Nell’s low birth was a severe handicap. The tempestuous Lady Castlemaine, whom Charles had recently created the duchess of Cleveland, was losing her influence after a decade as royal mistress; but instead of making spunky Nell a duchess and installing her in the palace, Charles started casting about for a nobly born woman. Even among the lowborn London performers, Nell had a strong rival in Moll Davis, a charming singer and dancer.
The competition between Nell and Moll Davis grew fierce. The king bought a fine house for Moll whereas he only rented one for Nell. He lavished Moll with horses, a carriage, and valuable jewelry. Feeling miffed, Nell invited her rival to lunch on the day Moll had an evening rendezvous with Charles. Nell put a strong laxative in Moll’s food, and afflicted with painful diarrhea, the poor woman spent the evening with a chamber pot instead of the king.
In 1671, Louise de Kéroualle, the twenty-two-year-old French-born lady-in-waiting to the queen, finally relented and allowed the king to crack open the glass of her virginity. Though tending toward frigidity, she had a strong hold over him and offered the education and courtly polish which Nell utterly lacked. With Lady Castlemaine now languishing on the sidelines, Louise became the king’s maîtresse-en-titre. But if her powerful position at court was a bed of roses, the thorn that came with it was Nell Gwynn.
In 1674 Louise had her portrait painted in a white smock, one breast exposed, leaning on pillows against a background of draperies, with her young son hovering as Cupid. Nell went to the same artist, posed in the same smock with the same background, had her two sons hovering as Cupid with ridiculous grins, and the king pictured in the background looking at her longingly.
Louise formed the affected habit of donning mourning whenever a great personage in France died, as if to show she were a near relation. Nell couldn’t resist poking fun at this, swearing that she would don mourning when the next khan of Tartary died. Nell said, “She claims that everyone in France is her relation; the moment some great one dies she puts on mourning. Well! If she is of such high quality, why does she play the whore? She ought to die of shame. As for me, it’s my profession. I do not pretend to anything else.”43
Nell loved to point out that for all her rivals’ blue blood, they were the king’s whores just the same as she, a sentiment these noble ladies trembled to hear. One day she called on Lady Castlemaine and felt snubbed by her coolness. Nell “clapped her on the shoulder and said she presumed that persons of one trade loved not one another!”44
To put Nell in her place, Lady Castlemaine drove her luxurious new coach drawn by six horses back and forth in front of Nell’s house—the king had never given Nell anything half so valuable. The following day Nell drove a broken-down cart pulled by six oxen in front of Barbara’s house, crying, “Whores to market, ho!”45
Nell offered Charles what his other mistresses could not—bawdy jokes and unfailing good humor. One day the king, Nell, and several others went fishing. Charles grew frustrated that he was not catching anything. Nell had someone distract him while she tied fried smelt—which had been in their picnic basket—to his line and threw it back in the water. When the king returned, Nell suggested he check his line. To his surprise he found that he had indeed caught a fish—a fried fish.
In addition to her practical jokes, Nell had a great talent for biting mimicry. Bishop Burnet noted that “she acted all persons in so lively a manner and was such a constant diversion to the King that even a new mistress could not drive her away.”46 Nell especially loved to mimic Louise’s lisping French accent for the king’s entertainment.
When Charles graced Louise with the titles of Baroness Petersfield, countess of Farnham, and duchess of Portsmouth at one stroke, Nell was livid. All she had of the royal largesse was a rented house, a few sticks of furniture, and some pin money. When she asked the king to do more for her and their two sons, he pleaded poverty caused by the war with France. To which Nell replied hotly, “I will tell you how you shall never want. Send the French [Louise de Kéroualle] into France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your own cod-piece.”47
If Louise was a Goliath of noble birth, fine manners, and political power, Nell was a little David slinging stones with deadly accuracy. One day soon after her ennoblement, Louise ran into Nell and condescendingly admired her fine dress. “Nelly,” she cooed, “you are grown rich, I believe, by your dress; why, woman, you are fine enough to be a queen.” To which Nell replied tartly, “You are entirely right, Madam. And I am whore enough to be a duchess.”48
Another story relates that one evening Nell, the king, and Louise were partaking of a painful supper together. In a rare effort at wit, Louise said she could make three chickens out of the two set before them on the table. “There’s one,” she said, “and there’s two, and one and two makes three.”49
Nell then lifted one chicken onto the King’s plate, the second onto her own, and suggested that Louise eat the third one.
