‘All’ the king’s women must logically include half his subjects. We would gain a seriously distorted impression if we treated Charles and the female members of his immediate circle in complete isolation from the attitudes towards women which were prevailing in society as a whole. Our conclusion, then, must try to set king and court in the wider context of the history of ideas, to identify the conventions governing male-female relations and the ways the king and his companions submitted to or rejected them. Western humanity has pilgrimaged from the sexual theology of Gregory the Great who asserted ‘no sin is committed unless the flesh takes pleasure in it; but when the flesh begins to take pleasure, then sin is born and, if deliberate consent is given, sin is complete’ to the modern orthodoxy that the pleasure principle is all and that restraint is a heresy against the freedom which is our ‘right’. Throughout that arduous journey men and women have tried, with only limited success, to understand and truly value each other.
In the long evolution of the Arthurian legends the ambiguity about woman – or the ambiguity with which man regards woman – became starkly clear. In the guise of Morgan le Fay or Nymue or the Lady of the Lake or Vivien or Guinevere she appeared as both the saviour of Camelot and the agent of its downfall, the object of desire and of revulsion, the hapless victim to be defended by chivalrous champions and the witch encoiling innocent knights in her sorceries, the giver of Excalibur and the leech who sucked the magical power from the Round Table’s fraternal fellowship. She was represented as both angel and devil. In Tennyson’s treatment Vivien was the arch-betrayer, Eve and the serpent wrapped in one. She beguiled the magician, became his devoted pupil, then turned his charms upon him and tripped away triumphantly through the forest, crying, ‘Fool!’ The symbolism of the legend is blatant: in the very moment of submitting gladly and willingly to woman’s sexual magic man despises himself and loathes the object of his desire. In appearing to dominate in the sex act, he becomes his partner’s slave. Gratification and emasculation are inextricably entwined.
The versifiers of the Restoration court more than any other group of English writers before or since gave powerful expression to this male affliction. Their pens were dipped in misogynistic bile and their lines smouldered with pornographic hatred. Traditionally, amorous poetry had been all about the exaltation of the mistress’s virtues, the ardour of pursuit, the longing for consummation. Writers idolised ‘love’ and panted with ardent desire. Not so the cynics who haunted the court of Charles II. Their bitterness stripped the man-woman relationship of all romance, idealism and mystery. Coupling became a mere animal experience in which the man was ensnared, not so much by his own instinct, as by the allurements of the ‘other’. In the satirical verses of the 1660s and 1670s women were castigated for presuming to choose where and whether to bestow their favours; for usurping sexual power which, by divine ordinance, belongs only to men. The sea change which had come over fashionable lyrics is well illustrated by contrasting the words of two jilted lovers. Michael Drayton, writing around 1620, accepted rejection with good grace.
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done: you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly, I myself can free,
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows,
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover.
There is nothing remotely gracious about Rochester, writing ‘A ramble in St James’s Park’ on the other side of the Civil War-Restoration divide.
May stinking vapour choke your womb
Such as the men you dote upon!
May your depraved appetite,
That could in whiffling fools delight,
Beget such frenzies in your mind
You may go mad for the North wind,
And fixing all your hopes upon’t,
To have him bluster in your cunt,
Turn up your longing arse t’th’air
And perish in a wild despair!
Neither example is unique of its time and type. Clearly, something radical had happened, at least in fashionable circles, to the way men treated and thought about women. We must seek some powerful cause which could produce the fury and violence of much Restoration satire – directed alike at women and at the king. It sprang from despair at the state of national life.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and wife of Charles’ old tutor, was in no doubt where to lay the blame for the degeneration of society.
Civil wars may be compared to a pair [i.e., a pack] of cards which, when they are made up in order, every several suit is by itself, as from one, two and three and so to the tenth card, which is like the commons in several degrees, in order, and the coat cards by themselves, which are the nobles. But factions, which are like gamesters when they play, setting life at the stake, shuffle them together, intermixing the nobles and commons, where loyalty is shuffled from the crown, duty from parents, tenderness from children, fidelity from masters, continencies from husbands and wives, truth from friends, from justice innocency, charity from misery. Chance plays and fortune draws the stakes.1
Every revolution is, in part, a sexual revolution. In the mid-seventeenth century, hundreds of families of the social élite lost their menfolk in battle, had their estates confiscated and spent longer or shorter spells in exile. The Restoration did not, with one wave of the wand, set all to rights. Property that had been seized or snapped up cheaply in a confused market could not revert automatically to its original ownership and the government shrank from legislation which would have alienated new landowners. Lawsuits begun in the 1660s dragged on for decades, even generations, often enriching only the lawyers. Society was radically disrupted for many years.
The effects on well-bred women and girls were tumultuous and often distressing. Orphaned or widowed or dowerless and finding themselves (whether at home or abroad) in a bewildering, alien environment, and bereft of the accoutrements of civilised life to which they were accustomed, they had to utilise whatever talents and charms nature had endowed them with. For many, the only way out of their plight was the obvious one of seeking a ‘protector’. Often, as was the case with Lucy Walter, they ended up being passed from hand to hand as high-class whores. Lucy’s name is known to us because of her relationship with the king but there were many who suffered the same fate and have disappeared in the dingy back alleys of history. They shared the insecure life of courtiers in exile, living as if there were no tomorrow, and, for some, there was not. They were kept until they became pregnant or until their lovers tired of them. They struggled to retain their looks, studied to learn the arts of seduction, sought abortions, suffered at the hands and tongues of rivals, intrigued and were intrigued against. To survive they had to be tough, coarse, manlike in their drinking, swearing and revelling in bawdy stories. It was only the fortunate and unscrupulous few, the ‘aristocracy’ of the profession, who made it into the company of the king’s friends and who managed to hold places among the court hangers-on or, eventually, to achieve marriage to Carolean aristocrats who could restore them to the mainstream of respectability.
For such women the freedom from convention provided by a society in crisis was, at best, a mixed blessing. There were others for whom liberty meant the opportunity to develop skills and achieve a prominence which would in ordinary circumstances have been impossible. More widows and daughters than ever before took over businesses and managed estates. Several assumed positive roles in support of their families or of the cause they believed in. Margaret Cavendish was one such. She was a twenty-one-year-old maid of honour to Henrietta Maria when, in 1644, she accompanied her mistress into exile. In France she married the erudite and accomplished Marquess of Newcastle and travelled with him in his wanderings. Despite the fact that her husband was regarded as a very great traitor, Margaret returned to England and spent a year trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Protector’s government to release income from some of the sequestered Newcastle estates. She was a lady of spirit as well as being something of a bluestocking and widely regarded as eccentric.
