damaging publications were read in the new coffee-houses which were springing up all over town. They were meeting places where a customer: ‘His pipe being lighted begins for to prate, and wisely discourses the affairs of the state.’123
The government regarded these establishments as potentially seditious and actually tried to close them down in 1675, claiming that they were rallying points for ‘disaffected persons’ where ‘divers false, malicious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the defamation of his majesty’s government and to the disturbance and peace and quiet of the realm’.124 Charles and his ministers were apprehensive about republican cliques, Nonconformists, parliamentary opponents and men critical of their wasteful and unsuccessful foreign policy. Such dissidents were more likely to combine into really dangerous opposition than people who were morally outraged by the king’s bedroom antics. But it was not only political activists who followed government business. A scandalised French ambassador reported, ‘In this country everybody thinks it his right to speak of the affairs of state, and the very boatmen want the mylords to talk to them about such topics while they row them to parliament.’125
Ordinary people had no business discoursing on ‘the affairs of the state’ – such was the fixed conviction of Charles and his ministers. And, in strictly constitutional terms, they were quite right. Parliament was the Crown’s only partner in the making of policy and the king was doing his level best to exclude even them from effective decision making. He would never have been as provocative as his father in publicly proclaiming that ‘a subject and a sovereign are clear different things’ but he certainly considered himself above criticism. What was true of politics was also true of morality. While he could occasionally be stung into angry response to attacks on Barbara Villiers (as in the case of the Oxford lampoon), he, for the most part, considered it beneath his dignity to notice them. This attitude was shared by the whole court and we should not regard that as anything out of the ordinary. Every age and nation has its grandees and it is a common defect of such people to believe that the restraints acknowledged by the common herd do not apply to them. Just as the leaders of modern big business see nothing wrong in awarding themselves six-figure bonuses while shareholders suffer the vagaries of the market and employees have their wages pegged, so Charles II’s cronies considered themselves free to flout the sexual ethics by which the bulk of the population at least tried to live and which provided one of the iron bands holding society together.
In the same barefaced way that Thatcherite economists attempted to sanctify greed, so some of the Stuart court wits went on to the offensive with their libertarian philosophy, extolling promiscuity in drama and verse:
In pious times, e’er priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multiplied his kind,
’Ere one to one was cursedly confined:
When Nature prompted and no law denied
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then Israel’s monarch, after heaven’s own heart,
His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart
To wives and slaves: And, wide as his command,
Scattered his Maker’s image through the land.
Thus, Charles’ poet laureate, John Dryden, in Absalom and Achitophel, portrayed the king’s peccadilloes as positive virtues, deliberately parodying Milton’s earnest religious verse and making a political connection between Charles’ sexual potency and his sovereign power and authority. For those who sought a champion with harder philosophical muscle to defend their hedonism there was Thomas Hobbes, who argued away the very idea of subjective values. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’, he said, were purely relative terms. They ‘signify our appetites and aversions which, in different tempers, customs and doctrines of men, are different … Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himself and, at one time, praises – that is, calls good – what another time he dispraises and calls evil.’126 The king, at the centre of this fashionable élite pledged to the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure, was largely impervious to the barbs of Grub Street hacks and pious moralisers. Indeed, if criticism had any impact, it was in making him even more determined to stand by those – like Lord Clarendon and Lady Castlemaine – who were the targets of abuse. To do any less would give the impression that he was not master in his own kingdom.
However, sheer stubbornness cannot explain why he was for so long in thrall to Barbara Villiers. Nor can love. In this relationship there was no trace of that mutual respect which is the necessary foundation of love. Neither party was faithful to the other nor expected faithfulness. Faced with the near-impossibility of understanding the closeness of this relationship, most biographers have fallen back on such words as ‘infatuation’ or ‘obsession’. One of Catherine’s attendants suggested to her that Barbara had ‘bewitched’ her husband, meaning the term to be taken in its metaphorical sense. Catherine, whose English was still far from perfect, understood the explanation literally and set about praying earnestly for the release of Charles from the Satanic coils embracing him. She grasped at this interpretation as the only possible way of comprehending a relationship which was otherwise to her both distressing and intensely baffling. Most contemporaries and later commentators did not trouble their heads with fancies about spells and potions and acknowledged that Charles was, indeed, in the grip of a powerful sexual obsession.
There is no doubt that Barbara Villiers was a vigorous, sexy, feisty lady and an extremely accomplished high-class prostitute. She had a variety of wiles and techniques with which to please her clients and, according to all the canards written about her, an insatiable desire for her own sexual gratification. John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the most unrestrained of the court wits, made frequent reference to her appetites in his verses. One poem satirised the prevailing fashion of court ladies to obtain satisfaction by using artificial penises and followed the now common convention of making lewd comments about several of the leading women about Whitehall. Barbara Villiers (by this time, Duchess of Cleveland) could not be left out.
That pattern of virtue, her grace of Cl———land
Has swallowed more p———s than the nation has land;
But by rubbing and scrubbing so wide it does grow,
It is fit for just nothing but Signor Dildoe.
Our dainty, fine duchess having got a trick,
To dote on a fool for the sake of his———,
The fops were undone, did their graces but know
The discretion and vigour of Signor Dildoe.127
In common gossip Barbara was credited with every kind of sexual practice from seducing her own servants to lesbianism and even to removing the private parts from a mummified corpse which spilled from its tomb in St Paul’s during the Great Fire – with her teeth! Even if some of these stories were the product of gossip and macabre imagination, they indicate that Barbara Villiers was widely believed to be capable of anything. It would be intriguing to know what Pepys meant when he described Lady Castlemaine as being accomplished in all those arts of Aretino which so captivated the king. Should we see her, perhaps, as some kind of seventeenth-century Miss Whiplash?
Here, I believe, we come closest to the heart of the secret. In a word it is ‘domination’. However adventurous and novel Barbara’s techniques were, even she ran out of ideas long before her relationship with the king dwindled. Yet, for years she entertained Charles several nights a week. The explanation lies in the fact that he was turned on by strong women. In his life Barbara was only the latest in a succession of domineering females: Henrietta Maria, Christabella Wyndham, Lucy Walter, Jane Lane and probably other companions about whose personalities we know little. This was a time in which gender roles were changing radically, especially in the upper reaches of society. Staid observers were scandalised at the ‘masculine’ behaviour of court ladies, who drank, swore and exchanged bawdy jokes with their male counterparts. At the playhouse they found it difficult to come to terms with female roles actually being performed by women (a reform the king insisted upon in person). The new etiquette of the court, where the Hobbesian pursuit of pleasure governed all, implied that a greater freedom and even a degree of equality should be granted to women. Forgotten is the ethereal virtue of Charles I’s court. Forgotten, too, the erotic lyricism of the Cavalier poets. Women are no longer the ‘coy mistresses’ to whom their devotees pledge unending adoration. Human relationships are now of the earth, earthy. In Dryden’s poem Marriage-à-la-Mode it is the wife who insists,
If I have pleasure for a friend,
And farther love in store,
What wrong has he whose joys did end,
And who could give no more?
’Tis a madness that he
should be jealous of me,
Or that I should bar him of another:
For all we can gain is to give ourselves pain,
When neither can hinder the other.
Powerful socio-psychological forces were behind these role reversals and, as we shall see, they were profoundly disturbing. At this point it is sufficient to note that the acutest critics of the reign identified Charles’ submission to his mistress as evidence of the greatest flaw in his character. The actor, playwright and poet, John Lacy, was a great favourite of the king’s (Charles even ordered a portrait of Lacy to be painted) but they fell out over Lacy’s unrestrained criticism of the court. Pepys recorded ‘the king mighty angry’ but conceded of one offending play, ‘it was bitter indeed but very true and witty’.128 Fear of royal disapproval did not prevent Lacy railing against the monarch in verse and pointing out to him the way mistresses should be used:
Go read what Mahomet did, that was a thing
Did well become the grandeur of a king,
Who, whilst transported with his mistress’ charms,
And never pleased but in her lovely arms,
Yet when his janissaries wished her dead,
With his own hand cut off Irene’s head.129
Better that Charles should play the oriental despot than that he should suffer the humiliation of being ruled by a mere woman. But that is precisely what Charles did suffer, and deliberately so. There was something in his psyche, and something only partially connected with sex, that needed the support, the control, the pain provided by a woman who dominated him. Whether or not this masochistic tendency had physical expression we cannot know but certain it is that, without it, we cannot explain the power that Barbara Villiers exercised over him. She would not have dared to be so importunate, to abuse him to his face – sometimes in front of other people – to force him to grovel on his knees for her forgiveness, if she had not understood that he had a need for these humiliations.
Having said all that, it is important to stress that there were clear limits to the influence Barbara was allowed to have. This was because, even from her, Charles maintained a degree of emotional detachment. Lord Halifax suggested that the king ‘lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them but he was not in love with them’. Because accessibility was part of the king’s personal style and because he was ludicrously lavish in his generosity to his friends – and spectacularly so to Lady Castlemaine – it seemed to jealous courtiers and to the disapproving throng that he was as putty in the hands of those who ministered to his pleasures. This is an impression that Halifax was eager to dispel.
He showed his judgement in this, that he cannot properly be said ever to have had a favourite, though some might look so at a distance. The present use he might have of them made him throw favours upon them which might lead the lookers-on into that mistake; but he tied himself no more to them than they did to him, which implied a sufficient liberty on either side.130
Charles Stuart was nobody’s fool. As J. R. Jones has pointed out, his ‘cynicism, opportunism and flexibility, his unsurpassed skill in dissimulation and in penetrating other men’s thoughts and even intentions, gave him a clear margin of superiority over all ministers and politicians’ and, we might add, mistresses.131 The king was secretive, devious and an able exploiter of factions for his own ends – political ‘virtues’ that he had learned in his many years on the road. He had become incapable of emotional commitment. Mistresses and friends could get close to him physically and share in roisterous, relaxed pursuits but few caught any glimpses of the inner man. That is why it has always been difficult to assess the precise contribution Charles’ bedfellows made to the framing of policy.
