Rival sultanas: Nell Gwyn, Louise de Kéroualle, and Hortense Mancini

Contents

CHAP.

I. — The Early Loves of Charles II. II. — The Beginnings of Nell Gwyn III. — Nell Gwyn and Lord Buckhurst IV. — " The King sends for Nelly "

V. — The Merry Monarch .

Chapter I

TT may be said that his inclinations to Love were the effects of health and a good constitution, with as little mixture of the seraphick part as ever man had. And though from that foundation men often raise their passions, I am apt to think that his stayed as much as any man's ever did in the lower region. This made him like easy mistresses. They were generally resigned to him while he was abroad, with an implied bargain. Heroick, refined lovers place a good deal of their pleasure in difficulty, both for the vanity of conquest, and as a better earnest of their kindness.

" After he was restored, mistresses were recommended to him, which is no small matter in a Court, and not unworthy of the thoughts even of a party. A mistress, either dexterous 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 influence and insinuations at all times. It was resolved generally by others whom he should have in his arms, as well as whom he should have in his Councils. For a man who was capable of choosing, he chose as seldom as any man that ever lived.

" He had more properly, at least in the beginning of his time, a good stomach to his mistresses than any great passion for them. His taking them from others was never learnt in a romance, and indeed fitter for a philosopher than a knight-errant. His patience for their frailties showed him no exact lover. It is a heresy, according to a true lover's creed, even to forgive an infidelity, or the appearance of it. Love of ease will not do it where the heart is much engaged ; but where mere nature is the motive, it is possible for a man to think righter than the common opinion, and to argue that a rival taketh away nothing but the heart, and leaveth all the rest.

" He had wit enough to suspect and he had wit enough not to care. The ladies got a great deal more than would have been allowed an equal bargain in Chancery for what they did for it ; but neither the manner nor the measure of pleasure is to be judged by others."

Thus wrote that shrewd observer of human character, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, of Charles II. and his mistresses, and those who have studied the career of the Merry Monarch will not find much with which to disagree.

There was certainly little enough of the romantic lover about Charles II. If he never descended so low as Louis XV. and certain other licentious princes, he was quite incapable of cherishing a genuine passion, such as his famous grandfather, Henri of Navarre, entertained for Gabrielle d'Estrees. He did not even demand, like Louis XIV., that his mistresses should at any rate pretend to be in love with him. So long as they were at hand to amuse him in his idle hours, he appears to have cared little what they did at other times. It is doubtful if there is another king in history who would have tolerated the glaring infidelities of Barbara Villiers. Yet they seldom provoked in Charles more than a momentary irritation, and that was caused, not so much by jealousy or disgust as by the doubts which they occasioned whether the children to which the sultana gave birth were his or another's.

Of Charles II. it might be observed, as was said of Philippe d'Orleans, Regent of France, that he had one of those precocious temperaments of which

La valeur n'attend le nombre des ann^es,

since if he did not quite succeed in equalling the achievement of that prince, who was commonly reported to have become a father in his fifteenth year,* he ran it pretty close, and before he left Jersey (June, 1646), when he was barely sixteen, he had already acquired that distinction.

Mr. Osmund Airy, in his monograph on Charles II., gives some interesting details concerning his Majesty's firstborn — a son — whose existence appears entirely to have escaped the notice of most historians :

" The secret was well kept, so well, indeed, that for more than twenty years afterwards, at the time that

* See the author's " Unruly Daughters " (London, Hutchinson ; New York, Scribner, 19 13).

I*

Charles was desirous of being received into the Catholic Church, he was able to inform the General of the Jesuits that it was known to but two other persons, the Queen of Sweden and Henrietta Maria. Of the mother we know absolutely nothing more than Charles discloses in the same letter. ' The boy was born/ he says, ' of a young lady who was amongst the most distinguished in our Kingdom, more from the frailty of our first youth than from any ill intentions or great depravity.' With her wrecked life, her motherhood which was her shame, she passes like a nameless shadow across the page. Of the child we hear more. In 1665 he was in London, and on September 27 of that year Charles gave a written acknowledgment that James Stuart was his natural son, having lived in France and elsewhere under an assumed name up to that date. Charles further ordered that he should be known as James de la Cloche du Bourg de Jarsey, and prohibited him from disclosing his birth until after his own death, when he might present this declaration to Parliament. The boy then went to Holland to pursue his studies. A year and a half later (February, 1667), Charles sent him another paper — which, like the first, still exists in the archives of the Jesuits — assigning to him, if it pleased his successor and Parliament, £500 a year, so long as he lived in London and remained a member of the English Church. On April 29, 1667, the young man was reconciled to Rome, and this circumstance led to another meeting with his father. ... In August, 1668 — if the documents in the archives of the Jesuits can be regarded as genuine — he had sent to the General of the Order a request that the son of his Jersey boyhood might be sent to him, in order that he might practise with him in secret the mysteries of the Catholic religion, ' without giving a shade of suspicion that we are Catholic' But the hope that he might be received into the Catholic Church, while outwardly appearing a Protestant, was destroyed by the uncompromising statement of the Pope in the case of James that even the Head of the Church himself had no power to grant such a dispensation."