She clearly refused to accept the word ‘impossible’, for her next enterprise and the one which was to occupy most of the rest of her life involved her venturing into the male preserve of literature. Her post-Restoration output was prodigious. She wrote – and had published – poems, plays, essays, philosophical discourses and she considered no subject beyond the pale of her competence or legitimate enquiry. Many men of learning were affronted by her poaching in their coverts and when she expressed a desire to visit the Royal Society the committee of that body spent a long time in heated debate before a majority decided that she might be welcomed. Far from being cowed by male chauvinism, Margaret took it upon herself to challenge the observations of some of the leading experts and to forestall their objections:
They will, perhaps, think me an inconsiderable opposite because I am not of their sex … But if this should chance, the impartial world, I hope, will grant me so much justice as will declare them [i.e., the impartial world] to be patrons not only to truth but also to justice and equity, for which Heaven will grant them their reward and time will record their noble and worthy actions in the register of fame to be kept in everlasting memory.2
The strong-minded Lady Cavendish was one of the celebrities of the age. She eschewed the frivolous life of the court and did not in the slightest bother her head about fashion. Whenever she travelled it was in luxurious style and accompanied by a large retinue but her own clothes, though sumptuous, belonged to a bygone era. Because of her rare and unconventional appearances she caused a great stir whenever she did appear in public. In the spring of 1667, Pepys was all agog for a glimpse of her and several times went out of his way in the hope of seeing her. For several weeks he was frustrated by the crowds that congregated wherever she went, as though, he commented, she had been the Queen of Sweden (a shrewd comparison, for Christina was a woman of a very similar stamp and one who aroused a like curiosity in her travels around Europe):
Thence Sir W. Pen and I in his coach, Tyburn way into the park, where a horrid dust and a number of coaches, without pleasure or order. That which we and almost all went for was to see my Lady Newcastle, which we could not, she being followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her. Only I could see she was in a large black coach, adorned with silver instead of gold and so white curtains and everything black and white and herself in her cap, but other parts I could not make [out].3
More remarkable because more talented and starting without Margaret’s social advantages was Aphra Behn, the first professional lady dramatist. She had already led a highly colourful life by the time she embarked on her literary career in 1667. She came from obscure merchant or, possibly, maritime stock and spent some of her earlier years in Surinam. Around 1664, when she was probably twenty-four, she married a Mr Behn, a London merchant of German extraction, but found herself widowed after a couple of years, when her husband succumbed to the plague. Now followed a brief but intriguing interlude, in which she was sent by Arlington to the Low Countries as a spy. Her employment in this mission may have been prompted by her facility with foreign languages but even so it suggests that she was recognised as a remarkable, resourceful woman and that she had influential contacts.
Aphra returned to London in dire straits, having received no payment for her services, a not uncommon predicament of government agents. She spent some time in prison for debt and wrote desperate letters to the king, begging for relief. There is no indication that he responded but Aphra did have influential friends and she seems to have endured only a few weeks’ incarceration. She might have avoided even that unpleasantness had she been prepared to become the mistress of one of the gentlemen of the court but there is no indication that she was tempted to go down that road, either at the nadir of her fortunes or thereafter. She was, quite simply, not that kind of girl and the lustful braggarts of Whitehall quickly sensed that she had no place in their sexual diversions. Easy virtue was associated with the ‘Frenchified’ aristocracy who disdained moral restraint and the poor who could not afford it. Aphra came from the Protestant middle ranks of society whose daughters were brought up to be respectable.
However, she did have friends among the court wits and the literary circles in which they moved. Rochester, Dryden and Killigrew were among her supporters and it must have been thanks to them that the Duke’s Men were induced to take the unusual step of accepting a play from Mrs Behn in 1670. The Forced Marriage was not entirely without precedent; one of Margaret Cavendish’s dramas had already been performed (and dismissed by Pepys as ‘the most silly thing that ever come upon a stage’) and Katherine Philips, royalist wife of a parliamentary army officer, had translated Corneille’s Horace and La Mort de Pompée which had been staged by the King’s Men. It might seem that there was a certain inevitability about the emergence of the woman playwright and that, since the theatres had been opened up to actresses, it was only a matter of time before talented women writers joined the fellowship of the stage. That was not how most contemporaries viewed things. The actress, as we have seen, was little more than a sex object, hired to flaunt her body before the male members of the audience and to deliver titillating lines – lines written by men. It was considered unseemly that a woman should devise the bawdy plots and construct the explicit dialogue demanded by playhouse patrons. Aphra found it prudent to publish her more outrageous comedies anonymously but, even so, she could not avoid censure for daring to write for the public stage at all and for outdoing her male counterparts in the cynical and frank dealing with the sexual mores of fashionable society. But while her critics carped, the public clamoured for more. Aphra found herself in an invidious situation and bitterly resented it. In her introduction to the printed version of Sir Patient Fancy she complained,
The play had no other misfortune but that of coming out for a woman’s. Had it been owned by a man, though the most dull; unthinking, rascally scribbler in town, it had been a most admirable play.
Members of her own sex, she suggested,
ought to have had good nature and justice enough to have attributed all its faults to the author’s unhappiness who is forced to write for bread and not ashamed to own it, and consequently ought to write to please (if she can) an age which has given several proofs it was by this way of writing to be obliged, though it is a way too cheap for men of wit to pursue who write for glory, and a way even I despise as much below me.4
She might not have sold her body to make a living but she was obliged, or so she claimed, to prostitute her art.
This did not mean that she was, by nature, a prude nor that she took no pleasure in the earthy nature of her poems and dramatic dialogue. On the contrary, she used them to offer a woman’s viewpoint on the battle of the sexes. She lampooned men’s sexual inadequacy, their inconstancy and the dual morality with which they justified their dealings with women. In her poem ‘The Disappointment’, Lysander, having used all the arts of seduction, wears down Cloris’ maidenly defences, only to discover that, when it comes to it, he is unable to perform. Who does he blame for this humiliation and frustration?
