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

by Leslie Carroll

  Beau was tried and convicted the following year, but was ultimately pardoned by Queen Anne. He returned to Barbara and began selling off her valuables and household effects. When she protested, he beat her, locked her in a room, and starved her until she acquiesced to his plunder of her property. Abused physically, mentally, and emotionally, during one such thrashing Barbara literally cried “Murder!” and finally got the attention of the neighbors. Her grandson, the Duke of Grafton, intervened and Beau was carted off to Newgate. On his release, he took up with the wife he had married not two weeks before he wed Barbara.

  In 1709, Barbara contracted dropsy. The accumulation of fluid beneath her skin swelled her body to the size of a beached whale. She died on October 9 at the age of sixty-eight, the disease having obliterated what remained of her once-spectacular beauty.

  CHARLES II and Frances Teresa Stuart 1647-1702

  Frances Stuart created a scandal by just saying no, becoming the embodiment of an empire without ever yielding her body.

  Her father, a distant relative of the Stuart monarchs, had been a physician in the court of Charles I. He managed to get his family safely to France after the beheading of his sovereign; and from her infancy, Frances was raised across the Channel in the court of Louis XIV.

  Charles II’s sister “Minette,” who was married to Louis’s brother the duc d’Orleans, sent the fourteen-year-old Frances back to England to serve as a maid of honor at Charles’s wedding to Catherine of Braganza on May 21, 1662. After the ceremonies, Frances was asked to remain in England as a lady-in -waiting to the new queen.

  Her remarkable beauty, in a court known for its plethora of pretty faces, earned Frances an extraordinary measure of adoration. The popular poet-playwright John Dryden praised her looks in verse. And Samuel Pepys, the ultimate seventeenth-century eyewitness, rhapsodized about her in his diary: . . . into the Queen’s presence, where all the ladies walked, talking and fiddling with their hats and feathers, and changing and trying one another’s by one another’s heads, and laughing. . . . But, above all, Mrs. Stewart [sic] in this dress, with her hat cocked and a red plume, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose, and excellent taille, is now the greatest beauty I ever saw, I think, in my life; and, if ever woman can, do exceed my Lady Castlemaine, at least in this dress nor do I wonder if the King changes, which I verily believe is the reason of his coldness to my Lady Castlemaine.

  In the same entry, Pepys fantasized about making love with her! So home to supper and to bed, before I sleep fancying myself to sport with Mrs. Stuart with great pleasure.

  Before long, Frances had earned the nickname “La Belle Stuart,” and the king was curly head over cavalier boots infatuated with her. Charles installed her at Whitehall in the rooms just below his own. How convenient for His Majesty—who had Barbara Castlemaine in the apartment just above his! In fact, the only time Charles did not cave in to Barbara’s shenanigans was when she banished the beautiful Frances from her rooms, where the king would visit nightly for lively conversation. Charles darkly warned Barbara that if Frances wasn’t there the next time he came upstairs, he would have nothing more to do with her.

  Though La Belle Stuart gave some of her contemporaries the impression that she was a bit of a bubblehead, she was probably just a wildly romantic young girl in a nest of cynics. And, in fact, she kept her head about her when all around her seemed to be indiscriminately opening their legs.

  Already a popular girl with the courtiers and the queen, Frances gently told her sovereign that she was saving herself for marriage, which had the effect of rousing his lust even more. Having spent her girlhood in the French court, she knew how to flirt and tease, but that was as far as things would go. With the pick of the handsomest cavaliers in England at her feet, she intended to wed for love. And why jeopardize her position in the queen’s train by incurring Catherine’s anger unnecessarily? Frances had observed enough of the lusty court to know how to play the game; in fact, she was a cannier player than most, despite the fact that she seemed to spend the bulk of her time at Whitehall building houses of playing cards.

  Barbara Castlemaine often pimped for her royal lover when she realized that the king was tiring of her demanding antics; yet she needed to be certain that any new conquest would be pliant enough to let her continue to pull the strings. Soon after Frances came to England, Barbara had sought to get the girl into his bed by staging a mock marriage between the two ladies, where Charles leapt into the breach at the moment of “consummation.” According to Pepys’s diary, . . . my Lady Castlemaine, a few days since, had Mrs. Stuart to an entertainment, and at night began a frolique that they two must be married, and married they were, with ring and all other ceremonies of church service, and rib-bands and a sack posset in bed, and flinging the stocking [much like our custom of tossing the bouquet]; but in the close, it is said that my Lady Castlemaine, who was the bridegroom, rose, and the King came and took her place with pretty Mrs. Stuart.

