Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  Alas, the good husband had a mean mistress. Just as the king and queen settled into Hampton Court for their extended honeymoon, Barbara swooped into the palace to deliver her latest child by Charles. Even worse, she bullied the king into appointing her a lady of the queen’s bedchamber. It was a monstrous insult to Catherine, who, sheltered though she was, knew exactly who the Countess of Castlemaine was. She angrily scratched the mistress’s name off her list of ladies. Then, after actually meeting Barbara, she went into a rage so intense that it left her nose bleeding. “It is said here that she is grieved beyond measure,” Charles’s sister Henrietta Anne (known as Minette) wrote from France, “and to speak frankly I think it is with reason.”

  Confronted with either an unhappy wife or an unhappy mistress, Charles chose Barbara, which began an ugly quarrel with the queen. Catherine threatened to leave England, only to be told she needed the king’s permission to do so. She was isolated at court, her Portuguese retinue sent away. When the king’s chief minister, Clarendon, tried to intervene on the queen’s behalf, Charles rebuked him: “Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise on my word to be his enemy as long as I live.”

  Harmony was eventually restored when Queen Catherine realized that the hysterics were best left to Barbara. She learned to graciously accept the king’s infidelities, and he came to honor her genuine goodness. Indeed, Catherine did what few women were able: She won Charles’s heart. His devotion to her was evident when she became dangerously ill in 1663 and the king went into a frenzy of anxiety—even if he did manage to steal away from the queen’s sickbed to sleep with Barbara.

  Catherine of Braganza prevailed with what Charles praised as her “simplicity, gentleness and prudence,” while Barbara was soon confronted with a rival more formidable than the queen. Her name was Frances Stewart, and she was one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting and, according to Charles’s sister Minette, “the prettiest girl in the world and the most fitted to adorn a court.” She was not only younger and more beautiful than Barbara‖ but infinitely more virtuous, unwilling to trade her chastity for reward or advancement. This made La Belle Stewart, as she came to be called, a rare creature in the Restoration court. Her guileless unavailability drove King Charles crazy with desire, his incessant pining documented in some (rather clunky) verse he wrote:

  Oh then, ’tis O then, that I think there’s no hell

  Like loving, like loving too well.

  Barbara was made frantic by the king’s diverted attentions and tried to refocus him by using the innocent young Frances as erotic lure. On one occasion she arranged a mock marriage between herself and the younger woman, ostensibly for fun. That night, as the unwitting Frances slept, Barbara set up a lesbian tableau for the king’s pleasure. But the king only had eyes for La Belle Stewart, whose virtue remained unassailable despite her sovereign’s single-minded pursuit. So desperate was the chase that Charles’s friends formed the “Committee for the Getting of Mistress Stewart for the King,” while he had his unobtainable love immortalized in an engraving as Britannia. It was with this image, adorned with helmet and trident, that Frances Stewart came to preside over British coinage for the next three centuries.

  The king’s relentless pursuit ended abruptly, not because he finally captured his elusive quarry but because Frances Stewart did the unthinkable and eloped with someone else. Charles was livid. “You may think me ill-natured,” he wrote to his sister Minette, “but if you consider how hard a thing ’tis to swallow an injury done by a person I had so much tenderness for, you will in some degree [understand] the resentment I use toward her.” Charles did manage to emerge from his petulant snit and, after Frances recovered unscarred from smallpox, was big enough to write, “I cannot hinder myself from wishing her very well.”

  The removal of Frances Stewart as a rival did little to revive Barbara’s diminishing status as the king’s favorite mistress. Her epic tantrums and relentless greed had grown intolerable, and Charles was ready to be rid of her. “Madame,” he said as he dismissed her, “all that I ask of you for your own sake is, live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.” As parting gifts Barbara was given the title Duchess of Cleveland as well as Henry VIII’s magnificent palace Nonsuch, which she promptly ordered dismantled and sold for scrap.a

  There was one last ferocious scene as Barbara tried to have the king acknowledge a sixth child she claimed was his. Charles had already accepted paternity of five of Barbara’s children, but this latest, a girl, he refused to recognize as his. The child appeared to be the result of one of Barbara’s other liaisons, perhaps with John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough.