His silent griefs swell up to storms,
And not one god his fury spares;
He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars;
But more the shepherdess’s charms,
Whose soft, bewitching influence
Had damned him to the hell of impotence.5
In her plays Aphra could not and did not shrink from giving the public what they wanted – bawdy scenes, sexual innuendo and political comment – but she refused to betray her sex. She exposed masculine weakness and extolled feminine virtues. The Young King (an early piece, though not staged till 1679, when it acquired fresh significance from the exclusion crisis) was, on the surface, an allegorical drama which delivered a commentary on the succession issue but it also entered a plea for the strength, wisdom and civilising influence of women. The story concerns Prince Orsames, kept from his throne because of a prophecy which declares that his reign will be short and bloody. His place is taken by his sister, Cleomena, an Amazonian figure who combines military prowess and statesmanship. Despite her wise governance, the ignorant mob clamour for a male ruler. The point the author makes is that, though men may be physically stronger, their very strength may betray them if they do not also espouse what she calls ‘softness’, a virtue mistakenly attributed only to women.
Aphra had a ready answer to the fashionable complaint that women exercised a usurped power over men. In a despairing tirade, ‘A Poem Against Fruition’, a contemporary had deplored the way women lured men with promises of bliss that proved illusory.
Fruition shows the cheat and views ’em near.
Then all their borrowed splendours plain appear
And we what with much care we gain and skill
An empty nothing find, or real ill.
The poet asks,
Are we then masters or the slaves of things?
Poor wretched vassals or terrestrial kings?
The answer is all too plain:
Unsatisfied with beauteous nature’s store,
The universal monarch, man, is poor.
In her reply, Aphra exposes the flaw in the argument with supreme irony: if the sexual hedonist is enslaved, it is not by women but by his own libertinism. It is her own ‘hapless sex’ that is the victim of man’s uncontrollable passion:
Why do we deck, why do we dress
For such a short-lived happiness?
Why do we put attraction on,
Since, either way, ’tis we must be undone.
They fly if honour take our part,
Our virtue drives ’em o’er the field.
We lose ’em by too much desert,
And, Oh! They fly us if we yield.
Ye gods! Is there no charm in all the fair
To fix this wild, this faithless wanderer?
Man! Our great business and our aim,
For whom we spread out fruitless snares.
No sooner kindles the designing flame,
But to the next bright object bears
The trophies of his conquest and our shame.
In constancy’s the good supreme.
The rest is airy notion, empty dream!6
She made the point even more strongly in her enormously popular comedy, The Revenge. In this she took the theme of an old tragedy, The Dutch Courtesan, and made very significant alterations. The original was the sombre tale of a prostitute deserted by her lover, who avenged herself on him and his new mistress before finally being brought to justice and flogged. In Aphra’s version the heroine, Corina, becomes a virtuous woman discarded by her lover, Wellman, in favour of a wealthy heiress. Disgraced and impoverished, Corina is forced to seek refuge in a brothel, where she is looked after without there being any question of her earning her keep in the traditional way. Various complications, disguisings and misunderstandings – the stock of Restoration comedy – occur before Corina and Wellman are reunited and he confesses that he is overwhelmed by the pure love of a good woman.
Aphra Behn was a woman struggling to maintain her place in a man’s world. Her talents amply fitted her to occupy such a place but there were several ironies about her position. The dislocations of the time forced her into a literary career but also created the opportunity which enabled her to take it up. She was both praised and condemned for presuming to ‘earn her bread’ with her pen. She believed in the Protestant virtues of faithful monogamy based on mutual love but had to work within the lascivious conventions of the contemporary theatre, which scorned those very values. She lived and worked in fashionable circles where women were expected to ape the habits and attitudes of their menfolk but she managed, nevertheless, to be a voice for the interests of her own sex. Whether or not male members of her audience recognised it or took it to heart, there was a moral in Aphra’s plays even though she had to wrap it up in the sensual trappings of libidinous convention. Hers was a stressful existence and it is scarcely to be wondered at that she found in lesbian relationships the fulfilment of her own emotional needs.
The Restoration theatre produced Britain’s first female celebrities. At a time when all professions and vocations were closed to the ‘inferior’ sex and when the very idea of women having any place within the structures of power would have seemed to herald the collapse of the social order, actresses appeared on the public stage and rapidly gained their coteries of admirers. It would be a couple of hundred years before acting was regarded as a wholly respectable calling for women but the first significant male dyke had been breached and there was to be no going back. Nell Gwynn’s is the only name now known to most people in connection with the revived theatre of Charles II’s reign but that is only because of her subsequent story. Her acting career was very brief. Patrons who flocked to Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the 1660s and 1670s did so to see other stars. Rebecca Marshall, Elizabeth Boutell and Elizabeth Barry were among the box office draws of those years.
They offered audiences a new experience, a range of emotional expression which the best boy actors had never been able to achieve. Because genuine female talent was available playwrights were able to create more complex characters. They made such an impact on at least one viewer – Samuel Pepys – that he referred to some of the actresses in his diary by their stage personas. Thus Mary Betterton became ‘Ianthe’ and Hester Davenport ‘Roxolana’, after the characters they played in Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes. The popularity of the leading stage ladies and the growing demand to see them in major roles led to significant changes in the structure of plays. We have already seen the establishment of the ‘gay couple’ convention. Just as the Hollywood star system of the mid-twentieth century threw up romantic couples like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, so Restoration theatre managers gave their patrons the amorous sparring of Hart and Gwynn. Female parts became more rounded and this led to a new kind of ‘coupling’. Actresses were no longer regarded just as foils for their male counterparts; they were antagonists in their own right. Heroines and villainesses fought out their rivalries on the boards. Davenant even wrote his own adaptation of Macbeth with an enlarged part for Lady Macduff as a virtuous foil for Lady Macbeth. The new variety of fictional representations represented women as, if not equal to men, at least complementary. Good fiction always challenges stereotypes and, in London at least, the drama was doing just that.
For a few actresses popularity brought wealth and power. The best example of this is Elizabeth Barry. Her first appearances had been dismal failures but Rochester took her in hand and the combination of court patronage and her own strength of character lifted her, by 1680, to the position of first lady of the stage. She was a rarity in being a great tragedienne who could also carry off comedy parts with conviction. All the leading playwrights wrote especially for her and it is said that she created over a hundred roles during her long career. And for her it was a career. She had several lovers from among the court and the intelligentsia and could doubtless have lived very comfortably as a courtesan but she chose to work hard at her profession – and this devotion certainly paid off. She commanded higher wages than any other actress, and than some actors. While looking out diligently for her own interests, she became something of a shop steward within the company, always ready to stand up to the shareholders if she thought she and her colleagues were being exploited. Eventually, in 1695, she led a breakaway group and formed a new company, of which she was, for some years, the organising genius.
