Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Rupert was summoned to help meet the Dutch encroachment. His skull was barely recovered from the double trepanning, but he joined the dukes of York and Albermarle as they summoned troops and took them to Upnor Castle. Pepys sneered at the sight of gentlemen volunteers — ‘young Hectors’ — assembling to meet the expected Dutch invasion. While these men rushed to the front line, the diarist enjoyed (in turn) a fine dinner, his mistress, and a good book. The next day Pepys gave further vent to his inferiority complex, mocking Albermarle for riding ‘with a great many idle lords and gentlemen, with their pistols and fooleries’.[603] As these men were fighting the Dutch, Pepys was planning how to get his personal savings out of London to a safe place. Meanwhile, Prince Rupert, who Pepys so despised, deployed a battery of artillery at Woolwich, covering a point in the river where he knew the enemy must pass. ‘On Thursday they came on again with 6 men of war and 5 fire ships’, Arlington wrote on 15 June, ‘... but were so warmly received by Upper [sic] Castle and battery on the shore that they were forced to retire, with great damage beside the burning of their 5 fire ships.’[604]

  Although the Dutch hovered at the entrance to the Thames for several days, and controlled the Channel for the next few weeks, they chose not to run the gauntlet of the Upnor and Woolwich gunners again. Warburton wrote that the Dutch were within point-blank range when the prince gave his first order to discharge at the enemy: ‘The sudden fire was maintained so fiercely, that there was no thought of resistance for a moment; as soon as the ships could be got about, they fled.’[605] John Evelyn recorded the aftermath of Rupert’s bombardment: ‘I went to see the Work at Woolwich, a battery to prevent them from coming up to London which Prince Rupert commanded, & [which] sunk some ships in the river.’[606]

  There were few consolations to accompany this humiliation. Because she was in Portsmouth, the Royal Sovereign was the only one of the navy’s five great ships to survive. And, thanks to the land-based defences commanded by James, Albermarle, and Rupert, Chatham dockyard was saved from destruction. However, following hard on the heels of the Great Plague and the Fire of London, the Dutch incursion up the Medway made a grim trinity of reversals for Restoration England. Feeling ‘dismally melancholy’, Ormonde expressed a commonly held sentiment when he wrote to the Earl of Anglesey: ‘God give us time and understanding to see and mend our faults of all sorts.’[607]

  The Second Anglo-Dutch War ended the following month, with both sides winning trading concessions, and most crucially, New York remained British. ‘Thus in all things,’ Pepys wrote, exaggerating the enemy’s overall ascendancy, ‘in wisdom — courage — force — knowledge of our own streams — and success — the Dutch have the best of us, and do end the war with victory on their side.’[608] While England’s Parliament and the United Provinces’ States-General signed the treaty with sincerity, the Duke of York and his following of warmongers saw this peace as an unwanted but inevitable interlude. They planned to resume hostilities as soon as a favourable opportunity presented itself.

  Chapter Twenty-Three - The Happiest Old Cur in the Nation

  ‘Scorn me not Fair because you see

  My hairs are white; what if they be?

  Think not ‘cause in your Cheeks appear

  Fresh springs of Roses all the year,

  And mine, like Winter, wan and old,

  My love like Winter should be cold:

  See in the Garland which you wear

  How the sweet blushing Roses there

  With pale-hu’d Lilies do combine?

  Be taught by them; so let us join.’

  ‘An Old Shepherd to a Young Nymph’, Edward Sherburne (1659)

  Rupert’s romantic history is one of the most frustrating strands of his life to unravel, because he was extremely discreet and was a very lazy letter writer. It is hard to imagine that a tall, handsome, dashing prince would ever have wanted for female admirers: Sir John Southcote, who served under Rupert in the Civil War, told his son that the prince was: ‘the greatest beau’ and ‘the greatest hero’.[609] Rupert never espoused celibacy and lifelong bachelorhood provided a succession of relationships, many of whose details remain obscure. In attempting to construct a true picture of Rupert’s love life, we have to rely to a large extent on the observations of his contemporaries.

