Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at
the Court of Charles II by Linda Porter review — No Love
Lost
Slander may have been a
price worthpaying for the material rewards of being Charles II's
mistress
Lisa Hilton
The Spectator ( 30 May, 2020)
Strolling through Whitehall
Palace in the early years of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys was
thrilled to spy a washing line displaying 'the finest smocks and linen
petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine's... and did me good to look upon
them’. The owner of the glamorous undergarments was Barbara Villiers,
the first of the many maitresses-en-titre of King Charles II
who form the subject of this incisive new study.
Linda Porter's eye for detail is no less acute
(though certainly less creepy) than Pepys's. In her hands the lives
and characters of the women who shaped the reputation of the
Restoration court emerge as far more discrete and individual than the
identikit line-up of Lely beauties whose portraits are one of the most
recognisable
identifiers of the period. Despite
Charles's reputation as a 'sleazy playboy', the list of his conquests
is comparatively short. Porter concentrates on his five principal
lovers: Lucy Walter, Barbara Villiers, Louise de Kerouaille. Hortense
Mancini and, of course, dear old Nelly Gwynn — as well as his
Portuguese queen, Catherine of Braganza, and Frances Stuart, best
known for being one of the few women who resisted Old Rowley's charms.
Nonetheless, the optimism surrounding Charles's
restoration was soon marred by a careless licentiousness which
exceeded the clandestine debaucheries of the Commonwealth
Womanising
became an addiction, fed by Charles's long years of idleness in exile;
and where the king led, his courtiers notoriously followed. Porter's
use of primary sources illustrates the positively pornographic nature
of public discourse, and demonstrates that viciously sexual language
as a means of attacking women seen to be powerful is a habit not
confined to the age of Twitter. Even a few lines attributed to George
Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, about his cousin Barbara show the
extraordinary level of obscenity that royal mistresses endured:
She was so exquisite a whore,
That in the belly of her mother,
Her c—t she placed so right before
Her
father f —d them both together...
While Porter is cautious about anachronism in portraying her subjects
as relatively modern — it would be inaccurate, she warns, to interpret
the troubled life of the defiantly unconventional Hortense Mancini as
'empowered' — she emphasizes that despite the malice and contempt
Charles's lovers could expect to attract, their position was one of
the few means by which they could attain wealth and independence. With
the exception of Lucy Walter, whose son by Charles was born before he
regained the throne, the 'royal whores' did very nicely out of their
disgrace. Scurrilous pamphlets may have been a price worth paying for
pensions, estates and titles for their children.
Charles’s legal wife enjoyed fewer
compensations. Though she brought Charles the most
generous marriage settlement ever received by an English monarch,
including the ports of Tangier and Bombay, Catherine of Braganza was
forced to endure years of humiliation over his philandering, her
position made all the more bitter by her own inability to fulfil the
primary purpose of queenship, a legitimate heir. The presence of
Charles's bouncing brood of bastards can only have added to her pain;
but Porter's portrait of the queen is more revealing than that of the
'clueless ingenue' depicted in many
accounts. Her contribution to the arts, particularly music, is given
full weight, as is her emergence as a capable ruler at the end of her
life.
The legends of Charles's sex
exploits have eclipsed the politics of his reign, and it is one of
Porter's strengths that she takes the implications of the royal
romping seriously. While she does not accept Kevin Sharpe's theory
that Charles practised a 'politics of
pleasure', willfully attempting an attack on conventional monarchical
morality through his lifestyle, she assesses the connection between
his anarchic sex life and the enigma of his character to interesting
effect. Conditioned by the trauma of his impoverished, peripatetic
youth, Charles as king was obsessed with secrecy, with a Hobbesian
belief only in the self-interest of those who served him. He had seen
majesty for the sham it was and had neither faith in, nor respect for,
it. In the words of the Marquis of Halifax, Charles 'lived with his
ministers as he did with his mistresses — he used them, but he did not
love them ‘It is testament to Porter's skill as a historian that by
the end of Mistresses the darkness at the heart of the brilliant
Restoration court is so bleakly exposed.
Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at
the Court of Charles II by Linda Porter, Picador, 304pp; £20
Return to Mistresses web page.