Oh King, this is my counsel unto thee and thy rulers and judges. Oh, hearken unto the light of Christ in your consciences that it may bear rule in your hearts, that you may judge for the Lord and oppression may be expelled in your dominions. Oh, that you would do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with the God of Heaven. Then would the Lord give you length of days and a long life, peace and plenty shall be in your dominions … joy and tranquillity shall be in your palaces. This shall you see and know to be accomplished if you will leave off oppressing the righteous and set the captive free.
The Trumpet of the Lord Sounded Forth Unto These Three Nations …
By one who is a sufferer for the testimony of Jesus in Newgate,
Hester Biddle7
Radical change was not confined to the microcosms of court and the capital. The words of an ardent Quaker pamphleteer quoted above remind us that the female revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was far from being confined to the women of fashionable London and Whitehall. It was a part of that larger but diverse, not to say confused, movement which Christopher Hill called ‘a period of glorious flux and intellectual excitement, when, as Gerrard Winstanley put it, “the old world … is running up like parchment in the fire!” ’.8 When the monarchy was overthrown, when bishops were abolished, when families who had ruled their localities for generations were harried into exile, then it seemed that no political, social, religious or economic change was impossible. The years of war and constitutional experiment threw up numerous groups, all of which constructed their templates for a new order. Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Baptists and Quakers were only the more easily identified of the visionary communities which emerged from the smoke of civil war. Beyond them and only partially observed amidst the confusion were myriad eccentric sects, cults and followers of self-styled prophets. In most of them women had their place among the body of ardent disciples. In some they were leaders.
In 1651 the Fifth Monarchist Mary Cary, in her New and More Exact Mappe or Description of New Jerusalem’s Glory, declared, ‘The time is coming when not only men but women shall prophesy; not only aged men but young men; not only superiors but inferiors; not only those that have university learning but those who have it not, even servants and handmaids’.9 Her words were amply fulfilled over the next couple of decades and she, herself, raised the banner by publishing pamphlets and addressing meetings of spellbound disciples on her own brand of politico-religious apocalyptic. But Mary and women like her did not rise like Anadyomene from the foam of civil conflict. We have to look back to their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations to see the accretion of layer upon layer of new ideas and ideals which challenged the traditional position of women in British society. Historians have become adept at digging down to the political and religious roots of the showdown between king and parliament. It was from those same roots that the suckers of female emancipation sprang.
Bible-embracing evangelical Christianity might seem a strange environment in which to look for the principles upon which radical propagandists would build their arguments for a realignment of the sexes. Had not St Paul laid down very strict rules governing the subordinate role of women? Indeed he had, and they were assiduously preached and taught in male-dominated, post-Reformation society. But in the New Testament those strictures were held in tension with other experiences of the early Church. God had poured out his spirit on ‘all flesh’ and that included women. Prophetesses and other prominent females had appeared, and the dominant spiritual message of the new faith was that there was no longer any distinction between Jew and Gentile, bond and free, man and woman, but all were ‘one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians iii.28). It was to this that Protestant fringers looked to justify their proclamation of a new society. They could call on the evidence of political events in support of their convictions. Had not God raised up Elizabeth Tudor to be the sword-bearer of Protestant truth against the Spanish/Roman Antichrist? Was he not, as the British nations tumbled towards bloody strife, preparing the way for Armageddon and the rule of the saints? How could orthodox clergy be so blind as to stick to legalistic arguments about women being in all things and at all times silent in the presence of their superior menfolk? That was nothing less than a stifling of the Holy Spirit and must be resisted as the world moved into its last age.
As the years passed, more and more women joined the ranks of the literate and, in some instances because their time was less fully occupied than that of their husbands and fathers, they gave themselves to study of the scriptures, printed sermons and pamphlets. They flocked to hear itinerant preachers and the propagandists of new interpretations. And some felt themselves called to be the heralds urging people to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’. Eleanor Touchet, Lady Davis (later Lady Douglas), was the daughter of the Irish peer, the Earl of Castlehaven, and born into an unruly family in which child abuse was common. Her brother was executed for homosexual practices in 1631. Her early life must have had much to do with the wild course of her later years. It was in 1625 that she was roused one morning by the prophet Daniel, announcing that the world would end in nineteen and a half years. The rest of her life was devoted to proclaiming judgement through pamphlets and impromptu preaching and foretelling dire national events. She denounced Charles I and his leading councillors and was obliged to flee to Holland to publish her prophecies. Those prophecies, like many examples of the genre ever since the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle, were cryptic, dense and (in her case) permeated with Bible quotes and autobiographical fragments:
… no inferior rack set upon in these days Charles Stuart his reign, as sometimes in Caesar Augustus, second of that monarchy, no small oppression, as the lineage of David a witness to it: closing it with these from her name, Rachel’s, signifying a sheep, rendering Charles his soil for the golden fleece bearing the bell: so whom he hath joined of her lamentation, &c this Jacob’s saying, Some evil beast hath done it, needs not ask Whose coat party-coloured also in pieces rent since our British Union, &c, not without cause of weeping because they are not …10
Eleanor’s most celebrated escapade was the occupation of the episcopal throne in Lichfield Cathedral where she proclaimed herself the primate of all England. Not surprisingly, despite her social standing, this lady spent several spells in prison and was a source of constant embarrassment to her successive husbands.
If Lady Douglas’ obscure rambling was a unique aberration we could safely dismiss it as having no significance. But as Edward Hyde observed in 1652, all England was ‘alarmed and even half dead with prophecies’. People wanted some sort of explanation for the violent disturbances of the time and were ready to listen to men and women – but especially women – who offered answers – the more extreme the better, or so it seems. In 1641 the prognostications of Mother Shipton were published. This legendary and perhaps wholly fictitious Yorkshire woman of the early sixteenth century was reputed a kind of folk Nostradamus who foretold a sequence of major events. The core of her prophetic material was freely added to in a score of books and pamphlets throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century and it was not just simple, superstitious folk who took her messages seriously. Prince Rupert, on being told about the Great Fire of London, remarked that Mother Shipton’s prophecy had come to pass.
Ecstatic women appeared all over Britain. When Oliver Cromwell moved to St Ives in 1631 he found the fenland town buzzing with the activities of a pedlar, Jane Hawkins, who
… Having fallen into a rapture of ecstasy, has uttered strange things in verse which she could not confess she could ever make before or can do now in matters of divinity and state.
The local clergy took her seriously.