  “God damn me, but you shall own it!” Barbara screeched. “I will have it christened in the Chapel at Whitehall and owned as yours … or I will bring it into Whitehall Gallery and dash its brains out before your face!”

  “I did not get this child,” Charles calmly replied.

  “Whoever did get it,” Barbara cried, “you shall own it.”

  He never did.

  Barbara was replaced by a bawdy actress, plump and dimpled, named Nell Gwynn—“a bold merry slut,” as Pepys called her—who thoroughly charmed the king. Though she lacked the social standing and education of some of the other royal mistresses, Nell’s earthy sensuality and quick wit made her one of Charles’s most treasured companions. She would remain so for nearly two decades, until his death in 1685.

  Nell called the king “My Charles the Third,” as she had already been with two lovers bearing the name, and in her utterly unaffected way, she would call out to him, “Charles, I hope I shall have your company tonight, shall I not?” And in contrast to Barbara, she was refreshingly free of a political agenda—a fact celebrated in a bit of popular verse:

  Hard by Pall Mall lives a wench call’d Nell.

  King Charles the Second he kept her.

  She hath got a trick to handle his prick,

  But never lays hands on his scepter.

  Politics may have meant little to Nell, but money was another matter. Like Barbara, she spent it lavishly. She also resented her lack of rank. Charles adored her, but he never deigned give her a title (with its many accompanying perks) as he had some of his other mistresses. Still, Nell did manage to obtain for her son by Charles a proper title. According to one account, she called out to the boy in front of the king, “Come here, you little bastard, and say hello to your father.” When Charles objected to the child’s being referred to as such, Nell quickly responded, “Why, Your Majesty has given me no other name to call him by.” Soon enough, the boy was made Baron Headington and Earl of Burford, as well as Duke of St. Albans sometime later.

  Nell reserved some of her most scorching wit for one of her rival mistresses, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, whose pretense just begged to be punctured. When, for example, Louise went into mourning for the death of some supposedly grand relation, Nell did the same in honor of her own imaginary relative, whom she called “the Great Cham of Tartary.” In any exchange of barbs, Louise was always left sputtering and looking stupid. Once, when Nell was dressed in an uncharacteristically lavish dress and dripping with jewelry, the duchess cracked, “Nelly, you are grown rich, I believe, by your dress. Why, woman, you are fine enough to be a queen.”

  “You are entirely right,” Nell shot back, “and I am whore enough to be a duchess.”

  Louise was hated by the British people for being French, Catholic, and an excessive drain on the treasury. One time, Nell was mistaken for the despised duchess as she rode along in her carriage. As an angry mob circled and grew menacing, Nell popped her head out of the carriage and, with typical aplomb, declared, “Good people, this is the Protestant whore!”

  It was just such a scene that demonstrated why Charles II was so devoted to this particular mistress, even if he never gave her the rank she wanted. On his deathbed the king was heard to plead with his brother, “Let not poor Nelly starve.”r />
  * Sister-in-law to Colonel Francis Wyndham, who sheltered Charles after his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Worcester (see Chapter 12).

  † James, who was given the title Duke of Monmouth by his doting father, led a rebellion against his Catholic uncle James II in 1685 and was beheaded as a result.

  ‡ Pepys reported seeing Barbara’s lacey petticoats hanging to dry in the Privy Garden at Whitehall and wrote that “it did me good to look upon them.” On another occasion he became so excited hearing a salacious story about her “that I spent in my breeches.”

  § As a sop to Barbara’s cuckolded husband, Roger Palmer, Charles created him Earl of Castlemaine, though it was clear that the power of the title rested with his wife. Palmer could only bear the humiliation for a time, and after Barbara delivered the second of the five children she would have with the king, he finally separated from her for good.

