by Roger Powell
Dame Cecilia’s eventual entry into the Dunkirk community was almost certainly influenced by the unfortunate death in 1712, of the Duke of Hamilton in a duel with Lord Mohun. The prospects of a good and suitable marriage for her had always been slim, given the uncertainty surrounding her paternity, but the delay in entering a religious community does perhaps suggest that she did entertain some hope of finding a husband.
There are two theories about the upbringing of her son Charles, which are not incompatible with each other. One is that he was brought up by his grandmother in Chiswick, and the other that he was placed in the household of the Earl of Middleton at St Germain-en-Laye. After his father’s death in 1712, he went to Antwerp and then Switzerland (where he was known as the Count of Arran and devoted himself to classical studies) before dying in Paris in 1754 and leaving issue of at least one son.
Dame Cecilia is not mentioned by Sandford as one of King Charles’s children, indeed her very existence is ignored by him. However, she is mentioned in a French work of reference of the late eighteenth century as King Charles’s daughter: Dictionnaire de la Noblesse, by M de la Chenaye-Desbois (pub. 1773).
Sir Charles Beauclerk, KG, FRS, 1st Duke of St Albans (1670-1726)
‘Come hither you little bastard’ was how his mother Nell Gwyn endearingly summoned her six year old son, Charles, in the presence of his father King Charles II, because as she said, she had no other name or title by which to call him. It is also said, unlikely though it be, that she threatened to throw her son into a river, lake or moat unless he was immediately ennobled and given a surname. But whatever the truth of these stories, it was not long before he was named Charles Beauclerk and created Earl of Burford (1676) and Baron Heddington and eight years later Duke of St Albans (1684) – the last Dukedom to be created by King Charles II. He was also given two colourful appointments; Hereditary Master Falconer of England and Hereditary Registrar of the Court of Chancery (worth £1,500 pa).
Described by Evelyn as ‘a very pretty boy’, Charles was the only surviving son of King Charles II and his favourite mistress, the actress ‘Pretty Witty Nell’, who paradoxically was appointed a Lady of Queen Catherine’s Privy Chamber and was the subject of King Charles’s deathbed wish ‘let not poor Nelly starve’. Nell Gwyn was never ennobled, although it was said on good authority that the King was planning to create her Countess of Plymouth which did not materialise, and later Countess of Greenwich, which was thwarted by his death. Nevertheless she was the mother of a duke and the founder of a dynasty.
Madame de Sevigne when writing to Madame Grignan in 1675 commented that
‘She [Louise de Keroualle, later Duchess of Portsmouth, another rival mistress of Charles II, of whom more anon – see page 88] had not counted on the advent of a young actress whose charms bewitched the King, and from whom she finds herself unable to detach him. In pride and resolution the actress is her match. If looks could kill Keroual would no longer be alive, the actress makes faces at her, often manages to inveigle the King, and boasts of his favours. She is young, untamed, bold, agreeable and dissolute, and she plies her trade with a will.’
Nell Gwyn, about whom no less than sixteen biographies have been written over the last three centuries – the most recent, by her descendant Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford and heir to the Dukedom, and published last year – as well as at least thirty four portraits and miniatures painted, (including those by Kneller, Lely and Verelest), captured not only the King’s heart, but the people’s too. Her life was the classic rags to riches story and her wit and sense of fun was infectious and would fill a volume.
Although neither her date nor place of birth are known with any certainty, nor even her father, it is clear that she was brought up in Covent Garden, London, where she first became an orange seller at the newly founded King’s Theatre. There she caught the eye of Charles Hart, its manager as well as one of the best known actors of the day, and it was he who introduced her to the stage and into his bed. In seven short years, she played at least twenty major roles and rose to become one of the most successful and best loved comic actresses of the day, before catching the Royal eye. The top playwright, John Dryden, wrote parts especially for her and would rather delay his productions than see them put on without her. She was indeed great box office as well as being the darling strumpet of the crowd.
