Nell was furious that Charles had bestowed a title on his French mistress. Louise, the new Duchess of Portsmouth, knew it and lorded it over her rival. Though Charles had, from time to time, hinted that he would ennoble Nell, his treasurer, Lord Danby, insisted that to elevate an orange-girl would upend the entire class system, challenging the entire notion of an aristocracy. Much as the king might desire to compensate Nell with a title, the Establishment would never countenance it.
Despite her disappointment, Nell petitioned Charles for something approaching equal compensation. Charles pleaded poverty. After all, the war with France was costly. All the more reason not to have given an English title to a French whore, thought Nell. “I shall tell you how you shall never want,” she fumed. “Send the French into France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your own codpiece!”
Unfortunately, the king did not take her advice.
After ennobling Louise de Kéroualle’s three-year-old royal bastard as the Duke of Richmond, to appease the unhappy, slighted Nell (whose own royal bastards had received no titles), Charles made her a Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber—a prestigious honor, though it might have been the queen’s idea and not Charles’s, to throw the baseborn Nell a bone. Nell was the only one of Charles’s mistresses whom the tiny, fragile Catherine actually liked. Having already resigned herself to her husband’s numerous affairs, perhaps Her Majesty acknowledged that she and Nell were the only women at court who really did have the king’s interests at heart.
Another thing that set Nell apart from Charles’s other mistresses was that she never meddled in state affairs. Nell happily admitted her ignorance on such subjects, perfectly aware that the role she played in the king’s life was that of a sexy pleasure giver, not a political adviser, “the sleeping partner on the ship of state.” No doubt the “Merry Monarch’s” ministers were very grateful for her self-awareness and wished that more of Charles’s mistresses had felt the same way. In the words of a popular ditty from the 1670s: 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.
The only time Nell took such matters into her own clever hands was when she thought Charles should be sensitive to the mood of his people and pay more attention to running the country. After the king had been neglecting to attend Council meetings, which was costing him both support and respect, Nell, who always had her lover’s interests at heart before her own, bet the Duke of Lauderdale £100 (almost $25,000 today) that she would have better luck than His Grace in lighting a fire under the king.
She then summoned her former employer and mentor Tom Killigrew and coached him in his role. A day or two later, the old actor-manager burst into the King’s Closet in full traveling costume.
The startled Charles exclaimed, “What, Killigrew, where are you going in such a violent hurry?”
“To hell,” Killigrew replied, panting, “to fetch up Oliver Cromwell to look after the affairs of England, for his successor never will.”
Nell’s scheme worked.
Though Barbara Castlemaine’s numerous royal bastards were given titles (which their mother fought and scratched to obtain), Nell’s two sons by the king were, in her own words, “princes by their father for their elevation, but they had a whore to their mother for their humiliation.” In fact, the boys had never even enjoyed a surname!
Nell wasn’t happy about it.
One day when Charles paid her a visit, Nell hammered home her point. Her way of informing their six-year-old son that his father had arrived was to shout into the next room, “Come hither, you little bastard!” Charles was appalled. But Nell’s remark achieved the desired result. On December 27, 1676, her paramour signed a royal patent, granting little Charles the titles of Baron Heddington, Earl of Burford—and in 1684, the boy was made Duke of St. Albans. He ended up living better than his mother did, with apartments in Whitehall and an allowance of £1,500 (today more than $367,000) a year. Among all seventeen of Charles’s royal bastards, Nell’s Charles was always a favorite of the king.
In January 1677, little James was given the title Lord James Beauclerk, the surname King Charles chose for both boys.
It was perhaps the best the king could do—but it wasn’t parity. Still, Nell retained her sense of humor and consoled herself by cheerfully reminding her aristocratic rivals that when all was said and done, they were providing the same service to the king.
Yet Nell did ultimately convince Charles to give her the freehold of 79 Pall Mall, where she was a popular hostess, and where Charles so often met his ministers and foreign emissaries to conduct affairs of state. After all, Nell teased, she deserved the freehold because she “had always offered [her] services for free under the crown!” Though her £4,000 (nearly $1 million) pension was a fraction of her rivals’ allowances, Charles did give (and built for) Nell a number of houses, as well as a passel of Irish properties, from which Nell derived an income during her lifetime.
And because she was the mother of an earl, she was accorded the status (though not the title) of a lady and entitled to receive a coat of arms. Nell immediately had it applied to her vast services of silver plate.
The year 1679 was a particularly devastating one for Nell. Her mother died after falling into a ditch in a drunken stupor; and typical of Nell’s loving heart, she honored the fat old bag with a lavish funeral. Later that year, Nell’s younger son, James, who had been sent off to France to be educated, died, purportedly “of a bad leg.” Nell thought the cause of death preposterous and was certain that Louise de Kéroualle had somehow contrived to have the boy poisoned.
Endeavoring to cheer and console her, Charles built his little Nelly a house just inside the grounds of Windsor Castle, where rumor had it that a secret tunnel connected Burford House with the king’s own apartments. Together the lovers poured their energies into improvements to Windsor, adding tennis courts, an orangery, and a bowling alley. Because Nell loved hawking, Charles made their surviving son Master of the Hawks and Grand Falconer, a sinecure the future Dukes of St. Albans would enjoy for centuries. And on June 11, 1679, a royal warrant reaffirmed Nell’s pension.
