by Uglow, Jenny
His mouth is wide, with thin lips, and he has a short chin. His cheeks are marked across under the eyes with two deep and prominent lines or wrinkles that begin near the middle of the nose and go towards the corners of the eyes, getting thinner and thinner and vanishing before they get there. He wears a wig, almost entirely black, and very thick and curly above the forehead, which makes him look sadder, but without giving him any trace of grimness; on the contrary his appearance is sad but not grim. Indeed a certain smiling look coming from the width of his mouth so greatly clears and softens the roughness of his features that he pleases rather than terrifies.6
The king was, he learned, lighthearted about religion, clever but lazy. In private life he was a good friend, with a dread of seriousness. As a lover, he was sensual but not ‘bestial’, and generous to his mistresses, especially in the first flush of infatuation.
Like all observers, Magalotti was fascinated by anything he could learn of Charles’s sex life. The very public nature of Charles’s sexuality was both a bonus and a drawback. On the one hand it implied an almost supernatural virility and potency; on the other it certainly diminished his dignity. Both points would later be made by Rochester in his famous lines about Charles’s sceptre and his prick being ‘of a length’. This could mean nothing if he needed dextrous cajoling even to get it up, and, then, could never be satisfied:
Restlesse he roalles about from Whore to Whore
A merry Monarch, scandalous and poor.7
In terms of the body politic as opposed to the body private, the identification of his prick with his power was potentially dangerous. If one drooped, then by implication the other might also collapse. In 1667–8, said Magalotti, Charles was thought to prefer friendship to ‘bodily relations’. During the Dutch crisis, wrote Pepys, ‘the King’s greatest pleasure hath been with his fingers, being able to do no more’.8
If conflict made him impotent or dulled his desire, when the war ended he found release in an unusual burst of promiscuity. So far Charles had been known as a one-woman man, or at least one at a time. In the next few months he was linked to a circle of names: to the maid of honour Winifred Wells, about whom Buckingham was so cruel; to Jane Roberts, a clergyman’s daughter down on her luck, who was imbued ever after with a deep sense of guilt, caught the pox and suffered in the same sweating-houses as Rochester. He was bracketed, too, with Maria Knight, the singer with the heavenly voice; with the beautiful Elizabeth, Countess of Kildare; and with Mary, Countess of Falmouth, the widow of his beloved Berkeley and the future wife of his friend from the circle of wits, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.
Buckingham was well aware of Charles’s sensual enjoyment of women and as soon as he was back in favour he began trying to direct Charles’s sex life as well as his political fortunes. He could see that he was weary of Barbara. While the war was at its height she had been seen constantly again with the ugly, frog-faced yet oddly attractive Henry Jermyn. Charles had crushed their earlier flirtation, but it was now accepted that they were lovers. When she thought she was pregnant again, however, she asked Charles to acknowledge the child. He would not, he said, given that he had no memory of sleeping with her in the last six months. ‘God damn me! but you shall own it,’ was her reply. If the baby was not christened at Whitehall, she would dash its brains out before him on the Gallery wall, and parade his bastard children outside his door.9 When Charles stood firm Barbara left to stay in Covent Garden with her friend Elizabeth, Lady Harvey, a member of the ubiquitous Montagu family and co-fighter against Clarendon. True to habit Charles begged forgiveness; true to custom, Barbara returned. Nothing more was heard of the controversial pregnancy.
In February 1668, while critics were poring over the state accounts, Barbara was gambling so deeply that she apparently won £15,000 in one night’s play, and lost £25,000 the next – betting £1,000 or more on one throw of the dice. She had also quarrelled with Buckingham, now that their alliance against Clarendon had ended. In Buckingham’s view, Charles needed a protestant mistress to counter Barbara’s Catholicism, a woman who would link him to the people, rather than the despised, licentious court. And where better to find one than the theatre.
