Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  The chestnut-haired Lucy, whom the contemporary writer John Evelyn described as a “brown, beautiful, bold but insipid creature,” was not bound by any political loyalties when it came to spreading her charms—the mistress of both Roundheads and Royalists. Regardless of civil strife, a girl’s got to earn a living, after all.

  Already a professional temptress, Lucy met Charles while he was in The Hague. The fruit of their passionate affair was the nineteen-year-old Charles’s first child, James Crofts, whom he created Duke of Monmouth in 1653, when the boy was only four years old.

  Because he would have been the legitimate Prince of Wales had Lucy ever married Charles, the teenage Monmouth encouraged the rumor that there had been a secret wedding between his mother and the king, the marriage contract locked away in a black box. But during their affair, and even after his son’s birth, Charles had apparently told Lucy he would never marry her and harbored no intentions of changing his mind.

  Their royal affair lasted until 1651, the same year that Charles was crowned King of Scotland. Lucy, sometimes referring to herself as Mrs. Barlow, raised their son on her own until Charles’s courtiers came to claim him from her in 1658.

  Lucy died of syphilis that year, long discarded by Charles and likely forgotten by all except her son, whose entire adult existence was predicated on the precarious line he walked between pride and embarrassment at his lineage.

  CHARLES II and Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland 1641-1709

  If Charles and his younger brother James, the Duke of York, and their cabal of witty courtiers—Buckingham, Sedley, and Rochester—were the Restoration Rat Pack, then Barbara Villiers was their Ava Gardner, a tempestuous temptress, moody, alluring, and demanding. Her hair-trigger temper was as legendary as her sexual magnetism.

  The auburn-haired beauty came from noble stock. Her father, Viscount Grandison, died in the service of King Charles I when Barbara was just a baby. Her first cousin George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, was a close confidant of Charles II.

  Sexually precocious, Barbara began her courtesan’s career at the age of fifteen as one of several lovers of the widowed Earl of Chesterfield, a man nearly twice her age. Their affair continued even after she wed Roger Palmer on April 14, 1659. The affluent, twenty-four-year-old Palmer belonged to a group of Royalist conspirators. In early 1660, the plotters needed an emissary to journey to the Netherlands, where Charles’s itinerant court was living in exile. Required for more pressing business in England, Palmer could not be spared for the enterprise, and clever Barbara, all of eighteen years old, was chosen to go to Breda in her husband’s stead.

  It didn’t take long for her to ensnare the twenty-nine-year-old Charles. The king became utterly smitten by her dazzling good looks and her outstanding amatory skills. By the time he returned to England to claim his throne, Barbara was well established as his mistress.

  On Restoration Day, May 29, 1660, Barbara watched the all-male procession, more than twenty thousand strong, triumphantly make its way through London. Charles II spent his first night back at Whitehall in her arms. That evening, or quite soon after, Barbara became pregnant; their first child, Anne, was born on February 25, 1661.

  Later that year, Roger Palmer was made Earl of Castlemaine, “the reason whereof everyone knows,” wrote the contemporary diarist Samuel Pepys. Soon, Lady Castlemaine was pregnant again. Palmer was conveniently dispatched on diplomatic missions, but was just as routinely brought back to London each time his wife was about to give birth, an annual occurrence between 1661 and 1665.

  Even during her advanced stages of pregnancy, Barbara shared her bed with Charles, whether from lust or the fear of losing her position to another mistress if she denied the king her charms for too many nights at a stretch. Barbara bore three sons and two daughters that were acknowledged and ennobled by the king, and during their eight-year affair, she amassed an enormous fortune, acquired any way she could get her hands on it.

  With a bachelor king on the throne, Barbara was the uncontested prima donna at Whitehall. But Charles’s ministers were pressing him to make a good marriage, to strengthen England’s base of power against her usual enemies, France and Spain. Recognizing the importance of an alliance between Britain and Portugal, Charles settled on Catherine of Braganza.

  Barbara was obviously none too thrilled. The last thing she wanted was for Charles to marry a beautiful princess who would give him a passel of legitimate children, thereby leaving her and her bastard brood to fend for themselves.