In fact the meeting of Charles II and Nelly seems to have been very contrived. Pepys records in July 1668 that ‘my Lord Buckhurst hath got Nell away from the King’s House, and gives her £100 a year, so she hath returned her scripts to the house, and will act no more.’ Finding yourself a rich nobleman to keep you – as Nelly had done, was pretty much the ideal for actresses and Nelly had done rather well! Charles (Sackville), Lord Buckhurst, later Earl of Dorset and of Middlesex was described by Horace Walpole as ‘the finest gentleman in the voluptuous court of Charles II.’ At this time, however, Buckhurst was mainly a man of pleasure, best known for his life of debauchery, although he was also well known as a poet and for his ballads. Later on he was to become a patron of the arts. This, then, was the man who took Nelly from her adoring public to settle her down in the spa town of Epsom. It was a happy and pleasant enough interlude.
One of the remarkable things about Nelly is that she always appears to have always been faithful to the man she was with - a sort of serial monogamy. This was unusual given the times and the company she kept, quite apart from her upbringing. She was truly loyal and being such a public figure, she could never have kept any lovers secret. But her move to Epsom was shortlived and within six weeks, Nelly was back in London, embarrassingly asking for her old job back. Buckhurst was not a man of bottomless funds and Nelly had been simply too expensive for him, although they were to remain friends for the rest of their lives. Nelly now looked to regain her old place at Drury Lane but this was awkward, for she had walked out on the Company and on her lover, its manager. Despite her box office appeal, it is hard to imagine any great welcome back. Yet despite Hart’s hurt feelings for Nelly, he had a business to run and she was certainly good for business.
But although Nelly was soon back on stage, unbeknown to her, a new chapter of her love life was about to open up. As Nelly’s career in the public eye had started in the King’s Company, little did she realise that it would be in the company of the King that she would continue for the rest of her life. For one of Nelly’s friends was the notorious Barbara Castlemaine, (see page 50), the King’s chief mistress and a patron of the arts and the friend of many an actor and actress. Barbara had been introduced to Charles Hart in 1668, and as Pepys records:
‘my Lady Castlemaine is mightily in love with Hart, of their house: and he is much with her in private, and she goes to him and do give him many presents’.
In doing so, Barbara broke with her cousin the Duke of Buckingham, who then set about driving a wedge between her and Charles II by introducing a rival, and who better than Nelly. But mistresses néeded installing and compensation for her current noble lover was required. There is good evidence that Buckhurst did indeed receive compensation for giving up Nelly to the King; he was sent on Royal business to Paris, on three occasions between 1669–70, and was also appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber – with its salary of £1,000 a year besides being granted land.
A story published at the time had Charles and Nell on their first date. The King had seen her at the theatre and had asked to meet her in a tavern for dinner afterwards together with her companion, Charles Villiers and his brother, James, Duke of York. At the end of the evening, the bar keeper presented Charles with the bill, but he carried no money. So Charles passed the bill on to his brother, who did not have enough money on him and he duly passed it on to the unfortunate Villiers who had to pay the whole bill. Whereupon Nelly cried out’Oddsfish! sure this is the poorest company that I ever kept!
In January 1668, Pepys was told that ‘the king did send several times for Nelly, and she was with him’ but her unique attraction was her sharp mind and wi
t that set her apart from all others. An example of this wit was the name Nelly gave her King. Because her two previous lovers had been called Charles (i.e.Hart & Buckhurst) she called her king ‘my Charles III’. Even the French ambassador so enjoyed the sparkle of Nelly’s ‘buffooneries’ that he wrote to Louis XIV, saying how the king’s spirits would rise when he was with Nelly.
Charles and Nelly had two sons, but her only surviving son, St Albans, as he became, was born in May 1670 at her house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Charles acknowledged the child straightaway who was called Charles after him, the third of his natural sons to be so-named. A portrait by Lely, painted at the King’s command, shows Nelly as Venus, with her son Charles as Cupid. Motherhood would now confer some financial security upon Nelly, for as the mother of the King’s son, neither she nor he would starve for as long as the King lived.