Bereft of anything resembling a sense of humor, sluggish Louise was utterly incapable of parrying Nell’s biting one-liners. Skewered alive, her only defense was to call upon every ounce of her formidable dignity.
Sometimes even Charles enjoyed jabbing the humorless and defenseless Louise. The French ambassador reported that the king had provoked Louise by “drinking twice in 24 hours to the health of Nell Gwynn” who “still made the Duchess of Portsmouth the butt of her tickling sarcasms.”50
By 1674 Moll Davis had retired and Lady Castlemaine had moved to France. These changes in the royal harem made no difference to Nell, but Louise de Kéroualle was delighted with her virtual free run of the palace. Her delight was short-lived, however. Soon a new rival appeared on the scene: hot-blooded, raven-haired Hortense Mancini, duchess of Mazarin. The king was soon heatedly pursuing the sensual seductress who had enjoyed affairs with the handsomest men and most beautiful women in Europe. Louise, prone to melodrama, became thin and pale, moping and weeping almost constantly. Now it was Nell’s turn to don black weeds. The actress, who knew how to ride out Charles’s infatuations, said she mourned for the “weeping willow” and her dead hopes.51
Sometimes fighting her rival’s intrigues was more than Louise could bear. One evening Honoré Courtin, the French ambassador, visited her and found her shattered by the strain. “The mistress wept bitterly,” he wrote in his dispatch to Louis XIV. “Sighs and sobs strangled her words. Indeed I have never seen so sad a sight, so moving. I remained with her till midnight, and tried in every way to restore her courage and make her understand how essential it was to her position that she should hide her suffering.”52
Courtiers loved to witness the equivalent of a seventeenth-century female mud-wrestling bout, and clapped their ring-bedecked hands together in glee at the thought of it. By the end of the year, the king’s fiery passion for Hortense was waning because of her flagrant infidelity—she even had an affair with Anne Palmer, Charles’s teenage bastard daughter with Lady Castlemaine. The sleekly insinuating Hortense, however, was permitted to remain officially in his harem.
While most men dream of a woman who plays the lady in the parlor and the whore in bed, Charles effortlessly attained this fantasy by spending his days with cold, refined Louise and his evenings with lusty, bouncing Nell. Try as she might, Louise could not expel Nell from the game. Sexually restrained to begin with, Louise had caught a virulent strain of venereal disease from Charles in 1674 which caused her untold suffering for months. She made Charles repay her in the form of two magnificent necklaces, one diamond and the other pearl, but was warned by doctors never again to have sexual relations with the king. It is a testament to Charles’s love for Louise that he kept her as his official mistress with little or no sex. But there were the king’s sexual needs to be met, and Nell was more than happy to provide these services.
One day Nell stopped by the apartments of Hortense Mancini and found Louise de Kéroualle there with her close friend the French ambassador. It was an odd group. Lady Harvey reported, “I do not suppose th
at in all England it would be possible to get together three women more obnoxious to one another.”53 Before Nell could prick Louise with her pointed barbs, the duchess haughtily swept out of the room. Nell turned to the ambassador and demanded to know why the king of France “did not send presents to her instead of to the weeping willow who had just gone out?”54 She said Louis XIV would spend his money more wisely in sending her gifts, as King Charles preferred her to Louise. As a matter of fact, he had sex with her—Nell—every night! The ambassador mumbled, turned red, and cringed.
Hortense adroitly changed the subject to the reputed beauty of Nell’s undergarments. In a heartbeat, Nell raised her skirts and showed the ambassador her petticoats, stockings, and garters. It is interesting to contemplate what else she might have shown him, as underpants were not worn. Whatever he saw, the ambassador was evidently delighted. In his official report to the foreign office in Paris, this worthy gentleman lavished ample praise on Nell’s undergarments “and certain other things that were shown to us all,”55 and proclaimed he had never seen anything “more magnificent.”56
6. Loving Profitably—The Wages of Sin
Beauty is potent, but money is omnipotent.