Two actresses who had leapt to fame in recent seasons were Moll Davis at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Nell Gwyn at the Theatre Royal. Moll had been on stage since childhood and was famed for her singing and her light-as-air dancing. Her first great hit was Sir Martin Mar-All, a farcical collaboration between Dryden and Newcastle (Pepys went three days running, it made him laugh so much), and George Etherege then wrote a madcap role for her as Gatty in She Would if She Could, complete with song and jig. In this play, as she and her companion Ariana spy their gallants, the language of naval warfare that the court knew so well is turned into the jargon of dalliance:
Ariana. Now if these should prove two men of War that are cruising here, to watch for Prizes.
Gatty. Would they had courage enough to set upon us; I long to be engag’d.
Ariana. Look, look yonder, I protest they chase us.
Gatty. Let us bear away then; if they be truly valiant they’ll quickly make more sail, and board us.10
A little later, as the mad Celania in a revival of Davenant’s The Rivals, Moll appeared in a more winsome vein, singing a plaintive song:
My lodging it is on the cold ground,
And very hard is my fare
But that which troubles me most is
The unkindness of my dear.
Yet still I cry, O turn love,
And I prythee, love, turn to me,
For thou art the man that I long for,
And alack what remedy.
She performed this so charmingly before the King, wrote the prompter John Downes, ‘that not long after, it Rais’d her from her Bed on the Cold Ground, to a Bed Royal’.11
In the autumn of 1667, Buckingham had been dangling both young actresses before Charles, having decided, said Burnet, that ‘a gayety of humour would take much with the king’.12 Both girls were guided secretly up the Whitehall back-stairs, but Nell ruined her chances of becoming a royal mistress by asking for £500 a year. Instead Charles took Moll. One of the satirists’ favourite stories was that Nell tried to put Charles off Moll Davis by dosing her, when she was about to dine with the King, with a drastic purgative called jalap, made from the pounded root of a Surinam herb and given to her by her friend Aphra Behn. If so, it was not effective, or at least not in the way she planned. In early 1668 it was confidently asserted that Charles had taken a house for Moll in Suffolk Street and bought her a ring worth £600, more than Nell had asked as an annual fee.
Oblique comments were made about Charles’s affairs in the theatre itself. In February 1668 Robert Howard’s dark new play, The Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma, featured a disgraced favourite – an implied attack on Clarendon – who tried to prostitute his daughter to the King of Spain. (Nell played Maria, the daughter whose integrity foiled her father’s dastardly plans.) Pepys sat nervously in the pit. Seeing that the play ‘was designed to reproach our King with his mistresses’, he wrote, ‘I was troubled for it, and expected it should be interrupted; but it ended all well, which salved all.’13 In public at least, Charles took no notice.
Moll Davis
Shortly afterwards, perhaps hoping to compete with Moll, Barbara Castlemaine herself went on the stage, taking a starring role in a glittering court performance of Corneille’s Horace. The translation was by the Welsh prodigy Katharine Phillips, ‘the matchless Orinda’, another exceptional woman, a friend of the Ormonds and Boyles and the poet of friendship and devotion between women. Katharine had died of smallpox in 1664, aged thirty-two, and her translation of Corneille was published after her death. The play was a success, with magnificent costumes and superb dancing, but Barbara should have known that she could never match an actress on the stage. This spring she was parading with the actor Charles Hart, as if tossing her head at the king for taking an actress lover. But Charles could not really care
. After the apprentice riots and The Poor Whore’s Petition, she had begun to seem coarse. ‘Paint Castlemaine in colours that are bold’, wrote Marvell, ‘Her, not her picture, for she now grows old.’ Even devoted admirers found she had lost some of her glamour. In early May 1668 Pepys watched her at the theatre, seated in the balcony with several great ladies. Not caring who was watching, she called to one of her women and borrowed a patch off her face ‘and put it into her mouth, and wetted it and so clapped it upon her own by the side of her mouth, I suppose she feeling a pimple rising there’.14
