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

by Leslie Carroll

  His three-year reign was one of the least successful in British history, though it would lead to massive government reform under the reign of his successors, William and Mary. James never forgave his daughter for “usurping” his throne.

  After an unsuccessful attempt at fomenting rebellion in Ireland—where William’s army knocked the stuffing out of him at the Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690—James retired to France. There he was content to enjoy his favorite sports—hunting and womanizing—until he was felled by a brain hemorrhage on September 16, 1701. James’s coffin was placed in the Chapel of St. Edmund in the Church of the English Benedictines in Paris. The tomb was desecrated during the French Revolution and his remains disappeared.

  Mary of Modena, who married James in 1685, survived him by seventeen years, dying of breast cancer on May 7, 1718, the same disease that had claimed James’s most successful mistress and first wife, Anne Hyde, on March 31, 1671.

  JAMES II OF ENGLAND/JAMES VII OF SCOTLAND and Anne Hyde 1637-1671

  The prodigiously buxom and flirtatious Anne Hyde was the daughter of Edward Hyde, a Wiltshire lawyer who turned to politics, becoming Charles II’s chancellor. Her contemporaries noted her intelligence, though they admitted she was not very pretty; in fact, Anne was most often described as a cow. A hearty eater during an era when slenderness was the vogue at court, the girl’s booty came in for some serious ribbing in a popular rhyme: With chanc’lor’s belly, and so large a rump, There, not behind the coach, her pages jump.

  For several years before the Restoration, Anne had been a maid of honor to Mary, the Princess Royal, sister of Charles and James. But it was in Paris at the exiled court of the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria where Anne first met Mary’s brother James, the Duke of York.

  The stuttering duke was stiff and reserved, with a downer of a personality, but by all accounts, James, tall, blue-eyed, and fair, was even more of a rake than his less classically handsome brother, Charles. It certainly wasn’t charm or affability that was the chick magnet—in fact, James was considered rather slow and plodding, particularly compared to the exceptionally bright and witty Charles. But then again, James didn’t attract the beauties of the age, as did his elder brother. On James’s embracing of Catholicism as well as loose women, Charles observed, “My brother will lose his throne for his principles and his soul for a bunch of ugly trollops.” He jested that James’s mistresses were so universally hideous that his priests must have given them to the duke as penance.

  With Anne Hyde, however, “dismal Jimmy” (as Charles’s famously clever mistress Nell Gwyn called him) must have scintillated. Apparently their affair grew passionate after the exiled court had moved to The Hague. After the Restoration, Anne’s father sent for her, and she returned to London, fat and glowing—but as Anne was always fat and glowing, her father didn’t notice that she was also pregnant.

  Hyde should have congratulated himself on the fact that his daughter had inherited his canny political skills, because in August 1659, Anne had successfully convinced the duke to sign a marriage contract. After that, they cohabited intermittently and clandestinely as man and wife.

  On Anne’s return to England, realizing they’d be caught sooner or later, James sneaked into Worcester House, her father’s home, with an Anglican chaplain in tow. The chaplain married Anne and James in a private ceremony on September 3, 1660. Only after they were legally wed did Anne’s new husband throw himself upon the king’s mercy, begging him to allow them to publicly marry.

  King Charles summoned Chancellor Hyde, a portly Polonius who had known nothing of his daughter’s affairs until the news was broken to him by two of his friends, the Marquis of Ormonde and the Earl of Southampton. Hyde assured the monarch that as soon as he got home to Worcester House, he would toss Anne out into the street as a strumpet. At the suggestion that Anne might actually be married, the politician then changed his tack, ranting that he would sooner see his daughter be the king’s whore than the duke’s wife—and if Anne were really married to James, she should be thrown into a dungeon in the Tower of London and an Act of Parliament passed to behead her.

  “And I shall be the first man to propose that to Parliament!” Hyde shouted.

  Charles endeavored to smooth things over, but poor Anne ended up locked in her room. However, Anne’s sympathetic mother managed to sneak the duke into her daughter’s chamber for conjugal visits.

  But Anne, a mere commoner, had unintentionally created an international incident.