Although Nelly’s will shows clearly that she did not become a Catholic, as Charles had done, it does seem clear that after Charles’ death in 1685, Nelly was subjected to a great deal of pressure from James that her son should become a Catholic and that his Protestant tutor should be replaced by a Catholic one. However, despite it all, the young Duke remained firmly Protestant and a Whig and was to support King William III.
After St Albans had spent some years in Paris, he became a soldier and later Colonel of Princess Ann of Denmark’s Regiment of Horse, now the 8th Hussars. According to the London Gazette, he distinguished himself greatly at the taking of Belgrade in 1688 (aged eighteen) for which James II made him a special grant of £2,000, but only two months later The Duke of St Albans’ Regiment was one of the first to defect to William of Orange and, having been decimated at Steenkirk in 1692, it was disbanded. In 1693 the Duke served in Flanders and took part in the Battle of Néerwinden. He returned there several times more with King William III and was present when he received Peter the Great at Utrecht and at the Treaty of Rijswijk, after which William presented him with a ‘sett of coach horses finely spotted like leopards’. Later that year he served as an Ambassador Extraordinary to France in 1697 to offer the King’s congratulations on the marriage of the Duke of Burgundy with Marie Adelaide, daughter of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, at a time when diplomatic relations had not been restored between England and France. On his departure Lord Portland wrote to the King:
‘I am annoyed to have to tell your Majesty that the Duke of St Albans left this place without making the usual present to the introducers, which has made a very bad impression, even as regards your Majesty. He has left debts unpaid in the shops, and borrowed 150 pounds from Lord Paston (his nephew) to avoid having his baggage seized. He promised to pay when he got home, and has forgotten both’.
St Albans subsequently held various important Court appointments under William III and George I, including Captain of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners, a Lord of the Bedchamber, Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire and was appointed a KG in 1718 and elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1722, which had been founded by his father.
Having only very limited means of his own, St Albans relied upon a number of pensions he received – extraordinarily £2,000 from Queen Catherine of Braganza, his mother’s pension of £1,500 which was transferred to him upon her death in 1687, £800 from the parliament of Ireland and £2,000 from the Crown. He had had to sell his mother’s house at 79 Pall Mall in order to settle her debts, but he still owned Burford House in Windsor as well as Bestwood Lodge in Nottingham, the mortgage of which had been paid off by James II. He was, however, considerably poorer than most of his half-siblings, whose mothers had been more grasping and avaricious.
A number of paintings and engravings of him by Kneller, Lely and others still exist and in 1704 he was described as ‘of a black complexion, not so tall as the Duke of Northumberland, yet very like King Charles’..
He married in 1694, the beautiful Lady Diana de Vere, whose portrait by Kneller (and Lely and others) is one of the ‘Hampton Court beauties’. She later became Mistress of the Robes and Lady of the Stole to Queen Caroline, formerly Princess of Wales, and was the only daughter and heiress of the 20th and last Earl of Oxford, KG and the last of the long and distinguished family of de Vere. The de Veres, who were created Earls of Oxford in 1142, were Lords Great Chamberlain of England for 500 years, and one of whose members may even have written the plays of Shakespeare. But whilst her blood may have been blue, she brought with her little or no dowry, other than twenty-two heraldic quarterings and her fertility. For they had a total of nine sons and three daughters from whom descend some 2,000 living members of the family, chief of which is Murray, 14th Duke (born 1939), a chartered accountant, who lives quietly in London with his third wife.
His father, Charles, 13th Duke was only ninth in succession to the dukedom when he was born in 1915, so by the time he succeeded his second cousin in 1964, eight male heirs had to have died. He had the same problem, therefore, as the Duke of Chalfont in that delightful film Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Alec Guinness played six separate roles as sons of the duke. However, although it is not suggested that Charles dealt with the problem in the same way, he did take four years proving his succession and persuading the Lord Chancellor to issue him with a Writ of Summons.
In fact Lady Diana was not the King’s choice of bride for his son, for in 1684 it was rumoured that Sir John Cutler’s daughter was his intended. However, this young lady married the Earl of Radnor, and being her father’s only child, took his estates elsewhere.