  A year after Frances came to court, her mistress was taken gravely ill, and many feared the queen would die. Pepys, with his finger on the court’s pulse, wrote on November 9, 1663: . . . The king is now become besotted upon Mrs. Stuart, that he gets into corners and will be with her half an hour together kissing her to the observation of all the world; and she now stays by herself and expects it, as my Lady Castlemaine used to do. . . . But yet it is thought that this new wench is so subtle, that she lets him not do anything than is safe to her, but yet his doting is so great that, Pierce [the royal surgeon] tells me, it is verily thought if the Queene had died, he would have married her.

  But the queen survived the fever and Charles continued to woo Frances, bestowing upon her an honor that no other royal mistress had ever gained. In 1664, to celebrate English naval victories over the Dutch fleet, Charles had commemorative medals struck, featuring the face of Frances Stuart as the personification of the realm. Samuel Pepys observed, At my goldsmith’s did observe the King’s new medal . . . there is Mrs. Stewart’s face as well done as ever I saw anything in my whole life, I think: and a pretty thing it is, that he should choose her face to represent Britannia by.

  For the next couple of years, Frances seemed content to do no more than flirt and tease (despite Pepys’s diary entry of April 15, 1666, where he wrote—having gleaned the gossip from Pierce, the royal surgeon—“for certain Mrs. Stuart do do everything with the king that a mistress should do”). The more La Belle Stuart was adamant about keeping her maidenhead to herself, the more ardent grew the monarch. But it was also clear that despite the queen’s inability to bear children, Charles had no intention of divorcing her. So Frances was faced with two choices: succumb and become another royal mistress (with the certainty that the king would tire of her eventually, especially when age and beauty began to fade), or find a husband with whom she could live happily ever after.

  In March 1667, the twenty-year-old Frances snagged herself another Charles Stuart—the 3rd Duke of Richmond and 6th Duke of Lennox. When the king got wind of their wedding plans, like a jilted lover he sought a way to thwart the match. Frances and her swain outwitted Charles by eloping.

  He took his revenge by dispatching Frances’s new husband to the Continent on numerous far-flung diplomatic missions. Although Charles swore he would have nothing whatever to do with Frances from then on, when she was infected with smallpox in 1669, he knelt at the new duchess’s bedside and forgave her for marrying without his consent. Frances survived the disease and Charles elevated her status to Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber. For retaining her dignity as well as her virginity in the face of such a skilled assault upon it, Frances may be the only one of Charles II’s mistresses to have earned the full measure of respect from his queen and court.

  In 1672, when Frances’s husband died without issue at the age of thirty-four, his estates reverted to the crown; but Charles pensioned off Frances with £1,000 (roughly $258,000 today) per annum for life. She invested her earnings wisely, eventually purchasing an estate in Scotl
and, which in her late husband’s honor she renamed Lennoxlove. She died in 1702.

  In many ways, the lovely Scots lass proved more immortal than the monarch. When coinage was introduced as a form of currency, Frances’s image from the victory medals was chosen to represent the realm; she remained the face of Britannia for three centuries, her profile gracing every English penny until 1971.

  CHARLES II and Nell Gwyn 1650-1687

  The brave and witty know no fear or sorrow.

  Let us enjoy today, we’ll die tomorrow.

  —APHRA BEHN, 1660s

  That couplet was written by a popular playwright and a dear friend of the actress-turned-royal-mistress Nell Gwyn. It sums up Nell’s vivacious spirit as well as the merry licentiousness of the Restoration. When Charles II was crowned in 1660, the kingdom joyously cast off the repressive shroud of Puritanism and the pendulum swung wildly in the opposite direction. It was time to party—and no woman better embodied the ethos of the era than “pretty, witty Nell Gwyn,” as the king’s friend and noted diarist Samuel Pepys had dubbed her.