Charles II. had undoubtedly an eye for beauty, but otherwise his mistresses did not do much credit to his good taste, and their haughtiness, infidelities, extravagance and jealousy of one another gave him at different times plenty of occupation.

Lucy Walter, the companion of his wanderings and the mother of the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, publicly disgraced herself and everyone connected with her. The daughter of William Walter, of Roch Castle in Pembrokeshire, a Royalist gentleman whose ancestral home was taken and burnt by the Parliamentary forces in 1644, after holding out bravely for the King, Lucy is said to have been born about 1630. After the destruction of Roch Castle, the members of the Walter family were separated, and at the end of the year 1647, or early in 1648, Lucy, as James II. afterwards put it, " having little means and less grace, came to London to make her fortune." Here she is believed to have resided with her mother's sister, Margaret Prothero, who had married a Dutch merchant of St. Dunstan's in the West, named Gosfright. This aunt would scarcely seem to have kept a very strict watch on her niece, for, soon after the young lady's coming to Town, we find Algernon Sidney, whose handsome head was to fall on the scaffold after the Rye House Plot, " trafficking " with her for her virtue. But, before this dishonourable arrangement could be concluded, Algernon's regiment received marching orders, and it was his brother, Colonel Robert Sidney, to whose persuasions Lucy eventually yielded.

Him she accompanied to The Hague, where she was seen by Charles II., who straightway fell in love with her and lost no time in getting her away from Robert Sidney, who was, perhaps, not unwilling to part with the lady.

On April 9, 1649, Lucy gave birth to a son (afterwards the Duke of Monmouth), whom Charles acknowledged as his. But the fact that his Majesty did not arrive at The Hague until the middle of September, 1648, occasioned serious doubts as to whether this was the case ; and it is certain that, when he grew to manhood, the Duke of Monmouth bore a much stronger resemblance to Robert Sidney than he did to his reputed father.

We need not discuss here the claim put forward by Monmouth and his partisans that a marriage had been celebrated between Charles and Lucy Walter, which gained sufficient credence to make the King, in June, 1678, consider it necessary to publish a declaration, which was entered in the Council-book and registered in Chancery, and stated " that, to avoid any dispute which might happen in time to come concerning the succession of the Crown, he did declare, in the presence of Almighty God, that he never gave, nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to Mrs. Barber, alias Waters, the Duke of Monmouth's mother, nor to any other woman whatsoever, but to his present wife, Queen Catherine, then living." That the claim was a baseless one is beyond dispute, though it is quite possible, and even probable, that Charles had promised Lucy marriage.

During July and August, 1649, Lucy was with Charles in Paris, and the respectable Evelyn, who travelled with her in Lord Wilmot's coach from Saint-Germain to the capital, describes her as " a brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid creature." Whether she also accompanied her royal lover to Jersey in the following September is not quite clear, but it is very probable that she did.

When, in June, 1650, Charles set out for Scotland, he left his inamorata at The Hague, where her conduct in itself constituted a sufficient refutation of the supposed marriage. For no sooner was the prince safely out of the way, than she began to look about her for consolation and found it in the person of Colonel Henry Bennet (afterwards Earl of Arlington), whom in due course she presented with a daughter.* Not satisfied with the attentions paid by this gentleman, she was also generally believed to have had tender relations with Lord Taafe (afterwards second Earl of Carlingford) and Colonel Thomas Howard, brother of James, Earl of Suffolk.

On his return to the Continent in 165 1, Charles wisely terminated his connection with this woman — though he continued to keep her well supplied with money, notwithstanding the empty state of the privy

* This daughter, Mary by name, married William Sarsfield, a brother of Patrick, Earl of Lucan, and, after his death in 1675, William Fanshawe, Master of the Requests to Charles.

purse — but he was to have much trouble before he was finally rid of her. Early in 1656 we find Daniel O'Neale, one of the Grooms of the Bedchamber, writing to his royal master from The Hague that he was " much troubled to see the prejudice hir [Lucy Walter] being here does your Majestie, for every idle action of hirs brings your Majestie uppon the stage." The particular " idle action " which the writer had in mind was a murderous attack with a bodkin which the fair Lucy had made upon her maid, who had threatened to reveal certain highly compromising facts which had come to her ears, through the indiscretion of a midwife. To save a public scandal, O'Neale was obliged to have recourse to bribery.

