by Uglow, Jenny
On 2 February Catherine gave a Candlemas masquerade, celebrating the ancient festival that marked the mid-point of winter between Christmas and Easter. ‘The queen was a woman of sense,’ declared Gramont’s memoirs, ‘and used all her endeavours to please the king, by that kind obliging behaviour which her affection made natural to her: she was particularly attentive in promoting every sort of pleasure and amusement especially such as she could be present at herself.’7 This particular night was long remembered for Buckingham’s complicated practical jokes, for the lavish and bizarre dresses, with yards of gauze, silver tissue and yellow ribbons, and for the noisy, stamping country dances. Here, as so often, the plain short queen was surrounded by glamour. Yet Catherine’s goodness won many hearts. Perhaps she took solace, too, in the fact that Charles slept with her often, no matter how many mistresses he had.
He did so, she knew, to beget an heir. And at court Catherine had to contend with his children as well as his women. The Castlemaine children were tucked up out of sight in their rooms across the Privy Garden, but Charles doted publicly on Jemmy, as James Crofts was called, who had his father’s dark hair and dark eyes and a sweet, open temperament. No one pretended he was clever. When he arrived at Henrietta Maria’s court at the age of nine after his troubled childhood he could hardly read or write, and although Charles had ordered intensive teaching, he was still far behind his peers. Almost as soon as he arrived the tale began to spread that he was in fact the lawful heir, Charles having married his mother in secret. This was reinforced when Charles made him wealthy, granting him an income of £8,000 a year, derived from a patent regulating the export of all new drapery. He also began negotiations for James’s marriage.
The chosen bride was Anne Scott, the twelve-year-old Countess of Buccleugh, who shone as one of the best young dancers at the New Year ball. Since her father stipulated that she marry someone of the same name, James changed his name from Crofts to Scott, was knighted, and soon ennobled as Duke of Monmouth. After the wedding, which took place on 20 April, soon after his fourteenth birthday, he was given the additional title of Duke of Buccleugh. Although Anne would remain with her parents until she was eighteen, Charles ordered a new set of lodgings to be constructed for the young couple in the Cockpit. In a typical Whitehall improvisation, the old Great Tennis Court built for Henry VIII was divided into two floors, with new chimneys and staircases, sash windows and lavish plaster-work ceilings.8
The queen was kind to Monmouth and welcomed him to her rooms, where he played cards with her maids of honour. Eventually she won his deep affection. But his presence was a constant reminder that she had as yet borne no legitimate heir, whereas Barbara Castlemaine had produced a child each year and was pregnant again. Barbara’s greed and ambition were flagrant. All the Christmas presents given to the king found their way to her, and at the king’s ball her costume dripped with more jewels than those of the queen and the Duchess of York put together. Sarah, the cook at Sandwich’s house, next door to Barbara’s, told Pepys that the king supped there four or five times a week and ‘most often stays till the morning with her and goes home through the garden all alone privately’.9 Even the sentries, watching him stride across in the dawn, knew all about it. But this year such excursions would end, when Barbara was given fine new quarters within Whitehall itself, over the west end of the Privy Gallery and Holbein Gate, with the upper floor overlooking the park.
Even so, Charles appeared slightly less enamoured with Barbara than he had been, and sharp courtiers began to spy out another beauty who might help their cause if she became his mistress. Soon they thought they had found one. Before Catherine’s arrival Henrietta Maria and Minette had recommended suitable attendants from France. At least two of her maids of honour were French, Mademoiselle de la Garde and Mademoiselle Bardou, but a third girl from Paris was Frances Stuart, whose father, a son of Lord Blantyre, had been a physician at the court of Henrietta Maria in exile. Frances’s widowed mother had brought her to England in January 1662, with a glowing recommendation from Minette.