Less than a week later, Pepys heard that Barbara was to leave Whitehall. Charles settled a pension on her of £4,700, paid out of Post Office profits through her uncles, Viscount Grandison and Colonel Villiers. Her new home was Berkshire House, for which Charles borrowed £4,000 from the ever-obliging Edward Backwell. Ironically this was the very house where Clarendon had taken refuge after the Fire, on the other side of the Park from Whitehall, but directly across the road from St James’s Palace, the home of the Yorks, who seemed to have forgiven her for her scheming against Clarendon and were becoming her closest friends. Her two eldest children, Anne and Charles, now aged seven and six, were currently in Paris but the three youngest, Henry, Charlotte and baby George, moved across the Park with their mother. Charles dropped in every day to see them, ‘as a good friend’ only, reported Ambassador Ruvigny.15
Barbara’s reign was over. At the end of the year, when the court attended a performance of Macbeth, Pepys was shocked to see Moll Davis lounging in a box just above the King’s. He watched Moll look down on Charles, and saw him look up at her, ‘and so did my Lady Castlemayne once, to see who it was; but when she saw her, she blushed like fire’.16
In May 1668, between dismissing parliament and setting off on his summer journeys, when he pensioned off Barbara, Charles made a series of such personal decisions, an emotional clearing of the decks. The catalyst was probably not the actions of his mistresses but a problem with his queen. When Magalotti tried to fathom Catherine’s nature, he jotted down notes about her liking for playing ombre and chatting with her women, her constant praying and her habit of lauding Portugal above all other nations. But he also liked to think that there was a wild, sensual creature within this small, plain woman. Catherine, he wrote, was thought to be ‘unusually susceptible to pleasure’:
She finds the king provided by nature with implements most suitable for exciting it, and it is said that her ecstasy is then so extreme that after the ordinary escape of these humours that the violence of pleasure presses even from women, blood comes from her genital parts in such great abundance that it does not stop for several days.17
If there were such alarming reports, and Catherine did bleed abundantly, this almost certainly says less about Charles’s performance than about her frail reproductive system. Charles never mentioned her miscarriage in Oxford in 1666, and may have believed that that pregnancy was a false alarm. But he had not yet abandoned hope of her bearing children and was delighted, early this year, when she announced that she was pregnant. Almost inevitably she miscarried, at dawn on 7 May. ‘And though I am troubled at it’, Charles told Minette, ‘yet I am glad that ’tis evident she was with childe, which I will not deny to you, till now, I did feare she was not capable of.’18 He added that the doctors had put her on a course of physic, ‘which they are confident will make her holde faster next time’.
As if looking afresh at his life, within days of Catherine’s miscarriage Charles set aside Barbara. Later in the month, when the weather turned from cold wind and rain to sudden heat, he left for two days in Newmarket. Back in town, he was kind to his wife, who grieved bitterly over her lost child, yet although he dined with her often he had not really changed. Catherine, as usual, knew just what was happening. At the end of May, when Moll Davies was about to dance her jig during a play at Whitehall, Catherine rose and left the room, ‘which people do think it was out of her displeasure at her being the King’s whore, that she could not bear it.’19
Charles’s affair with Moll would last on and off for the next six years and they had a daughter, Mary, in 1673.20 But she hardly touched his heart: in 1668 his deepest feelings were still for Frances Stuart. The previous year, after peace was proclaimed and he could write to Minette again, he had tried to explain why he acted so harshly towards Frances, whom Minette had been fond of since she was a girl in Paris:
I do assure you that I am very much troubled that I cannot in everything give you that satisfaction I could wish, especially in this business of the duchesse of Richmonde, wherein you may thinke me ill natured, but if you consider how hard a thing ’tis to swallow an injury done by a person I had so much tendernesse for, you will in some degree excuse the resentment I use towards her.21
Before he wrote the word ‘tendernesse’ he first wrote ‘love’ then crossed it out. He saw Frances’s behaviour as a direct provocation, a breach of friendship and faith, ‘therefore I hope you will pardon me if I cannot so far forget an injury which went so neere my hart’. Minette begged him to take her into favour again, but his pride was hurt. A poem survives in his hand, an easy exercise in courtly pastoral:
I pass all my hours in a shady old grove,
But I live not the day when I see not my love;
I survey every walk now my Phillis is gone,
And sigh when I think we were there all alone;
O then, ’tis then, that I think there’s no hell
Like loving, like loving too well.