  ‖ Pepys called Frances Stewart “the greatest beauty I ever saw I think in my life; and if ever woman can, doth exceed my Lady Castlemaine.”

  a Nothing remains of the palace on-site, although some pieces of it were recovered and are now in the British Museum.

  14

  James II (1685–1688): A Fool and His Crown

  My own children have deserted me!

  —KING JAMES II

  Upon the death of Charles II in 1685, the throne passed to his brother James II, who would reign less than four years before being ousted by his daughter and son-in-law in 1688. James maintained a court-in-exile in France as a guest of his cousin Louis XIV until his death in 1701.

  James II suffered from a malady that proved fatal to his reign: He was, as Lord Montagu put it so succinctly, “a wilful fool”—an obstinate believer in his royal prerogative, without the intelligence to exercise it properly. “He has all the faults of the King his father [Charles I],” observed the French ambassador Paul Barrillon, “but he has less sense and behaves more haughtily in public.” Indeed, the only lesson James seemed to have gleaned from the fate of his father was to become even more unyielding when challenged. And though, unlike Charles I, he managed to keep his head, his political stupidity cost him his crown. Worse, it was his two daughters, Mary and Anne, along with his nephew William, who snatched it from him.

  James ascended the throne peacefully after the death of Charles II in 1685, which was rather surprising given all the controversy that surrounded him during his brother’s reign. He had converted to Catholicism—a mortal sin in the minds of most Englishmen—and, aggravating the fact, he made no effort to conceal it. (Curiously, though, James’s zealous embrace of his new faith did nothing to diminish his lusty appetite for ugly mistresses.*) So outraged was the reaction to James’s undisguised Catholicism that King Charles was forced to exile his brother for a number of years. There were even several attempts in Parliament to have James excluded from the succession. Though these ultimately failed, Charles, always wise to political realities, as well as his brother’s foibles, predicted nothing but disaster when James inherited. “My brother will lose his throne for his [Catholic] principles,” the king declared, “and his soul for a bunch of ugly trollops.”

  Charles had been remarkably prescient. Almost as soon as James came to the throne he began to squander the goodwill that accompanied his succession by pressing his pro-Catholic agenda. For example, he appointed Catholic officers to head regiments of an expanded standing army, which was against the law. Parliament objected and was prorogued, never to sit again during the king’s reign.

  In an era of violent religious divides, James refused to recognize the deep antipathy toward his adopted faith that had developed in the English psyche since Henry VIII’s split from Rome a century and a half before. Almost every literate home contained a copy of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which detailed the horrors of “Bloody” Mary Tudor’s efforts to stamp out heresy in England by burning Protestants alive. And every year people riotously celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, marking the failure of a Catholic plot to blow up Parliament during the reign of James I.

  Many Englishmen associated Catholicism with arbitrary rule—a belief reinforced by the persecution of Protestants in France by the absolute monarch Louis XIV, James II’s cousin and ally. Now their king was demonstrating the same tendencies by subverting the law to achieve what many believed was his ultimate aim: the destruction of the established Anglican Church and a reunification with Rome.

  The tension between the king and his subjects was well illustrated in July 1687, when James—on his knees—welcomed the papal nuncio, Count d’Adda. Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had refused to present d’Adda at court because, he said, it was against the law to recognize the pope’s representative. “Do you not know I am above the law?” the king asked loftily, to which Seymour replied, “You may be, sire, but I am not.”

  One factor did mitigate the fears about James’s Catholic despotism: His two daughters by his first wife, Anne Hyde, were his only heirs, and both were staunchly Protestant. “I must tell you that I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do,” the younger daughter, Anne, wrote to her sister, Mary, “and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England.”