… the vicar and Mr Wise, his curate and another scholar, sitting at the bed’s feet and copying out the verses which the poor woman … did dictate, which amounting to some thousands, they had transcribed fair with intent to print them … 11
The incident provides a clear demonstration of how such ecstatics obtained credibility. Jane’s utterances could be dismissed as fraudulent or the babblings of an insane woman or they had to be accepted for what they claimed to be, pronouncements from on high. To those who believed or wanted to believe they carried their own authentication and men of the cloth who accepted them had no alternative but to become the devoted scribes of the handmaid of the Lord. Once the prophecies were endorsed by intelligent and godly men their widespread influence was assured.
The behaviour that found ready acceptance among some parish clergy was rife among members of the sects. Women did not have to be possessed of spectacular gifts to be accorded equality with men. John Bunyan had great difficulties with some of the female members of his Baptist congregation in Bedford throughout much of Charles II’s reign. He resisted a determined movement to allow his sisters in Christ to minister in the congregation or even in separate women’s meetings. His opposition was implacable but he acknowledged that he was ‘like enough to run the gauntlet among [women] and to partake most smartly of the scourge of the tongues of some’.12 Clearly, there were many Bedford Baptists who believed that Bunyan was being unreasonable and in some congregations women were allowed more latitude but the tinker-turned-minister insisted that if he yielded the point he would be no better than a Quaker or a Ranter.
For members of those sects, allowing women to exercise their gifts was not only a spiritual requirement, it was part of their programme of social justice. They were opposing a regime one of whose imperfections was the subjugation of one-half of humankind. In the more outlandish assemblies women preached, taught, served as missionaries, both at home and abroad, and shared in the government of local congregations and groups. They occupied a vital place in the life of such movements. Indeed, had it not been for women the Quaker movement would not have become so firmly established. Recent research has unearthed the names of over 300 female radical activists and claimed them as early heroines in the long battle for women’s rights. In the new dispensation they strove to create, they certainly believed that spiritual equality of the sexes would be expressed in very visible ways. But it was essentially the religious imperative, based on a daring interpretation of Bible texts, that gave these bold, forthright women and their supporters unassailable sanction. It was as though they had been long imprisoned by convention and had suddenly discovered the key which would open the cell door. Being authorised and empowered by the Holy Spirit allowed them to break out from the control of husbands and fathers, and if their trances, fasts and ecstatic utterances carried conviction among their neighbours it was hard for their menfolk to silence them.
For the more radical communities it was a small step from women’s partnership in government to sexual liberty. Those who wanted to break away from the traditional conventions had various motives and always put forward the most elevated of reasons. Quakers, for example, dispensed with the bride’s promise to obey in the wedding ceremony on the grounds that submission to any earthly authority detracted from the allegiance believers owed only to God. Reformers were essentially rebelling against the obvious disadvantages of the status quo – loveless marriages, marriages contracted for financial gain or the consolidation or preservation of estates, widespread adultery, and the dual morality which underlay all these ills. Many sectarians accused the Church of failing women. Although it advocated monogamous relationships based on mutual affection and fidelity, its patriarchal system was seen by many as playing into the hands of unscrupulous parents and fortune hunters who used women and girls as pawns in their matrimonial games.
Yet, in matters of sex, motives are rarely pure and disinterested. When the Ranters insisted that God’s elect could not sin and that free love was directed by the Holy Spirit, this was merely draping lust in pious garb. When zealots advocated female nudity as a means of outlawing the provocative dress fashionable after the Restoration one may doubt the sincerity of their righteous indignation. When a young woman worshipping in Whitehall Chapel threw off her clothes and streaked through the congregation, shouting ‘Welcome the Resurrection!’ we might suspect mere attention seeking. Among the varied solutions put forward by the daring new thinkers all were impracticable at that time and some were highly suspect. A Baptist lady, Mrs Attaway, urged the easy availability of divorce to men and women, an idea supported by many thinking people, including John Milton (though he only advocated this right for men). It was a proposal three centuries ahead of its time. A contrary way of dealing with the unhappiness of couples manacled together in monogamous misery was polygamy, a solution seriously advocated by some of the leading thinkers of the day. Significantly, what was proposed was that a man might have more than one wife – never the reverse.
Most of these fundamental social reforms were put forward, and in some cases adopted within closed communities, avowedly in the interests of both sexes, but it is difficult to see how women could have benefited from any of them. Until they achieved a degree of economic independence the vast majority of women would always be reliant on the male members of their families and it would, therefore, be the men who made the rules. As long as that was so, dual morality would prevail (whatever the established and Nonconformist churches taught about adultery). What is important is that sexual relationships, like all other social conventions, were being openly scrutinised as never before and that there was a real tension between conventional ethics and the achievement of a fairer society. That tension emerges in a story Margaret Cavendish wrote, called The Matrimonial Agreement. At first sight it appears to have a decidedly modern feminist ring to it. In this tale a gentleman of some means paid suit to a lady, pledging undying devotion and fidelity. For her, however, words were not enough; she demanded a written bond in which her husband agreed that if he broke his marriage vows she would not only be free to do the same but would be entitled to a portion of his estate suitable to her proper maintenance. In course of time the inevitable happened and the lady confronted her husband, who was obliged to abide by their agreement. But any suggestion that the author was advocating sexual equality was removed by the moral of the story which showed her to be still firmly tied to traditional attitudes:
Now jealousy and rage are her two bawds to corrupt her chastity, the one persuading her to be revenged, [the other] to show her husband she could take delight and have lovers as well as he. This makes her curl, paint, prune, dress, make feasts, plays, balls, masques, and have merry-meetings abroad, whereupon she began to find as much pleasure as her husband in variety and now begins to flatter him and to dissemble with him that she may play the whore more privately, finding a delight in obscurity, thinking that most sweet which is stolen. So they play, like children, at bo-peep in adultery and face it out with fair looks and smooth it over with sweet words and live with false hearts and die with large consciences.
