The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home
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Yet Mary was not reduced to an anonymous or solitary life. Buckingham may have loved Anna Maria in Mary’s place, but Mary was still his wife and enjoyed all the material trappings that this entailed. She was, said the Vicomtesse de Longueville, ‘very fond of finery’, adorning her dresses with luxurious, if rather unfashionable, gold lace cuffs and heavy jewels.3 These added to Mary’s faintly absurd appearance, but at least gave her a modicum of pleasure. Her marriage had also secured for Mary a position as one of the foremost noblewoman in the country, after Queen Catherine and the Duchess of York. Indeed she was known to greatly enjoy the company of the queen, with whom she attended balls and played games.
Even when his currency at court was low, Buckingham used his writing to express his political opinions. Of his many plays the satire The Rehearsal, first staged in 1671 and published anonymously a year later, is the most enduring. The Rehearsal was a satire on the heroic drama, a genre of play popular with Restoration audiences. Heroic dramas were written in rhyming couplets and formal language, which often verged on the bombastic. Typically, these plays were set in exotic or historic locations such as Ancient Rome, Babylon or Peru. The plots were epic, entailing conquests, sieges and clashes of civilisations, and the characters usually grand and powerful – protagonists included Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor. Common themes were love, honour and divided allegiance.4 The main advocate of the form was the poet John Dryden, who invented the term ‘heroic drama’ to describe his play The Conquest of Granada (1670), which dramatised the conflict between Islam and Christianity during the fall of Moorish Spain.
Buckingham found the pomp and pretension of the genre objectionable and its scale risible. He particularly took exception to the classical rhyming couplets in which Dryden wrote. In The Rehearsal two gentlemen, Mr Smith and Mr Johnson, watch with increasing scorn and incredulity the preposterous new work by the playwright Mr Bayes. The action of the play-within-the-play encompasses a sequence of absurd mock-heroic episodes: two characters challenge each other to a duel on the grounds that they do not love the same woman; a company of soldiers kill each other, then stand up and perform a dance, with limited success; the playwright attempts to demonstrate the moves, but falls flat on his face, breaking his nose.
The first performance of The Rehearsal took place on 7 December 1671 at the Drury Lane Theatre. By this time Buckingham had returned to London following a period of mourning in the country for his lost son and, having sold York House, was living at Wallingford House with Anna Maria and Mary. The duchess enjoyed a comfortable but quiet life, while Buckingham and Anna Maria’s lives continued in an endless whirl of social activity. The poet Edward Waller recalled one night of revelry with the couple that lasted until four in the morning and was forced to decline an invitation for the following night, writing to his wife that ‘such hours cannot be kept’.5
The Drury Lane Theatre was managed by the King’s Company, which was one of two licensed theatre companies in London and run by Thomas Killigrew, father of the loutish Henry. On the night of a play, Drury Lane was always crammed with coaches. Access to the theatre was down narrow passages between the surrounding buildings, an architectural flaw that would have resulted in significant congestion and particularly irked Pepys.
On the first night of The Rehearsal Buckingham positioned Dryden in an adjacent box to his, so that he could enjoy the playwright’s reaction to the work.6 Their artistic differences had played themselves out in a long-running personal feud that dated back to 1667, when Buckingham and Dryden had staged plays at the same time: The Chances and Secret Love respectively.7 In the epilogue to The Chances, Buckingham poked fun at Dryden’s pomposity: ‘The end of plays should be to entertain / And not to keep the auditors in pain’. A year later, Dryden retaliated in a prologue, accusing Buckingham, who had adapted The Chances from an existing play by John Fletcher, of ‘robbing the dead’. Dryden’s continued acclaim only spurred Buckingham on in his literary endeavours.