  As it turned out, Barbara needn’t have worried about the queen’s beauty or her fertility. “She has nothing viable about her capable to make the king forget his inclinations to the Countess of Castlemaine, the finest woman of her age,” wrote Sir John Reresby, who officially welcomed the new queen to English shores.

  Catherine of Braganza arrived in Portsmouth from Portugal in 1662. She resembled a fragile sparrow, more childlike than womanly in appearance. Though her eyes sparkled with intelligence, buck teeth marred her smile and made her upper lip protrude. Her thick dark hair was dressed in the height of fashion—for Portugal—in tight clusters of curls that sprang like squarish wings from either side of her head, mirroring the image made by the old-fashioned farthingales on her hips.

  “I thought they had brought me a bat instead of a woman,” a shocked Charles wrote to his chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon. Yet the king was determined to be loyal to his odd little wife, whom he actually fancied—sort of—remarking to Clarendon, “I am confident never two humours were better fitted together than ours are . . . I must be the worst man living (which I hope I am not) if I be not a good husband.”

  The thought was not father to the deed, however. Charles could never deny himself Barbara’s charms for very long, no matter how much she drove him crazy and how often he tried to dump her. The king admitted that he was “no atheist but [he] could not think God would make a man miserable for taking a little pleasure out of the way.”

  And Barbara certainly knew how to provide it. It was said that she was expertly versed in all the erotic tricks illustrated in Pietro Aretino’s banned book of sixteen sonnets, an Italian Renaissance Kama Sutra of sorts. She was an utterly confirmed voluptuary, the rare female rake.

  So enamored of Barbara was Charles that he had spent the entire first week of Catherine’s arrival at Barbara’s King Street residence while his bride-to-be cooled her heels amongst a bunch of courtiers in Portsmouth. Across the land, church bells pealed and bonfires were lit in celebration, but there was no fire outside Barbara’s London home, even though the king was inside it.

  Barbara’s brazenness knew no bounds. On the day of the royal wedding, she hung up her lingerie to dry on palace grounds for all the world to see, a gesture that titillated Pepys, who wrote on May 21, 1662, “. . . in the Privy-garden saw the finest smocks and linnen petticoats of my Lady Castlemayne’s laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw, and it did me good to look upon them.”

  Barbara was heavily pregnant with her second child by Charles. She insisted on the privilege of giving birth at Hampton Court, a deliberate power grab intended to upstage the new queen’s arrival and redirect the court’s focus to the royal mistress’s favor and fecundity. Barbara badgered, threatened, hectored, and cajoled until the reluctant Charles relented.

  Now twenty-one, Barbara had been Charles’s mistress for nearly two years. Aware that she would inevitably lose some ground now that Charles had married Catherine, she extracted his promise to appoint her as one of the Ladies of the Queen’s Bedchamber, the highest honor a lady of the court could achieve. However, the twenty-three-year-old Catherine had been warned by her mother not to tolerate Lady Castlemaine’s presence at court—and, in fact, to insist that all of the king’s mistresses be dismissed from Whitehall.

  As Charles presented a number of ladies to their new queen, he slipped Barbara in among them. Catherine extended her tiny hand and a warm smile to the stunning woman curtsying b
efore her. But as Charles uttered the words, “My Lady Castlemaine,” Catherine, registering the connection, made a strangled gasp for air, and fell back into a dead faint, blood gushing from her nose.

  Charles did not even follow the pair of servants who bore the stricken queen to her chamber. Poor Catherine’s reaction had made him cross. A struggle then ensued over Barbara’s appointment as a Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber. According to custom, Charles presented Catherine with a list of possible candidates for her approval. The queen promptly struck Barbara’s name from it. The king presented the list again, and once more, Catherine vigorously crossed off his mistress’s name.

  Charles issued a lengthy statement, insisting that “my wife shall never have cause to complain that I broke my vows to her if she will live towards me as a good wife ought to do, in rendering herself grateful and acceptable to me, which it is in her power to do. But if she continues uneasy to me I cannot answer for myself that I shall not endeavor to seek other company.”