The voluptuous, undisciplined mercuriality that was Charles II’s court did not permit the formation of two simple factions – old guard versus young Turks. It was riven by individual ambitions, rivalries, feuds, jealousies, alliances and love affairs. The relationship between Barbara and her cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, well illustrates the changeable nature of internal politics at Whitehall.
No contemporary had a good word to say for George Villiers. Many royalists blamed him for having made his peace with the Cromwellian regime, for having married General Fairfax’s daughter, for being restored to his lands and for having established himself as the richest nobleman in England before the Restoration. They resented the way he had wormed his way back into Charles’ favour, becoming a gentleman of the bedchamber and also gaining a seat on the council. Burnet unequivocally identified Villiers as the king’s evil genius. The satirist Samuel Butler, though enjoying Buckingham’s patronage, wrote of him that ‘continual wine, women and music had debauched his understanding’. Pepys was astonished to learn that the duke enjoyed a certain popularity with some sections of the London populace: ‘they must be very silly,’ he wrote, ‘that think he can do anything out of a good intention’.132 But it was Dryden, who admittedly had had a falling-out with Buckingham, who delineated his character most spitefully in Absalom and Achitophel:
A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts and nothing long:
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking …
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both (to show his judgement) in extremes:
So over violent or over civil,
That every man with him was god or devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded but dessert …
He laughed himself from court; then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne’er be chief.
Onlookers were appalled by Buckingham’s turbulent behaviour – his scandalous love affairs, his frequent quarrels, some of which ended in duels or, at least, challenges, his persistent intrigues, his tendency to laugh at the king behind his back – and wondered that Charles could take such pleasure in his company. It was a court colleague who caught the essence of the man in lines which indicate why the monarch found Buckingham such an irresistible companion, despite his many follies:
Let him at business ne’er so earnest sit,
Show him but mirth, and bait that mirth with wit,
That shadow of a jest shall be enjoyed
Though he left all mankind to be destroyed.133
The words might have been written about Charles himself, and the king permitted Villiers a degree of familiarity he allowed to few others. The duke took full advantage of this and on several occasions overstepped the mark. For example, when Minette returned to France at the beginning of 1661, Buckingham not only accompanied her but began paying ardent court to her. This was a considerable embarrassment to Henrietta and an even greater irritation to her jealous fiancé, who complained to Charles and demanded the duke’s immediate recall.
Buckingham had been one of Barbara’s supporters in the early days of the reign and they were natural colleagues in the campaign against Clarendon. However, they fell out in 1663, probably over Barbara’s receiving instruction in the Catholic faith. Buckingham, as a free-thinker, loathed the dogmas imposed by the hierarchies of both Rome and Canterbury, and his sympathies lay very much with the downtrodden Nonconformists. He may also have concluded that his cousin was getting too big for her expensive satin shoes. Whatever the reason for their estrangement, Buckingham decided that it was time that Barbara was replaced in the king’s affections. This brings us to ‘The Strange Affair of La Belle Stuart’.
On 4 January 1662, Henrietta, duchesse d’Orléans, sent a message to her brother:
I would not miss this opportunity of writing to you but by Madam Stuart who is taking her daughter to be one of the maids of the queen, your wife. Had it not been for this purpose I assure you I should have been very sorry to let her go from here, for she is the prettiest girl imaginable and the most fitted to adorn a court.134
Can Henrietta’s introduction of little Frances Stuart really have been as ingenuous as it sounds? She understood Charles well enough to know that he would be intrigued to see for himself ‘the prettiest girl imaginable’ and that, if he liked what he saw, the matter would not end there. If Henrietta had a hidden agenda, the inspiration for it may have come from recent events in Paris. Only a few months before she had drawn the attention of Louis XIV to one of her own attendants, Louise de la Vallière, in order to dispel rumours of the king’s attachment to herself, which were driving her husband to distraction. The plan had worked so well that Louise was now installed as maîtresse en titre. Henrietta may have reasoned that the same stratagem might work at Whitehall to lure Charles away from Lady Castlemaine, whose character and ambition were already damaging her brother’s reputation. Frances’ mother was reputedly an extremely cunning woman and may very willingly have connived at a plan to dangle her daughter before the King of England’s eyes.
Frances Teresa Stuart, still under fifteen at the time of Minette’s letter, was, indeed, a striking young woman and very different in character and appearance from Charles’ mistress in residence. She had spent virtually all her life in the household of Henrietta Maria, where her parents had taken refuge in 1649, and the queen mother felt fondly protective of her. On her transfer to the English court she made an immediate impact. There was about her a naïveté and a freshness which set her apart from the fashion set by Barbara. Within a year her portrait was being painted and eagerly sought after by connoisseurs of female beauty. The Duchess of York commissioned Sir Peter Lely to paint the likenesses of eleven ‘Windsor Beauties’ and that of Frances, in the role of ‘Diana, huntress chaste and fair’, was the most accomplished. The Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany who was visiting England was among those who begged a miniature. And Pepys in his diary dethroned Barbara Villiers when he recorded, ‘Mrs Stuart … with her sweet eye, little Roman nose and excellent [figure], is now the greatest beauty I ever saw, I think, in my life, and, if ever woman can, do exceed my Lady Castlemaine’. He went on to speculate on the impact her arrival at court was having: ‘nor do I wonder if the king changes, which I verily believe is the reason of his coldness to my Lady Castlemaine’.135 Whether or not this delicious bait was deliberately offered to Charles by a faction determined to use her for their own ends, once he had swallowed it such a faction did emerge eager to take full advantage of the king’s latest obsession. Frances’ principal mentor was the Duke of Buckingham.
He allied himself with Bennet in seeking to procure this latest beauty for the royal bed. Such pimping was commonplace. Halifax recorded that it was
no small matter in a court and not unworthy the thoughts even of a party. A mistress, either dextrous in herself or well instructed by those that are so, may be very useful to her friends, not only in the immediate hours of her ministry, but by her influences and insinuations at other times. It was resolved generally by others whom he should have in his arms, as well as whom he should have in his councils. Of a man who was so capable of choosing, he chose as seldom as any man that ever lived.136
The schemers did their best to elbow Lady Castlemaine aside by monopolising the entertainment of the king and ensuring that their protégée was frequently in his company. Buckingham and his wife gave a dinner for the royal couple at Wallingford House, their town residence, in July 1663, from which Barbara was excluded. On this occasion she won, for Charles simply went on from the party to her quarters and spent the night there. Perhaps the sight of Frances’ unavailable charms roused him to such a pitch of excitement that he had to find release in the place where he was most sure of being obliged.
For the main fact about La Belle Stuart, as everyone was calling her, and the only one that makes her story interesting, is that she was ‘unavailable’. There was about Frances an unsophisticated, lighthearted girlishness that appealed to many of the jaded male palates about the court. She loved games and treated flirtation as just another amusement. But she always remained sufficiently in command of herself to know when to stop. She gained a reputation for virtue rare in the household of Charles II and this, of course, only excited her suitors the more. On one occasion the king drew the attention of the French ambassador to her maidenly modesty. Frances, he said, had confided to him a strange dream in which she had shared a bed with three envoys recently despatched from Paris. The naïve recounting of this nocturnal fantasy caused her to blush deeply, Charles observed approvingly. He, of course, was in a position to command more from her than the young bucks who tumbled over themselves to gain her attention. She permitted him greater liberties, and the easily shocked Pepys noted that the two of them were seen kissing in palace corridors quite openly. But that was as far as it went – even after Barbara joined in the game.
Lady Castlemaine was far too shrewd to try to undermine her young rival. She knew Charles well enough to realise that any displays of temper or backbiting would only rebound upon herself. So she treated the king’s latest infatuation as a game and one in which she could join in wholeheartedly. She took the new girl under her wing, organising entertainments in her own rooms at which Charles could ogle and fondle Frances. Sometimes Barbara invited the ingénue to sleep with her, and Charles would visit in the small hours for three-in-a-bed antics, but even in these circumstances Frances kept her ankles firmly crossed. Early in 1663, a rumour reached Pepys that Lady Castlemaine had instigated the frolic of a mock wedding with herself as the groom and Frances the bride:
Married they were, with ring and all other ceremonies of church service and ribbands [the cuttings of ribbons from the bride’s dress] and a sack posset in bed and flinging the stocking; but in the close it is said that my Lady Castlemaine … rose and the king came and took her place with pretty Mrs Stuart.137
Yet, all the talk around Whitehall was of La Belle Stuart’s continued resistance. Sometimes Charles’ impatience got the better of him, as when he told the irritatingly virginal Frances that he hoped the day would come when he would see her ‘old and willing’.
Barbara also allowed herself to become agitated. Realising that her strategy had not worked, she suddenly turned against her young rival and forbade her her chambers. Charles’ response was swift: if Frances did not come, neither would he. Lady Castlemaine resorted to her usual retaliation; she took herself off to Richmond. But this time she was not followed within hours by a supplicant king. It was her friend and collaborator, Charles Berkeley, who enabled her to save face. He took Frances down to Richmond and persuaded her to return to court. La Belle Stuart would have been dim indeed not to realise the potential power she now held in her hands and the question which now thrusts itself forward is whether she can have been as innocent as she seemed or whether she and her backers were playing for high stakes. Was she, in effect, assuming an Anne Boleyn role? The clever Tudor woman had held Henry VIII at bay for six years in the hope that he would divorce a wife who had failed to provide him with a male heir and marry her instead. The position, in 1663, was very similar. It was becoming painfully obvious to all concerned that Catherine was barren. It was imperative that the king, notoriously capable of siring bastards, should have a legitimate son, a requirement rendered the more urgent by the unpopularity of the current heir presumptive. James, Duke of York, was known to be more pro-Catholic than his brother and, even at this early stage, many of the king’s subjects were appalled at the prospect of him inheriting the Crown. It will have occurred to several movers and shakers round the court that the simplest way of overcoming the succession crisis would be for Charles to divorce Catherine and marry a young, healthy woman to whom he was, manifestly, attracted. There would, of course, be diplomatic complications; the Portuguese would be furious. But Charles was not unduly bothered by what the Portuguese thought. The alliance had failed to deliver the advantages he had been led to expect. Bombay had not been handed over as promised. Tangier was already showing signs of becoming a maelstrom that would suck in inordinately more men and treasure than it was worth. English troops sent to the peninsula were complaining of being ill-treated and underpaid. Spain was taking reprisals against English ships. And, to cap all these inconveniences, a substantial part of that glowing dowry which had been Catherine’s major asset had never been delivered. So, a change of wife was, theoretically at least, politically possible.