The protagonist of The Rehearsal, Mr Bayes, was played by the celebrated comic actor John Lacy, who was favourite of Charles II and had been responsible for spotting the talent of 14-year-old orange-seller Nell Gwyn, who went on to be an acclaimed actress before becoming long-term mistress to the king. For the first performance of Buckingham’s play, Lacy’s Mr Bayes was dressed in Dryden’s signature black velvet. Dryden later retaliated in his poem Absalom and Achitophel, which depicted the central political players of the time – Thomas Clifford, 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh; Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington; Buckingham; Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Baron Ashley; and John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale – in the guise of biblical characters. Buckingham’s character was reflected in the frivolous Zimri, a dilettante with erroneous opinions and a debauched lifestyle:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long:
But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking;
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ,
With something new to wish, or to enjoy!8
By the time Dryden penned Absalom, his wrath had been simmering for ten years; sitting across from Buckingham on the opening night, he remained taciturn. The Rehearsal concluded with a vigorous jig, and an epilogue that called for an end to heroic drama: ‘Let’s have, at least, once in our lives, a time / When we may hear some reason, not all rhyme / We have this ten years felt its influence / Pray, let this prove a year of prose and sense.’
The character of Bayes was not only a parody of Dryden, but was also inspired by another of Buckingham’s rivals, Lord Arlington, secretary of state of the southern office (in the 17th century, the position was divided geographically). Years earlier, Buckingham and Arlington had formed a temporary alliance to ensure the political ruin of the Lord Chancellor, the 1st Earl of Clarendon. With Clarendon forced into exile, a new political arrangement evolved. Whereas English monarchs had previously taken counsel from a single, favourite minister, Clarendon was replaced by several influential advisers. These were Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington and Lauderdale, the elite political group who came to be known by the acronym the ‘Cabal’. Although popular perception of the Cabal was of a unified coterie surrounding the king, it in fact comprised disparate members with clashing political agendas that surfaced in the wake of Clarendon’s removal from power. The greatest of these rivalries was between Buckingham and Arlington.
Arlington cut a powerful figure at court. He was a formidable linguist and a good political tactician; a strip of black tape covering a wound on his nose served as a reminder of his loyal service during the Civil War. Like many courtiers, he was jealous of Buckingham’s close relationship with Charles II, which gave the duke an influence disproportionate to his political position. In 1667, Arlington exploited Buckingham’s association with the astrologer John Heydon in order to damage his relationship with the king. Heydon was a controversial mystic who had a reputation for treasonous pursuits and had previously been accused of trying to break Buckingham out of the Tower of London with the help of a gang of disgruntled sailors. Heydon, branded a plotter, was a liability to Buckingham. During a search of Heydon’s Tower Hill lodgings, Arlington claimed to have discovered a treasonous horoscope commissioned by Buckingham, which predicted the date of the king’s death. Using this evidence, Arlington embarked on a mission to disgrace his rival.
Arlington’s smear campaign proved successful in so far as Buckingham was sent to the Tower. Conditions at the Tower were better than most other prisons, and many held there were guilty of religious or political crimes. In some instances, incarceration at the Tower was the prelude to execution, but others were detained there indeterminately, or ‘at the King’s pleasure’. Buckingham’s stay was unlikely to last more than a few months, and gave
the London public an opportunity to express their support for him. As Buckingham coached across London, he was cheered by the traders and the city merchants who championed him as a man of the people. He even stopped off on the way to dine with companions at the Sun Tavern in Bishop’s Gate. The meal was a debauched affair and Pepys recorded that the duke was ‘mighty merry, and sent word to the Lieutenant of the Tower that he would come to him as soon as he had dined’.9 A large crowd gathered outside the tavern and, after eating and drinking his fill, Buckingham appeared on the balcony to acknowledge the cheers. Following his release in July 1667, the feud continued.
Bayes’s blundering attempts to direct his unruly troupe of actors were widely interpreted as a parody of Arlington’s political delusions and his credibility at court collapsed. Aspiring wits strutted about court with black patches on their noses to mimic Arlington’s disfigurement and later printed editions of The Rehearsal depicted the central protagonist with a black patch on his nose.
As The Rehearsal opened to cheering crowds, it seemed that Buckingham’s fortunes were once again ascending. The time to set his plans for Cliveden into motion had arrived.
