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

by Leslie Carroll

  After their wedding celebration, Mary and William returned to Holland. Left behind in London, Frances Apsley was unsure how things stood between her and her epistolary lover now that Mary had married.

  In a surviving draft of a letter she penned to Mary, Frances lamented, Since it was my hard fate to lose the greatest blessing I ever had in this world, which was the dear presence of my most beloved wife, I have some comfort that she is taken from me by so worthy and so great a prince . . . Your Highness has put a hard task upon me to treat you with the same familiarity as becomes a fond husband to a beloved wife he dotes upon . . . I think what the scripture says that man and wife are but only one body and then your heart is mine, and I am sure mine is yours . . . I must ask your pardon for my presumption, yet since my life depends upon it, for I can live no longer than your favor shines upon me, it will be a great charity in your Highness to continue your love and bounty to a husband that admires you and dotes upon you and an obedient servant that will always serve and adore you.

  Reading between the lines, it sounds like Frances is asking Mary for a job. Although a position was not forthcoming, Mary had not forgotten Frances, nor her passion for her. When she became pregnant, Mary wrote to her adored “husband,” assuring her that I have played the whore a little; because the sea parts us, you may believe that it is a bastard.

  Mary miscarried that fetus, but she and William remained diligent in their duty to beget an heir. However, it doesn’t sound like they had a whole lot of fun going about it. Mary told a friend, “He comes to my chamber about supper time upon this condition—that I will not tire him with multiplicity of question, but rather strive to recreate him.”

  When she was just a girl, Mary had once remarked to Frances Apsley with regard to her own father’s infidelity to her young stepmother, “In two or three years men are always weary of their wives and look for a Mrs [mistress] as soon as they can get them.”

  Unfortunately, this proved to be the case with her own marriage. William was satisfying his more amorous urges in the arms of his clandestine mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, a woman whose pedigree connects many of the dots of the Stuart dynasty’s romantic history.

  Elizabeth’s mother was Frances Howard, governess to both Mary and Anne. As a daughter of Sir Edward Villiers, Elizabeth had been a playmate of Mary’s back at Richmond. Both Elizabeth and her sister, Anne Villiers—who fell in love with and married William’s confidant, Hans Bentinck—came to Holland with Mary after she married William. Elizabeth’s cousin, Lady Castlemaine, was one of Charles II’s most notorious mistresses. Her great-uncle, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, had been the lover of King James I.

  Elizabeth had inherited none of Lady Castlemaine’s extraordinary beauty, but the spindly William, with a nose like an eagle’s beak, was no Dutch Adonis. Elizabeth had a cast in her eyes that made her myopic; according to the great satirist and statesman Jonathan Swift—a dear friend of hers, no less—“the good lady squints like a dragon.” Another contemporary wrote, “One can’t imagine her arousing desire.”

  The twenty-year-old Elizabeth caught the prince’s interest in 1677, soon after the royal wedding, when she was traveling with Mary’s entourage to Holland. To throw gossips off the scent, she flirted mercilessly with a Scottish mercenary, Captain Wauchop, but no one was fooled. By 1679, everyone was whispering about her affair with William, and by 1680, she was his acknowledged mistress.

  William wasn’t as interested in “Squinting Betty’s” looks as in her intelligence. What made Elizabeth so alluring, particularly to a man who didn’t place a premium on carnality, was her quicksilver wit. And unlike William’s young wife, his mistress was a stimulating conversationalist. Although Mary was kind and eminently affable, her education had been sorely lacking. Gone were the days of the Renaissance when princesses received a thorough schooling in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Women of Mary’s era were expected to be vacuous and ornamental.

  Historically, no one expected a king to be in love with—and therefore, sexually faithful to—a wife that had been selected for him. William was no exception, but at least—unlike his uncle, Charles II—he attempted to be discreet about it. William would tell Mary that he was up working late on dispatches, and she swallowed his excuses, although she probably would have been glad of her husband’s attention on a more frequent basis. Her only solace was her ongoing correspondence with Frances Apsley. It might also have comforted her to know that Hans Bentinck, an extremely straight arrow, regardless of whatever sort of affection William had once harbored for him, was disgusted by his sister-in-law’s behavior with the prince.