  Catherine’s temperament would not suffer such indignities. “The king’s insistence upon that particular can proceed from no other ground but his hatred of my person. He wishes to expose me to the contempt of the world. And the world will think me deserving of such an affront if I submit to it.” She then threatened to board the next boat for Lisbon.

  In retaliation, Charles dismissed Catherine’s train of somber Portuguese ladies and musty-robed monks, leaving her with a handful of servants chosen at his pleasure, none of whom spoke her language.

  Barbara had scored another triumph.

  In the early 1660s, Barbara reveled in the knowledge that Charles was still in the first flush of his infatuation for her. “The lewdest, as well as the fairest of his concubines,” anything she requested, no matter how great or petty, was hers. If a minister dared refuse her demands, Charles made it clear that an enemy of Barbara’s was an enemy of the crown.

  One man who dared to test the king’s policy was his chancellor, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Clarendon refused to recognize Barbara’s elevated position as maîtresse en titre and would not seal any document that bore her name. All royal patents and warrants passed through Clarendon’s hands, and as long as he was chancellor, Barbara would not be granted a single English title—which was why Roger Palmer was created Earl of Castlemaine, an Irish peerage.

  Having had enough of public cuckoldry, Palmer managed to secure a legal deed of separation, indemnifying himself for up to £10,000 (currently more than $1.8 million) against her debts. Husband and wife met publicly for the last time in August 1662, at Whitehall, where they watched the king and queen make their state entry into London via river from Hampton Court.

  As time went on, Barbara’s promiscuity and her infidelity to her royal lover became well known at court. The Bishop of Salisbury remarked that Barbara was “most vicious and ravenous, foolish but imperious, very uneasy with the king, and always carrying on intrigues with other men.”

  She was once accosted by two masked courtiers in St. James’s Park, who called her a “vile whore,” adding that she was likely to suffer the same fate as Jane Shore, the mistress of Edward IV—who, legend had it, died on a dung heap. And when a group of disgruntled apprentices razed a number of London brothels, the cry went up to pull down the biggest stew of them all—Whitehall Palace.

  Charles finally refused to acknowledge Barbara’s sixth child, a daughter, whose father might have been Henry Jermyn, the dwarfish Earl of St. Albans—or John Churchill, a handsome youth who would go on to a distinguished military career, earning him the title Duke of Marlborough. However, Barbara was not one to let a dodgy paternity stand in the way of her rage for honors and titles—for her children as well as for herself. Well aware that her emotional blackmail always worked on Charles, late in her pregnancy Barbara threatened the king with everything from public humiliation to infanticide. “God damn me, but you shall own it!” she shrieked. “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.”

  Charles stood his ground, convinced the child was not his, but Barbara’s sexual power was like a drug, and he was hopelessly addicted. Two weeks later, the lovers were hot and heavy again. Barbara made the king kneel before her and promise never more to offend her in the same way.

  In 1666, the same year that the Great Fire destroyed a third of London, the Royal Navy was given worthless chits instead of pay, but £30,000 (approximately $6.4 million today) of Barbara’s debts for purchases of jewelry and gold and silver plate were cleared by the king. Barbara then greedily helped herself to the treasures of the Jewel House at the Tower of London, signing documents that promised their safe return. But as always, she managed to turn the loan into a royal gift.

  Two years later, in an effort to silence her clamoring for more wealth, Charles gave Barbara Berkshire House, which also effectively removed her presence from Whitehall. Barbara named the residence Cleveland House in 1670 when Charles ennobled her further, creating her Baroness Nonsuch, Countess of Southampton, and Duchess of Cleveland. These honors were bestowed “in consideration of her noble descent, her father’s death in the service of the Crown, and by reason of her personal virtues.” There was another reason not stated in the warrant: Charles was about to install a new mistress, the orange-girl-turned-actress Nell Gwyn, in a posh town house in Pall Mall, and the insanely jealous Barbara required further proof of Charles’s devotion.