Chapter 6
CONCEPTION
THE MOST CONVENIENT way to travel from London to Cliveden in 1671 was by boat along the River Thames. The Thames west of London had traditionally been a stronghold of royal power. During the early stages of the English Civil Wars, large sections of the river had been held by the Royalists, and when Charles I’s government was banished from London in 1642, Oxford became the temporary royal capital. At the Restoration, there was much pomp and ceremony to signify the return of royal power to the river; in August 1662, Charles II was rowed from Hampton Court in a flotilla that self-consciously imitated the great Tudor pageants that had occurred on the Thames. But despite these regal associations, most of the traffic on the river was not so refined. The Thames was the main east-west thoroughfare in the south of England and estimates of the number of watermen working on the river at the end of the 17th century range up to 40,000.1 On top of these there were many ‘bargees’, who lived and worked on large brightly coloured barges, some of which had riverscapes painted on the sides, as well as boats carrying all kinds of cargo, and ferries crossing between the riverbanks.
Travelling upriver from the royal palace at Hampton Court, a 17th-century vessel would pass between Shepperton shore and the town of Weybridge, before winding around Chertsey, where Buckingham’s friend Abraham Cowley went to escape the crowds and vice of the capital, only to die an early death while out gathering hay. The vessel would then pass beneath Windsor Castle, situated on its precipitous knoll of chalk, and Dorney Court, where the first English pineapple was grown in the 1660s (the gardener John Rose later presented it to Charles II). Moving west along the river, the average size and draught of boats got smaller: as they decreased in size the boats were known as ‘western barges’, ‘trows’, and ‘worsers’. Boats operating at the western reaches of the river had to be shallow and highly manoeuvrable, and it was said of the Thames barges that they could sail anywhere after a heavy dew.2
Further upriver, just beyond Maidenhead, the Thames was bordered on its east side by a cliff of 140 feet. The woods that stood along the top of the cliff were all that remained of the primeval forest that once covered the Thames Valley south of the Chiltern Hills. Except for the woods, the land along this stretch of the Thames was, by the 17th century, quite bare. John Evelyn described it as ‘wretchedly barren… producing nothing but fern’.3 Buckingham’s house at Cliveden would be built at the north end of the cliff, with the Thames and the Cookham floodplain to the west, and a wooded hollow to the south and east.
In order to build a house in this position an enormous platform needed to be created, which would have involved excavating massive amounts of earth. The house was to stand in the centre of this platform, surrounded by a vast terrace. It was an unusual design. Many of Buckingham’s peers were somewhat perplexed by Cliveden’s location. The contemporary preference was for a sheltered setting close to water, or a house situated in the middle of a hillside with space for gardens below and plantations above.4 Instead Buckingham planned to build his house on the highest ground, forgoing shelter for an all-encompassing view of the Buckinghamshire countryside. Buckingham’s decision to build a country house in such a unique location was not just a question of style or design. On a symbolic level, a 17th-century country house was an index of status and expressed the genealogy, political power, prestige and character of its owner. Buckingham sought to communicate something of his worldliness and education in his choice of an Italianate design for Cliveden, and the Villiers coat of arms was to feature prominently around the house.
Political uncertainty and continued fears about confiscation of property meant that only ten country houses were built in the 1660s, but during the following decade construction picked up, and Cliveden was one of 19 new-build country houses of the 1670s. Among the other members of the court nobility who built houses during this decade was Arlington, Buckingham’s political foe. It was not only members of the peerage who expressed their stature in this way. During the last third of the 17th century an increasing proportion of country houses were built by wealthy professionals and merchants. Country-house builders of the 1680s included the slave trader Ferdinando Gorges, and Henry Parker, who built Honington Hall in Warwickshire with profits made trading English cloth for currants, wine and cotton wool in the Levant.5 Buckingham was determined that his project would rival not only the plans of entrepreneurs and aristocrats, but those of the king himself: at the time Charles was undertaking extravagant building programmes at Richmond, Whitehall, Greenwich and Kensington, designed and overseen by Sir Christopher Wren.
Such undertakings were extremely expensive and the future of Buckingham’s Cliveden was not fully secure. The duke was not renowned for his ability to manage money. Like most aristocrats of the time, Buckingham had inherited many estates, some of which he leased for a profit. According to the system of primogeniture, land passed from the father to the eldest son. Buckingham’s father had not been born into landed wealth but had been given estates by James I and Charles I; however, the greatest part of the second duke’s substance came through his maternal grandfather, the 4th Earl of Rutland, from whom he inherited substantial groupings of land in Rutland and Yorkshire. Estimates of the value of Buckingham’s estates varied widely. Writing to Charles II in 1660, Buckingham had guessed his rent roll to be about £30,000 a year, just under £2.5 million in today’s money; Pepys assessed it more conservatively, at £19,600; and a report by his trustees, who managed his finances from 1671 onwards, calculated that if his mortgaged lands were recovered and all his lands were leased, he would receive an annual rent yield of £17,951.6
Buckingham’s decision to establish a trust to manage his assets was motivated, at least in part, by political anxiety. It had not escaped him that his trip to Versailles had been a fool’s mission and a sign that his favour with the king was waning. Clarendon’s prosecution for treason following his fall set a dangerous precedent for deposed courtiers to face serious legal charges. One of the consequences of a felony conviction such as treason was the forfeiture of estates to the Crown. Having narrowly escaped charges of treason during the Heydon affair, the risks of this must have weighed heavily on Buckingham’s mind. One way of securing assets against confiscation in the event of such a prosecution was to arrange for them to be held under a Declaration of Trust. Although the legal status of trusts was unclear at the time of the Restoration in 1660, a widely discussed legal case in 1669 had reinforced their status as bulwarks against the confiscation of assets by the Crown.7 It is likely that an awareness of his fragile political position informed Buckingham’s decision to visit the London bank of Clayton and Morris in Austin Friars, just north of the junction between Throgmorton Street and Threadneedle Street, in 1671.
From 1671 until Buckingham’s death in 1687, Robert Clayton and John Morris, along with four ot
her trustees, controlled the duke’s estates. They inherited a badly managed portfolio. After the Restoration Buckingham’s estates were managed by Mr Braythwaite, a republican whom Buckingham found entertaining, but who was extravagant and untrustworthy, later siding with his employer’s enemies during the Heydon affair. In 1668, Braythwaite was succeeded by Edward Christian, who falsified accounts in order to line his own pockets and stole from the duke’s ready cash. He was eventually dismissed by the trustees in 1673, but by this time Christian had wreaked significant damage on Buckingham’s finances.8 The unfortunate succession of accountants provided more fodder for Dryden, whose Zimri was ‘Beggar’d by fools whom still he found too late / He had his jest, and they had his estate.’9 To make matters worse, Buckingham had accumulated huge debts and was paying interest rates as high as 18 per cent on his borrowings. On 24 August 1672, in a desperate bid to save his beloved glassworks from his creditors, Buckingham signed a deed gifting it and ‘all the stock at Vauxhall’ to Anna Maria,10 but his plan failed. A year later, Buckingham’s beloved glassworks were put up for sale at £4,000.11
The first step taken by the trustees in order to improve the condition of Buckingham’s finances was to increase rents on his lands so that they reflected the value of the properties, and the next step was to consolidate his debts in loans with an interest rate of no more than six per cent.12 Their aim was to enable him to meet his regular expenses, to grant him £5,000 a year allowance and to mitigate for extraordinary expenses such as the building of the house at Cliveden. But even after the trustees’ initial measures had been taken, Buckingham’s estates still failed to yield sufficient funds to achieve these ends and, between 1674 and 1678, Clayton and Morris sold off large groups of the duke’s estates in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire and London, raising £101,238.13 As these properties were being sold off, new investment opportunities arose: in 1672 the company of Royal Adventurers Trading To Africa was re-established as the Royal African Company, with a charter that included the right to sell slaves. The company benefited from close ties with Charles II and his successor James II, and was popular among aristocratic investors. Buckingham was an early subscriber.14