  To say that Nell was lowborn is to sugarcoat her childhood. Although her birthplace is disputable, with three locations (London, Oxford, and Hereford) each claiming paternity, she grew up in Coal Yard Alley amid the London slums. Her father, who had been jailed in Oxford for being a Royalist, died in prison, most likely a debtor as well. Nell’s mother, a beauty reduced by hard luck and hard times to an obese, brandy-swilling soak, sold ale at Mrs. Ross’s in Drury Lane. Nell used to tell people that she was “brought up in a bawdy house to bring strong waters to the gentlemen.”

  With her flame-colored curls streaked with gold, her oft-praised dainty feet, her flawless peaches-and-cream complexion, perfect teeth hidden by a full and sensuous mouth that poets swooned over, and hazel-green eyes framed by soft brown brows, Nell was a petite, yet voluptuous, spitfire. She had an infectious laugh, an earthy sense of humor, swore like a sailor; and, though illiterate and uneducated, had a lightning-quick wit. Her secret girlhood crush was the new king, twenty years her senior, six feet two, and swarthy with blazingly intelligent black eyes, a dashing mustache gracing the upper lip of a sexily sardonic mouth. He also disdained wigs, because he didn’t need them with his head of inky black curls that tumbled past his shoulders.

  Upon his accession, Charles immediately set about reopening the theatres that the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, had shut down. Charles had tapped Thomas Killigrew to form a company in the king’s name and it was at the new King’s House in Drury Lane that the twelve-year-old Nell and her older sister Rose got jobs hawking oranges to the gallants in the pit, honing their skills at flirtation and witty repartee. Rose followed the predictable trajectory for such a pursuit and ended up a prostitute.

  But Nell’s destiny would be somewhat different. After eighteen months, the theatre manager, impressed with Nell’s pluck, asked her if she’d ever considered taking acting lessons.

  In March 1665, the fifteen-year-old Nell, having been coached by Shakespeare’s great-nephew Charles Hart, made her stage debut in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor. Her performance was an instant success, leading to Nell’s prompt receipt of an invitation to join the company.

  Nell not only possessed a strong, clear voice that could be heard above the rowdiest crowd, but had an effortless gift for mimicry and improvisation and matchless comic timing. Her vitality was contagious. By the end of 1666, “Sweet Nell of Old Drury,” as she was affectionately called, was the indisputable queen of the London stage.

  One early evening in April 1668, after watching a performance of She Wou’d If She Cou’d, Nell and her date repaired to a nearby tavern. Dining there was the king himself and his brother James, the dour Duke of York (who Nell called “Dismal Jimmy”). The royals invited Nell and her friend to join them. When the bill came, neither the monarch nor the duke had the means to pay it. Nell suddenly found herself stuck with the tab.

  Making as much light as possible of her predicament by employing the king’s favorite expression, Nell cried, “Od’s fish, this is the poorest company I ever was in!”

  The king, utterly charmed, laughed uproariously. Nell had made a conquest for life. Her life, anyway.

  The illiterate actress and the erudite, worldly sovereign found common ground in myriad ways, drawn to each other by a mutual passion for the theatre, a shared ribald sense of humor, and a love of sport and the outdoors. Charles had great respect for honesty, and in a world of perfumed artifice, Nell’s was a bracing tonic. Above all, their royal affair was born of an ever-deepening friendship, which can’t be said about any of Charles’s other mistresses.

  Aphra Behn told Nell, “You glad the hearts of all that have the happy fortune to see you, as if you were made on purpose to put the whole world into good humor.” No wonder Nell captured the heart of a king.

  The only one of his harem to genuinely love the countryside, Nell had Charles all to herself each summer when the court went to Newmarket for the races, and for hunting, fishing, and hawking. There, the lovers could almost pretend they were man and wife in a pastoral Arcadia. Charles, who had learned as a youth to conceal his true emotions, allowed himself to feel vulnerable around Nell. And she made him laugh, a gift that can never be underestimated.

  With Charles, Nell felt appreciated and adored. He was her best friend and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to please him, even if it meant sharing his affection with other mistresses. Still, Nell acknowledged that her position was precarious, and necessitated some sort of insurance policy. To that end, she didn’t quit the stage for the first three years of her royal affair. She even returned to the theatre soon after giving birth on May 8, 1670, to their first child, Charles. It sent a clear message to her adoring public that the monarch was not providing them with enough to live on. In February 1671, the king, publicly shamed, ensconced Nell and their baby in a fashionable town house at 79 Pall Mall, which he paid for and furnished.