How did all this play with Frances? Was she, as many observers who judged from outward appearances thought, a frivolous, empty-headed creature, incapable of subtle designs, or had she decided quite clearly that she was not going to be satisfied with titles and jewels as payment for becoming another notch on the King of England’s bedpost? It certainly beggars belief that a girl brought up in French and English palaces can have been reticent and inexperienced in matters sexual. Most of her colleagues in the queen’s entourage had their delicious secrets to share as they giggled together in Whitehall’s withdrawing rooms and, in a court atmosphere which was, according to Pepys, ‘nothing almost but bawdry from top to bottom’, their male counterparts were very explicit about what they wanted. Mistress Stuart may have been a fun-loving girl when she returned to England but her subsequent career showed her to be resourceful and intelligent. Pepys must surely have been right in his conviction that she was far from being an empty-headed, manipulated young woman. Referring to the failure of Buckingham and his confederates to achieve Charles’ seduction for him, the diarist wrote, ‘she proves a cunning slut and is advised at Somerset House by the queen mother and by her mother’.138
If we wish to know what this advice consisted of we should look carefully at the relations between the women closest to Charles, particularly during the autumn of 1663. Charles was tiring of Barbara Villiers. She would remain a fixture at court for several years and a continual drain on the royal purse, and, though her complete eclipse was often prophesied, this was more out of hope than from any informed knowledge of the king’s feelings. She had become a habit whose dangers were obvious but whose hold was difficult to break. Charles needed, or thought he needed, a maîtresse en titre and no one else could fill that role. Had Frances succumbed to his importunity there can be little doubt that he would have grasped the nettle of dismissing Lady Castlemaine and replacing her with his new concubine. For the middle months of the year Barbara had once again been great with child and she was delivered of a son, christened Henry, in September. Charles, presumably for good reasons, refused to accept that he was the father and there was yet another row. Eventually, as always, Barbara won and Charles, thereafter, demonstrated great affection for the new baby but every crack in his relationship with Lady Castlemaine had the potential to widen into a chasm.
At the same time matters between the king and queen were improving. Catherine was trying really hard to be the sort of consort her husband wanted. Not only did she wink at his affairs, she learned his language, cast away her natural modesty to dress in the more revealing English style and adapted herself to court pastimes. Pepys observed that she began to be more ‘brisk’ and ‘debonair’ and to ‘play like other ladies’. The French ambassador also reported that Catherine was entering into the spirit of things: ‘There is a ball and a comedy every other day. The rest of the days are spent at play either at the queen’s or at Lady Castlemaine’s, where the company does not fail to be treated to a good supper.’139 She was more demonstrative in her affection for Charles, riding out to meet him on the road on his return to court and there hugging him and assuming ‘all the actions of a fond and pleasant lady’. The writer hoped that this might make the king ‘like her the better and forsake his two mistresses’.140
The second of Pepys’ aspirations was a non-starter but king and queen did draw closer together. Then, in October, there was a crisis: Catherine fell dangerously ill. Like an emotional magnifying glass, this had the effect of concentrating the king’s affection. As his wife’s condition rapidly deteriorated, he spent hours at her bedside. For some days he watched helplessly and with genuine concern as priests and doctors plied their bizarre remedies. Catherine’s shaved head was covered with a nightcap reputed to possess miraculous powers. She had to endure the constant chanting of Latin prayers and her feet were festooned with the bleeding carcasses of slaughtered pigeons. When Charles could stand the mumbo-jumbo no longer, he drove everyone out, insisting that Catherine needed rest. With some of his wife’s ladies, he watched over her and wept what observers believed to be genuine tears as she sank into a delirium and extreme unction was applied. The next few days made a deep and lasting impression on him. Catherine at times believed herself to be suffering the pangs of childbirth and to have presented Charles with the hoped-for son. She gazed upon the boy in her delusion and apologised that he was so ugly. Then, in more lucid moments, she told her husband that she knew she was dying and begged him to marry someone he would find more pleasing and who would, in very truth, bear him an heir. It was all extremely affecting and Charles would have been callous indeed not to have been moved. Just what his feelings were we can only guess but guilt must have had its place alongside pity and sadness. He could not return such devotion but that does not mean that he was not touched by it. When, according to the French ambassador, the king repaired, after his vigil, to Lady Castlemaine’s rooms where he expected to find Frances Stuart, it did not indicate a callousness on his part. Whatever his emotional needs, Charles always sought their fulfilment in female company.
He was, of course, fully aware of the political implications of the queen’s imminent death. Everyone was. As the French ambassador indicated, the king’s ‘remarriage is already discussed. Everyone chooses him a wife according to his own inclinations and there are some who do not look for her out of England.’141 The Somerset House group had made their choice and matters seemed to be falling out better than they could have hoped. Little Frances had no political standing but, by the same token, she would bring with her no political baggage. Freed from a Portuguese alliance which had become an embarrassment, Charles would have no wish to tie himself in fresh diplomatic coils. He would be free to follow his own desires – and there was no doubt where they led.
But all schemes and speculations came to nothing. The crisis passed and Catherine lived. Her gradual recovery can be traced through the king’s letters to his sister. On 2 November he wrote: ‘My wife is now out of all danger, though very weak, and it was a very strange fever for she talked idly four or five days after the fever had left her, but now that is likewise past and [she] desires me to make her compliments to you and Monsieur, which she will do herself as soon as she gets strength.’142 The greetings from Paris had been faithfully delivered by the comte de Cominges, for at this stage of her illness it was not only pain and the ministrations of her doctors that she had to endure. Etiquette demanded that, weak though she was, the ambassador be admitted to her chamber. Because her affliction had affected her hearing the message he brought had to be bellowed by Charles into her ear! Three weeks later the king reported, ‘She mends very slowly and continues still so weak as she cannot yet stand upon her legs.’143 Matters had improved considerably by 10 December: ‘My wife is now so well as in a few days she will thank you herself for the concernment you had for her in her sickness. Yesterday we had a little ball in the privy chamber where she looked on … Pray send me some images to put in prayer books. They are for my wife … I assure you it will be a great present to her and she will look upon them often, for she is not only content to say the great office in the breviary every day, but likewise that of Our Lady, too, and this is besides going to chapel …’ Was it with a sense of irony that Charles then closed his letter with the words, ‘I am just now going to see a new play, so I shall say no more but that I am entirely yours’?144 By the following spring everything was back to normal – or, perhaps, not, for we can discern a greater degree of attentiveness even in Charles’ sardonic description of his timetable: ‘I have been all this afternoon playing the good husband, having been abroad with my wife, and ’tis now past twelve o’clock and I am very sleepy.’145 Charles’ attentiveness to Catherine throughout these worrying weeks calls into question the image sometimes presented of him as a neglectful, uncaring, even cruel husband. Too often attention has been focused on his monumental unfaithfulness without recognition of two aspects of his relationships with women: he was too detached to be capable of grand passion and too involved to be incapable of genuine sympathy.
The fact that Charles had almost lost his wife deepened his affection for her. Her recovery and her continued infertility prolonged the succession issue and there was still talk, from time to time, of a royal divorce and remarriage but it is doubtful whether the king ever, thereafter, took the possibility very seriously. He would have found it very hard to inflict humiliation and mental suffering upon the woman whose thoughts as she faced death were only for his continued happiness. And Catherine did everything possible to oblige him by bearing the desperately desired heir. She tried all the prayers and holy relics her priests prescribed and all the nostrums of her physicians. In the summer of 1662 she resorted to the waters of Tunbridge Wells which had a reputation for curing barrenness. That proving ineffective, the following year she took herself to the other ancient spa at Bath. She repeated these visits periodically thereafter. Everything that could have been done was done to get the queen pregnant. Not for one moment would Charles have faulted her genuine desire to give him a child or her efforts to carry that desire into effect.
This did not stop his vain pursuit of Frances Stuart, which continued year in and year out. In 1666 he flattered her by broadcasting her image widely abroad. To mark naval victories in the Dutch war he commissioned a gold medal, bearing his own likeness on one side and, on the reverse, a representation of Britannia. The woman chosen to personify the triumphant nation was Frances Stuart. The poet Edmund Waller drew from this a moral that Charles certainly had not intended when he compared Britannia’s resistance to naval attack with Frances’ staunch defence of her honour against the ‘golden rain’ of the king’s bounty:
Britannia there the fort in vain
Had battered been with golden rain;
Thunder itself had failed to pass;
Virtue’s a stronger guard than brass.146
It was about the same time that Charles approached the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask whether inability to produce children was, in the Church’s eyes, valid grounds for divorce. However, he was only driven to this extremity by rumours that La Belle Stuart was about to be married (see here) and nothing more came of it. In 1672, when England’s first copper coins were issued, Frances’ Britannia once again was chosen to adorn the ‘tails’ side, and for over a century the woman Charles II never conquered chinked around in the nation’s small change.