  Of course Barbara required the funds to sustain her new titles, so she demolished the spectacular Palace of Nonsuch, which had been built by Henry VIII. The exotic pinnacles and turrets and the lavish plasterwork and intricate carvings were dismantled and sold for scrap.

  Dipping her grasping hand into every possible pot, she amassed annual revenues totaling as much as £43,200 ($10.6 million today) from various excises and taxes, along with a raft of leases and real estate. And during the 1660s and 1670s, she made at least an additional £15,000 (nearly $3.7 million) a year through influence peddling and selling offices.

  Barbara entertained her own cabal of courtiers to pursue her personal agendas, though the political advice she often gave the king proved wildly unpopular because it was always self-aggrandizing. And she routinely pushed through the appointments of men who would be in a position to steer more wealth and influence her way.

  John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who skewered his contemporaries with his wicked wit, continually lambasted Barbara’s avarice and rapacity: Castlemaine is much to be admir’d

  Although she ne’er was satisfied or tired.

  Full forty men a day provided for this whore,

  Yet like a bitch she wags her tail for more.

  Whenever Charles took up with another mistress, Barbara would avenge herself with other men, flaunting their liaison in public. After the king pensioned her off, Barbara took as her paramour Charles Hart, an actor from the King’s Theatre who had been Nell Gwyn’s lover on her way up the social ladder. Barbara’s other subsequent bedfellows included a studly footman with whom she shared a bath; Jacob Hall, a rope dancer with the flexibility of a contortionist, whom she seduced in his booth at Bartholomew Fair; and the celebrated playwright William Wycherly. Yet from time to time over the years Barbara and Charles would reignite their passion. More than any of his other mistresses, she understood the nature of his character, his need for variety and excitement sexually; in that respect they were very much alike.

  Occasionally, Barbara was caught in the act. Once, when the king surprised her with a visit, she had to send the gnomelike Henry Jermyn crawling under her bed. And one morning, after Barbara had just spent the night with John Churchill, Charles made another startling appearance in her boudoir. As Churchill endeavored to sneak out the window, Charles phlegmatically quipped, “I forgive you, for you do it for your bread.”

  Though Barbara regularly raped the Royal Treasury, she was perpetually short of funds. She was a compulsive gambler
, and also footed the bill for her string of low-rent lovers. But after Lord Treasurer Danby clamped down on Treasury funds going to royal mistresses, Barbara received only £6,000 (now nearly $1.5 million) a year for life, plus £3,000 apiece for each of her royal bastards.

  After 1670, when the baby-faced Bretonne Louise de Kéroualle became the king’s new maîtresse en titre, their passion began to cool. In 1676, Barbara went to live in Paris, consoling herself with a bouquet of posh French lovers. She briefly returned to London in 1679 for the wedding of one of her sons. She took the opportunity to launch a final raid on the Treasury, filching £25,000 (over $6.2 million today) after a fight with the acting Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Essex, who told Charles he would rather be dismissed from his position than pay Barbara the funds she demanded. Charles took him at his word, and a new Lord Treasurer was installed who had no qualms about releasing vast sums of money to the king’s former paramour.

  By March of 1684, Barbara had returned to London for good, and had once more taken up residence in Cleveland House opposite St. James’s Palace. Her live-in lover was the handsome and devilishly sexy Cardonell “Scum” Goodman, an actor at the King’s Theatre and sometime highwayman.

  On his deathbed in February 1685, Charles seemed to have forgiven Barbara for all her bad behavior, whispering to the Duke of York, “Be kind to the Duchess of Cleveland. . . .”

  Soon after the king’s demise, Barbara plummeted into debt, descending below the ranks of the demimonde into the shadow world of thieves and sharpers. Ever the nymphomaniac, her judgment was often impaired by her hormones.

  In 1705, her husband, Roger Palmer, died at his mother’s estate in Wales, and that November 25, the sixty-four-year-old Barbara wed Robert “Beau” Feilding, who was several years her junior. He also turned out to be a bigamist.