After this affair, efforts were made by the King's friends to persuade Lucy to return to England, and this she consented to do, in consideration of an annuity of £400 ; and was duly shipped off from Flushing, being accompanied by her two children, her maid, her brother, and her admirer Thomas Howard. Previous to her departure, she had an interview with Charles, either at Antwerp or Brussels, where he presented her with a pearl necklace valued at .£1,500. In London, she took lodgings over a barber's shop, not far from Somerset House, where she passed as a Dutch widow ; but her identity was soon discovered by Cromwell's intelligence department, and towards the end of June, 1656, she and her maid Ann Hill were arrested as spies and clapped into the Tower. Here they were detained until July 16, when they were discharged ; and Cromwell issued an order to send away " Charles Stuart's lady of pleasure and the young heir and set them on shore in Flanders, which is no ordinary courtesie."

August found Lucy and her suite back in Brussels, where fresh scandals followed their arrival, and it was found necessary to place the lady and the future Duke of Monmouth in a sort of captivity in the house of Charles's Ambassador. Finally, the unfortunate King, who had already made several ineffectual attempts to get possession of his son, whom he accused the mother of " making a property of to support herself in those wild and disgraceful courses she hath taken," was at last successful, and placed the boy in the care of Henrietta Maria.

Deprived of the royal favour and separated from her son, to whom, to do her justice, she appears to have been tenderly attached, Lucy was compelled to leave Brussels, where the authorities, indeed, had only tolerated her presence out of consideration for Charles. She made her way to Paris, still beautiful, according to Erskine, and is said to have lived a very depraved life, from the consequences of which, if we are to believe Clarendon, she died in the autumn of 1658.

There are several paintings of Lucy Walter. Among them may be mentioned the painting by Lely at Knebworth House ; the demi-nude portrait in the possession of the Marquis of Bute, which was engraved by Van der Berghe for Harding's " Gramont ; " and two miniatures at Montagu House. At Ditchley is a portrait of Lucy and the Duke of Monmouth as the Madonna and Child.

Worthless as was Lucy Walter, the mistress whose io RIVAL SULTANAS

reign began immediately on Charles's restoration to the throne, and continued for more than twelve years, was even worse.

Barbara Villiers, afterwards Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland, was the only child of William Villiers, second Viscount Grandison, who fell fighting for the King at the siege of Bristol, and Mary, daughter of the first Viscount Bayning. William Villiers is described by Clarendon as a pattern of virtue, in which respect his daughter unfortunately was very far from taking after him ; indeed, if we are to believe the gossip that was in circulation about her in later years, her amorous propensities had been discerned when she was still a little girl. " This afternoon," writes Pepys, " walking with Sir W. Cholmley long in the gallery, he told me, among many other things, how Harry Killigrew* is banished from Court, for saying that my Lady Castlemaine was a little lecherous girl when she was young. . . . That she complained to the King, and he sent to the Duke of York, whose servant he is, to turn him away. The Duke of York has done it, but taken it ill of the Lady. She attended to excuse herself, but ill blood is made."|

After the untimely death of her first husband, Lady Grandison married her kinsman, Charles Villiers, Earl of Anglesey, at whose house in London Barbara was brought up. With her wealth of dark auburn hair, her blue eyes, her perfect features, and her exquisite figure, she was one of the most lovely girls that one could wish

* He was the son of Thomas Killigrew, and at this time Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York.

J Pepys's Diary, October 21, 1666.

THE EARLY LOVES OF CHARLES II n

to see ; and, such being the case, it is surprising that her mother and step-father, who must surely have been aware of her inclinations for the opposite sex, should have permitted her the liberty which she seems to have enjoyed. Any way, at the age of seventeen, she had fallen desperately in love with the young Earl of Chesterfield, grandfather of the letter-writer, a handsome young spark, who appears to have been capable of carrying on as many love-affairs at the same time as was the celebrated Marechal de Richelieu in later years, and was only too ready to respond to her passion. The nature of the relations which existed between them may be inferred from the following letter addressed by Barbara to the earl :

" It is ever my ill fortune to be disappointed of what I most desire, for this afternoon I did promise myself the satisfaction of your company ; but I feare I am disappointed, which is no small affliction to me ; but I hope the faits may yet be so kind as to let me see you about five o'clock ; if you will be at your private lodgings in Lincoln's Inn Fields, I will endeavour to come."