The concluding bathetic sentence shows Margaret Cavendish clearly refusing the role of social crusader: ‘But these, repenting when they died, made a fair end.’13
Lady Newcastle’s story brings us back to the prevailing attitudes of the social élite in Restoration society. And it was ‘restoration’ that that society was all about – restoration of the monarchy and all the values and assumptions that the returning exiles and those who flocked to the Stuart court believed to have been the cement of the old order, before the nations had gone mad and plunged into an orgy of self-destruction. When, a hundred years after the event, Richard Brinsley Sheridan proclaimed, ‘In Oliver Cromwell’s time they were all precise, canting creatures and no sooner did Charles II come over than they turned gay rakes and libertines,’ he gave expression to what had become a firmly established myth, and one that had less truth than most. During the Commonwealth and Protectorate, whatever repressive activities Puritan vigilantes might have been engaged in, there was a positive orgy of eccentric behaviour and unrestrained ideas. There was virtually no censorship and, as one commentator famously observed, it seemed that the world was turned upside down. It was Charles II’s ministers and the Cavalier Parliament who were the reactionaries, intent on putting the clock back and clamping down on the freedom that had turned into licence. To a large extent they were successful. ‘Property triumphed. Bishops returned to a state church, the universities and tithes survived. Women were put back into their place. The island of Great Bedlam became the island of Great Britain, God’s confusion yielding place to God’s order.’14
But any return to the old ways was not instantaneous and it was far from complete. There were aroused expectations and radical convictions that refused to be stuffed back into the box and securely locked up again. At the very end of the century no less a person than Daniel Defoe was arguing for more opportunities for women, confident, as he said, that ‘had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves’.15 A feminist writer, Mary Astell, ventured into the pamphlet war on a variety of topical subjects. Mary is most remembered for proposing a scheme that never came to fruition to establish a kind of scholarly nunnery in which women might retire from the world to devote themselves to learning and piety. For this presumption she was roundly vilified. In some ways little had changed in a couple of generations. In 1659 a foreign treatise translated into English with the title, The Learned Maid, or Whether a Maid may be a Scholar, had been given a similarly rough reception.
Similar controversy attended the inflow of pornography into Britain. In January 1668, Pepys confided to his diary,
… stopped at Martin’s, my bookseller, where I saw the French book which I did think to have for my wife to translate, called, ‘L’ecole des Filles’, but when I came to look in it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw, rather worse than ‘Puttana Errante’, so that I was ashamed of reading it …16
Helot’s Ecole des filles (1655) was one of several pornographic works of French and Italian origin which had been finding their way into England, where they had been eagerly translated, well over a decade before the king’s return. Pepys was unable to resist the salacious tome. Three weeks later he was back at Martin’s to buy it in plain binding, ‘because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found’. He bore it home and spent much of the next day at the office surreptitiously devouring it, squaring this with his conscience (even if he did not succeed in convincing the readers of his diary in later years) with the reflection that it was ‘not amiss for a sober man once to read [it] over to inform himself in the villainy of the world’.17 The Ecole des filles, which was publicly burned by the hangman in 1672, was obviously not the first such book that Pepys had read, since he could compare it with Puttana Errante, written in the style of Aretino, and available in French by 1660.
The undercover trade in such provocative literature went on under both the Cromwellian and Carolean regimes. During both it was officially outlawed but flourished because there was a steady demand and because censorship was lax. Pornography was even more readily available on the continent and members of the itinerant Stuart court of the 1650s – both men and women – were well versed in the latest examples to come off the presses. For many it had the added attraction of being anathema to the Puritans. By reading such material and assuming the loose sexual morals that it advocated, royalists could display their superiority over the ‘canting hypocrites’ currently in power in their homeland.
Pornography fed into the mind set of the leaders of Restoration society. It was, of course, exploitative and assertive of male aggression towards the opposite sex. It represented women as permissive, lustful and seductive. Every daughter of Eve, it suggested, was a whore at heart. There was, as there always is, a very thin dividing line between sexual excitement and loathing for those who provoked that excitement. The writers of the growing volume of anti-feminist satire in the 1660s and 1670s crossed that line.
Drawing on their own experience, on court gossip and on the relationships of the royal brothers with their procession of mistresses, they painted a picture of women as the representatives, if not the very embodiment, of the chaos that had overtaken British society. By usurping power they had thrown all into confusion. In what rapidly became an established verse genre, they vilifiy over and again ‘that viler sex that damned us all’. They rage against the cruel trick of creation that has made woman necessary for the process of procreation, while, at the same time, using that trick as an excuse for their own irresistible sexual urge. They reiterate woman’s inferiority:
Whate’er was left unfit in the creation
To make a toad, after its ugly fashion,
Of scrapings from unfinished creatures had,
Sure was the body of a woman made.18
Nor was it only the third-rate, pleasure-sated wits of the court who gave vent to sexist ire or despair. As remarked in the opening pages of this book, it was John Milton, in Paradise Lost, who pondered,
O, why did God,
Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, and not fill the world at once
With men as angels without feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind?19
And in Hudibras Samuel Butler begged leave to doubt whether these inferior beings actually possessed a soul.
Where was Charles in all this? Not, as has often been casually assumed, setting the tone of cynical hedonism expressively advocated by court poets. What incensed libidinous wits and solemn councillors alike was precisely that the king did not share their anti-feminism. Men who had supported the Stuart cause with their money and their blood, who had sacrificed lands and position, who had shared the discomforts and the shame of exile, and also those who had stayed at home and endured the humiliation of anti-monarchist triumphalism wanted above all else a king who was Protestant, powerful and politically adept. Their ideal ruler would give the strong lead which, as most of them grudgingly acknowledged, Cromwell had given but he would direct his talents to reestablishing and sustaining Charles I’s polity of Crown and Mitre and purging the land of every vestige of politico-religious chaos. What they got was a king who was soft on his enemies, was committed to religious toleration, more than a little inclined to Catholicism, in the pocket of the French king and dominated by women. And it was that last weakness which for many observers was the causa causans of all the ills which beset the regime.
The staunchly royalist Evelyn regarded the third Stuart as a man who had tragically missed his moment of greatness, ‘for never had king more glorious opportunities to have made himself, his people and all Europe happy’. The reason for this failure was, in the diarist’s considered opinion, that Charles was ‘an excellent prince, doubtless, had he been less addicted to women, which made him uneasy and always in want to supply their unmeasurable profusion’. Evelyn resented the siphoning off of royal bounty which should have been lavished on ‘many indigent persons who had signally served both him and his father’, and he lamented Charles’ ‘too easy nature’ which allowed him to be manipulated by ‘prophane wretches, who corrupted his otherwise sufficient parts’. The writer recalled the last time he had seen the king alive and could not forbear moralising:
I am never to forget the unexpressable luxury and prophaneness, gaming and all dissolution, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which, this day sennight I was witness of; the king, sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland and Mazarin, &c, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000 in gold before them … it being a scene of utmost vanity … six days after all was in the dust.20
We could dismiss this as sanctimonious preachifying if it were not supported by commentators who certainly did not share Evelyn’s piety, some of whom might even have been among the gamblers in the royal apartments on that winter’s night. Rochester, Buckingham and others who had taken the king’s bread held him in disregard, if not contempt. And much of the reason was that Charles did not share their attitude towards women, who existed, in their view, to be used and abused at the whim of their masters. The key to his effeteness seemed to be his declining of this macho treatment of the opposite sex. One satirist identified Charles with Priapus, the Greek god of procreation:
The poor Priapus king led by the nose
Looks as one set up for to scare the crows.