  Samuel Pepys, Rupert’s great critic, assumed the prince to have been promiscuous into middle age. In 1666, before the two trepanning operations brought relief, Pepys wrote with relish of discharge from the prince’s head wound and speculated on its causes: ‘It seems, as Dr Clerke also tells me, it is a clap of the pox which he got about twelve years ago, and hath eaten to his head and come up through his skull.’[610]

  Although we know Pepys’s diagnosis to be flawed, this regurgitated gossip suggests Rupert had a reputation as a ladies’ man. However, we are aware of few of his lovers’ identities. We know of the gaoler’s daughter, during his imprisonment after Vlotho. There is also the possible union with the Duc de Rohan’s daughter — ‘The Mirror of Virtue’. Then there is the alleged affair with the Duchess of Richmond, during the Civil War. Otherwise, there are hints of flirtations, some of which may have become sexual encounters: John Evelyn recorded in his diary, in 1663, ‘Sir George Carteret, Treasurer of the Navy, had now married his daughter Caroline to Sir Thomas Scot, of Scottshall, in Kent. This gent: was thought to be the son of Prince Rupert.’[611] If Scot was Rupert’s illegitimate child, he was never acknowledged as such by the prince.

  Dudley Bard was openly recognised as Rupert’s son. He was born during the Second Anglo-Dutch War — probably in 1666 — and educated at Eton, across the Thames from his father’s quarters in Windsor Castle. He was commonly referred to as ‘Dudley Rupert’ and, after he followed his father into the military, as ‘Captain Rupert’. His mother was Frances Bard, the daughter of one of Charles I’s most loyal and exotic supporters.

  Frances’s father, Henry Bard, was the academically gifted son of a priest. A Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Henry’s passion was foreign travel: as a young man he walked through France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Palestine, before reaching Egypt, where he stole a copy of the Koran from a mosque. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Henrietta Maria secured his appointment as a lieutenant colonel of infantry. Bard justified this patronage: he proved an effective recruiting officer in Ireland and performed with initiative and courage at the battle of Cheriton Down, in March 1644, before his men were cut to ribbons in a powerful Parliamentary cavalry charge. He lost an arm there and was taken prisoner. On his release, he rejoined the Royalist army and was given the Irish title of Viscount Bellamont. When Rupert stormed Leicester in 1645, the one-armed peer was the first Royalist up the scaling ladders. He was next seen with the prince at Naseby.

  Towards the end of the Civil War, Henry was captured once more and was given the choice of an indefinite spell in gaol or permanent exile. He joined the Prince of Wales’s court on the Continent and continued to make waves: he was arrested as a suspect in the murder of Isaac Dorislaus, a Dutchman who had coordinated the prosecution at Charles I’s trial. For want of evidence, the case against Bellamont was dropped and he was released.

  In 1656, Bellamont was sent as ambassador to Persia (a country he loved — he named one of his daughters Persiana) and India, to trawl for funds for the Royalist cause. His mission failed and, soon after seeing the Taj Mahal nearing completion, he died — accounts say either of heat stroke or in a sandstorm. He left behind a penniless wife and four children. His only son was called Charles Rupert: he was a godson of Charles I, which explains the first name, while the second is testimony to his close friendship with the prince. Certainly, Rupert remained in contact with Bellamont’s children after their father’s death: he began his affair with Frances, the eldest of the three daughters, soon after she reached womanhood.

  Frances has left only a faint historical footprint — a great frustration, since we know she was one of Rupert’s two great loves. Indeed, she claimed to be his wife.
This is certainly possible, but since the prince continuously and vigorously denied the union, one of them was lying. Supporters of Frances’s claim point to a scrap of paper that reads:

  July the 30th 1664

  These are to certifie whom it may concerne that Prince Rupert and the Lady ffrances Bard were Lawfully married at petersham in Surry by me

  Henry Bignell

  minister [612]

  Bignell was not Petersham’s priest in 1664, but served there both beforehand and afterwards. It therefore seems probable that — if genuine — this affidavit was written at a later date, perhaps at the request of Frances or of one of her supporters, to give retrospective evidence of the event. The parish’s official register of births, deaths, and marriages is unfortunately incomplete, the relevant pages for 1664 among several passages that have been torn out and lost.