All these personal manoeuvrings had clear foreign policy implications. This was the one area of royal business in which Charles did take a close interest. It was accepted that relations with other European rulers formed an undisputed part of the royal prerogative, but this did not mean that council and parliament had no say in such matters, nor that the king’s right to form alliances and wage war need take no account of the wishes and prejudices of his people. The English were, as usual, suspicious of their cross-Channel neighbours. The current focuses of their xenophobia were France and the United Netherlands; France because it was Catholic, militarily successful and, by long tradition, hostile to English interests; the Dutch Republic because it was a powerful commercial and colonial rival and because there was unfinished business left over from the war of 1652–4. Charles shared the mercantile community’s dislike of the Dutch and responded with personal indignation to the clashes which were becoming more frequent between the convoys plying the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes to distant trading posts and colonies.
Official attitudes towards France were not so straightforward. Charles was unsympathetic to the prevailing Francophobia. His objective was to remain on good terms with his cousin in Paris while not engaging in any overseas adventures that might prove costly. The queen mother’s group worked closely with Louis’ ambassadors. Those ambassadors were not always assiduous in furthering Anglo-French harmony. Intent on asserting the rights and dignity of their own masters and aware of the reserve that existed in some government circles, they tended to be prickly and provoke diplomatic situations. For example, when the comte de Cominges arrived late at a banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London and discovered that the host and his guests had already taken their seats at table, he returned home in a huff and sat down to write to Louis XIV complaining of this ‘incivilité grossière et barbare’.
However, it was not only the agents who stood so stiffly on what they considered matters of national pride. Their masters could be just as sensitive. In the early 1660s a long-running dispute disturbed relations between the two kings over the courtesy to be shown to English ships in home waters. Charles insisted that the vessels of all other nations should dip their flags or topsails to ships of his navy. Louis demurred, assuring his brother monarch, ‘I will be found ready to put mine own [state] in jeopardy rather than tarnish by any faint-heartedness the glory which I am seeking in all things as the principal aim of all my actions.’147 Charles was equally adamant: ‘I desire friendship with France but I will never buy it upon dishonourable terms and I thank God my condition is not so ill but that I can stand upon my own legs and believe that my friendship is as valuable to my neighbours as theirs is to me’.148 But for all Charles’ bravado, the fact was that he needed Louis more than Louis needed him. In the event of rebellion at home or war abroad he would find it very difficult to survive without the aid of Europe’s richest and most powerful monarch. Whatever the prejudices of his fellow countrymen, Charles required the French king as an insurance policy. It was for this reason that he decided early on to make sure of Louis’ friendship by opening a confidential ‘hotline’ to the Louvre which would avoid the inevitable distortions of the other channels. And the perfect courier was to hand: a person from whom he had hardly any secrets; a person much admired and respected by the French king. Henrietta, duchesse d’Orléans.
On 26 October 1662, Charles wrote one of his many letters to Minette but this one was different. It was formal in tone, lacked the sibling banter that usually marked their correspondence and it was written in French. There was a good reason for this: the letter was meant to be shown to King Louis.
I consider nothing of greater value than the intimate friendship between the king my brother and myself and I assure you that the consideration has strongly influenced me … to forge a very close correspondence between us, in which I am strongly persuaded of your intervention. And if it please you to propose to him that we may communicate our thoughts to each other in our own hands by this private channel I shall be very glad, knowing how much this mutual confidence will contribute towards maintaining our friendship. I have charged the bearer to acquaint you and the king my brother with the present state of my affairs and with the procedure I propose to adopt. He will assure you of all the respect I have for your person and of the desire I have that you should be the witness and pledge of the friendship between the king my brother and myself …149
For the rest of the decade Charles’ sister played a central role in his secret diplomacy. The Somerset House junto had realised that Henrietta’s changed status in Louis’ court gave her an enhanced importance. The French king who had once been so dismissive of this ‘bag of holy bones’ remained utterly charmed by his sister-in-law. For his part, Charles was anxious to involve his sibling in the making of policy and not as a mere intermediary. ‘I would not have this business pass through other hands,’ Charles assured her, ‘and I would be very willing to have your opinion and counsel how I should proceed in this matter.’150 While, in the last analysis, Charles would always keep his own counsel, he relied heavily on his mother and sister in his relations with Cousin Louis.
It was not an easy position for Minette, because the interests of the two nations were not wholly compatible. Louis’ eyes remained fixed on the isolation of Spain and ensuring her continued decline. He wanted to maintain peace between the other leading states to prevent any of them turning to Madrid for aid and to this end he had signed alliances with both the Dutch and the English. He was, therefore, far from pleased to see his two allies drifting inexorably towards war. Minette became the conduit for the grumbles of her brother and brother-in-law: the French ambassador was feeding lies to his master; the English ambassador ‘must be given imperative orders’ not to be so stiff and unaccommodating; the Dutch were bragging that they had the French king’s friendship and must be silenced; Charles petulantly protested his constant commitment to Anglo-French amity and complained that ‘it is not my fault if it do not succeed according to my inclination and desire’.151 Charles blamed the belligerence of the Dutch and the eagerness of his own mercantile community for the outbreak of hostilities but his insistence that he desired nothing but peace was far from sincere. Parliament and the City were looking to him to repeat the naval triumphs of the Cromwellian regime and the bid to achieve some easy popularity could not be resisted. A French ambassador graphically confirmed this interpretation of events. ‘The English,’ he reported, ‘are like their own mastiffs, which, as soon as they see other dogs throw themselves upon them and throttle them if they can – and then go back home and lie down and go to sleep.’152
However, it was essential that Charles should be as sure as possible of the intentions of his ‘brother’ of France. In letter after letter he urged Minette to find out exactly what Louis had in mind and to agree a new treaty of mutual defence that would deter Dutch aggression. In the event, the French king played a waiting game. When England entered the Second Dutch War (1665–7) she was alone but none the less self-confident for that. The conflict and its attendant calamities would savagely undermine national morale and the standing of the government. It all began well enough with the battle of Lowestoft, at which the enemy lost 5,000 men and twelve capital ships. Cynics claimed that the greatest element of the victory was the death of Charles Berkeley, newly created Earl of Falmouth, who was blown apart by roundshot while standing on the quarterdeck of the flagship next to the Duke of York, an event immortalised by Andrew Marvell:
Such as his rise such was his fall, unpraised:
A chance shot sooner took than chance him raised.
His shattered head the fearless duke disdains
And gave the last-first proof that he had brains.153
But while Berkeley’s enemies exulted, Charles, it was reported, wept bitter tears.
The defeated Dutch had already, though inadvertently, launched their revenge. A fresh cargo of bubonic plague had been delivered to London in merchandise coming from the Levant via Holland towards the end of the previous year. Starting in May and continuing throughout a sultry summer, the epidemic claimed, week on week, more and more victims, until 70,000 out of a population approaching half a million had perished. This appalling visitation, seen by many as divine judgement on the sins of the nation’s leaders, was described in the accounts of Pepys, Evelyn and other contemporaries and it takes little imagination to envisage the helplessness, despair and mental anguish of citizens cooped up in their overcrowded hovels with the dead and dying or, if they could, fleeing by road or river, often bearing the infection with them. Charles removed his court to Salisbury. At first all seemed well. The French ambassador reported that La Belle Stuart and her friends played bowls as though they had not a care in the world. But then, ‘another man died this morning in the street, an unpleasant custom which begins to spread’.154 The king hurriedly moved on to Oxford.
The cup of the nation’s woes was not yet filled. Despite all that the king and his sister and England’s politicians and sailors could do, fate had cruel tricks in store. Minette had urged her brother to come to a clandestine arrangement with Louis:
In God’s name … do not lose any time in obtaining the king’s secret promise that he will not help the Dutch; for you understand that he cannot promise you this openly because of his engagements with them … But, as in this world appearances must be kept up … you ought, as I have already said, to content yourself with a secret agreement …155
Charles repeatedly assured her that that was precisely his desire and hinted that it was Louis who was holding back (as was, indeed, the case). Caught in the middle, Henrietta sometimes felt that Charles was not doing all he should to ease the progress of their underground diplomacy. When she accused him of not taking her fully into his confidence, he was stung to respond:
… if you are not fully informed of all things, as you complain of in your letters, it is your own fault, for I have been a very exact correspondent and have constantly answered all your letters, and I have directed my Lord Holies [the ambassador] to give a full account of our dispute with Holland, if you will have the patience to hear it. I shall sum up all in telling you that I desire very much to have a strict friendship with France, but I expect to find my account in it, as ’tis as reasonable that they should find theirs.156
Clarendon noted that many people faced the year 1666 with anxious foreboding, because it was one ‘long destined by all astrologers for the production of dismal changes and alterations throughout the world’.157 It began ominously when Louis declared war on England. He claimed that he was in honour bound to meet his treaty obligations to the Dutch but his real interest was soon revealed in a series of raids in the West Indies, which the English navy, preoccupied in home waters, was powerless to prevent.
The French king, while delighted to make such opportunistic sallies, never intended to risk ships and men on behalf of his ally. He was playing a deliberate double game the objects of which were to keep the belligerents occupied with each other without seriously altering the military and naval balance in Europe, and to secure for himself the position of arbiter in the eventual negotiations for peace. He promised the Dutch naval aid but was deliberately slow in delivering it. However, the mere threat had a disastrous effect on the one major sea battle of 1666. At the end of May two massive fleets set out to confront each other off Ostend. However, the English received intelligence that French reinforcements were on their way, and Prince Rupert took twenty ships to go in search of them. In the ensuing four-day battle with the full force of the Dutch navy the depleted English force received a severe mauling. By the time Rupert returned from his fruitless quest for French ships a quarter of the English men-o’-war had been sunk or taken and the remainder were manned by depleted and exhausted crews. The result was a reversal of the battle of the previous year although the Dutch were, themselves, too battered to be able to follow up their advantage.