In 1659 Barbara became the wife of Roger Palmer, son of Sir James Palmer, a Buckinghamshire gentleman, and heir to a considerable fortune. It was a marriage of convenience on both sides, and was far from putting an end to the Chesterfield affair, for shortly afterwards we find the lady writing to her noble admirer that she was " ready and willing to go all over the world with him."

That Barbara entertained a genuine passion for Chesterfield admits of no doubt. " My dear life," she writes to him, when lying ill of small-pox, " I have been this day extremely ill, and the not hearing from you hath made me much worse than otherwayes I should have been. The doctor doth believe me in a desperate condition, and I must confess that the unwillingniss I have to leave you makes me not intertaine the thoughts of death so willingly as otherwise I should : for there is nothing beside yourselfe that could make me desire to live a day, and if I am never so happy as to see you more, yet the last words I will say shall be a praire for your happiness, and so I will live and dey loving you above all other things."

Barbara's illness, which, fortunately for her, left no traces behind, and a duel in which Chesterfield killed his adversary and was obliged in consequence to remain in seclusion for a time, broke off the liaison, and later in the year the lady and her husband left England to join the Court of the exiled King in the Netherlands. It must have been now, and not as some writers have supposed after Charles's return to England, that his intimacy with Barbara began, since early in 1 660 we find Chesterfield, who was then at Bourbon-les-Bains, informing the latter that he had received " news concerning her ladyship which made him doubt of everything," and entreating her to send him her portrait, " for then he should love something that was like her, and yet unchangeable, and though it would have no great return of kindness, yet he was sure that it would love nobody else better than her very humble servant."

The news to which Chesterfield refers was confirmed soon after Charles's triumphal entry into London, and his Majesty's infatuation was patent to all the world. On Shrove Monday, February 25, 1 660-1, was born Barbara's first child, Anne, afterwards Countess of Sussex, the paternity of whom was claimed by Roger Palmer, but was afterwards acknowledged by the King (by a royal warrant of 1673), though the child was generally assigned to Chesterfield, whom, according to Lord Dartmouth,* she very much resembled both in face and person. Despite this, there seems to be no grounds for suspecting the earl, from whose letters to Barbara it would appear that the lady had for a long time past refused to have anything to do with him, and that even his billets-doux remained unanswered.

In the following December, Roger Palmer received the reward of his complaisance by being created Earl of Castlemaine and Baron Limerick in the peerage of Ireland, and Pepys, who saw the patent at the Privy Seal Office, remarks upon the limitation of the honours to the lady's heirs male, " the reason whereof everybody knows."

On March 13, 1662, the new Queen, Catherine of Braganza, arrived from Portugal. In honour of her arrival the principal citizens lighted bonfires before their doors, but there was none before that of Barbara's lodging. However, Charles, presumably to reassure his mistress, spent the evening with her, and, says Pepys, " the King did send for a pair of scales and they did weigh one another ; " and it was soon evident that it would require charms infinitely more potent than those which poor Queen Catherine possessed to lure his Majesty from the side of his inamorata.

That lady, on her side, was determined that the

* Burnet, " History of My Own Times."

Queen should not be permitted to remain under any delusion as to where her husband's affections lay, and designed that her approaching confinement should take place at Hampton Court, where the royal couple were spending their honeymoon. It was only with great difficulty that the King succeeded in persuading her to renounce this intention.

Barbara's second child — Charles, afterwards Duke of Southampton — was born early in June, 1662. Castlemaine, who had recently joined the Church of Rome, caused the boy to be baptized by a priest, which furnished his consort with a pretext for leaving him and conveying all her effects and " all the servants except the porter " to her uncle's house at Richmond. Shortly afterwards, the child was baptized again, this time according to the rites of the Church of England, by the rector of St. Mary's, Westminster, the King and Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, being the two godfathers.