  It is equally plausible that Frances was never married to Rupert. Perhaps she was embarrassed by her years as a mistress and chose to deny them by falsely claiming a more respectable status. She had a reputation for integrity later in life, which Rupert’s sister Sophie thought exceptional: ‘She is an upright, good and virtuous woman. There are few like her; we all love her!’[613] It is impossible to judge whether this uprightness was a feature throughout Frances’s life or whether it developed after a spell as a prince’s paramour.

  The piece of paper allegedly signed by the priest is the only tangible evidence to suggest that Rupert and Frances were married. If they were, it must have been secretly, for there are no contemporary references to their wedding. The couple spent three years together, before their relationship ended in bitterness. ‘She cannot be very good-natured,’ Sophie consoled her brother at the time of the break-up, ‘if she has offended you.’[614] However, Frances had every right to feel bitter, for it seems likely that she was spurned by Rupert for another woman, and a glamorous one, at that.

  *

  In the autumn of 1667, Rupert suffered further complications to his unrelenting head wound. The Duke of York immediately despatched his French surgeon to assist, before writing with concern:

  My dear Cousin,

  As soon as Will Legge showed me your letter of the accident in your head, I immediately sent Choqueux to you in so much haste as I had not time to write by him; but now I conjure you, if you have any kindness for me, have a care of your health, and do not neglect yourself, for which I am not so much concerned ... I write to you without ceremony, and pray do the like to me, for we are too good friends to use any. I must again beg of you to have a care of your health; and assure you that I am yours,

  J.Y.[615]

  The following summer Rupert was persuaded to accompany Catharine of Braganza and the court on their annual descent on Tunbridge Wells. The queen had first taken the waters there in 1664, to convalesce from a life-threatening illness. She found it a comfortable summer retreat — a rural escape from the heat and dirt of the capital: it was to London what Fontainebleau was to Paris. Writing in 1771, Richard Oneley described a landscape that would have altered little since Rupert’s visit a century before: ‘The town and castle of Tunbridge, the navigable river Medway, and the rich meadows, through which it runs, finely diversified with corn-fields, pasturage, hop-gardens and orchards ... form a most beautiful scene.’[616]

  The town was famed for its spa water, which was viewed as a cure-all. While Rupert drank it to purge his blood, the queen hoped it might boost her fertility: she remained childless and was desperate for a remedy. The seasonal influx included many aristocrats whose only maladies were chronic sycophancy and rampant hedonism, and who wanted to be near the royal family at play. The queen insisted that Tunbridge relax the formalities that were her everyday lot elsewhere. Grandees played at the simple life, renting small houses and relying on skeleton staffs. Each day began with a general congregation around the wells. Cups of water were consumed before strolls in the shade of the trees, games of bowls, or dancing in the queen’s apartments. Catharine’s physician encouraged dancing, believing it would jiggle the queen’s reproductive system and help her to conceive. Fruit, game, and flowers were available from market stalls run by ‘young, fair, fresh-coloured country girls, with clean linen, small straw hats, and neat shoes and stockings.’[617]

  The gentle, rural idyll gave way to more sophisticated evening entertainment. Al fresco dancing took place on the bowling green, ‘a turf more soft and smooth than the finest carpet in the world’.[618] In the holiday atmosphere, flirtation was common and affairs were rife. The prince, renowned for his sternness and eccentricity, must have cut a strange figure in such heady, frivolous company. Lord Orford, a great admirer of Rupert’s scientific abilities, wrote that the Prince ‘could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, [but] was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits’.[619]

  These ‘wits’ were a new generation, who entertained the king and helped shape history’s perception of his rule as a time of loose living and superficial pleasure-seeking. Their time had come, now Clarendon and his sensible, disapproving manner had been condemned to exile. They viewed Rupert as a curmudgeon, a relic from a distant age: ‘He was brave and courageous, even to rashness,’ Count Grammont conceded, ‘but cross-grained and incorrigibly obstinate: his genius was fertile in mathematical experiments, and he possessed some knowledge of chemistry: he was polite, even to excess, unseasonably; but haughty, and even brutal, when he ought to have been gentle and courteous: he was tall, and his manners were ungracious: he had a dry hard-favoured visage, and a stern look, even when he wished to please; but, when he was out of humour, he was the true picture of reproof.’[620] It is a sharp but cruel portrait of a bruised old warrior. The prince was not yet 50, but he appeared older, his manner and appearance prematurely aged by the demands and exertions of a life in the front line. Prince Rupert seemed to have been around forever, and to have no place in the new, lax atmosphere of Charles II’s court.