—JOHN RAY, ENGLISH PROVERBS
ONE DAY IN THE LATE 1850S A GROUP OF FRENCH COURTIERS visited an old castle under restoration. Among the group was Napoleon III’s mistress, Marie-Anne de Ricci, Countess Walewska, an Italian charmer who had married the son of Maria Walewska, and Napoleon. The countess pointed to a lizard gargoyle and remarked, “It is very well executed, but such a water pipe must be very expensive.” The emperor’s minister of the household, Marshal Vaillant, replied angrily, “Less expensive than yours, Madame.” When another member of the party remonstrated with him for his rudeness, he continued, “This drainage has cost us four million francs!”1
The mistress, as opposed to the wife, could be dismissed at any moment with no financial settlement. Her powerful friends at court supported her only while she retained power, expecting favors in return. Exiled and reviled, the former royal mistress could find herself flying from the zenith of magnificence to the depths of poverty and disgrace at a moment’s notice.
The wise royal mistress, therefore, began to collect for her retirement as soon as she was appointed, ensuring a lavish lifestyle to cushion her inevitable fall. Cash was always handy, as well as jewels, gilded carriages, fine horses, and gold and silver plate—objects which could easily be converted into cash should the deposed mistress suddenly find herself sent packing into exile.
Royal mistresses also coveted titles—countess, marquise, and duchess—which gave them an official position at court on a par with other courtiers. The titles came with castles and rent-producing lands, which also provided cash if managed well. Additionally, most royal mistresses received annual pensions for their services. The problem with titles, lands, and pensions was that they could always be revoked if the political winds reversed direction. Cash and its equivalent were always preferable in times of emergency.
Ironically, this lining of the royal mistress’s pockets with taxpayer money so enraged the king’s family, court, and subjects that she had to line them even more quickly.
Athénaïs de Montespan loved profitably indeed. When she began her affair with Louis XIV, her best pair of diamond earrings was in hock. Within a short time, she built three navy vessels for the king at her own expense, and recruited the crews from her native region of Poitou.
English royal mistresses did not have it quite as easy as their fair French counterparts. While the Sun King’s word was law, his contemporary Charles II often found his gifts to royal mistresses blocked by court officials. Lord Chancellor Clarendon—who controlled much of Charles’s money—made known that he was “an implacable enemy to the power and interest she [Barbara, Lady Castlemaine] had with the King, and had used all the endeavors he could to destroy it.”2 He knew that Lady Castlemaine’s “principal business was to get an estate for her and her children,”3 and “to pay her debts, which she had in few years contracted to unimaginable greatness, and to defray her constant expenses, which were very excessive in coaches and horses, clothes and jewels.”4 The king’s requests for gifts to Lady Castlemaine never seemed to make it past Lord Clarendon’s desk, and the king had to find other paths by which to route his largesse.
Jewels
Most royal mistresses were known for their greedy love of fine jewelry, and many flaunted finer gems than the queen. It was not only vanity which prompted the mistress to weigh down her neck and ears, wrists and fingers with diamonds, but the omnipresent fear of sudden disgrace. Indeed, jewelry was the commodity closest to cash. A king’s ransom could be stuffed into a small sack or sewn into hems and bodices if the mistress needed a hasty escape—as some did.
In 1662 when the Muscovite ambassador brought Charles II rich presents from the czar—furs and jewels amounting to £150,000—Lord Chancellor Clarendon begged the king not to give them away to “anyone.” By “anyone” the chancellor meant the grasping Lady Castlemaine. Charles promised. Stymied here, Lady Castlemaine then persuaded her royal lover to give her every Christmas present he had received from the peers—many were jewels intended for Charles to pass on to his queen. Soon Lady Castlemaine was loaded down with jewels “far out-shining the Queen,” according to diarist John Evelyn, who saw her at a palace celebration.5 Courtiers were not pleased to see their gifts to the king adorn his nasty mistress.