  With spies well placed in Mary’s household, her father, James II, eventually caught wind of William’s affair with Elizabeth. James was afraid that Mary would seek a divorce, or else that William would look to get rid of her in order to marry Elizabeth. Henry VIII had set a literally dangerous precedent.

  Faced with a confirmation of the liaison she’d long sought to ignore, Mary was openly humiliated. One night, she staked out Elizabeth Villiers’s apartments, and caught her husband tiptoeing out the door at two a.m.

  Mary exploded then and there, accusing William of infidelity. When they had both calmed down a few days later, his response was, “What has given you so much pain is merely an amusement; there is no crime in it.” William accused Mary’s servants of plotting against him and several of her closest attendants were summarily dismissed.

  The queen decided to handle the matter on her own. As Elizabeth was still one of her ladies-in-waiting, Mary dispatched her to England with a letter for King James, requesting her father to detain Elizabeth. But the clever mistress opened the letter herself and delivered it instead to her own father. Sir Edward Villiers advised Elizabeth to head directly back to Holland and beg the royals to reinstate her.

  Mary refused to see Elizabeth on her return. But William compelled her to welcome his mistress into her household again. Elizabeth ended up residing with her sister Katharine, where William continued to visit her.

  Over time, however, Mary begrudgingly came to accept the situation. Elizabeth was in the retinue that accompanied William and Mary to England in 1688 when they became king and queen. For services rendered to her, Mary granted her childhood companion and lady-in-waiting ninety thousand acres of property in Ireland that had belonged to her father, James, when he was Duke of York. Some historians have stated that the land grant was William’s idea and that Mary wept to see her father’s property bestowed upon her husband’s mistress. In any event, unfortunately for Elizabeth, that grant was revoked by Parliament in 1699.

  Mary’s friendship with Frances Apsley fizzled out. In 1682, Frances had married the much-older Benjamin Bathurst, a director of the East India Company. She had not even told her correspondent about her marriage, and Mary was quite hurt to learn of it through the grapevine.

  When Mary’s sister, Anne, became Princess of Denmark, she found places in her London household for both Frances and Benjamin. Because of the Stuart sisters’ sibling rivalry, Frances’s new position as Anne’s retainer made her a potentially untrustworthy confidante, as anything Mary dared share with her might be repeated to Anne. In any case, Mary, now a queen and in love with her actual husband, seemed to have outgrown her epistolary one.

  When William was off fighting in Ireland, supporters of the former king, James II, spread the rumors that William’s lover was pregnant and that William and Mary’s marriage was on the rocks, neither of which was true. To halt the malicious gossip William sent a letter to his bishops ordering them to preach against adultery and the pervasive practice of openly kept mistresses. Meanwhile, the king continued his romance with Elizabeth, though he at least endeavored to be more discreet about it.

  In December 1694, when Mary fell ill with smallpox, she began to put her affairs in order, burning much of her personal correspondence, including her youthful letters. The absence of these documents may account for the scant information we have regardin
g her relationship with Frances Apsley. Mary had also burned her diaries in 1677 before she left for Holland.

  On her deathbed, Mary begged her husband to dismiss his mistress. Early in their marriage, she had come to adore William, ever after fearing she would lose half of herself every time he went off to war. His long affair with Elizabeth Villiers, even if it had grown platonic over time, had broken her heart. William, who slept by his dying wife on a camp cot, could not refuse this final request.

  He pensioned off the forty-year-old Elizabeth with a gift of lands worth £30,000 a year (over $7.2 million today) and arranged a marriage to her cousin, Lord George Hamilton, the fifth son of the 3rd Duke of Hamilton. Elizabeth wed Hamilton on November 25, 1695, and the following year he was made Duke of Orkney.