Dressed in Paris fashions and speaking fluent French, la belle Stuart, as she was known, was approaching her fifteenth birthday. She danced beautifully, was playfully childish and gossipy, and laughed at all Charles’s jokes: here was no brilliant, independent, scheming mind à la Castlemaine. ‘It was hardly possible for a woman to have less wit and more beauty,’ decided Gramont. In fact Frances would grow into a far cleverer and more capable woman than such a judgement suggests, but in the early 1660s she was very young, and enjoyed being the new darling of the court. Her current passion was said to be building card castles, an abuse of good cards that baffled the men engaged in the high-bidding games in her apartments. Buckingham, always on the look-out for a route to Charles’s favour, paid her lavish attention, building sky-high card castles, writing songs, making up stories and generally becoming indispensable. Barbara Castlemaine too saw the charm, and the danger, of the slender, fair-haired adolescent and enrolled her as a sexual accessory: ‘The king, who seldom neglected to visit the countess before she rose, seldom failed likewise to find Miss Stewart in bed with her.’10 In February 1663, the two apparently undertook a mock marriage, ‘with ring and all other ceremonies of church service, and ribbands and a sack-posset in bed and flinging the stocking’. And then, ‘my Lady Castlemaine, who was the bridegroom, rose, and the King came and took her place with pretty Mrs Stuart.’11 It was all public, all a ‘frolique’ – but not quite.
Frances Stuart, by Samuel Cooper
Charles’s dalliance with Frances had begun before New Year. After the audience for the Russian envoys, Charles, the Duke of York and assorted nobles, including the Earl of Chesterfield, had rolled into Frances’s apartments at Whitehall, talking of the extraordinary appearance of the ambassadors. When Will Crofts declared that the Russians, as if in a fairy story, all had handsome wives, and all their wives had handsome legs, Charles maintained that no woman had such fine legs as Miss Stuart. To prove the truth of his assertion, ‘with the greatest imaginable ease’, Frances immediately showed her legs, riffling her skirts up above her knee.12 Colonel George Hamilton, one of her many would-be lovers, was later astounded by Frances’s competitive desire to prove her beauty, and her total lack of concern at showing off her body. ‘I really believe’, he declared, ‘that, with a little address, it would not be difficult to induce her to strip naked, without ever reflecting upon what she was doing.’13
Charles was amused by Frances, and by his courtiers’ intrigues and rows, ribaldry and wit. But to outsiders the court had begun to seem scandalous, cut off from reality. MPs muttered about the court’s extravagance, and about Charles’s open adultery and bastard children, asserting that neglect of his wife was the reason why she had not conceived. Under such criticism Charles’s attention swerved back to Catherine. In May 1663, in hope that the waters would aid conception, he took her to the spa at Tunbridge Wells, where Henrietta Maria had gone before his own birth. ‘Every method of getting a successor to the English Thorne is to be tried’, Cominges explained, ‘and the King on his part contributes all that could be asked of true affection and regular assiduity.’14
Within easy reach of London, Tunbridge was a fashionable resort. Catherine’s entourage stayed in the neat houses that straggled around the Wells, and in the mornings they drank the waters and promenaded down the tree-shaded walk. One side of this was lined with shops for lace and jewellery, gloves and stockings, with a new amusement, the ‘raffle’ copied from the fair at St Germain. On the other side lay the market, where country girls with straw hats sold their produce. In the long afternoons they watched the courtiers play bowls, a diversion that astonished Ambassador Cominges. In France this was the sport of labourers and servants, whereas here, he reported, it was ‘the exercise of gentlemen…and the places where it is practised are charming, delicious little walks, called bowling-greens, which are little square grass plots, where the turf is almost as smooth and level as the cloth of a billiard
table’.15 The green was also a gaming-table, since every spectator was free to lay a bet, and in the evenings it became a ballroom where courtiers whirled on the smooth turf until the early hours. Catherine loved Tunbridge, inventing entertainments, and matching its natural ease and freedom by dispensing with ceremony. The town in its summer dress dripped with intrigue, as if the waters had gone to people’s heads. ‘Well may they be called les eaux de scandale,’ wrote Cominges in July 1663, ‘for they nearly ruined the good name of the maids and of the ladies (those I mean who were there without their husbands).’16 It did not suit everyone. Two years later the young rake Henry Savile decided, ‘that Tunbridge is the most miserable place in the world is very certain, and that the ladies do not look with very great advantage at three in the morning is as true’.17