Then, just as in 1665, tragedy on land followed needless loss of life at sea. The Great Fire of London broke out on Sunday morning, 2 September. When, four days later, it was finally brought under control, 436 acres inside and outside the walls had been consumed, 13,200 homes and business premises had been reduced to mounds of hot, smouldering ash, and St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-nine parish churches, the symbols of civic and family continuity, had vanished. The impact of this series of disasters was devastating. The parliament which had clamoured for war now drew the purse strings tight and demanded peace. Charles approached Louis, and ‘the king his brother’ brokered a settlement. Magnanimously he offered to hand back England’s West Indian possessions in return for the neutrality which would allow him to pursue his continental ambitions unimpeded. Talks with the Dutch began at Breda in March. As an economy move Charles ordered the bulk of his navy to be laid up at Chatham and the crews paid off. He thus paved the way for one of the worst defeats in British maritime history. The brilliant Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter was back in the North Sea and the no less brilliant chief minister Johan de Witt was delaying the peace talks to allow him time for a final strike at the enemy. In early June de Ruyter sailed his fleet into the Thames estuary and, unimpeded by English ships or any effective fire from the woefully inadequate shore batteries, harried the coast, worked his way into the Medway and sent fireships into the anchorage. Several men-o’-war were damaged, three were totally destroyed, and the flagship, the Royal Charles, was towed away, to the cheers of Dutch crews, by ‘a sorry boat and six men’ (as one bitter watcher from the shore recalled). Then the enemy withdrew, but only to patrol the river mouth for several weeks and keep the panic-stricken English guessing about their intentions.
London’s citizens, who had survived the horrors of epidemic and inferno, were now terrified at the prospect of a new and wholly unfamiliar threat – rape and pillage at the hands of a triumphant foe. Samuel Pepys’ reaction was typical of that of many of the better-off Londoners:
I presently resolved of my father’s and wife’s going into the country, and, at two hours’ warning, they did go by coach this day, with about £1,300 in gold in their night-bag. Pray God give them good passage and good care to hide it when they come home, but my heart is full of fear.158
All was panic and confusion. There was a run on the bankers. The value of gold soared as citizens rushed to turn silver and other valuables into more portable wealth. Horses and wagons were at a premium. Pepys was torn between his duties at the Navy Office and his concern for his own possessions:
I sent for my cousin Sarah and her husband … and I did deliver to them my chest of writings about Brampton and my brother Tom’s papers and my journals, which I value much, and did send my two silver flagons to Kate Joyce’s, that so, being scattered what I have, something might be saved. I have also made a girdle, by which, with some trouble, I do carry about me £300 in gold … that I may not be without something in case I should be surprised, for I think in any nation but ours people that appear … so faulty as we would have their throats cut.159
Pepys was terrified of mob rule and was anticipating that angry demonstrators looking for someone to blame for the present calamity would vent their fury on the administrators of the navy. He well judged the mood of the populace; as the risk of invasion subsided, fear gave way to anger. All the pent-up emotions of the last three years exploded in a cacophony of outrage against the government. There was no broad agreement about who was to blame. Disillusionment embraced everyone in authority. In tavern, coffee-shop, marketplace and wherever people discussed politics they railed against the king, the court, the ministers, the mistresses, parliament and the bishops. Pulpit orators inveighed against wickedness in high places, and self-appointed prophets wandered the streets naked, warning of the imminent dies irae. Those two sober citizens Mr Evelyn and Mr Pepys took a turn around Westminster Hall one April day,
talking of the badness of the government, where nothing but wickedness and wicked men and women command the king: that it is not in his nature to gainsay anything that relates to his pleasures; that much of it arises from the sickliness [i.e. poor health] of our ministers of state, who cannot be about him as the idle companions are and, therefore, he gives way to the young rogues; and then from the negligence of the clergy, that a bishop shall never be seen about him, as the King of France hath always …
Evelyn regarded Charles as his cousin’s inferior in every department of life.
… the King of France hath his mistresses but laughs at the foolery of our king that makes his bastards princes and loses his revenue upon them and makes his mistresses his masters.160
Indeed, the contrast between the two monarchs could not have been more striking. Louis had grasped his opportunity to go on the rampage in the Spanish Netherlands. Conquering town after town throughout the summer, his spectacular advance had about it more of the air of a pageant than a military campaign. When Lille capitulated on 27 August Louis arrived with all his court, including his wife and two mistresses, and received the keys of the city at the hands of the chief magistrate while all the church bells tolled solemnly. He had certainly begun to live up to his own boast that he would ‘show the whole earth that there is still a king in the world’.
Throughout these calamitous events England looked to its king for leadership and the common perception was that he failed lamentably to provide it.
As Nero once with harp in hand surveyed
His flaming Rome and as that burned he played.
So our great prince, when the Dutch fleet arrived,
Saw his ships burned and as they burned he swived.
So kind was he in our extremist need,
He would those flames extinguish with his seed.161
So an anonymous versifier lashed the king with angry satire. Such condemnation was not altogether justified. When Charles took his court away from the capital in 1665 he was doing no more than other monarchs had done for centuries (Henry VIII, for example, was positively hypochondriacal about possible infection and fled from one royal residence to another at the first sign of disease) and he was among the first to return to Whitehall at the end of the year. When the heart of the City went up in flames the royal brothers were soon in the thick of firefighting activities, wading in a conduit to fill buckets. In the immediate aftermath he took a lead in making emergency arrangements for the establishment of temporary markets and business premises and in commandeering buildings where citizens could store the possessions they had managed to salvage. In June 1667, when all London quaked in fear of the Dutch fleet advancing upriver and even of a French army being transported across the undefended Channel, Charles and James were up before dawn organising the sinking of ships in Barking Creek and elsewhere to impede the progress of enemy vessels. Charles was ambivalent about crises. No man more resolutely avoided conflict, at both personal and national levels, but when catastrophe confronted him he responded energetically and even enjoyed getting to grips with problems. The truth was, as Clarendon had long ago discovered, that Charles Stuart was lazy rather than incompetent.
However, in politics perception is all and, by this point in the reign, most observers had become convinced of two things: the king was sunk in depravity, and affairs of state were in the hands of favourites and mistresses. To discover how far this was true we shall have to review the in camera activities of the royal circle during the turbulent first decade of the reign. There was a considerable difference between what happened within palace walls and what the generality of people believed happened. One valuable source of information is to be found in diplomatic exchanges. It was part of a foreign ambassador’s task to try to understand the way government worked and which personalities enjoyed the greatest influence, and this makes diplomatic reports more reliable than the scandalous stories spreading outwards from Whitehall and growing more sensational with each retelling. However, we do have to make allowance for national prejudice and that ignorance of the culture which could only be dispelled by long residence. In 1664, the comte de Cominges informed his master that Lady Castlemaine was worth cultivating because she and her cronies had a great deal of power behind the scenes. This, he indicated, was a national malaise: ‘women … have such a hold over the minds of men in this country that it may be said the English are truly slaves to their wives and their mistresses through custom and through weakness’.162 We may dismiss Cominges’ xenophobic reasoning from the particular to the general but, in that he and his successors found it worthwhile to cultivate Barbara and to pay her for information, it is clear that she did know a great deal about government policy and used her position to sway political decisions.
Lady Castlemaine was mightily relieved by the queen’s recovery in the closing weeks of 1663. She had everything to gain from the maintenance of the status quo and everything to lose if Catherine died and Charles offered marriage to Frances Stuart. Despite their occasional fierce quarrels (or, perhaps, because of them) Barbara and Charles had settled into a routine relationship. In the summer of 1665, another French envoy reported that Charles’ passion had now cooled and that he derived more pleasure from their private dinner parties and his visits to their children, of whom he was very fond.163 Berkeley’s death at the battle of Lowestoft was an unpleasant blow but one from which she recovered quickly by urging Charles to appoint Baptist May to the vacant keepership of the privy purse. ‘Bab’ May was one of the wilder young blades about Whitehall who, according to Burnet, commended himself by ‘serving the king in his vices’. Pepys described him more directly as a ‘court pimp’. Now, thanks to Barbara, he bathed in the golden shower of royal favour. As well as his lucrative post he received land grants on Pall Mall Fields and King Street where he built houses for the booming market fed by courtiers and social aspirants who clamoured for property close to the palace. May showed his gratitude by keeping up the flow of cash from the privy purse into Barbara’s coffers.
This happened at the same time that the mistress lost another valuable ally. The advent of plague convinced Henrietta Maria that the time had come to beat a temporary retreat to her homeland. The Somerset House junto had failed in its main objective, to keep England firmly tied to France. Louis’ diplomats had made strenuous efforts during the early months of the Dutch war to bring the parties to the negotiating table. The queen mother and Lord St Albans had added their voices to those urging Charles not to force the French king to choose between his allies, but, not for the first time, Charles had rejected his mother’s advice. Now, with the likelihood of England finding itself at war with France, the vicinity of London was not a safe place to be. Henrietta Maria’s residence was an all too obvious target for the hostility of Francophobe mobs. At the end of June the queen mother left, planning to return only when it was safe to do so. It remained for an anonymous rhymer to assess, in brief, her English sojourn:
The pious mother queen hearing her son
Was thus enamoured with a buttered bun [a reference to James’ espousal to the pregnant Anne Hyde],
And that the fleet was gone in pomp and state
To fetch for Charles the floury Lisbon Kate,
She chants Te Deum and he comes away
To wish her hopeful issue timely joy.
Her most uxorious mate she used of old;
Why not with easy youngsters make as bold?
From the French court she haughty topics [i.e. grandiose ideas of absolute monarchy] brings,
Deludes their pliant nature with vain things.
Her mischiefbreeding breast did so prevail,
The new got Flemish town was set to sale.
For those and Jermyn’s sins she founds a church [the convent of the Visitation at Chaillot],
So slips away and leaves us in the lurch.164
It is not entirely coincidental that Barbara’s influence began noticeably to decline from this time. Without a figurehead and a pro-French policy around which to cohere, the Somerset House junto disintegrated. Personal rivalries asserted themselves, principally those between Clarendon, Buckingham, May and Bennet (recently created Earl of Arlington). The ‘workings’ of government became more fluid than ever. The council and its committees continued to regulate daily business but they had become the battleground of factions. Clarendon was progressively sidelined by Arlington, and the chancellor could later point out that between the summer of 1665 and the autumn of 1667 he had enjoyed less than half a dozen private audiences with the king and that any attempt to blame him as ‘the sole manager of affairs’ for the nation’s calamities was absurd. The leaders in court and council manoeuvred around each other, daggers in hand, alert for opportunities to strike while at the same time watching their own backs. Lady Castlemaine, who needed allies, took care to be on good terms with the younger men with whom she was united in the desire to bring down the chancellor. This included making peace once more with her cousin, Buckingham.
