Charles II, one of our most popular kings, was
a fascinating but deeply flawed and unreliable ruler, heading what was
seen in his own lifetime as a dissolute and immoral court. Charming as
Charles undoubtedly was, the enduring sobriquet coined for him by Lord
Rochester, 'the Merry Monarch', was hardly accurate, although
elsewhere in his A Satyr on Charles II he stated more precisely that
'Restless he rolls from whore to whore'. The women Rochester was
referring to, along with a non-mistress and a queen, are the seven
subjects of Linda Porter's Mistresses.
While two of Charles
Il's mistresses, Barbara Villiers and Louise de Kéroulle, were of
aristocratic background and successively occupied the powerful,
semi-official position of
maîtresse-en-titre for the entirety
of his reign, others were actresses or from the gentry Porter's three
chapters on the combative and largely forgotten Lucy Walter, who
became Charles's mistress during his exile when they were both
eighteen, gives an unbiased portrayal of what she describes as a
'brittle and sad life'. But it was Barbara and Louise, created
duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth respectively, who were the most
important of the king's mistresses. Their functions at court went far
beyond merely satisfying the sexual demands of the monarch. Porter
explains in lively detail their political activities and their roles
in offering access to the king, as well as their patronage and their
accumulation of personal wealth.
Barbara was already
the king's mistress at the time of the Restoration in 1660. Porter
describes how she understood the importance of being visible at court
to maintain her role, something that didn't cease when the king
married Catherine of Braganza two years later. Porter captures the
avaricious and cruel elements of both the king's and Barbara's
personalities as she describes their treatment of the Portuguese-born
queen, with Charles installing his mistress as one of his wife's
ladies of the bedchamber and having her constantly in the queen's
presence. Porter questions the idea that Catherine became friendly
with Barbara to appease her husband, suggesting that she instead put
up with her under sufferance. Barbara would humiliate the queen in
other ways too. In one of the many portraits of Barbara produced by
Peter Lely, the king's principal painter, she appears as the Madonna,
holding up one of her bastard sons by the king as the infant Christ,
while apparently pregnant with Charles's next child. Porter notes the
`hint of triumphalism' in the picture.
Porter provides a realistic depiction of
Catherine, Charles's misunderstood consort, which goes beyond reducing
her to the gendered stereotype of the long-suffering wife. While
Charles refused to divorce her, not just in response to the upswell of
anti-Catholic feeling during the Popish Plot but also because he
wanted to secure a legitimate heir, she held a superior position to
the king's mistresses, who occupied servile roles. In Porter's view,
Catherine created her own distinctive identity with `considerable
aplomb', decorating her apartments with Indian calicoes and employing
fashionable Italian musicians and Catholic artists. She also hints at
the queen's involvement in Charles's deathbed conversion to
Catholicism.
Porter presents an
interesting depiction of Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond, the
woman who refused to be bedded by the king, despite his obsession with
her, reflecting on her astute business mind and instinct for survival.
The 'baby-faced Bretonne', Louise de Kéroualle, held the role of
king's mistress for the longest time, from 1670 until Charles's death
in 1685. Louise's French nationality, her Catholicism, the suspicion
that she was spying for Louis )(IV and the vast amount of money she
obtained from the king (Porter calculates she was latterly receiving
the equivalent today of ‘59 million annually) made her Charles's most
unpopular mistress.
Louise's antithesis, the best-known of Charles
mistresses, was the actress Nell Gwyn. Although she was highly visible
at court and her two sons by the king were ennobled, Nell played up
her lowliness (she was raised in a brothel and may have been a child
prostitute) and seemed to enjoy cultivating a patriotic persona. She
famously settled a mob that had begun attacking her carriage thinking
Louise was inside by shouting, 'Pray good people be civil, I am the
Protestant whore!' Porter says that Nell's 'cheerful vulgarity' added
to her popularity (she once laced the food of fellow actress-mistress
Moll Davis with laxatives before an arranged evening with the king).
She also correctly states, in contradiction of two well-known lines on
her relationship with Charles (`She hath got a trick to handle his
prick/But never lays hands on his sceptre'), that the claim Nell
wasn't interested in politics is untrue and discusses, for example,
her open support of the Protestant Duke of Monmouth during the
Exclusion Crisis.
The last of Charles's mistresses was Hortense
Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin (a love from his period of exile, to whom
he had proposed in 1659), who came to England in 1675 as part of a
plot to replace Louise. Porter highlights Hortense's eccentricities,
such as her nocturnal fencing in St James's Park, dressed in a
nightdress, with the king's eldest daughter (with whom she may have
had a sexual relationship). Although a mistress for only around a
year, Hortense remained at court; less than a fortnight before the
king's death, the diarist John Evelyn was appalled to see, alongside a
group of courtiers gambling and a 'French boy singing love songs', the
king 'toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland and Mazarin'.
While we might not necessarily learn anything
new here about the lives of these women, Porter's engaging and
well-researched book convincingly presents them as adding to both the
glory of the king's reign and its failings. Evelyn thought Charles
would have been 'an excellent prince ... had he been less addicted to
women’. One of the book's strengths is Porter's uncompromisingly
impartial treatment of the king while discussing the lives of the key
women in his life.
By Linda Porter