Yet in the mimics of the spintrian sportfn1
Outdoes Tiberius and his goatish court.
In love’s delights none did him ere excell;
Not Tereus with his sister Philomel.fn2
As they at Athens we at Dover meet,
And gentlier far the Orleans duchess treat.
What sad events attended on the same
We leave to the report of common fame.21
The poet, by an association of ideas, not only links Charles with all manner of sexual practices, but brings in Henrietta and the Secret Treaty of Dover to complete the catalogue of the king’s disreputable acts.
Charles’ critics were not slow in pointing out the contrast between him and more effective monarchs. The most obvious was Louis XIV, a real warrior king.
Thus, whilst the King of France with powerful arms
Frightens all Christendom with fresh alarms,
We in our glorious bacchanals dispose
The humble fate of a plebian nose.22
The allusion is to the unfortunate fate of Sir John Coventry, MP for Weymouth, who, in 1670, during a Commons debate on the taxation of theatres, made some disparaging remarks on the king’s interest in actresses. A group of ruffians, acting, some believed, on royal orders, stopped Coventry’s carriage, dragged him out and, in the ensuing brawl, slit his nose. It is very unlikely that Charles was behind the assault but he was known to be extremely sensitive to insults involving his lady friends and that was sufficient to lend credence to the rumour.
Ironically, he was also compared unfavourably with Queen Elizabeth.
A Tudor! A Tudor! We’ve had Stuarts enough.
None ever reigned like Old Bess in the ruff.23
Elizabeth was a woman but she lived in the collective memory as someone who had ‘the heart and stomach of a king’. Poets looked back to hers as a golden age when the Crown provided inspiration to heroes who ventured forth triumphantly against the Catholic foe.
This isle was well reformed and gained renown,
Whilst the brave Tudors wore th’imperial crown,
But since the ill-got race of Stuarts came
It has recoiled to popery and shame.
Misguided monarchs, rarely wise or just,
Tainted with pride or with impetuous lust.24
Frustration shudders through such lines. The follies of the king’s father and grandfather had resulted in two decades of appalling carnage and political chaos. Notwithstanding that, loyal Britons had rallied to the royal standard, supported the cause when it seemed irredeemably lost, and given the Stuarts a second chance. Charles II had squandered this fund of royalist goodwill and it was his relationships with women that most glaringly showed up his shortcomings. Looking back through tinted spectacles over more than half a century, nostalgic poets observed the image of a Virgin Queen ‘whose undiminished and uncorruptible sexuality bespoke the power of both the monarch and the nation … Charles, on the other hand, “spent” his erotic and political capital, his sexual extravagance degrading his masculine authority and making him … less than a woman, impotent, sterile, effeminate, homosexual.’25
Can we, with the benefit of historical perspective, say anything to modify the harsh judgement passed by many contemporaries, from bishops to rakes? We will certainly bring to our assessment the insights of our own age, an age which, adrift on a swirling sea of moral relativism, is less inclined to reach black and white verdicts. Whether or not that renders us more or less reliable tribunal members than our seventeenth-century ancestors is beside the point; we can only look at Charles II from where we stand.
He had grown up in a fairytale court and then been pitched out into the real world. Most of his formative years had been spent among ordinary people – both men and women – and he certainly got closer to his subjects than any other monarch before or since. He had had to pack away with the toys of childhood, the magic moments of irresponsible pleasure at his parents’ glittering court and, as he met with soldiers, war widows and harassed local gentry who questioned the necessity of the conflict they were caught up in, he discarded the concept of semi-divine monarchy that carried Charles I stubbornly to death on a frosty winter’s day. His mother’s pragmatism, not to say downright duplicity, seemed to him a more effective political tool than the idealism of his father, or, for that matter, of the English fanatics who wielded the fatal axe, or the dour Scottish Presbyterians among whom he spent several gloomy months. The inattention to business which so frustrated Hyde was not simply the product of laziness: Charles found it increasingly difficult to stomach the preaching of yet another group of theorists – the ministers who wanted to mould him to their image of kingship. Survival through the uncertain years of exile was all about living from day to day. A cardboard king could not afford the luxury of principles. What appeared to many as an attitude of cynicism might more accurately be called non-idealism. Charles did not reject high principles – indeed, he always respected men who were motivated by strong beliefs. He simply did not see their relevance to himself. And in that, he had much in common with the indolent wits who were his companions before and after the Restoration and also with a wider constituency of his war-weary subjects.
However, he could not discard the influences of those who were close to him in his earliest years; their personalities and attitudes helped to form the future king’s character matrix. Charles absorbed his father’s unfailing courtesy and also something of his reserve. He never suffered from that shyness which was often misconstrued as aloofness in Charles I – quite the reverse – but he was able, when he wished, to distance himself from those around him and to assert that separateness necessary to princes. There was always a limit to the extent that he shared in the boisterousness of his carousing companions. Observers, who deplored the antics of the young louts which Charles seemed to find so amusing, acknowledged that he never shared in their bouts of heavy drinking and public rowdyism. He personally deplored the readiness of the young bloods to settle their disputes by crossing swords and more than once banished men from court for duelling. Thus, he was never a fully paid-up member of the macho Cavalier culture. This needs to be stressed because he was often accused of those excesses which were certainly characteristic of the court over which he presided but in which he did not fully share. Charles was never an unbridled libertine and to compare him with the likes of Tiberius was an absurd exaggeration. In no vice did he indulge to excess. Drinking, feasting, gambling – all these he enjoyed in moderation and if he often partied into the small hours, the other side of his regimen was an addiction to healthy exercise. He walked daily and frequently played tennis, went hunting and swimming.
It was much the same with his whoring. An innumerable cavalcade of women passed through his bedchamber. Most of them were low-class prostitutes procured for him by the likes of Taaffe and Chiffinch. Unlike the king’s court ladies and actresses, they remain anonymous and that is precisely because Charles was discreet. Just as he never joined in tavern crawls with his cronies, so he did not visit in person the red light districts of continental cities. In other words, Charles behaved in this regard in the same way as many other European princes and there is no evidence that he was more sexually voracious than they. These casual, carnal encounters were just that and they tell us nothing about his significant relations with the opposite sex.