But in the changed and highly tense atmosphere of these years it was difficult to pursue private agendas or even to be sure what those agendas were. The war disrupted the cosy pattern of informal and semi-formal meetings which had been part of the governmental process. Not only did the Somerset House gatherings cease, but Barbara was no longer able to enjoy mealtime tête-à-têtes with French and Spanish ambassadors. It also cut the hotline between Whitehall and the Louvre via Henrietta. The private correspondence had manifestly failed in its objective. Charles had convinced himself that ‘the king my brother’ would not take arms against him and the reality came as a profound shock. As matters went from bad to worse in 1666–7 the behaviour of all the lead players was highly coloured with irrationality. Humiliated at sea, confronted by an angry parliament unprepared to pour good money after bad into the war chest, recognising that his reputation in the country at large had reached its nadir, Charles veered between an insouciant, ‘business as usual’ attitude and bouts of bad-tempered stubbornness. He maintained his visits to the theatre and to Newmarket and persisted in his pursuit of La Belle Stuart. But he refused to yield ground when Louis suggested compromises that would bring about a rapid peace. He flew into sudden rages which took even his closest companions by surprise. On one occasion he turned on Barbara for some slighting remark she had made about the queen. Charles damned her for an ‘insolent woman’ and banished her from court for several days. Where the king led, the court followed. The atmosphere was electric. ‘There are scarce any two that dare trust one another, but every man is jealous of his neighbour, and those in power practising to supplant one another. The king and court were never in the world so bad as they are now for gaming, whoring, swearing and drinking and the most abominable vices that ever there were in the world; so that all must come to nought,’165 one of Pepys’ informants told him and, though the diarist was ever ready to believe the worst, it is evident that the tensions of this nightmare period in the nation’s life were wreaking psychological havoc at the centre. In the year from December 1666 to December 1667 they gave rise to a sequence of events that overturned the balance of forces at Whitehall and stripped Charles II of the last vestiges of honour.
The unstable Buckingham set the train in motion. He presented himself as the main opponent of the government in the House of Lords. His targets were Clarendon and Ormonde and he raged against policies they inaugurated or backed, totally unconcerned that, in so doing, he was opposing the king. He tried, with some success, to gain a popular following by his swagger and the splendour of his entourage, by his writing of popular, bawdy plays performed on the London stage and also by championing such underdogs as Nonconformists and unpaid sailors. In the closing weeks of 1666 he twice picked violent quarrels with parliamentary opponents which resulted in brief periods of incarceration. Charles was growing tired of the public antics of his court buffoon but he largely had himself to blame. His indulgence encouraged the wits to show off their talents without any restraint and the end result was that they had little respect for anyone, including their king. The Earl of Rochester, a new addition to the inner circle, would become the embodiment of irreverence. His cutting and vicious satires have survived because he was the most talented of the court poets but his verses are typical of the comment that many of Charles’ companions were able to get away with:
Restless, he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
and:
Here’s Monmouth the witty,
And Lauderdale the pretty,
And Frazier, that learned physician;fn3
But above all the rest,
Here’s the duke for a jest,
And the king for a grand politician.166
Buckingham believed that he could never exhaust Charles’ store of goodwill and, having stayed in town to witness the triumphant opening of his latest comedy, The Chances (in which Nell Gwynn drew great applause), he took himself off to the country without bothering with the courtesy of excusing himself from his royal household duties. This left his rivals in possession of the field.
Arlington gathered a miscellany of evidence against the duke, the most damning of which was that he had procured one Heydon, an astrologer, to cast the king’s horoscope. This fell within the scope of the treason statute, which made it an offence to ‘compass or imagine the monarch’s death’. On 22 February the evidence was shown to Charles, who was genuinely appalled. He ordered Buckingham’s arrest and stripped him of his court and council positions. Rochester was appointed to take his place as gentleman of the bedchamber. The duke went into hiding and did not emerge for four months.
Charles, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a different kind of rivalry. Frances Stuart had continued to be the recipient of the king’s indecent advances and continued to resist them. It was clear that Charles was not going to divorce his wife and, indeed, Frances was sufficiently attached to her mistress not to be enthusiastic about supplanting her. By the spring of 1667 she was in a state of serious distress, possibly made worse by the disaster which had befallen one of the other young ladies about the court. Margaret, Lady Denham was, at eighteen, the same age as Frances and, to judge from her portrait, a very attractive woman. The previous year she had been married to the fifty-year-old surveyor of the king’s works, Sir John Denham. He was a sick man and Margaret, like many another full-of-life bride, might have philosophically endured her lot in the hope that she would not have to do so for long. However, when the Duke of York paid his attentions to her, she willingly succumbed. This threw the cuckolded husband into a paroxysm of rage. Indeed, it seems to have turned his mind, for he stormed into the king’s presence, declaring himself to be the Holy Spirit coming in vengeance. Days after this, Margaret fell suddenly ill and died. In her final agonies she claimed that her husband had poisoned her by means of a cup of chocolate but some gossips accused the Duchess of York of Lady Denham’s murder. Whatever the truth of the matter, the tragedy and its moral implications profoundly shook the little world of Whitehall Palace. It even startled James into declaring that he would never again take a public mistress – though not into keeping this promise. Its impact on an impressionable young woman is not hard to imagine.
Frances could not stand the pressure any longer. John Evelyn told Pepys that she was ready to accept an honourable proposal from any man worth £1,500 a year who would rescue her from the king’s clutches. Thus, when her distant kinsman, the Duke of Richmond, protested his love for her, Frances enthusiastically encouraged him. Richmond was a gentleman of the bedchamber and a courtier who had good reason to be grateful to his king. Since the Restoration he had received generous gifts of land and money. At last Barbara Villiers saw her opportunity. Nothing would infuriate Charles more than discovering that someone else had brought down the doe that he was so passionately hunting, especially when that someone was a man who should be tied to him by bands of gratitude. She conceived it to be her painful, loyal duty to open his eyes. Her accomplice was William Chiffinch, keeper of the king’s closet or privy stairs. As Charles’ general factotum, it was Chiffinch’s job to know everything that went on in the palace. All Barbara had to do was bribe Chiffinch to let her know when Frances and her lover were together and the rest would follow easily. Thus it was that, late on a winter’s night, she hastened the king through the Whitehall corridors to Mistress Stuart’s room. There the couple were discovered, if not in flagrante delicto, certainly in a totally compromised situation. The king was angry and humiliated. La Castlemaine was triumphant. But Frances found the strength to stand up to her rejected lover, pointing out that Richmond could offer her the honourable estate of matrimony which Charles could not. The next day she implored Queen Catherine to intervene on her behalf and gradually the king was brought to give his grudging blessing to the couple’s union – or so it seemed.
In reality, he was not prepared to resign his prey to another. No one had ever taken a woman away from him and he was not going to allow that record to be broken. He needed to unearth something discreditable about Richmond and he employed in the task, not one of his amoral cronies, who could have been relied on to manufacture what he could not discover, but the virtuous Clarendon, who would lend gravitas to proceedings which were essentially sordid. The chancellor was set to examine Richmond’s financial status, the intention being that he would report that the young man could certainly not support a wife. But Clarendon, who profoundly disapproved of the king’s amours, found that the proposed groom, though certainly not wealthy, was of sufficient standing to offer marriage to one of the queen’s ladies. Charles was furious at being thwarted. He convinced himself that Clarendon had personal dynastic motives for opposing his sovereign’s will: by blocking any possibility that the king might remarry he was securing the Crown for his own grandchildren. The reality was that Charles’ pride had been severely dented and that he fancied himself deeply in love with Frances Stuart. Only that can explain why he continued to pursue her with uncharacteristic determination and vigour and why, in the aftermath of his defeat, he lashed out with vicious cruelty against the easiest target.
Charles’ next ploy was to offer to elevate Frances to the position of maîtresse en titre. He would make her a duchess in her own right, thus raising her above the Countess of Castlemaine, and provide her with lands and income to support her dignity, ensuring that she would be far better off than poor Richmond could ever make her. Not only did Frances decline this magnanimous offer, she also returned all the jewellery the king had given her. Still he refused to take ‘no’ for an answer. It was at this juncture that he approached Archbishop Sheldon about the possibility of acquiring a divorce. If a marriage was not blessed by God with children and if both parties agreed to part, could the Church release them from their vows? Diplomatically, Sheldon asked for time to consider the matter. Presumably Charles told the object of his desire all that he was prepared to do for her; that he was now offering her, not a coronet, but a crown. Whatever the poor girl’s ambitions may once have been, she was now terrified by the king’s importunity. The more he pressed her, the more attractive a quiet provincial life with her own Charles Stuart, Duke of Richmond, seemed. One night at the end of March 1667, when driving wind and torrential rain kept all the denizens snugly indoors, she slipped out of her rooms at Whitehall and joined her lover at the Bear Inn by London Bridge. As soon as it was light the next morning, the couple crossed to the south bank, rode along the Dover road to the duke’s estate at Cobham and were hurriedly married.
Frances had grown up quickly as a result of her experiences at court. Her later career showed her to be a level-headed and intelligent woman. During her husband’s long absences on diplomatic missions and after his death she administered the considerable family estates efficiently and, by prudence and thrift, added extensively to her own property. She overcame Charles’ anger and was reinstated in society where she made a reputation for herself as a cultured patroness of writers and a knowledgeable collector of old master drawings.