  She was soon pregnant again, and on Christmas Day 1671, she gave birth to their second child, James, the king’s eighth son by five different mothers. That year, at age twenty-one, Nell finally retired from the stage.

  Soon, it was common knowledge that a person had to visit “Mrs. Neslie” if they wanted the ear of the king. Charles trusted Nell implicitly, fully aware that she was looking out for his interests in preference to her own. Foreign ambassadors adored her. Because Nell herself was of the people, she kept her lover connected with the needs of his subjects. And yet it was her low birth that precluded her from becoming his maîtresse en titre.

  However, noblewomen who felt compelled to accept Charles’s other mistresses, such as Barbara Castlemaine and the French Louise de Kéroualle, because they were wellborn ladies, refused to be in the same room with Nell. Nell would on occasion lament her outcast state to her lover, who tried to ameliorate matters by letting the hypocritical biddies know that “those he lay with were fit company for the greatest woman in the land.”

  To the lower classes she became a cult heroine. Nell was the goddess of the guttersnipes, as close to a queen as one of their own could ever aspire. The tradesmen adored her because she was the only one of the king’s mistresses who always paid her bills promptly. And there were others who countenanced Nell’s presence in their king’s bed more easily than that of his Papist mistress Louise de Kéroualle. At least Nell was a Protestant. In 1681, during a time of open anti-Catholic sentiment, Nell’s coach was stopped in an Oxford street by a mob who believed the passenger to be the detested Louise. The shade was lifted and out of the window popped Nell’s pretty face amid a profusion of red curls. “Pray good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore!” she cheerily announced, turning the jeers of the angry swarm into a rousing chorus of cheers.

  Though Nell wasn’t above competition, she always had a sense of fun about it—the sexy jester of the Restoration court, popping people’s pretensions like balloons. She was particularly adept at affecting Louise de Kéroualle’s lisping Frenc
h accent, deliberately mangling her surname into the decidedly prosaic “Cartwheel.” Nell’s imitation of her continental rival (who she nicknamed “Squintabella” because of the slight cast to one of Louise’s eyes) even had bishops in stitches. Louise also had the annoying habit of turning on the crocodile tears at the drop of a hat, earning her another nickname from Nell—“the Weeping Willow.”

  When Louise de Kéroualle had a portrait of herself painted in a revealing white shift, with her son (by Charles), portrayed as Cupid, hovering in the background, Nell commissioned a portrait of herself in the same pose and garment—flanked by her two cherubic royal bastards.

  The Frenchwoman’s penchant for donning mourning whenever a noble personage (of any nationality) passed away was another affectation mocked by Nell when she threw on widow’s weeds and announced to the court that she was mourning the death of a wildly obscure potentate, the Cham of Tartary.

  One afternoon Barbara Castlemaine (who by that time was sleeping with the playwright William Wycherly) flaunted her royal bounty by ostentatiously parading in front of Nell’s house in her lavish coach pulled by three teams of horses. The following day, Nell (though she envied Barbara’s expensive equipage) put the powerful mistress in her rightful place. She drove back and forth in front of Castlemaine’s home in a rickety oxcart drawn by three teams of cattle, calling out at orange-seller volume, “Whores to market, ho!”

  Charles’s other mistresses didn’t appreciate being mocked, but the king loved her sense of mischief. Surprisingly, he even found it refreshing when he was the butt of her pranks. One sultry evening, Nell suggested a fishing party. Though her idea appeared spontaneous, in fact, she’d had it all planned out, complete with silken fishing nets and gold hooks. But as the merriment progressed, the king became visibly peeved that he had not caught anything. When he wasn’t looking, Nell dived into their picnic hamper and pulled out a string of fried smelts, which she managed to attach to his rod, then sweetly suggested to her lover that he check his line. The astonished monarch laughed uproariously when he realized what Nell had done. Baronne d’Aulnoy, an eyewitness to the event, wrote that Nell told the king, “It was only right that a great king should have unusual privileges. A poor fisherman could only take fish alive, but His Majesty caught them ready to eat!”