Back in London, it was rumoured, untruly, that Charles had made Frances his mistress.18 Certainly Barbara was suspicious, and anxious not to lose her hold on him. In early July, raised voices echoed across the Whitehall courtyard. Barbara vowed she would never receive Frances in her apartment again; Charles that he would not set foot in them unless she was there. Barbara turned on her heel and left for Richmond to take shelter with her uncle. Charles shrugged, but he still pursued her upriver on the pretence of going hunting. During these quarrels Catherine seemed to shine, and could even administer a sardonic put-down. In early July, when Barbara commented on how long the queen sat patiently while her dresser got her ready, Catherine replied, ‘I have so much reason to use patience that I can very well bear with it.’19 A fortnight later, seeing her in Hyde Park, Pepys noticed how pretty she looked in her short crimson petticoat and white laced waistcoat, ‘and her hair dressed a la negligence’.20 Charles was riding hand in hand with her and ostentatiously ignoring Barbara, who looked on unsmiling in her yellow plumed hat. No courtiers now rushed to help her down from her horse, and she had to rely on her servants. Afterwards, said Pepys, in Catherine’s presence chamber at Whitehall, ‘all the ladies walked, talking and fiddling with their hats and feathers and changing and trying one anothers’. With a twinge of disloyalty he decided that Frances Stuart, ‘with her hat cocked and a red plume, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose, and excellent Taille, is now the greatest beauty I ever saw I think in my life, and if ever woman can, doth exceed my Lady Castlemayne; at least, in this dresse’.
There were new amusements at court, including the Lottery, which Charles allowed Sir Arthur Slingsby to set up for one day in the Banqueting House, with four hundred prizes, including a coach, but mostly of furniture.21 The town swung into summer pleasures. People walked out to see the birds in St James’s Park, or to play at Pall Mall on the great sandy court. They strolled further, gathering in Hyde Park to watch the quality ride around the ring in their smart carriages with coats of arms on the door, hoping to see the beauty of the hour – in this case Frances Stuart. They took trips to the countryside, carrying picnics to the quiet village of Islington, driving out to the coaching inns of Knightsbridge, or hiring boats to take them upriver, where they could wander through the orchards and meadows of Chelsea. Back in town, men took their wives to smart taverns, like the Bear at the Bridge Foot across the river, where French food was served. In the evenings they drifted to the pleasure grounds at Fox Hall and Spring Gardens or the new Mulberry Gardens. Despite rebellions in the north, for many it was a season of moonlight and song.
Nothing entertained this leisured, gossipy world so much as the continuing affairs of the court’s leading ladies. By late July 1663 Charles was reconciled with Barbara, while Frances stuck to the advice of her mother and Henrietta Maria, and resisted his advances. She was safe: Charles was known to be a kindly man who would never force himself on her. This summer Lely painted her appropriately in a glorious pose against a stormy countryside, holding a bow that hinted at her as a chaste Diana. (She loved having her portrait painted and being admired: the following summer Pepys spotted her after a sitting, ‘in a most lovely form, with her hair all about her eares, having her picture taking there. There was the King and twenty more, I think, standing by all the while.’22) The frustrated Buckingham camp, who had banked on her becoming Charles’s mistress, staged a weekend in August where the Duchess of Richmond invited a party to the country, including Charles and Frances. The ruse was so obvious that two uninvited guests swiftly appeared, first the heavily pregnant Barbara and then the queen. This time Catherine came without her chief attendant, Barbara’s ally the Countess of Suffolk, declaring that ‘she would not always have a governess at her heels, especially in places where the King was’.23
Given the court’s extravagance, it was not surprising that when the accounts were done, even Charles was horrified. In his speech to parliament, requesting more funds, on 27 July, he promised that he was about to embark on economies. The money they granted him, he admitted, ‘will do me very little good, if I do not improve it by very good husbandry of my own, and by retrenching those very expenses which in many respects may be thought necessary enough. But you shall see, I will much rather impose upon myself than my subjects.’24 Following this, the Exchequer asked to see the domestic accounts. The household had been using the thirty-year-old establishment books, following the number of servants, and the meals given to courtiers in his father’s reign. The estimated budget had been vastly overspent and drastic cuts had to be made. Charles cut the traditional round of court ceremonies, apart from the Garter feast, and gave up the grand dining in public. Only the most senior courtiers, about 180 people, retained full ‘diets’, board and lodging at Whitehall. Effectively, this cut the income of many royal servants by two thirds. Below stairs, the stern restructuring reduced the number of servants from over five hundred to around 220. ‘On a sudden’, the Earl of Anglesey told Ormond, ‘above three hundred below stairs, most of which have families, are deprived of a livelihood, the splendour and dignity of the Court is taken away, and general discontent and murmuring occasioned hereby.’25 (Ormond, now in Ireland, was still technically Lord Steward.) The discontent was certainly loud, though assuaged by a hint that the diets for the wider circle were only suspended. In fact they were abolished for ever.