  Elizabeth’s marriage proved to be a happy one. She bore three healthy children, and as the Countess of Orkney became a noted hostess during the era of the Hanoverian kings. She entertained both George I and George II at Cliveden, her estate in Buckinghamshire.

  The seventy-year-old former royal mistress was present in all her glory at the coronation of George II in 1727. An eyewitness noted that “she exposed a mixture of fat and wrinkles, and before a considerable pair of bubbies a good deal withered, a great belly that preceded her; add to this the inimitable roll of her great eyes and her gray hair which by good fortune stood directly upright, and ’tis impossible to imagine a more delightful spectacle.”

  She died on April 19, 1733, at the age of seventy-six.

  After William pensioned off his mistress in 1694, he focused on grieving for his late wife. William had never been made so distraught as he was by Mary’s death. According to Bishop Burnet, the king had uncharacteristically sobbed that “during the whole course of his marriage he had never known one single fault in her: there was a worth in her that nobody knew besides himself.” The king remarked that “from being the happiest,” he was “now going to be the miserablest creature on earth.” His wife might not have been his favorite lover, but she had been a true partner.

  He never remarried, nor did he rekindle his romance with Elizabeth Villiers. His new fascination was one of his page-boys, a rakish fop named Arnold Joost van Keppel. Keppel had captured the king’s attention when he suffered a riding accident in 1691, an eerie echo of the James I-Robert Carr affair. But it was not until after Mary’s death—when she, and by her directive, Elizabeth Villiers, were both out of the picture—that William fixated on Keppel.

  Keppel was a ladies’ man as well. Toward the beginning of William’s reign, when Keppel was a mere colonel in the Horse Guards, he commenced a torrid affair with a sultry older woman, Hortense Mancini, who had been one of Charles II’s mistresses. Then he dumped Hortense for her daughter, Marie-Charlotte, but that relationship did not last long.

  William was displeased at Keppel’s catting about, but he cared for him too much to keep him out of favor for too long.

  Hans Bentinck warned William that his affection for Keppel was giving rise to rumors that they were lovers. William angrily replied, “It is a most extraordinary thing that one could have no esteem of friendship for a young man without its being criminal.” True, but the king’s response is pretty much word for word the same one he’d given Mary when she caught him sneaking out of Elizabeth Villiers’s boudoir.

  Bentinck couldn’t remain at court and watch his sovereign self-destruct. After serving as ambassador to France, he returned to England in 1699, preferring to retire after thirty-five years of faithful service rather than watch the king make a fool of himself over Keppel.

  William bestowed numerous grants of money and property on his new favorite, and ennobled him to the peerage, creating him 1st Earl of Albemarle on February 10, 1697, and making him a Knight of the Garter in 1700. Keppel proved himself an able military commander and settled down as he matured, marrying a Dutch woman in 1701, with whom he had two children.

  Despite the rumors about his relationship with William, if the king had been homosexual, the world would have heard about it long before they decided to gossip about Keppel. Servants could be bought for a song, and foreign ambassadors were always eager to send damaging information back to their homelands. Certainly Bentinck, the straight arrow in every way who knew William better than anyone, would have raised the issue of the king’s proclivities years before the Keppel kerfuffle.

  Although the scandal reached international proportions as the gossip spread from drawing rooms to military camps to foreign courts, what is most likely is that the middle-aged William saw the young, flamboyant Keppel as the son he never had. Or not. In any event, the king’s outsized indulgence toward his protégé sparked jealousy from others—particularly his oldest and dearest friend, the man who had risked his own life to save his sovereign’s.

  But toward the end of William’s life, Bentinck renewed their friendship, visiting William every day. And William died clutching Bentinck’s hand to his heart. Bentinck was sixty years old when he succumbed to the lung disease pleurisy seven years later, on November 23, 1709.

  Keppel-made-Albemarle was also at the dying king’s bedside. William is said to have pressed the keys to his private cabinet and drawers into the earl’s hand and whispered, “You know what to do with them.” Although it was probably a straightforward request, anyone looking for a gay slant between the two men can spend years analyzing William’s final directive to his favorite.