On the morning after the couple’s flight the sensational news was all round the court and Charles went to Frances’ apartments to verify it for himself. In the doorway he met Lord Cornbury, Clarendon’s son, who had gone to see Mistress Stuart on some quite unrelated business. In his fury, the king smelt conspiracy. ‘Suspecting that Lord Cornbury was in the design [he] spoke to him as one in a rage, that forgot all decency, and for some time would not hear Lord Cornbury speak in his own defence.’167 Only after several hours had passed had Charles cooled down sufficiently to allow the younger Hyde to explain himself. Whether or not he accepted Cornbury’s protestations of innocence, he remained convinced that Clarendon, in cahoots with his lifelong friend, Gilbert Sheldon, had deliberately obstructed him. On the subject of Frances Stuart the king was beyond rational thought.
False in thy glass all objects are,
Some set too near, and some too far:
Thou art the fire of endless night,
The fire that burns and gives no light.
All torments of the damned we find In only thee,
O Jealousy!
Thou tyrant, tyrant Jealousy,
Thou tyrant of the mind!
(John Dryden, Song of Jealousy)
Deeper in his psyche than all the political calculation of the next few months lay the delusion of betrayal. It was this that motivated policy and which alone can fully explain the fateful decisions he made before the year’s end.
The next significant event was the death, on 16 May, of the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Southampton. Charles appointed a commission to look into the working of the department. The reforms they set in hand were probably long overdue but another member of the old guard had now gone, Clarendon was more exposed and Lady Castlemaine exulted that, at last, the stubborn cork had been withdrawn from the bottle of royal bounty. Buckingham surrendered himself two weeks after the 1666 Medway disaster. The timing was brilliant. The government, with which he now had no connection, was wallowing in the depths of unpopularity. A mob had descended on Clarendon’s new house. They broke windows, hacked down trees, set up a gibbet before it and daubed on the gate: ‘Three sights to be seen: Dunkirk, Tangier and a Barren Queen’. Throughout London, the people ‘do cry out in the streets of their being bought and sold and … make nothing of talking treason in the streets openly, as that we are bought and sold and governed by papists and that we are betrayed by people about the king and shall be delivered up to the French and I know not what’.168 They had identified Clarendon, Arlington and Co. as the villains and they were looking for a champion. They remembered that Buckingham had proclaimed himself the sailors’ friend and opposed the administration in parliament and this was enough to make him their hero. The accused felon’s journey to the Tower was no public humiliation, as his enemies had intended. He rode with his attendants and friends to the Sun tavern in Bishopsgate, where he appeared on a balcony to receive the plaudits of a large crowd of supporters who had gathered there. He sent word to the lieutenant of the Tower that he would be graciously pleased to wait upon him when he had dined. After a leisurely meal he sauntered the half-mile to his prison attended all the way by citizens who desperately needed something or someone to cheer.
On 8 July the prisoner was brought before the council for examination and then returned to the Tower awaiting the king’s pleasure. Charles was in a dilemma. To leave Buckingham languishing in prison would be to make a martyr of him, and Charles’ inclination was, anyway, always towards clemency. But to restore the miscreant would be to vindicate him over against the king’s own ministers and to allow him to continue to make a nuisance of himself. At this point Lady Castlemaine gave the king the benefit of her wisdom. She saw things in very simplistic, selfish terms. The choice was between Buckingham and Clarendon. Both men were vulnerable. One would have to go. Would it be the people’s darling or the obnoxious man who had for so long stood in her way, whom nobody loved and of whom it would soon be written,
Pride, lust ambition and the people’s hate,
The kingdom’s broker, ruin of the state,
Dunkirk’s sad loss, divider of the fleet,
Tangier’s compounder for a barren sheet:
This shrub of gentry, married to the crown,
His daughter to the heir, is tumbled down?169
Charles told her roundly not to meddle in things that did not concern her. She persisted; if he was set on having his most able servants thrown in prison while his kingdom was run by fools, he was as big a fool as they! The interview ended with Charles dismissing Barbara as a ‘whore’ and a ‘jade’.
If Lady Castlemaine was now demonstrating a determination bordering on recklessness, it was in large measure because she had fallen to the desperate contagion that was in the air. She was panic-stricken by the recent collapse of the financial market which threatened to deprive her of whatever part of her fortune she had not frittered and gambled away. She had to cling to her position and make the most of it while she still exercised any power over the king. It was about this time that she suddenly began to be very hospitable to the French ambassador, offering him information for cash. That source, like all others, would dry up if she fell out of favour. Yet, recently she had put her own position in jeopardy by involving herself in either a renewed or an ongoing affair with Harry Jermyn and she was now pregnant with her sixth child. Charles was not pleased with his mistress’s latest amorous adventure and made it clear that he would not acknowledge the baby as his. It was a crisis moment for the royal whore. If word spread that she and her brat had been cast aside she would be ruined in an instant. The role of royal mistress was a precarious one, as Charles’ earlier lovers had discovered. But Barbara’s natural psychology did not desert her. She had never been the kind of woman to wheedle and beg and she did not resort to that strategy now. Though blatantly in the wrong, and despite her disagreement with the king over Buckingham, she flew into one of her passions. ‘Damn me, but you shall own it!’ she shouted, and threatened that if he did not agree to have the child baptised in Whitehall chapel as a royal bastard, she would bring it to him and dash out its brains before his face.170 Then she flounced out and retired to a friend’s house, hoping that the old strategy would work. Days passed and there was no sign of Charles. Eventually, she sent word to him, to say that she would receive him if he cared to call. He came – and Barbara made him grovel.
The latest estrangement occurred against the background of a disastrous recalling of parliament. Unsure about the ratification of the peace treaty and, therefore, whether he would need more money to continue the war, Charles decided to summon the houses to meet on 25 July. Given the mood of the country this was a hazardous undertaking: ‘everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver,’ Pepys observed,
and commend him, what brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him; while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers and good liking of his people, who have given greater signs of loyalty and willingness to serve him with their estates than ever was done by any people, hath lost all so soon, that it is a miracle what way a man could devise to lose so much in so little time.171
The king was understandably nervous. Matters deteriorated still further when among the wildly fluttering aviary of rumours appeared the suggestion that he was intent on overcoming all opposition by ruling with a standing army. Charles, it was said, had been urged to this by Lady Castlemaine and ‘Bab’ May. Alarming, vivid memories of 1642 haunted men’s minds and, when the Commons assembled, one member delivered himself of a lengthy harangue on the theme of threats to the liberty of the subject. One after another, angry members stood to denounce the government and to demand the disbanding of the land forces which had been recruited for the nation’s defence.
How well founded were the MPs’ fears and suspicions? Had there arisen a serious conflict of interest between court and parliament similar to that which had pitched the British nations into civil war? Certainly the Crown had raised troops by somewhat dubious financial means to guard the coast against possible invasion. Certainly Charles and his closest advisers were highly frustrated by parliamentary opposition. At the same time, they were utterly inept at handling the assembly. Councillors used the Lords’ chamber to play out their own rivalries, Clarendon treated the Commons with little less than contempt and none of the ministers had any skills in managing parliament. Meanwhile, around the palace unrestrained tongues were muttering about the king boldly asserting his mastery in the current crisis and bringing the rabble Commons to heel. It would not be at all surprising if Barbara Villiers was among the hawks. She had become very bold in airing her opinions on matters of state and her own security was very much in the balance during these crucial days. If the king failed to assert himself and allowed parliament to demand more concessions or exercise greater control over him, she, as the most bloated of the royal bloodsuckers, would find herself in serious trouble. Only recently, out of £400,000 allocated to the privy purse for war expenditure, Charles had used £30,000 to pay off her debts. This was not the kind of information she would want a parliamentary committee to insist on examining.
Charles, hovering between overawing his critics and appeasing them, ended up doing neither. As soon as he received confirmation that peace had been concluded, he grabbed at the opportunity to prorogue parliament, delaying only long enough to deliver himself of a homily about the members’ unwarranted lack of trust in their sovereign. The representatives were sent back to their shires and boroughs after only four days, angry that they had put themselves to the trouble and expense of answering the royal summons without having any of their grievances addressed. Inevitably, fresh damaging rumours now ran round the City: the new king was treating parliament as cavalierly as the last one had done; Charles, like his father, was planning to rule without the assembly. On Sunday 28 July, the seventy-four-year-old Dr Robert Creighton, Dean of Wells, boldly upbraided king and court about the evils spreading out from the centre of the nation’s life. He preached against adultery, ‘over and over instancing how for that single sin in David, the whole nation was undone’. Somehow, with a nice piece of declamatory legerdemain, he turned his discourse to the government’s record of ineptitude, denouncing ‘our negligence in having our castles without ammunition and powder when the Dutch came upon us and how we have no courage nowadays, but let our ships be taken out of harbour’.172 (The aged cleric seems not to have suffered for this boldness, for three years later he was appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells. Perhaps, on this occasion, the king displayed his much-boasted talent of being able to sleep through sermons.)
It was obvious to Charles that he had to divert this flood tide of criticism away from the Crown. He had already thrown a sop to the Commons by releasing Buckingham, who once more preened himself in the House of Lords in all his resplendent finery. Within days the duke was restored to his offices and a self-interested truce was patched up between the people’s hero and his old enemy, Lord Arlington. Now, all the major players were in place for the season’s most cynical drama, ‘The Lamentable Tragedy of Edward, Lord Clarendon’.
There was no inevitability about the events of autumn 1667. Charles could, at any time, have taken different decisions. Nor did he lack for sound advice. George Carteret, one-time lieutenant-governor of Jersey and now a councillor and treasurer of the navy, was among those who told the king that drastic reform of court and government was essential to any change of public attitude towards the administration. He pointed out that, whatever Charles and his close companions did in private, there must be ‘at least a show of religion and sobriety’. This had, more than anything else, sustained Cromwell’s regime and the reason was simple: the people expected their leaders to adhere to the prevailing morality. ‘That is so fixed in the nature of the common Englishman that it will not out of him.’173 Carteret’s sense of the popular mood is confirmed by modern historical research, which presents a picture of a cultural revolution in swing throughout the seventeenth century. It was not a move towards greater libertarianism; quite the contrary. Illegitimate births were in decline and at the local level ecclesiastical and civil authorities worked together to enforce those laws and mores which held society together. ‘A hardening attitude to bastardy; some decline in tolerance towards bridal pregnancy … tighter public control over marriage entry: these changes add up to a significant adjustment in popular marriage practices and attitudes to extramarital sexuality, especially among the middling groups in society.’174 Nor was this the result, as court wits liked to assert, of repressive Puritan preaching. Instead it stemmed from a variety of sociological developments to which evangelical Christianity gave legitimacy.