Despite the Duke’s obvious delight in his wife’s charms, he still found the time to frequent the establishment of Mother Elizabeth Whyburn where ‘only the crème de la crème of harlotry’ were gathered. It was here that he became ‘besotted with the charms of Sally Salisbury,’ a notorious prostitute, and competed with Lord Bolingbroke, the Earl of Cardigan and his own half brother the Duke of Richmond for her favours. This amazing creature was born in 1692 in Shrewsbury of poor parents who came to London to seek their fortune. Whilst very young, she was debauched by the infamous Colonel Francis Charteris, known as ‘the Rapemaster General of the Kingdom’. Later she was to claim that she had lain ‘with the noble Augustus just over from Germany’ the Prince of Wales (later George II). St Albans’s association with her did him no credit, but it was perhaps too much to expect the son of Charles II and Nell Gwyn not to display a want of judgement in matters of the heart.
The eight surviving sons born to the Duke and his Duchess are a striking example of public service. Of these six became Members of Parliament for Windsor, where their grandfather King Charles had commissioned a house to be built for Nelly close to the Castle which he named Burford House. This is now part of the Royal Mews and was sold back to George III by 3rd duke in 1778 for £4,000 to help house his large family.
St Albans’ eldest son, Lord Burford, described by Lord Hervey as ‘one of the weakest men either of the legitimate or spurious brood of Stuarts’ was an MP from 1722–26, having previously held Bodmin. On his succession to the Dukedom in 1726 his career in the House of Commons ceased, but he went onto become Constable and Governor of Windsor Castle, High Steward and Warden of Windsor Forest, KG and KB. The chapter describing him in the official family history is headed ‘The Insupportable Labour of Doing Nothing’.
Lord William, the second son, with the support of his cousin the 2nd Duke of Richmond, was elected MP for Chichester serving there for seven years becoming Vice Chamberlain of Her Majesty’s Household, only to die at the early age of thirty five. But the most able of the sons was the third son, Lord Vere, who served as MP for Windsor from 1726–41 and was created a peer in 1750 as Lord Vere of Hanworth. His career in the Navy saw him rise from Captain in 1721 to Admiral in 1748, besides serving as Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire.
The fourth son, Lord Henry was a professional soldier and Colonel of the 31st Foot, who distinguished himself at the Siege of Gibraltar. During the 1745 rebellion his regiment, the 31st Foot, formed part of the forces commanded by Lt Gen Sir John Ligoner to defend the Midland
s from the advancing Jacobite army. Fortunately his regiment took no part in the final battle at Culloden, but he subsequently fell foul of ‘Butcher’ Cumberland when he refused to alter his vote at a court martial brought by the Duke against a soldier he would have condemned. For this act his was roundly persecuted by Cumberland, earning for himself much sympathy and Cumberland almost universal condemnation. He also served as MP for Thetford for twenty years, having been given his seat by his cousin the 2nd Duke of Grafton.
However, the most interesting and colourful sprig of the ducal house was undoubtedly Lord Sidney, the fifth son. He too was MP for Windsor and served as Vice Chamberlain of the Household to King George II and was appointed a Privy Councillor. He was also a notorius fortune hunter and, according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Nell Gwyn in person, with the sex altered’ whose pursuit of the Duchess of Cleveland, his aunt by marriage, was immortalised in the verses:
‘Her children banished, age forgot,
Lord Sidney is her care;
And, what is a much happier lot,
Has hopes to be her heir’.
He also paid court to the elderly Lady Betty Germain who was forced to part with £1,000 in order to get rid of him.
The sixth son Lord George shared a pension of £800 on the Irish establishment with his brother Lord Henry, and for a short period in 1745 he was aide-de-camp to George II. He ended his military career as a Lieutenant General and Commander in Chief of the King’s Forces in Scotland from 1756-67 and a member of the Royal Company of Archers (now the Sovereign’s Body Guard for Scotland), having earlier been Lieutenant Governor of Gibraltar. During the ‘45 rebellion he served as a Lt Colonel of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, which formed part of Ligonier’s forces in the Midlands.