  The Queen Mum, Henrietta Maria, came over from Paris “to prevent so great a stain and dishonor to the Crown.” Then a group of courtiers was enlisted to convince James of his wife’s rampant promiscuity—and therefore, her unsuitability to be his duchess. Anne was traduced by men who had never even met her, all claiming to have bedded her. It seemed that every man in England had crawled out of the woodwork to testify to Anne’s lasciviousness, each sworn statement more outlandish than the last.

  Charles didn’t believe a word of it, and assured his increasingly livid chancellor that his daughter was being unjustly slandered. As Anne lay abed, the birth of her baby imminent, the king sent his most trusted ladies to attend her.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. Anne, shrieking with labor pains, was forced to endure another torment. The oh-so-sensitive Bishop of Winchester visited her bedside and demanded, “Whose child is it of which you are in labor? Have you known any man other than the Duke of York?” Anne responded in the negative, and probably spat out a lot of other negative things to the bishop besides.

  Enter Henrietta Maria, in high dudgeon at Dover, ready to defend her son’s good name and tar Chancellor Hyde with the brush of treachery for daring to marry an undeserving creature of his own lowly brood into the royal house—little realizing that she and the chancellor were on the same side.

  Charles stepped in and averted a crisis by making Hyde a baron, with a gift of £20,000 (well over $4.3 million today) to sustain the honor. By the time the groom’s mother reached London, she was greeted by the bride’s father, now Baron Hyde of Hindon, a peer of the realm. The following year Charles made Hyde Earl of Clarendon.

  The dowager queen’s argument about the worthiness of Anne Hyde’s family had thus been gracefully nipped in the bud, and eventually, Henrietta Maria grew to accept her new daughter-in-law.

  Anne was clearly the dominant partner in the marriage, yet she could not prevent James from returning to his rakish ways soon after their union was legalized in the eyes of family and state. “The duke is in all things but his codpiece led by the nose,” Samuel Pepys observed.

  Anne coped with her husband’s frequent infidelities by overeating. She was also perpetually pregnant, giving birth to eight children in nearly as many years, but only two daughters, Mary and Anne, survived to adulthood. The rest died in infancy.

  After suffering from cancer for three years, Anne finally succumbed to the disease in 1671, a few weeks after giving birth to her eighth child. In her final days, she also became a secret convert to Catholicism.

  One evening after enjoying a hearty dinner at Burlington House, Anne retired to pray, and then collapsed in the chapel. A frantic James sent for the Bishop of Oxford, but by the time he arrived, Anne was incoherent.

  She died at St. James’s Palace in her husband’s arms, with the words “Duke, Duke, death is terrible. Death is very terrible.” She was buried in Westminster Abbey.

  The Duke of York subsequently married a fifteen-year-old Italian princess, the willowy Mary of Modena, who became his queen in 1685 on the death of Charles II. Mary was twenty-five years younger than her husband and bore him two children.

  Anne Hyde is one of the few royal mistresses to end up marrying her lover, and one of only six profiled in this volume, the others being Katherine Swynford; Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Kathryn Howard—the three mistress-wives of Henry VIII; and Camilla Parker Bowles.

  Anne’s two daughters each went on to become Queen of England, and both would make their
mark in British history. Mary, born on April 30, 1662, would marry William of Orange and become a key player in the Glorious Revolution that would overthrow her own father and place herself and her husband on the English throne. Her younger sister, Anne, born on the sixth of February in 1665, would inherit her mother’s corpulence as well as her father’s crown. Under Queen Anne, England and Scotland were combined into a single nation in the Act of Union signed on May 1, 1707, thereby making Anne Hyde’s younger daughter—the issue of the woman who was such a “stain and dishonor to the Crown”—the first monarch of Great Britain.