The life of the court in no way mirrored the life of the country; there was a deep-seated contrariety between them. Clarendon and Buckingham were more than personal rivals: they were the embodiments of wholly incompatible attitudes to life. Nothing less than that explains the destructive bitterness with which the two men confronted each other. As the summer of 1667 faded into autumn, rival camps struggled more frantically than ever for the mastery. ‘While all should be labouring to settle the kingdom, they are at court all in factions, some for and others against my lord chancellor and another for and against another man.’ Any who looked to Charles for clear direction were disappointed: ‘the king adheres to no man, but this day delivers himself up to this and the next to that, to the ruin of himself and business’.175
On 9 August, Lady Clarendon, the support of her husband in good times and bad throughout more than thirty-five years, died. She was fortunate in being spared a share in the chancellor’s utter degradation. It was a mere two weeks later that Charles sent his brother with the request that Clarendon voluntarily relinquish the seals of office. The king tried to make it appear that he was doing his old councillor a favour: parliament would be reconvening in October and they would be certain to demand Clarendon’s impeachment for the mismanagement of the war. To prevent this Charles was giving him the option of retiring from public life and placing himself beyond the reach of his enemies. All this was only partly true. The new assembly would certainly be calling the government to account and all its members were fearful of the consequences. All, therefore, had a vested interest in setting up a scapegoat and the unpopular chancellor was the obvious candidate. There was nothing unusual about ministers of the Crown being thrown to the wolves to divert criticism; that hazard went with the territory. Nor can there be any doubt that Clarendon was in part to blame for his own downfall. He had never abandoned that schoolmaster—pupil relationship which Charles found increasingly irritating. In his policies he had failed to move with the times, seeking, as far as possible, to restore royal power in Church and State as it had been before the revolution. Illness combined with pressure of work had resulted in a lack of efficiency and Clarendon had not kept on top of government business. But for all his failings Edward Hyde had been the main architect of the Restoration and if he had accumulated too much power in his own hands, it was because the king had placed it there. He certainly deserved better than to be first abandoned by the king and then given over into the hands of his most hated enemy.
Clarendon asked for an audience with the king and this took place on 26 August. As well as protesting his complete loyalty, he warned Charles not to set a dangerous precedent. If he allowed enemies to displace ministers whom he trusted then there could be no stability in government. He urged the king to beware especially of Lady Castlemaine. That was the point at which Charles abruptly terminated the interview. As the dismissed minister crossed the privy garden around noon, word reached the royal mistress, who was still abed. She jumped up, called for her nightgown and ran into her aviary, where she stood, ‘joying herself at the old man’s going away’.176 According to one witness, Hyde looked up and saw her. ‘O, Madam, is it you?’ he said. ‘Pray remember that if you live you will grow old.’ It was an excellent curtain line but an admonition that Barbara scarcely needed. Like Marilyn Monroe, she was fully aware that ‘we all lose our charms in the end’ and that insurance against that day was vital. In 1667, as in 1967, ‘diamonds were a girl’s best friend’. She was grasping her opportunities with both hands. She used her influence with the treasury commissioners to secure a £1,000 pension out of the profits of the post office. She obtained a warrant to ‘borrow’ some of the king’s plate stored in the Tower and, when Clarendon was out of the way, she simply forgot to return it. Now that the old guard dogs had been removed Barbara found several new ways into the royal and national vaults. It is no wonder that most people believed that the decision to sack Clarendon had been taken in Lady Castlemaine’s rooms.
As to that, nothing can be proved. The engineers of the minister’s downfall were the king and Buckingham. Ironically, the only woman known to have played a central role in it was not Barbara Villiers, who had long schemed to bring about just such an event, but her rival, Frances Stuart, who had never shown an interest in politics. Clarendon refused to give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him slink away. Charles had to send a minion to demand the seals from him and thereafter the ex-minister remained in his London house. His removal left a gaping hole in the administration and, to the absolute astonishment of most observers, the man who now filled it was the Duke of Buckingham. What few people knew was that the agent of this fateful reconciliation was Lady Castlemaine. She who had displeased the king by speaking up for the disgraced duke stuck to her guns and brought the two men together in her apartments. Once there Buckingham smooth-talked his way back into favour and subsequently achieved the leadership of government business by promising to deliver to the king all those political goodies that he craved – a pliant, well-managed Commons, religious toleration and generous grants of taxation. But none of these items headed Buckingham’s personal agenda. He first pursued Clarendon with a lust for vengeance bordering on paranoia. Whether his cousin was behind this vendetta, as many suspected, cannot now be known but the campaign certainly has upon it the stamp of someone who had once promised to have Clarendon’s head raised on a spike. Was vengeance her fee for having aided Buckingham’s rehabilitation? And did this Delilah weave her spells on the king also? What is clear is that Charles, to his eternal shame, allowed himself to be manipulated.
By the time parliament met on 10 October, the duke had prepared articles of impeachment, charging Clarendon with misdemeanour. The punishment for this was banishment and, for the moment, that was all Charles was prepared to sanction. What he desired was to have the old man out of the way. But for Buckingham there could be no half-measures. He wanted Clarendon dead and he worked with manic determination to concoct more serious accusations. By intense and determined activity, Buckingham persuaded the king to accept and a reluctant Commons to agree on treason charges against Clarendon. But the upper house was not so pliant. Their lordships rejected a demand from the king for Clarendon’s imprisonment. Suddenly Charles realised that they were not disposed to proceed against one of their own members for treason without very good and evident reason. Now the king was trapped. He could not afford to lose face and forfeit popularity by failing in this very high-profile enterprise. His response was a piece of manipulation worse than anything that had been attempted in his father’s reign. He planned to prorogue parliament and then have the ex-minister tried by a special court of hand-picked peers. Whether this stratagem would have succeeded or stirred up more unrest will never be known because Charles never put it into practice. He simply used it as a threat to force Clarendon into exile. He strongly ‘advised’ the earl to flee the wrath to come and, when that failed to prise him out of the residence derisively known as ‘Dunkirk House’, he ordered the old man to seek refuge abroad. At the end of November Clarendon took coach for the coast and crossed to Calais. He who had succoured his master through long years of exile and seen him safely restored to his native land was destined never to see England again.
The reasons for Charles’ ferocious persecution of the man who had served him faithfully for over twenty years were many and complex. He told Ormonde that his old friend’s ‘behaviour and humour was grown so insupportable to myself and to all the world also’177 and there is no doubt that Clarendon’s hectoring and censoriousness had worn down even Charles’ igneous patience. There was an element of political awareness in the decision. Charles knew that parliament had to be handled with more skill than the chancellor could muster and he looked to Buckingham to be more accomplished in this field. Ruthless popularity seeking was another motive. Something dramatic had to be done to rescue the government’s reputation from the depths to which it had sunk. And Charles was, as ever, all too easily influenced by his favourites who were possessed by an obsessive hatred. Then there was Clarendon’s own obstinacy, which played right into his enemies’ hands. If he had quietly withdrawn when the king first suggested it there would have been no need to wield the cumbersome weapon of impeachment. But the chancellor, mantled in his own shining virtue, refused to act in a way that would imply guilt and, to avoid being humiliated by Clarendon’s vindication, the king had to agree to the stakes being raised.
But there was one intensely personal grievance which gnawed away at the king’s vitals. The Frances Stuart affair had so deeply wounded him that eight months later he was still reacting to it. When Henrietta had heard about the elopement and her brother’s angry response, she had written to intercede on behalf of the woman she had recommended to Charles’ service. He replied at the end of August:
I do assure you I am very much troubled that I cannot in everything give you that satisfaction I could wish, especially in this business of the Duchess of Richmond, wherein you may think me ill-natured. But if you consider how hard a thing ’tis to swallow an injury done by a person I had so much [here Charles wrote the word ‘love’ then crossed it out] tenderness for, you will in some degree excuse the resentment I use towards her. You know my good nature enough to believe that I could not be so severe if I had not great provocation, and I assure you her carriage towards me has been as bad as breach of friendship and faith can make it. Therefore, I hope you will pardon me if I cannot so soon forget an injury which went so near my heart.178
In November the stricken Clarendon wrote to his master protesting his abiding loyalty and dissociating himself from whatever misdemeanours his enemies were alleging against him. He declared himself perplexed to know precisely what offences he was supposed to have committed. Then, in an obvious allusion to the Richmond elopement, he continued,
I am as innocent in that whole affair and gave no more advice or counsel or countenance in it than the child that is not born; which your Majesty seemed once to believe when I took notice to you of the report and when you considered how totally I was a stranger to the persons mentioned, to either of whom I never spake a word, or received message from either in my life. And this I protest to your Majesty is true, as I have hope in heaven.179
In the affairs of kings personal grievances weigh as heavily as matters of state and may have consequences out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Charles’ rejection by La Belle Stuart is a dramatic example.
In the immediate aftermath of Clarendon’s departure Charles wrote a detailed report of the whole business to the one person above all others whom he knew would receive the news with unalloyed joy. That person was his mother.
fn1 ‘level coil’ = on equal terms One of Barbara’s lovers was Charles Hart, a leading player at the King’s Theatre
fn2 Ducking was the traditional punishment for shrews and prostitutes.
fn3 Sir Alexander Frazier was one of the king’s doctors and a firm adherent of Barbara Villiers. His principal asset appears to have been his skill as an abortionist.