His relationship with his mother was fundamental. From his earliest memories of her until the day of her death Henrietta Maria exercised a strong influence over her favourite son. Though there were times when he ignored her advice and found her interference irksome, there were others when he sought her counsel or, through simple inertia, allowed her and the Louvre party to shape policy. The prince’s earliest mentors, the Marquess of Newcastle and Christabella Wyndham, each in their way helped to fix his basic understanding of women. Newcastle impressed upon his charge a chivalrous attitude towards the opposite sex which was already becoming passé and Charles’ nurse provided that demonstrative affection which his own mother was less free to show.
Courtesy and consideration always dominated his treatment of the women closest to him. This emerged over and again. His behaviour towards Lucy Walter was ultimately barbarous but the final rejection came only after a long, tumultuous relationship during which he had given her frequent proofs of his love and promised more than he was able to deliver. Her importunity and, perhaps, the political threat she was believed to represent, forced him to the final exigent but, even then, he could not bring himself to cast her off personally but had to act through intermediaries. Women were vital to Charles during the exile years. Not only did they satisfy his physical needs, they also bolstered his ego. At a time when everything he attempted turned to dust and ashes in his hands, they restored his faith in his manhood. As his letters to Jane Lane showed, Charles was always embarrassed at his inability to recompense them as he believed he should and this may have influenced his extravagance towards his mistresses as soon as he had the wherewithal to be generous. He felt gratitude and a sense of obligation towards his women for whatever each gave him. When Clarendon urged him to disentangle himself from Barbara Villiers the king replied that he had compromised her and could not abandon her. He was similarly unwilling to cast aside his barren wife, saying that it would be monstrous to treat her so unkindly simply because she was unfortunate enough not to be able to have children. And few things enraged Charles more than affronts to his female friends.
Inevitably, some women took advantage of Charles’ easygoing nature. The two duchesses milked their relationship with the king to the last drop. They built up personal fortunes, accumulated titles for themselves and their offspring and became unbearably arrogant about their special relationship. They took money for obtaining offices and other signs of royal favour and they insinuated their clients into important positions. They participated in ministerial intrigues, and from as early as the 1650s (according to his correspondence with Jane Lane) Charles permitted his female intimates as well as members of his own family to offer advice. He saw nothing untoward about admitting them to his counsels. Mother, sisters, mistresses – he took them all into his confidence – to a certain extent. Never fully; no one enjoyed that privilege. However, it was the involvement of the king’s women in affairs of state that so shocked political observers.
Yet, one indulgence was worse in the eyes of court watchers: the king enjoyed the company of women – lots of women. Indeed, he seemed at times actually to prefer female company. Charles surrounded himself with people who amused him. His regular entourage included wits, scientists, actors, philosophers and young bucks but always there were lively, beautiful women. The old convention of segregating the sexes into the two sides of the palace, the king’s and the queen’s, evaporated. The apartments of Charles and Catherine were separate but mistresses now had their own rooms, and those, like Nell Gwynn and Moll Davis, who did not were provided with houses nearby and came and went freely. The sexes mingled in a new, and to many observers a scandalous, way. This open nature of the court posed problems for ministers, ambassadors and all who aspired to influence or who had important business to conclude with the king. They had no alternative but to dance attendance on the king’s friends, to give dinner parties for his women, to seek easy access to the mistresses’ chambers where Charles was often to be found and to offer bribes to gain their intercession with him. The one thing they certainly could not afford to do was to fall out with these vital intermediaries. All this paying court to mere ‘royal playthings’ was humiliating for them.
There was an infuriating permanence about the king’s women. Ministers came and went, often departing with their rivals’ knives firmly embedded in their backs, ambassadors were recalled, sometimes in disgrace, and even longstanding cronies like Buckingham endured lengthy spells of disfavour, but Charles’ female intimates were immovable. Nothing, it seemed, could prompt him to abandon them – not the desperate sadness of Catherine’s childlessness (and it was a sadness to both husband and wife); not Barbara’s constant bullying; not Frances’ resistance to his advances; not the raging storm of unpopularity against Louise; not lampoons against Nell’s vulgarity; nothing moved Charles to desert his role of protector. It was all immensely frustrating for those who believed, as most members of the establishment did believe, that politics was a man’s game. Given the wider concerns about the unnatural usurpation of power by women in many walks of life, it is easy to see why the king’s female companions became such an obvious target for those who suggested easy explanations for the ills besetting the realm.
Charles was at odds with the prevailing political correctness. He was always attracted by strong, feisty women. Those of his own family – Henrietta Maria, Mary, Henrietta – had all made their mark in a man’s world, standing up to political enemies and enjoying the confidence of princes. The women he became attached to during and after his exile had surmounted huge family and personal difficulties in their upward scramble. Only Catherine of Braganza was not made of such stern stuff but she, too, proved herself to have the stamina which earned her her husband’s affection. There was a shared suffering between all these women and the disinherited prince who regained his throne only after two decades of impecunious and humiliating wandering. Perhaps that was the real secret of the bond that existed between Charles and his close female companions. It was a bond which few contemporaries understood and most deplored.
We can comprehend it because we live in an age of greater sexual equality. The freedoms gained by seventeenth-century women were shortlived. As the upheavals of war and politico-religious dislocation receded into history, the old gender conventions reasserted themselves. Women were, for the most part, put back in their place. The ploughshares of social and philosophical change had not bitten deeply enough and the means of communication did not exist that could carry new ideas into every town and village of the British islands. Women had to wait for the more thoroughgoing revolutions of the twentieth century before they could begin to take their places alongside men. If we are right to regard our treatment of women as more civilised than that of our ancestors then we might be inclined to identify Charles II as a ‘modern’. He was certainly weak. He was self-indulgent. He squandered his opportunities and was severely lacking in political foresight. But, ironically, we may judge to be most admirable that aspect of his behaviour which contemporaries considered most reprehensible – his treatment of women.
fn1 ‘spintrian sport’ = male prostitution.
fn2 According to the legend, Tereus, King of Thrace, raped his sister-in-law Philomela, daughter of the King of Athens, then cut out her tongue and imprisoned her in a castle to ensure her silence. The atrocity being discovered, Queen Procne and her sister murdered the king’s son and served him up to Tereus at a feast.