  WILLIAM AND MARY

  WILLIAM III 1650-1702 AND MARY II 1662-1694 RULED ( JOINTLY WITH MARY) 1689-1694 WILLIAM RULED ALONE 1694-1702

  THOUGH RAISED A PROTESTANT, MARY STUART WAS THE oldest daughter of the Catholic James, Duke of York (the future James II). When Mary was just fifteen years old, her father informed her that she was to be married to her lovestruck twenty-five-year-old first cousin, William, Prince of Orange—a taciturn asthmatic with a slight hunchback. Those were only three of the reasons that the bride spent the entire wedding ceremony weeping copiously.

  The ceremony took place at St. James’s Palace in London on November 4, 1677. They must have looked like a seventeenth-century version of the Mutt and Jeff cartoons—skinny, sallow, lanky-haired William, a whole five inches shorter than his 235 rosy-cheeked, big-boned teenage bride with her alabaster skin and luxuriant dark curls.

  The bridegroom was the last of the House of Orange-Nassau, which had ruled the Independent Dutch Republic since William’s great-grandfather, “William the Silent,” founded it in the mid-sixteenth century. His mother was Mary Henrietta Stuart, the sister of Charles II and James, making William James’s nephew as well as his son-in-law.

  As the Dutch Republic’s Stadtholder, William was an able ruler and an accomplished military commander, despite his spindly stature. For six years he bravely resisted French aggression in the Netherlands. In 1678, when a peace was concluded without any concessions on the Dutch side, William was hailed as a Protestant hero across Europe.

  The thirty-eight-year-old William and twenty-seven-year-old Mary acceded to the English throne in “the Glorious Revolution” of 1688, becoming the first joint rulers of England. However, their coronation did not take place until February 1689, after Parliament convened a special session, in which Mary and William were formally invited to become queen and king on the proviso that the executive authority be placed in William’s hands. The new monarchs also had to agree to a Declaration of Rights (entered in the statute books as the Bill of Rights) that condemned the way James II had used his prerogative in the matter of dispensing the laws.

  An affable people-pleaser and a good-natured soul, throughout her reign Mary was very aware that many subjects considered her a “usurper” of her father’s throne, but over time the English did embrace her as a beloved queen.

  The pensive William was at the official helm, but he spent nearly every spring and summer overseas on military campaigns. In his absence, the governance of the realm was placed squarely in Mary’s hands, and she proved a highly competent and effective administrator.

  Several major changes took place during the reign of William and Mary, planting the seeds of a constitutional monarchy. The Triennial Act required that a new Parliament convene every three years. A Mutiny Act prevented a king from keeping a standing army in peacetime without the consent of the House of Commons. William strengthened the expansion of trade at home and abroad in 1694 by founding the Bank of England, which provided for secure long-term government borrowing, financing trade ventures and foreign-policy interests.

  Mary died of smallpox on December 28, 1694, at the age of thirty-two, and was buried at Westminster Abbey. In exile in France, James refused to allow his daughter to be officially mourned, so bitter was he at her role in his enforced abdication.

  One of the cornerstones of William’s reign after Mary’s death was the 1701 Act of Settlement that required all future monarchs to be members of the Church of England, and forbade the sovereign to leave the country without parliamentary permission.

  William continued to advance policies of tolerance. Freedom of the press was granted in 1695, and religious restrictions were loosened (for all but Roman Catholics). Jews were no longer compelled by law to observe the Christian Sabbath and Quakers were not penalized for refusing to swear under oath.

  William survived Mary by more than seven years. He never remarried. On March 8, 1702, at the age of fifty-one, William died of pneumonia after a fall from a horse broke his collar-bone. It was rumored that his horse stumbled into a molehill, prompting James’s supporters, the Jacobites, to anthropomorphize the little burrower by toasting “the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat.” He died clutching the hand of his closest adviser, Hans Willem Bentinck, Earl of Portland. When the corpse was undressed it was discovered that William had worn Mary’s ruby and diamond ring along with a lock of her hair tied around his left arm with a black ribbon. He had loved her more than he had ever revealed.

  William was buried in Westminster Abbey alongside his queen. Because William’s marriage to Mary was childless, the crown passed to James II’s younger daughter, Anne, with whom the vibrant Stuart dynasty would end.