  Both women had been raised Protestant at Charles II’s insistence to counter the criticism arising from his brother’s avowed Catholicism. James had not been pleased. He wanted his daughters instructed in his own faith, but as he wrote in his memoirs, he did not attempt it because “they would have immediately been quite taken from [me].” That didn’t mean he didn’t try to convert them later, though, especially after he became king. His elder daughter and heir, Mary, had married her cousin William of Orange (the son of James’s sister Mary) and lived with him in the Netherlands. From across the English Channel, James bombarded her with religious tracts he hoped would open her eyes to his faith. The princess of Orange was not persuaded by his proselytizing, however.

  “I have found nothing in all of this reading but an effort to seduce feeble spirits,” she wrote, “no solid reasoning, and nothing that could disturb me in the least in the world, so much that the more I hear of this religion the more pleased I am with my own, and more and more thanks have I to render to my God for His mercy in preserving me in His true faith.”

  The Protestant succession seemed secure, but the comfort that came from that was shattered in 1687 when it was announced that the king’s second wife, the Catholic queen Mary Beatrice of Modena, was pregnant. If she had a son, he would succeed James and a Catholic dynasty would be entrenched. This was too terrible to contemplate, and, wrote the Tuscan ambassador Terriesi, “it would be impossible to describe the passion of those who do not desire [the birth of a son].”

  Few, it seemed, were more distraught than the king’s daughter Anne. “No words can express the rage of [Anne] at the Queen’s condition,” Terriesi reported. “She can dissimulate it to no one, and seeing that the Catholic religion has a prospect of advancement, she offers more than ever, both in public and in private to show herself hostile to it, and [to be] the most zealous of Protestants, with whom she is gaining the greatest power and credit at this conjunction.”

  A concentrated and cynical campaign to discredit the queen’s pregnancy began almost as soon as it was announced. Anne led the charge. “It is strange to see how the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true,” wrote Anne’s maternal uncle Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon. “Good God, help us!”

  Certainly Anne did not have to dig very deep to reach the venomous bile she unleashed in calling into question her stepmother’s pregnancy. She already loathed the queen, despite the fact that Mary Beatrice had always treated her well. “She pretends to have a great deal of kindness to me,” Anne wrote to her sister, “but I doubt it is real, for I never see any proofs of it, but rather the contrary.”

  Among the many faults Anne found with Mary Beatrice was her belief that the queen had pushed James toward his Catholic extremism.
“She is a very great bigot in her own way,” Anne wrote, “and one may see by her that she hates all Protestants.” (This coming from the woman who declared, “The Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous, and directly contrary to Scriptures, and their ceremonies—most of them—plain, downright idolatry.”)

  Poor Mary Beatrice probably had no idea just how much her stepdaughter hated her. Anne made certain of that. “I am resolved always to pay her a great deal of respect,” she wrote to her sister, “and make my court to her, that she may not have any just cause against me.” Now, with her great façade of friendliness, Anne was prepared to destroy the queen by cultivating the innuendo surrounding what she called Mary Beatrice’s “false belly.” She actively encouraged doubt with her sister, Mary, in the Netherlands:

  For, me thinks, if [the pregnancy] were not [a deception], there having been so many stories and jests made about it, she should, to convince the world, make either me or some of my friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child she looks as if she were afraid one should touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she is undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock. These things give me so much just cause for suspicion that I believe when she is brought to bed, nobody will be convinced it is her child, except it prove a daughter. For my part, I declare I shall not, except I see the child and she parted.

  Mary, who had always enjoyed a warmer relationship with her stepmother—just three and half years her senior†—was at first rather complacent upon hearing the news of the queen’s pregnancy. “I rendered thanks to God that this news did not trouble me in any fashion,” she wrote in her journal. Although Mary would be supplanted as her father’s immediate heir if a son was born, she was perfectly content to be William’s wife, the princess of Orange, and really had no desire to be queen of England anyway. But then came Anne’s letter, which, Mary wrote, “gave me just reason to suspect there had been some deception.”