Lady Castlemaine had excellent credit with London jewelers, as they knew the king would pay her bills. There are some records of her purchases—a ring for £850 and two diamond rings for a total of £2,000.
In 1666—a year when sailors in the Royal Navy were given worthless vouchers instead of pay—the king cleared Lady Castlemaine’s debts to the amount of thirty thousand pounds, which included jewelry and gold and silver plate—and bought her more jewelry. Unsatisfied with such bounty, Lady Castlemaine helped herself to the king’s Jewel House in the Tower of London, signing documents agreeing to return the jewelry and plate that she had borrowed. But somehow she always managed to turn the loan into a gift.
England’s prince regent, who later became George IV, was so generous in dispensing valuable jewelry to his lady friends that he single-handedly made his jeweler a multimillionaire. Horribly in debt, chased by creditors, the heir to the throne made monthly visits to the London showroom of Rundell and Bridge. In October 1807 the prince spent nearly two thousand pounds (approximately two hundred thousand dollars in today’s money) on more than thirty pieces of jewelry inlaid with precious gems, including eight bracelets, four brooches, several silver serving dishes, and fine snuffboxes. It was his habit, when wooing a new mistress, to present her first with a miniature portrait of himself or a lock of his hair in a locket surrounded by diamonds. As the affair progressed he would lavish her with emerald rings, ruby necklaces, and a matched pair of sapphire bracelets.
It should come as no surprise that it was a mistress of George IV who amassed the greatest heap of gemstones during her tenure. Lady Conyngham was an unlikely royal mistress—fat and kind, rich and rapacious. In 1820, at the age of fifty, she found her way into the bed of the far heavier sixty-year-old king.
Lady Conyngham immediately reaped the rewards of her services in jewelry. The king gave her a large sapphire surrounded by diamonds which had belonged to the Stuart monarchs. When taking it from the Royal Treasury, the king had said the sapphire must go in his coronation crown. Instead, it appeared on Lady Conyngham’s ample waist. Upon King George’s death in 1830, Lady Conyngham—having been reminded by the government of Madame du Barry’s unfortunate death on the guillotine—very decently returned the sapphire and other royal gems to the keeper of the privy purse, saying she was not certain that the late king should have given them to her.
Lady Conyngham was always aglitter with gems at parties. One witness described her as being very dull and very brilliant at the same time. George’s bills at jewelers at this time include
d £3,150 for a necklace of remarkably large oriental pearls, £400 for a pair of diamond earrings, £437 for a pair of pearl bracelets, £530 for an emerald necklace, and £740 for another pearl necklace. Some estimated that the king had given his mistress £100,000 worth of jewelry, or $10 million in today’s money.
Louis XV’s Madame de Pompadour preferred collecting estates to jewelry. She had little taste for jewels, though her position required her to wear them daily. Her gems were of the finest quality. A portion of her collection consisted of a diamond necklace with 547 stones, a set of emerald jewelry, and forty-two priceless rings. But they meant little to her; she twice turned in her jewels to the treasury to help out in time of war.
Her successor, Madame du Barry, would never have been so generous. She positively adored her gems and launched new fashions in jewelry. Throughout the first seven decades of the eighteenth century, court women usually wore diamonds or pearls alone, or sometimes emeralds or rubies outlined by small rows of diamonds, but never two conflicting colors. When she became royal mistress in 1769, Madame du Barry encouraged jewelers to experiment with setting different-colored stones together—amethysts and sapphires, rubies and emeralds, aquamarines and garnets.
The infamous diamond necklace which would cause Queen Marie Antoinette such trouble a decade later was originally made for Madame du Barry. A veritable yoke of the largest and finest gems collected throughout Europe, the necklace consisted of a collar of huge stones from which hung intertwined ropes of diamonds. In a time of national financial disaster, this necklace outraged even the frivolous courtiers of Versailles. Despite the quality of its stones, many found the necklace to be incredibly ugly and compared it to an animal halter. Madame du Barry would have worn it with pride, however, if Louis had not died before purchasing it for her.
Sex with Kings Page 14