  The talk of Tunbridge Wells in 1668 was Charles II’s lust for the ravishing but chaste Frances Stewart. The more she denied him, the more vigorously he pursued her. Catharine of Braganza, seeing the state into which ‘la belle Stewart’ had whipped her husband, decided to unsettle her rival by importing further competition. She summoned a company of actors to Tunbridge Wells, one of whom was Nell Gwynn, the daughter of a brothel-keeper who had drowned in a ditch while drunk. Nell had progressed from selling herring in the street and then oranges in the theatre, to becoming one of the liveliest and best-known actresses in the land. Bawdy, sexy, and witty, she was to be Charles II’s most famous mistress. Within two years she had added to the king’s illegitimate tribe, producing a boy who was called Charles, Duke of St Albans — living proof of her light-hearted boast that she was a ‘sleeping partner in the ship of state’.[621] Rupert’s eyes, however, were not on the captivating Nell. As Count Grammont recorded with glee, they were fixed elsewhere:

  The Queen had sent for the players, either that there might be no intermission in the diversions of the place, or, perhaps, to retort upon Miss Stewart, by the presence of Miss Gwynn, part of the uneasiness she felt from her’s: Prince Rupert found charms in the person of another player, called Hughes, who brought down, and greatly subdued his natural fierceness. From this time, adieu alembics, crucibles, furnaces, and all the black furniture of the forges: a complete farewell to all mathematical instruments and chemical speculations: sweet powder and essences were now the only ingredients that occupied any share of his attention. The impertinent gypsy chose to be attacked in form; and proudly refusing money, that, in the end, she might sell her favours at a dearer rate, she caused the poor prince to act a part so unnatural, that he no longer appeared like the same person. The King was greatly pleased with this event, for which great rejoicings were made at Tunbridge; but nobody was bold enough to make it the subject of satire, though the same constraint was not observed with other ridiculous personages.[622]

  Margaret Hughes, known as ‘Peg’, was from a thesp
ian family and was one of the first generation of professional English actresses. Stage plays had been banned by Parliament in 1642. However, Charles II greatly enjoyed the theatre — he had been weaned on it, receiving his own troupe (‘Prince Charles’s Players’) at the age of one — and three months after the Restoration he granted patents to two playwrights, Sir Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant, which permitted them to open theatres and to put on plays for profit. These were coveted awards, given to two Royalists, in the face of intense competition. Killigrew had served as a page to Charles I and had followed the court into continental exile. He founded the King’s Company, which was initially more prestigious than its rival, gleaning the more accomplished actors and specialising in the established texts. Killigrew’s troupe was based at the Royal Theatre, Drury Lane, from 1663. Davenant had been the Marquess of Newcastle’s senior artillery officer at Marston Moor. He later spent two years imprisoned in the Tower of London. Now, in happier times, he formed the Duke’s Company and began to build a theatre in a converted real tennis court at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was noted for its innovative use of moving scenery. Both men were to benefit from a revolution to their art, which sprung from the monarch’s permissiveness.

  Charles had seen his mother and her ladies-in-waiting act in the privacy of the court from an early age — indeed, the first time the word ‘actress’ was used in its modern context, to describe a female stage performer, was when it was applied to the queen by the pen of an admiring courtier. During his travels on the Continent, Charles had seen the ready acceptance of actresses: they had been permitted in France, Italy, and Spain in the late sixteenth century, and in parts of Germany in the early seventeenth.

  Out of Protestant prudery, which held that flaunted female flesh would corrupt morals, women’s roles on the English stage were played by boys and effeminate men — the most famous of whom, Ned Kynaston, was judged by Pepys, during one performance, to be ‘the prettiest woman in the whole house’.[623] The king — sexually adventurous and a keen appreciator of all things feminine — did away with gender discrimination. From 1660, both Killigrew’s and Davenant’s companies employed women. In 1662 Charles issued a royal warrant that declared that women were to play all female parts: this, he was sure, would guard against ‘unnatural vice’.