On February 1, 1685, Charles spent the evening in the company of Nell and his other mistresses, past and present. The following morning, Nell’s thirty-fifth birthday, while he was waiting to be shaved, the king’s eyes suddenly rolled back into his head, he began foaming at the mouth, and he slipped off the chair, hitting the floor with a heavy thud.
When Nell heard the news, she came running to Whitehall, but the Establishment had already surrounded the monarch and, in case he was about to die, refused to allow a fallen woman to sully his royal presence. For the next four days, as the king swung from violent convulsions to periods of lucid tranquility, his team of physicians tried every medical method in the book to revive his health. But all the bleeding, cupping, purges, purgatives, and quack remedies did not avail. Nell was desperate for news of her lover’s condition. As a duke, their son was permitted to be present (along with the king’s other ennobled illegitimate children), and he reported back to his frantic mother on the monarch’s progress.
During the king’s final hours, he bestowed on their son the ring that the boy’s paternal grandfather, Charles I, wore on the scaffold the day he was executed—the ring the king had passed to Bishop Juxon for safekeeping, and which the bishop had ultimately given to the future Charles II. In fact, Charles had worn the ring during his triumphant Restoration Day procession through London on his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1660. If ever there was an indication of Charles’s preference for Nell above all other mistresses, it was his gift of this most personal, and most treasured, possession to their only surviving son.
On Charles’s deathbed he was said to have told his brother James, “Let not poor Nelly starve.” Romantic last words perhaps, but those who adore Nell Gwyn’s unique spark and her insatiable vital
ity might argue that Charles could have ensured that she would never hunger for anything while he lived. He had plenty of opportunities to do so. A king’s mistress was expected to live large and entertain lavishly, as a society and court hostess, and to maintain herself in style after his demise. Nell’s £4,000 pension was actually considered exceptionally modest for one in her circumstances.
Nell was in desperate financial straits following Charles’s death in 1685. She began selling off her possessions, and feared that her lover’s last words would go unheeded by the new king.
But three months later, James did send Nell some money to live on, paid the lion’s share of her creditors’ bills, and in January 1686, granted her an annual pension of £1,500 (a shade over $382,000 today). Nell was the only one of Charles’s mistresses ever to receive her funds directly from the Treasury, as only she could be depended upon to spend the money on what it was intended for.
Still faithful to the memory of her lover, Nell repulsed the advances of several suitors after the king died, sorrowfully telling one expectant gent that she would “not lay a dog where the deer had lain.”
She spent the brief remainder of her life as she had always lived it, gaily and in the company of good friends. It was rumored she was ailing, possibly suffering from the clap, the only unwelcome gift from her royal lover of twenty years. In March of 1687, Nell suffered a stroke, then was felled by a second one in May that left her paralyzed. For months, from her sumptuous silver bed, attended by Charles’s former physicians, she waited for death to reunite her with the king. Nell Gwyn died on November 14, 1687. She was only thirty-seven years old. Nell would never live to see her royal son become a war hero, nor dandle any of her thirteen grandchildren.
As a measure of her fondness for Nell’s memory, the dowager Queen Catherine awarded Nell’s oldest royal bastard a pension of his own, granting the young Duke of St. Albans £2,000 a year (over half a million dollars today), adding to the annuity of £4,000 that the late king had already given the boy.
On November 17, the day of Nell’s funeral, the streets were mobbed with mourners from all strata of society. Her eulogy was delivered without irony by the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Contained in her will were numerous charitable bequests to Protestant and Papist alike, consistent with Nell’s lifelong generosity and her refusal to become mired in state or religious politics.
The Earl of Rochester’s advice, “. . . with hand, body, head, heart, and all the faculties you have, contribute to his pleasure all you can . . . ,” had been Nell’s credo. Of all Charles’s mistresses, she was the only one who never accepted a bribe to influence him on another party’s behalf. Although she was jealous of the material gains of her rivals, Nell seems to have genuinely loved the king, and was utterly devoted to him and his welfare. Beyond her obviously stunning looks, wicked wit, and tremendous sense of playfulness and fun, it was Nell Gwyn’s character that made her so special to Charles II.
CHARLES II and Louise Renée de Penancoët de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth 1649-1734
In 1670, when Charles’s beloved sister, Henrietta Anne, Duchesse d’Orleans, came over from Versailles to negotiate the Secret Treaty of Dover between England and France, she brought with her a number of unexpected gifts. First were some presents for the bastard child that the royal mistress Nell Gwyn was about to bear; second was the young woman who would become Nell’s chief rival for the king’s affections—“Minette’s” young and pretty lady-in-waiting Louise Renée de Penancoët de Kéroualle.
Louise’s skin was pale, her baby face framed by a puffy halo of soft dark curls. Her almond-shaped, heavy lidded eyes conveyed dreaminess to some, dullness to others. Her placid, even icy, expression never seemed to change. Gorgeous but vacuous is probably how she was viewed by most of Charles’s courtiers.