That same day, the Queen, who up to this time had firmly refused to receive her rival, and had erased her name from the list of ladies of her bedchamber which had been submitted to her, was surprised into receiving the countess at Hampton Court. A painful scene followed. " The Queen was no sooner sate in her chair," writes Clarendon, " but her colour changed, and tears gushed out of her eyes and her nose bled and she fainted, so that she was forthwith removed into another room, and all the company retired out of that where she was before." This, so far from causing his Majesty to feel ashamed of himself, merely served to make him the more determined to force his mistress

BARBARA VILLIERS, COUNTESS OF CASTLEMAINE AXD DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND

From a painting by Sir Peter Lely at Hampton Court.

upon his unwilling consort, and Clarendon, to his intense disgust, was commissioned to persuade the Queen to submit to the indignity of receiving the favourite. For some time, however, the Chancellor made but little progress with his ungrateful task, and Charles and Lady Castlemaine became convinced that he was more than half-hearted in the matter. At length, the former, losing all patience, addressed to the Minister a letter couched in terms which plainly showed the irritation which he felt at his want of success. " Lest you may think," he writes, " that, by making a farther stir in the business, you may divert me from my resolution, which all the world shall never do, I wish I may be unhappy in this world and in the world to come, if I fail in the least degree of what I am resolved, which is of making my Lady Castlemaine of my wife's bedchamber, and whoever I find endeavouring to hinder this resolution of mine, except it be only to myself, I will be his enemy to the last moment of my life." Finding that there was no help for it if he wished to maintain his own position, Clarendon succeeded in overcoming the opposition of the Queen ; and at the beginning of September the King and Queen and Lady Castlemaine were seen riding together in the same coach, and the pacification of the royal household seemed to be complete.

Lady Castlemaine had not remained long at Richmond, for, learning that her husband had gone to France, she promptly returned to Westminster, with all her goods and chattels. His lordship soon returned too, and on the day of the Queen's arrival at Whitehall from Hampton Court, Pepys saw them both watching the pageant from the roof of the Banqueting House though not together. " I glutted myself with looking on her," he writes, " but methought it was strange to see her lord and her upon the same place walking up and down without taking notice one of another, only at first entry he put off his hat, and she made him a very civil salute, but afterwards took no notice of one another ; but both of them now and then would take their child, which the nurse held in her arms, and dandle it."

The diarist also relates an incident which shows that there must have been good points in the character of the favourite, notwithstanding what certain writers have maintained to the contrary :

" One thing more, there happened a scaffold below to fall, and we feared some hurt, but there was none, but she of all the ladies only run down among the common rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take care of a child that received some little hurt, which methought was so noble. Anon, there came one there booted and spurred that she talked long with, and by and by, she being in her hair, she put on his hat, which was but an ordinary one, to keep the wind off. But methinks it became her mightily, as everything else do."*

As will be gathered from the foregoing, our diarist was at this time, and indeed for long afterwards, a fervent admirer of Lady Castlemaine, or, at any rate, of her charms, and he seems to have admired her as much in lighter costumes as when in " full panoply ; " indeed, he assures us that even a glimpse of her laced

* Pepys's Diary, August 23, 1662.

smock and linen petticoats, " laced with real lace at the bottom," floating in the breeze one May morning in the Privy Garden " did him good." In the following October, he tells us of a visit which he paid to Sir Peter Lely's studio in the Piazza, Covent Garden, where among other pictures he saw " the so much desired by me picture of my Lady Castlemaine, which is a most blessed picture and that I must have a copy of." And some weeks later he speaks of visiting the engraver Faithorne's and carrying home with him " three of my Lady Castlemaine's heads."

In the late summer of that year, her ladyship had official lodgings assigned her hard by the Cockpit at Whitehall, which soon became a focus of intrigue against Clarendon, in whom the sultana recognized an obstacle which it was necessary to remove at all costs. Before the end of the year she and her allies had succeeded in bringing about the dismissal of the Chancellor's old and tried friend, Sir Edward Nicholas, who was succeeded in his post of Secretary by Sir John Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington.

At the beginning of 1663 it was reported that Barbara's influence was declining. The cause of this was the appearance upon the scene of a rival beauty, in the person of Frances Theresa Stuart, commonly known as " La Belle Stuart." The lady in question was the elder daughter of Walter Stuart, third son of the first Lord Blantyre, whose family was related to the Royal House of Stuart. Frances was born about the year 1647, and educated in France, of which country she had assimilated the tastes, particularly in the matter of dress. Pepys tells us that Louis XIV.

" cast his eyes upon her and would fain have had her mother, who is one of the most cunning women in the world, to let her stay in France, as an ornament to his Court." But Mrs. Stuart was not without her suspicions as to the Most Christian King's intentions, and preferred to accept for her daughter the post of maid of honour to Catherine of Braganza. And so, in January, 1662, Frances came to England, and Charles II. 's sister, the Duchesse d'Orleans, wrote to the King :

" I would not loose this opportunity of writing to you by Mrs. Stewart, who is taking over her daughter to become one of the Queen, your wife's, future maids. If this were not the reason of her departure, I should be very unwilling to let her go, for she is the prettiest girl in the world, and one of the best fitted I know to adorn a Court."