Household costs were no longer the largest item in the peacetime budget, but two years later, the Treasury accounts still showed large outstanding bills and arrears of pay stretching back two years or more. The royal rat catcher was owed £12 and the bowling-green keeper £91, but over £500 was due to the watchmaker while the apothecary bills (perhaps including material for Charles’s laboratory experiments) were ten times as much.26 Still, although payments lagged behind, the economies of 1663 led to a change of tone at court. It became less a source of free meals for hangers-on and more of a social hub, a fashionable meeting place for the political and commercial elite.
The main court story, through all the travails of the year, was still the rivalry of Charles’s women. But he was good at manoeuvring his way through rivalries. In natural philosophy he forwarded the cause of Boyle while remaining close to Hobbes; in politics he kept the loyalty of Clarendon yet slipped Bennet into power; in his household he brought radical changes while soothing the old courtiers’ feelings. When it came to the three principal women in his life – Catherine, Barbara Castlemaine and Frances Stuart – he sometimes looked harassed by the rows but balanced his relationships adroitly. He seemed able to shut off compartments of feeling to banish internal conflict, either psychological or moral. With regard to Catherine, he was careful always to distinguish her position as queen, ensuring that she was waited on with due ceremony – even if she was forced to have Lady Castlemaine among her women. He made sure that her rooms were fine and despite the cuts he now ordered a new canopy for her bedchamber, made from thirty-two yards of the inevitable crimson damask, with new bolsters and hangings, chairs and stools. His cash books were dotted with small payments for little presents, like satin and silk ‘Sweet bags’ or a white taffeta pillow.27 But his main preoccupation remained the need for an heir. The Tunbridge magic had
failed, so now they looked to a different spa. In August 1663, while reports were flooding in of rebels in the north, and the Exchequer was struggling with his household accounts, Charles set out with Catherine on a trip to Bath.
This was supposed to be a modest private tour, without courtiers or officers, yet it turned into a minor royal progress to Bath, Bristol and Oxford. On the towns along their route the mayors and aldermen made speeches and handed over gifts – a purse of gold in Reading, and another in Newbury. John Aubrey squired them round the old hill fort of Silbury and the standing stones at Avebury, which were beginning to attract the attention of antiquarians keen to find an ancient glory in England’s past. Lord Seymour entertained them at Marlborough, Sir James Thynne at Longleat and the Herberts at Badminton, although the old manor house was too small to ask the whole royal party to stay, a humiliation that Herbert found hard to live down. But despite this warm hospitality, the journey across the Cotswolds, with its steep scarp slopes, deep wooded valleys and rutted roads, was misery for the queen. The weather was dreadful and they travelled on, with ‘storms of wind and rain so great…that her Majesty will hardly hazard herself again for a dinner in this mountainous country’.28
In Bath both Charles and Catherine went to the baths, a highly ritualised yet intimate routine. It was the custom to go early in the morning, having undressed to your underclothes in your lodgings, the men in ‘underpants’ under their shirt, the girls and women in shifts. The bathers were carried, discreetly, in a sedan or enclosed chair but at the steps to the baths the men, including the king, stripped off their shirts and plunged into the water. Afterwards they lay on linen sheets in a warmed bed and drank mulled wine ‘to regain their strength’.29
Spectators in fashionable clothes lean over the parapet to watch men and women floating and plunging in the elegantly designed King’s and Queen’s Baths.