  MARY II and Frances Apsley 1668-1727 WILLIAM III and Elizabeth Villiers 1655-1733 and Arnold Joost van Keppel 1669/70-1718

  Mary was only nine years old when she and her younger sister, Anne, were sent to live at Richmond Palace with the bustling family of Sir Edward Villiers, whose wife, Frances Howard, was their governess.

  At the age of twelve, Mary developed a raging crush on the twenty-one-year-old Frances Apsley, the beautiful daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, the king’s hawks keeper, and later Governor of the Tower of London. The adolescent Mary was enamored of lurid romances and cross-dressing theatrical performances; in her love letters to Frances she pilfered their pen names, Clorine and Aurelia, from a theatrical masque by John Crowne titled Calisto, or the Chaste Nymph, which Mary and Anne had performed at court. “There is nothing in this heart, breast, guts, or bowels but you shall know it,” Mary wrote to her sweet “husband.”

  Clearly influenced by the pastoral poetry that was so popular at the time, Mary rhapsodized, I would be content with a cottage in the country, a cow, a stuff petticoat and waistcoat in summer and cloth in winter, a little garden to live upon the fruit and herbs it yields, or if I could not have you so to myself I would go a begging, be poor but content—what greater happiness is there in the world than to have the company of them one loves to make your happiness complete.

  Mary assured Frances that she was her . . . humble servant to kiss the ground where you go, to be your dog on a string, your fish in a net, your bird in a cage, your humble trout. . . . I may, if I can tell you how much I love you, but I hope that is not doubted. I have given you proofs enough. If not, I will die to satisfy you, dear, dear husband. If all my hairs were lives, I would lose them all twenty times over to serve or satisfy you.

  No ambiguity there. Mary sent her letters to Frances furtively, fully aware that her governess would not have approved of the tenor of her correspondence.

  But the feeling between Mary and Frances was not entirely mutual. Even if Frances were inclined to favor women, her pursuer was, after all, not much more than a child, a motherless, romantic adolescent who very much needed to love and be loved. And Frances probably saw no harm in humoring Mary by maintaining the fiction of a passionate connection. She was, perhaps, the only one in Mary’s rarefied little sphere who showed her some genuine affection.

  As soon as she heard the news that she was to wed her wheezing first cousin, Prince William III of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, the fifteen-year-old bride-to-be wrote tearfully to Frances: If you do not come to me some time today, dear husband, that I may have my bellyful of discourse with you, I shall take it very ill . . . for I have a great deal to say to you concerning I do not know how to tell in the letter
. If you do come, you will mightily oblige your faithful wife, Mary Clorine.

  Frances Apsley’s name was significantly missing from the list of ladies-in-waiting asked to accompany Mary to Holland. As William seemed to play a role in deciding who would go, perhaps he had been delicately warned of Mary’s passionate attachment to the young woman. Mary did not even get to bid good-bye to Frances. Sir Allen had fallen gravely ill and Frances was attending him.

  Meanwhile, rumors that William was gay surfaced from time to time over the years as well, although given the chance to cat around, he had numerous heterosexual liaisons, most of which were kept well under wraps. It’s possible that when William was fourteen years old he developed a crush on Hans Willem Bentinck, who that year entered his household as a pageboy. Ten years later, when William was felled by smallpox, he was certain that Bentinck had saved his life by sharing his bed, as it was commonly believed that a healthy person sleeping beside a smallpox patient would draw some of the illness into themselves. Bentinck would go on to become William’s closest and most trusted adviser. In 1689, after the Glorious Revolution, William naturalized Bentinck a British subject and created him Earl of Portland and made him a Knight of the Garter in 1697.

  In any event, if rumors of William’s homoerotic bent were true, he was supremely lucky to have been mated with a wife whose inclinations, at least during her youth, were distinctly Sapphic.

  Their wedding night was an embarrassment. It was the custom of the times for the bridal couple to be escorted to the marital chamber and officially put to bed, to begin the performance for which they were united. Evidently, William was less than enthusiastic about his conjugal duties, because King Charles II, the couple’s lusty uncle, had to exhort the groom, “Now, nephew, to your work! Hey! St. George for England!”