On the eve of Minette’s departure from Dover, her brother requested a keepsake, one of the jewels he had previously given Minette. Louise opened the jewel casket as Minette asked Charles which treasure he might like.
The flirtatious king took Louise’s hand, saying that she was the only jewel he desired. This response didn’t sit too well with Minette, who had promised Louise’s parents, impoverished though noble-born Bretons, that she would shield their daughter from the licentiousness of the English court.
The ladies returned to Paris, but three weeks later, Charles’s beloved Minette was dead from a sudden illness, probably caused initially by a perforated ulcer. The inconsolable monarch petitioned King Louis XIV to permit Louise to return to England, promising that the twenty-year-old Bretonne would be made a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine.
It wasn’t a tough sell. Louis had the opportunity to place a spy for France in the English court, and in their sovereign’s bed. Buckingham had already reminded Charles that if a Frenchwoman had his ear (as well as other body parts), England stood to gain a tacit alliance with Louis. The move was also a sop to the English Papists. Charles had made vague promises about converting; with a Catholic mistress he could indefinitely postpone the actual event, yet retain his pledge of good faith to become a Catholic.
Louise, who was no naïf, but in fact had been thoroughly coached in her role, was adept at playing the innocent. Her parents had schooled her in the arts of courtesanry with the hope that she would conquer their own king. However, Louis XIV already had a Louise in the position—the gorgeous, golden-haired Louise de la Vallière, and he wasn’t in the market for a replacement.
Charles was so smitten by Louise’s soft, gentle voice and her fragile modesty act that he offered her anything she desired—lands, titles for herself and any future royal bastards, and a generous allowance—if she would sleep with him. The king called Louise “my dear life,” telling her, “I love you better than all the world besides.” But she cannily realized that he was in love with love, and fired up more by the chase than the conquest.
The ambitious Louise immediately had herself installed in the finest apartments in Whitehall, fitted up as exact replicas of her opulent rooms at Louis’s palace. Louise’s inner sanctum was supremely plusher than the queen’s.
However, after several months of coy delays, Louise was in danger of holding out too long. She was a natural prude rather than a sexual siren, and both the French and English envoys were becoming increasingly frustrated with her delays. But when the Duke of Buckingham mentioned that the queen, who remained incapable of bearing children, might be replaced one day, Louise’s pink little ears (as well as her avarice) pricked up. Daydreaming of the crown set upon her corona of dark curls, she agreed to surrender her body to the king.
In 1671, as Charles prepared for his annual trip to Newmarket for the races, Lord Arlington made Euston, his Suffolk estate, available for the royal tryst.
The contemporary diarist John Evelyn was a houseguest of the Arlingtons at the time. About the conquest of Louise de Kéroualle he wrote: During my stay here with Lord Arlington neere a fortnight, his Majesty came almost every second day . . . the king often lay here . . . It was universally reported that the faire lady [Louise de Kéroualle] was bedded one of these nights and the stocking flung after the manner of a married bride; I acknowledge she was for the most part in her undresse all day, and that there was fondnesse and toying with that young wanton . . .
The surrender of Louise’s much-vaunted virginity yielded valuable fruit. Nine months later, on July 29, 1672, she gave birth to a son, the fifth of Charles’s royal bastards to be given his forename. And from the moment of his birth, Louise considered him his father’s heir presumptive. For love’s labors won, in July of 1673 she was ennobled by the king as Baroness Petersfield, Countess of Farnham, and Duchess of Portsmouth.
Although Charles worshipped her, for the most part Louise was widely detested in England. Nobles were appalled (as they routinely were) that Charles had elevated a whore. Patriotic commoners were disgusted that a Frenchwoman was cleaning out the Treasury.
Louise was even disdained by thieves. When her coach was de
tained on the Portsmouth Road by Old Mobb, a notorious highwayman, Louise tried to talk her way out of a holdup by asking the brigand if he knew who she was, warning that he would pay dearly for robbing her. Old Mobb replied, “I know you to be the greatest whore in the kingdom and that you are maintained at the public charge.” (Actually, her bills were secretly being footed by the French.) The Restoration-era Robin Hood then informed Louise that he had a whore of his own to maintain at the public expense, “same as the king,” and took Louise’s jewels.
Louise proved as grasping as the best of them, going toe to toe with Barbara Castlemaine over their respective sons’ royal patents. Louise was ecstatic to learn that Charles was going to ennoble her two-year-old son to a dukedom, but her delight was dampened by the news that one of Castlemaine’s royal bastards would be elevated at the same time. However, the Lord Treasurer Danby’s signature was first required for the patent to be valid, and Louise was extremely close (if not intimate) with Danby. The two mothers, Cleveland and Portsmouth, schemed to get to Danby first. It was Louise who discovered that Danby’s holiday plans had changed at the last minute, and she sent her agent to meet the Lord Treasurer’s coach the night before Barbara’s agent was scheduled to perform the same service. Danby therefore signed Louise’s son’s patent first, and to this date the Duke of Richmond takes precedence over the Duke of Grafton!
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 19