  Albemarle died on May 30, 1718, at the age of forty-eight. His direct descendants include Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

  ANNE

  1665-1714 RULED 1702-1714

  THE LAST OF THE STUART MONARCHS, ANNE WAS THE younger daughter of King James II and his first wife, Anne Hyde. She spent her early childhood in France in the hope of a cure for her rheumy eyes. Unfortunately, no remedy was found, and Anne would always squint, giving the shy girl a permanently petulant expression. In 1670, she returned to England, and just a year later her mother died. The six-year-old Anne and her older sister, Mary, were sent to live at Richmond with the family of Sir Edward Villiers and his wife, Frances Howard, the girls’ governess. They were raised there alongside the six Villiers daughters and a number of other girls thought to be suitable companions for the young royals, including Frances Apsley and Sarah Jennings.

  On July 28, 1683, King Charles II married his eighteen-year -old niece Anne to Prince George of Denmark. Evidently, George had a strong sense of marital obligation, because Anne gave birth seventeen times in as many years and endured several miscarriages as well. The great tragedy of her life is considered 249 by many to be that none of her children survived to adulthood. In any case, from constantly being pregnant her weight continued to balloon, so that by the end of her life, purpose-built hoists had to haul her about in a most unregal fashion, plopping her into extra-sturdy chairs. She always suffered from ill health, including morbid obesity, gout, and porphyria, the metabolic disorder that contributed to the demise of her relative King George III.

  Because she was a younger sister, Anne had never been groomed for the throne. On March 8, 1702, when she became queen at the age of thirty-seven on the death of King William III, she lacked any serious background in statecraft. Her indolent husband (whom she grew to love very much) preferred to take a backseat, so Anne was forced to step up to the plate and work hard. She proved a diligent sovereign.

  For most of her reign, England was involved in the war of the Grand Alliance against France. The Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill—husband of Anne’s favorite, Sarah—planned successful campaigns and achieved three notable victories.

  Anne’s reign is also notable for the May 1, 1707, Act of Union, uniting England and Scotland as one realm, henceforth to be known as Great Britain. During her rule, territorial gains and economic privileges led to the foundation of the British Empire.

  Anne faced significant criticism that her political decisions were too often influenced by her favorites, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham. One detractor complai
ned that the country was governed from Anne’s bedroom by a bunch of dictators in petticoats.

  Despite her evident preference for women, Anne was despondent when her husband died in 1708. She did not remarry. Her only child to survive infancy was her eldest son, William, Duke of Gloucester, who died at the age of eleven on July 29, 1700. As William and Mary had no heirs either, Anne became the last of the Stuart dynasty.

  According to the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement enacted during William’s reign, the English crown had to pass to Anne’s nearest Protestant relation, paving the way for the Hanoverian dynasty and the Georgian era.

  Suffering from suppressed gout and severe dropsy that led to erysipelas (a high fever accompanied by a bacterial infection below the skin), Anne died on August 1, 1714, at the age of forty-nine. She was buried in Westminster Abbey in a coffin so enormous that it was practically square. Anne was succeeded by her second cousin, George Ludwig, the eldest son of Sophia, the late Electress of Hanover, who ascended the English throne as George I.

  ANNE and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough 1660-1744 and Abigail Masham, Baroness Masham c. 1670-1734

  Sarah’s father, an MP named Richard Jennings (sometimes spelled Jenyns), died when she was just eight years old. But because he had made a favorable impression on the Duke of York, Jennings’s daughters, Frances and Sarah, were given positions as maids of honor to the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena. Sarah was thirteen years old in 1673 when she joined the duchess’s household.

  Her friendship with James’s younger daughter, Anne, began to blossom in 1675, when Anne was only ten. For the next twenty-five years, Sarah would remain Anne’s bosom companion and confidante.

  When Anne became queen, she installed Sarah as a Lady of the Bedchamber. They corresponded frequently when they were apart, but their pet names for each other were hardly the lofty pseudonyms Mary and Frances Apsley employed. Anne and Sarah were the far more prosaic Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman.