by Roger Powell
Of all the royal bastards that appear in this book, Monmouth is the only one who sought to claim the Crown. In this he was unique and in spite of all the so called legal impediments preventing Monmouth from succeeding to his father’s crown, there was widespread belief that he would make a better candidate than his Roman Catholic uncle, the Duke of York. Indeed his very illegitimacy was seen by at least one contemporary, Charles Blount, as a positive advantage viz:
‘And remember, the old rule is, He who hath the worst title, ever makes the best King; as being constrain’d by a gracious government, to supply what he wants in Title; that instead of God and my Right, his Motto may be, God and my People’.
However, unlike his predecessor, Henry VIII, Charles II was not prepared to settle the succession question by statute. Indeed in many respects he was the architect of the whole succession problem. Had he simply divorced his wife and married again, there would almost certainly not have been a succession crisis. As the Earl of Shaftesbury pointed out:
‘Can anyone doubt, if he looks at the King’s face, as to his being capable of making children? He is only fifty. I know people of upwards of sixty who have no difficulty in making children.’
By refusing to agree to the exclusion of his brother James from the succession, Charles set the scene for Monmouth’s subsequent invasion. In retrospect it could be argued therefore that Monmouth’s attempt to take the Crown by force, despite his illegitimacy, was not the unprecedented act of a madman.
William of Normandy had done exactly the same thing in 1066, despite there being a legitimate heir male to the Crown with a superior title to his own. Charles had four options, to declare Monmouth’s legitimacy as a fact; to declare his legitimacy by an Act of Parliament; to decree that bastardy was not a bar to inheriting the crown; or to assert that ‘unlawful marriage of parents ought not to illegitimate the children’; but he ignored them all. There was also the belief that in the event of Monmouth succeeding to the Crown his bastardy would be automatically cancelled.
Like his father, Monmouth gained an unenviable reputation as a gallant. Among his many conquests could be counted the lovely Eleanor Néedham, younger sister of the incomparable Jane Middleton, a noted beauty of the early Restoration. By Mistress Néedham, Monmouth had four children, two sons and two daughters viz: Brig-Gen James Crofts and Capt Henry Crofts, RN. ‘For Debauchery and Irreligion he was one of the vilest Men that has set foot in Boston’ claimed Judge Sewell. Henrietta, Duchess of Bolton – who accompanied the ladies of the condemned Jacobite peers with a petition to the House of Lords in 1716 and in doing so earned the condemnation of Lady Cowper viz: ‘The Duchess of Bolton went with the ladies, to make believe she was one of the Royal Family: though that won’t do; it’s too plainly writ in her face that she’s Penn’s daughter, the quaking preacher’, ‘She said Lady Derwentwater came crying to her, when the Duke was not at home, and persuaded her to go to plead for her Lord’ and Isabella, who died an infant.
After Monmouth’s death, Mistress Néedham married a commissioner of the Inland Revenue and bore him a daughter. She also received regular payments from the Treasury to help with the expense of her children’s upkeep and education. Monmouth also had a daughter, Mary Hicks, by, it is said, Elizabeth, daughter of the poet Edmund Waller. This young lady was married at the age of thirteen, in 1689, to James de Cardonnel, who served as secretary to the Duke of Schomberg during the Jacobite Wars in Ireland, and she had by him eleven children. The present day representative of this family is Charles Boyd Findlay, of Alton, Hampshire (see Burke’s Landed Gentry of Scotland).
Monmouth also had an intrigue with Mary Kirke, a Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York (Mary of Modena) but appears to have shared her favours with the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave. Warned of Mulgrave’s interest in his mistress, Monmouth had him placed under house arrest in the palace guard house. Mulgrave retaliated by challenging one of the Duke’s adherents, Mr Felton, to a duel, Lord Middleton and Mr Buckley being seconds. Nine months later, in May/June 1675, the unfortunate maid ‘had the ill fortune to become the mother of a boy, which however, died within 3 or 4 hours’. ‘It was not said yet to which father it belongs’.
After the child was born, her brother Capt Percy Kirke challenged Mulgrave to a duel ‘for having debauched and abused his sister’ despite the fact that ‘ye Earle purged himself before hand of any injury he had done of ye nature & though shee herself does not accuse him either of getting ye child or any other act that we heare of’. Again Lord Middleton acted as Mulgrave’s second and Kirke was seconded by Capt Charles Godfrey, who later married James II’s ex-mistress Arabella Churchill. Mulgrave was severley wounded but Mrs Kirke ‘persists to protest that she does not know whether he be man or woman’. Mrs Kirke, who was aunt to the 1st Duchess of St Albans, subsequently married, as his second wife, Sir Thomas Vernon, Bt, and by him had several children. However, the greatest love of Monmouth’s life was Henrietta, Lady Wentworth, whom he took as his mistress in 1680. There were no children of the union, but the relationship was strong and lasted until his death.
Unlike his cousin the Duke of Berwick (see page 99), Monmouth was not a naturally gifted soldier or commander. But that did not prevent his father from making him Captain General of all the Armed Forces in England, Wales and Scotland. His victory over the covenanters at Bothwell Bridge in 1679 was due mainly to the experience and abilities of his more able subordinates, in particular John Graham of Claverhouse, subsequently known as ‘Bonnie Dundee’. Nevertheless he displayed conspicuous bravery on a number of occasions during his military career. The most notable was at the siege of Maestricht in 1673, on which occasion Louis XIV wrote to King Charles
‘I ought not to forget to mention that the day after, the besieged having made a sortie upon the hald moon by means of a small mine, the Duke attacked their guard in hand upon the first alarm of the sortie, and dislodged them’.
He also took part in the naval battle of Sole Bay in 1665 when the English Fleet under the command of the Duke of York defeated the Dutch. Having seemingly reached such dizzy heights of favour, he then earned the King’s displeasure in 1683 by becoming implicated in the Rye House plot to kill the King and Duke of York and was banished the kingdom. Nell Gwyn (see page 75) tried to act as an intermediary, but to no avail. The King never spoke his name again and even on his deathbed, he did not mention him.
In the post Restoration years, the rumour that Charles had married Lucy was so strong and persistant that the King was eventually forced to make several public declarations denying it. The belief that he could be legitimate, clearly played on Monmouth’s mind for the whole of his life, but what evidence did he have to support it? The unofficial marriage certificate drawn up by his ex-tutor, Thomas Ross, was obviously a key factor in leading him to commit, in the eyes of some of his contemporaries, the ultimate folly of rebelling against his uncle James II. However, whilst his father remained alive, his ambition was held in check and of all the King’s bastards, he was the most loved and indulged. Had he been content to be the first noble in the land after his uncle James, a long and fruitful career in government could have been his for the taking.
During his lifetime Monmouth enjoyed a princely income of over twenty-one thousand pounds per annum, far more than any of King Charles’s other bastards. Only the Duchess of Cleveland had an income that surpassed his, due mainly to the number of children she had borne the King. In addition to his pensions etc., Charles also purchased John Ashburnham’s house at Chiswick for him at a cost of seven thousand pounds and later Moor Park at a cost of thirteen thousand, two hundred pounds from the Duke of Ormonde.
When Charles II died in 1685, Monmouth finally took the fateful step of landing at Lyme Regis on the south coast of England with a handful of supporters and munitions and was proclaimed King at Taunton. Within a short time four thousand men had flocked to his standard, most of whom were weavers and artisans. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to take the city of Bristol he atta
cked the Royal army at Sedgemoor and suffered an ignominious defeat. He was later captured in the New Forest and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he was beheaded (at the 5th blow) in 1685. Although all his honours were forfeited, his wife was able to pass on her own title as Duchess of Buccleuch to their children, and indeed their grandson was restored to the English honours of his grandfather, excepting the Dukedom of Monmouth.
On his deliverance by water to the privy stairs at Whitehall for his fateful interview with King James, he was observed by the Earl of Ailesbury, who dearly loved him and afterwards wrote of him that he
‘was a fine courtier, but of a most poor understanding as to cabinet and politics, (who) gave himself wholly up to flatterers and knaves by consequence’.
The image of the poor Duke ascending the stairs ‘lean and pale with a disconsolate physiognomy’ haunted him for the rest of his life. But even King James was forced to admit that ‘from the very beginning of this desperate attempt’ the Duke ‘behaved with the conduct of a great captain and had not made one false step’. Praise indeed!
Neither of Monmouth’s legitimate sons resembled their royal grandsire but the younger Henry Scott, subsequently created Earl of Deloraine by Queen Anne, was renowned for his good breeding and was a personal friend of George, Prince of Wales, later George II. His mother, the Duchess of Buccleuch, complained repeatedly about his extravagance stating that she had given him £20,000 plus another £4,000 for the building and furnishing of his house at Leadwell, thus leaving him just £5 in her will. His second wife Mary, daughter of Charles Howard, a grandson of the Earl of Berkshire, became mistress to George II and was also governess to the Princesses Mary and Louisa.
Their affair began in the winter of 1734 following the dismissal of Lady Suffolk, the King’s previous mistress of some twenty years standing.
‘About nine o’clock every night the King used to return to the Queen’s apartment from that of his daughters, where, from the time of Lady Suffolk’s disgrace, he used to pass those evenings he did not go to the opera or play at quadrille, constraining them, tiring himself, and talking a little bawdy to Lady Deloraine, who was always of the party’, claimed Lord Hervey.
On the death of her husband, Lady Deloraine had married again in 1734 to Mr Wyndham, six years her junior, and by him had at least one son whose paternity was called into question by none other than Sir Robert Walpole. According to Lord Hervey:
‘Sir Robert one day, whilst she (lady Deloraine) was standing in the Hall at Richmond with her little son of about one year old in her arms, said to her: ‘That’s a pretty boy, Lady Deloraine; who got it?’ To which her Ladyship, before half a dozen people, without taking the question at all ill, replied: ‘Mr Wyndham, upon honour’; and then added, laughing, ‘but I will not promise whose the next will be’
If Lord Hervey is to be believed, she had:
‘one of the prettiest faces that ever was formed, which though she was now five and thirty, had a bloom upon it, too, that not one woman in ten thousand has at fifteen and what is more extraordinary a bloom which she herself never had till after she was twenty five and married. She was of a middle stature, rather lean than fat, neither well-made, nor crooked, not genteel, and had something remarkably awkard about her arms which were long and bony, with a pair of ugly white hands at the end of them.’
When the affair ended is unclear, but Lady Deloraine died in 1744.
The present representative of the family is Richard Walter, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry, KBE, DL (born 1954), one of the largest landowners in the country. It is interesting to note that through his grandmother, Mary (Molly), née Lascelles, he (and his cousin the Duke of Northumberland) also descend from Nell Gwyn and Charles II through the Dukes of St Albans (see page 75).
Although the Duke’s father was officially recognised as Chief of the Name and Arms of Scot, his surname is in fact Montagu-Douglas-Scott, thus representing the great alliances and inheritances that have been made by his ancestors over the centuries. The complicated arms matriculated at the Court of the Lord Lyon are firstly his paternal Royal quartering, being the arms of King Charles II, debruised by a baton sinister argent as Earl of Doncaster; secondly for the Dukedom of Argyll; thirdly for the Dukedom of Queensberry; fourthly for the Dukedom of Montagu; and in the centre of the shield an inescutcheon with the arms of Scott. The family motto Amo (I love) certainly seemed appropriate enough when granted.
Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Howard, later Countess of Yarmouth (née Boyle, later FitzRoy) (1650–84)
Charlotte was born in about 1650 in Paris, the daughter of Charles II by Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Killigrew, Vice Chamberlain to Charlotte’s grandmother, Queen Henrietta Maria. Elizabeth had been married in 1638, at the age of sixteen, in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall to Francis Boyle, the 4th surviving son of the 1st Earl of Cork. Francis was later created Viscount Shannon, the original patent was dated 1654 at Paris and sold at Sotheby’s in 1965. According to the Duke of Ormonde, Viscount Shannon was ‘a plain, honest gentleman’ and from his surviving letters would seem to have been ‘a kindly and fair-minded man’.
At the time of her daughter’s birth Elizabeth Boyle was twenty-eight years old and Charles just twenty years old. The age difference is interesting simply because it is the only recorded case of Charles having an older woman as his mistress. Charlotte grew up to be very like her father in looks and her portraits display a lively intelligence and a merry disposition. At the age of thirteen she was married to James Howard, who died in 1669 aged nineteen, (grandson of Theophilus Howard, 2nd Earl of Suffolk, KG, PC) and by him had a daughter Stuarta, who became a Maid of Honour to Queen Mary II; she died in 1706. Charlotte married again in 1672 William Paston, subsequently 2nd Earl of Yarmouth, a stalwart supporter of King James II to whom he remained loyal at the Revolution, even at the cost of several periods in the Tower of London. Unfortunately Charlotte died suddenly in 1684 at her house in Pall Mall, aged only thirty-four, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving two sons (who predeceased their father) as well as two daughters. She died ‘Without any Arms of her own, the King, her father, not having assign’d her any in her Life-time.’
Although Charles never publicly acknowledged Charlotte or granted her the royal arms, he did grant her and her husband a modest pension of £500 in 1667, which continued to be paid to her even after the death of her husband in 1669. The King’s failure to recognise her may have been due to her mother’s desire to hide her indiscretion. Legally she was the daughter of Lord Shannon and was named as such in official documents as is evidenced by the following entry in the parish registers of Heston, Middlesex:
1662/3 9 March
Jacobus Howard, Thoma Howard, Armigero Patre praenobili Suffolccie Comite & Charlotta Boyle, Patre Francisco Vicecomte Shannon
In her naturalisation papers granted the same year, she was once again described as Lord Shannon’s daughter:
‘Charlotte Boyle, born at Paris in France, daughter of Francis,
Viscount Shannon, brother to Earl of Corke’
William Paston was not created Earl of Yarmouth, for that honour had already gone to his father Robert in 1679. William ‘a Non Juror all King William’s reign, but a man of sense and knowledge in the affairs of his country’ was not so fortunate when it came to managing his own finances. By 1708 it was said of him that he
‘is as low as you can imagin; he hath vast debts, and suffers every thing to run to extremity; soe his goods have all been seised in execution and his lands extended, soe that he hath scare a servant to attend him … And yet cannot be perswaded to take any method of putteing his affairs in a better posture, wch they are still capable of’.
None of the Earl’s sons survived him, the eldest Lord Paston, a godson of Charles II, died at the age of 45 in 1718 and his younger brother William at the age of 35 in 1717. The former earned some notoriety in 1700 when he
‘shot the Ld Portland for refusing to marry his sister
Mrs Howard, to whom he had promised marriage. My Ld Paston challenged first but he refused, and so was shot’.
Lord Portland, then British Ambassador to France, was of course a favourite of William III and the affair caused quite a stir. When Lord Paston eventually married, it was to a lady who was described by one historian as ‘the daughter of a porter and an apple woman’. The union produced only a daughter, who died unmarried in 1731.
Of Lady Yarmouth’s daughters, the eldest, Charlotte, married firstly Thomas Herne, of Heverland, Norfolk and secondly Thomas Weldon. By her first husband Lady Charlotte had seven sons one of whom bore the unusual name of Hanover Herne, no doubt named in honour of the House of Guelph. The child was born in 1712, before George I came to England, and one wonders what the other descendants of Charles II thought about this honour. Lady Yarmouth’s younger daughter Rebecca married Sir John Holland, Bt and died in 1726, having borne her husband three sons and three daughters.
The modern day representative of the family is Sir Charles John Buckworth-Herne-Soame, 12th Bt, who is descended from Lady Charlotte’s eldest son Paston Clement John Herne.
Charles FitzCharles, Earl of Plymouth (1657–80) and Catherine FitzCharles
Catherine Pegge was the daughter of Thomas Pegge, the squire of Yeldersley Old Hall, Derbyshire and a staunch Royalist, by his wife Katharine, daughter of Sir Gilbert Kniveton, Bt of Mercaston, another brave cavalier who paid a high price for his loyalty. Catherine had met King Charles II in Bruges whence the Pegges had fled, and it was not long before she was the mother of two of his illegitimate children, Charles and Catherine. Subsequently she married in 1667, as his 4th wife, Sir Edward Green, 1st and last Bt, of Sampford, Essex and died in 1678. By her husband she had had another daughter Justinia, who died unmarried in Pontoise, France in 1717, aged fifty, and a son William who died before his father. Sir Edward had died in 1676 in Flanders a ruined man who