The lives of seven women who
shared Charles II’s bed make a colourful story of courtly lust,
says Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor Thursday March 26 2020, 5.00pm, The Times
One evening in 1663 the voluptuous Lady
Castlemaine, Charles II’s principal mistress, arranged a sexually
charged mock marriage between herself and teenage Frances Stuart, a
maid of honour to Catherine, the king’s wife. In his diary Samuel
Pepys recorded that after the ceremony the couple ended up in bed
together, but at the last moment the king replaced Lady Castlemaine
under the covers.
Charles was roughly twice the age of Stuart and besotted with her. Her image is still familiar to many of us — she served as the model for Britannia on the nation’s coinage until decimalisation. In the end the only way she could escape his pestering was by eloping with a conveniently infatuated duke.
Stuart was unusual among Charles’s women in
that she successfully resisted his advances, then and later. Not
everyone was so lucky. In the same diary entry Pepys reported that at
a recent ball at Whitehall, “a child was dropped by one of the ladies
in dancing; but nobody knew who, it being taken up by somebody in
their handkercher”. The next day, however, a maid of honour fell ill
and was removed from court. It was rumoured that the king had been the
father of her miscarried child.
His courtiers followed the royal example and
were as sexually incontinent as their master. In this they were out of
step with most of the population, which meant that the king’s
vigorously varied sex life became a political issue that endured
throughout his 25-year reign. His mistresses were an expensive luxury,
and he and his government were always chronically short of money. The
personal morality of the king (God’s Anointed and the head of the
Church of England) sapped royal authority. It was also feared,
probably wrongly, that he allowed his mistresses to dictate policy to
him.
In this lively account of Charles II’s women
Linda Porter concentrates on the interlinked stories of seven
individuals: five mistresses, one almost-mistress and one wife. At the
centre of these stories is the enigmatic figure of the king.
Lucy Barlow, the feckless mistress of the
king’s years in exile and the mother of his first known child, later
the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, became an expensive embarrassment
before her convenient death in 1658.
When the king was restored to his throne he
was already entangled with the glamorous Barbara Villiers, later Lady
Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland. She presented Charles with a
number of children, most of whom were probably his, and milked her
royal lover for all she could. She persuaded Peter Lely to paint her
as the Madonna, with her first royal bastard in the role of the infant
Jesus. Pepys, always susceptible to female beauty, found her wildly
attractive. On one occasion he was driven to distraction by the sight
of her underwear drying in the privy garden (“laced with rich lace at
the bottom . . . [it] did me good to look upon them”).
It’s impossible not to feel sorry for
Catherine, transplanted from the staid, old-fashioned court of
Portugal to the raffish, sophisticated and sexually adventurous world
of Whitehall. To her horror her husband insisted that Lady Castlemaine
be appointed as one of the ladies of her bedchamber. Catherine brought
a substantial dowry, but she was not a great beauty; she was a Roman
Catholic, which did her no good at all in the aggressively Protestant
country where she now lived; and, worst of all, she failed to present
the king with an heir, while he sired a string of bastards.
Her childlessness was not only a personal tragedy for Catherine; it coloured political developments for the rest of the reign and beyond. Despite being under intense pressure to divorce her the king refused. His behaviour towards his wife was always a strange mixture of the callous, the affectionate and the protective.
The king had a taste for the theatre. One of
his first acts after the Restoration in 1660 was to encourage the
reopening of the theatres, closed under the Commonwealth. He also
allowed women to act on the public stage. Unsurprisingly, at least two
of them became his lovers. The best known — then as now — was Nell
Gwyn. There was no love lost between her and Moll Davis, another
actress who shared the king’s bed. It was said that Gwyn ruined a
tryst between Davis and the king by sending her rival a well-timed
selection of sweetmeats laced with a laxative.
Gwyn, alleged to have grown up in a bawdy
house, knew how to make a splash. This was the age of bling before the
word was invented. For her house in Pall Mall she commissioned an
ornate silver bedstead decorated with heads — some of mythical
figures, others all too real — including that of Gwyn’s main rival for
the king’s affections, Louise de Kérouaille, who had succeeded
Castlemaine as the king’s official mistress. Gwyn called her
Squintabella.
The baby-faced
Louise, soon to be made a duchess, was widely disliked for being
French, Roman Catholic and unusually greedy. Like Castlemaine, she
dabbled in politics. The king showered her with gifts, one of which
was less than welcome: a sexually transmitted disease, possibly
syphilis. Charles, who was interested in scientific matters, dosed
himself enthusiastically with mercury and achieved at least a
short-term cure; Louise was not so lucky: her health was permanently
damaged. Although the sexual side of their relationship diminished,
his affection for her did not. As the years passed, she grew fat; he
called her “Fubs”, an affectionate term for a plump person, and named
a yacht the Fubbs
in her honour. Squintabella retained her commanding position
until the king’s death, but he did find time for a year-long affair
with the scandalous Hortense Mancini, the highly intelligent niece of
Cardinal Mazarin who was careering around Europe trying to avoid her
abusive French husband. Even Charles drew the line, however, when
Mancini embarked on a passionate lesbian affair with his illegitimate
daughter, the married Countess of Sussex. They were less than discreet
about it. One night in St James’s Park the two ladies, clad only in
their nightdresses, practised their fencing.
But the king did not bear Mancini a grudge.
Just before Charles died in 1685, John Evelyn, the diarist, was
profoundly disgusted to find him at Whitehall spending a cosy evening
gambling with her, Louise de Kérouaille and Lady Castlemaine.
The lives of these seven women make a terrific
story and Porter tells it well. There’s nothing radically new about
most of her conclusions, although she does make a good case for
reassessing Stuart, the one that got away, who was clearly more
intelligent and more resolute than it is often claimed.
At the heart of the book is the abiding mystery of the king, whose motives have divided historians and biographers since his death. Porter is stern with him, perhaps rightly. He is not a hero for the Me Too generation. Still, Charles II makes the private lives of our royal family seem tame by comparison, and the tabloids would have loved him.
Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at
the Court of Charles II by Linda Porter, Picador, 304pp; £20