This is conventional enough but with regard to Frances the sentiment rings true. Charles had loved her.
Frances spent the months after her marriage looking after the Richmond estate at Cobham in Kent, while her husband raised troops in Dorset amid the fears of a French invasion.22 After the war ended the couple thought of going to France, where Richmond, as duc d’Aubigny, had estates in Berry, and where Frances could attach herself to the household of Henrietta Maria. But in the end Frances decided to come to London and join her mother at Somerset House. When she arrived there at Christmas 1667, her old friends from court flocked to see her. Charles, however, scotched any rumours of a reconciliation. ‘You were misinformed in your intelligence concerning the Duchesse of Richmond,’ he told his sister. ‘If you were as well acquainted with a little fantastical gentleman called Cupide as I am, you would neither wonder, nor take ill, any sudden changes which do happen in the affaires of his conducting, but in this matter there is nothing to be done in it.’23 And then, in the early spring of 1668, Frances contracted smallpox. His anger forgotten, Charles dashed to see her.
Frances’s illness hardly marred her beauty and it saved her friendship with Charles. In May, the month of Catherine’s miscarriage and Barbara’s move from Whitehall, Charles appointed Richmond Lord Lieutenant of Kent. Pepys noted that while the King supped nightly with Catherine, it seemed that he was ‘mighty hot upon the Duchess of Richmond’.24 One night, rather than taking a coach to see her at Somerset House, he impetuously took a scull and rowed downriver alone. Since the garden door was shut, he climbed over the wall to see Frances. There was no talk of an affair, but Charles admitted to Minette that being with her, and worrying about her illness, made him completely forget to write, ‘and I must confess this last affliction made me pardon all that is past, and cannot hinder myself from wishing her very well’.25 With affectionate concern he fretted about Frances’s scars and problems with her eyes and hovered over her progress to recovery.
Catherine had always remained friends with Frances, and later that year, after the Richmonds gave ‘a grand dinner for their majesties’, she appointed her a Lady of the Bedchamber.26 The Richmonds moved into rooms by the bowling green in Whitehall, and Frances was back among her friends and family. (Her sister Sophia, a dresser to Henrietta Maria, also became one of Catherine’s attendants, and married the son of Charles’s Master of the Household.) Barbara was said to be so furious at her reinstatement that she refused to have supper with the king, who to
ok to dining instead with Monmouth, Buckingham and Rupert at the Duchess of Monmouth’s. (He was always kind to Monmouth’s young duchess, who had dislocated her hip while dancing at court and walked with a limp for the rest of her life.)
Visiting Frances became one of the few untroubled areas of Charles’s life. Her husband, however, remained a problem, intemperately demanding overseas posts and getting into brawls. In 1672 Richmond was sent to Denmark as ambassador, where he splashed out on furs, ran up debts and complained loudly of the dullness of the Danes. After a few months, in the winter snows, despite everyone’s advice, he rowed out for a drunken evening with the captain of an English frigate moored off Elsinore. In the darkness he missed his step between ship and boat and plummeted into the icy waters. He died the same evening. Frances did not remarry, but stayed at court with the queen. Since she had no children, after her husband’s death the Richmond and Lennox title reverted to the crown: in 1675 Charles would bestow it on his son by his mistress of the next decade, Louise de Kéroualle.
Charles’s many children were all dear to him, although his favourite was always Monmouth, now a handsome, wayward and easily influenced teenager. In early 1668, when Monmouth was in Paris, Charles asked Minette to look after him for, he confessed, ‘I do love him very well’. He was anxious that she should keep him from joining Louis’s army in Flanders, where he might be plunged into a ‘hot campaign’. When Monmouth went back again to France in June, he wrote an amused paternal letter: ‘He intendes to put on a perriwig againe, when he comes to Paris, but I believe you will thinke him better farr, as I do, with his short haire.’27