Royal Marriage Secrets

by John Ashdown-Hill

  Although Lucy seems to have received little in the way of formal education, she was brought up in a gentry milieu, with the social graces which would later enable her to mix with people of rank. However, in 1640 her parents parted, and the following year a long separation dispute between them commenced in the House of Lords.17 Lucy left both Wales and her father, travelling with her mother to an England which was then on the brink of Civil War. With her mother she settled in London. According to the later accounts of James II and his father-in-law, Lord Clarendon,18 Lucy is rumoured to have embarked on a love affair with Algernon Sidney, an officer in the Parliamentary army. Subsequently, she is said to have transferred her affections to his younger brother, Robert, who was a Royalist. This account is repeated as fact by Clifton in his recent biographical account of Lucy in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,19 but there seems to be no contemporary evidence to support it. Other writers have argued that ‘the account of her relationship with Algernon Sidney accords neither with the latter’s known movements nor with his character’, and James II is known to have had reasons for wishing to disparage Sidney as well as Lucy Walter.20

  Monmouth supporters later alleged that Lucy met Charles, possibly in the West Country, in about 1645, and that a relationship developed between the young couple (who were then in their mid-teens). It is even suggested that a secret marriage took place between them at that time. Later rumours and publications dating from the nineteenth century have claimed that a record of Charles’s marriage to Lucy once existed in the parish register of the church of St Thomas, Haverfordwest, but that the record was destroyed early in the eighteenth century. It is true that the Walter family had a house in Haverfordwest.21 However, there is no real evidence that such a marriage record ever existed, or that it was destroyed as reported.

  Nor does a meeting between Charles and Lucy at that time seem plausible. Charles’s movements at that period may be briefly summarised as follows: early in 1645 his father sent him to Bristol to take command of the Royalist forces in the west. On 2 March 1646 he escaped to the Scillies, moving on to Jersey on 16 April. On 26 June 1646 he landed in France, where he remained until the desertion of an English fleet from the Parliamentarian to the Royalist side took him to the Netherlands to assume command of the newly arrived ships. Charles arrived in The Hague on 12 July 1648. Nothing whatever is known of Lucy Walter’s movements during the period 1645 to 1647, but there is no solid evidence of any meeting with Charles prior to 1648.

  Nevertheless, a letter from Sir Edward Hyde (later Lord Clarendon and father-in-law of James II) to Mr Secretary Nicholas has been cited by one author as possible evidence of such a meeting, and indeed, as evidence of a marriage between Lucy and Charles. Although this letter does not name Lucy, and probably has, in reality, nothing whatever to do with her, the fact that it has been cited elsewhere as evidence of her marriage means that we must review it here. The letter is dated 7 March 1646/47, and in it Hyde states that:

  I am far from secure, for many reasons, that the intelligence from London of the Prince’s Marriage may not be true, we were apprehensive of it before he went, and spoke freely to him our opinions of the fatal consequences of it.22

  This letter has been interpreted as implying Charles’ presence in London, but that is clearly an error. In March 1646/47 Charles was not in London, but in France. London is merely cited in Hyde’s letter as the source of a marriage rumour in respect of Charles. And the rumour in question referred not to a marriage with Lucy Walter but to a wedding with Charles’s French cousin, la Grande Mademoiselle.23 The courtship of these royal cousins had been encouraged by the prince’s Catholic mother (and Mademoiselle’s aunt), Queen Henrietta Maria, and Hyde’s evident disapproval of the match was doubtless occasioned by a combination of the religion and the nationality of the prospective bride. At all events, the marriage rumour was false. In the context of Charles’s courtship of Mademoiselle, however, it should also be noted that Charles is on record as having promised his cousin in July 1649 that he would terminate any other attachments if they married.24 This hardly seems compatible with the notion that Charles was then already married to Lucy Walter.

  It is not known how Lucy reached the Netherlands. The suggestion was later made that she came there in company with Robert Sidney. This suggestion may be correct, although there is actually no surviving contemporary evidence to support it. Hyde (who was of course a hostile witness) later wrote that Lucy came to The Hague with the deliberate intention of meeting and seducing Charles, but there is no reason to believe him. ‘On balance, however, likelihood lies with the idea that Lucy Walter was introduced to Charles at the Hague by a courtier in July 1648’,25 and that Charles quickly became enamoured of her. Harris suggests that ‘Charles met Lucy during a brief visit to The Hague in July 1648, when she was still under the protection of Colonel Robert Sidney (1628–68), and it was during this time that Monmouth was evidently conceived’.26 At this period the 18-year-old Lucy was described, even by her enemies, as an attractive brunette, and it would be otiose to doubt her charms, since it seems inherently improbable that Charles would have deliberately selected an unattractive partner. The Baronne d’Aulnoy, who had seen her, said of Lucy:

  her beauty was so perfect that when the King saw her in Wales where she was, he was so charmed and ravished and enamoured that in the misfortunes which ran through the first years of his reign he knew no other sweetness or joy than to love her, and be loved by her … He was so very young, and this was his first passion.27

  For some reason Lucy was known in the Netherlands as ‘Mrs Barlow’. Her motives for using this alias are unknown.

  Charles was evidently besotted with the ravishing ‘Mrs Barlow’, and soon his devotion to her welfare became such a talking point that rumours concerning their relationship sprang up like weeds. It was assumed by many, from the very beginning, that they had secretly married while Charles’s passion was overwhelming his judgement, and so firmly established did the belief become that official denials in later years only served to reinforce it.28

  There seems no possible room for doubt that a sexual relationship rapidly developed between Charles and Lucy. When, in 1649, Lucy bore a baby boy who was christened James, Charles acknowledged his paternity without hesitation.29 The arguments which James II would later advance to suggest a different father for the boy were clearly specious, and motivated by self-interest.30 Charles II consistently treated the boy as his son, and there is widespread modern agreement that ‘portraits of the two as adolescents show a clear family likeness’.31 Indeed, Oliver Cromwell, who briefly held the future Duke of Monmouth and his mother in the Tower of London during the summer of 1656, specifically commented at that time upon the boy’s resemblance to ‘Charles Stuart’.32 And although, after the Restoration, couplets could sometimes be heard in London denigrating Monmouth’s claim to be Charles II’s son,33 modern scientific evidence has now proved beyond any possible doubt that Charles II was Monmouth’s father. Y-chromosome DNA tests have shown that Monmouth’s direct descendants, ‘the Dukes of Buccleuch descend in the male line from the same stock as do the Dukes of Grafton, St Albans and Richmond, which of course is from King Charles II’. 34

  Charles and Lucy can have spent only a short time together before Charles put to sea with the fleet. However:

  most biographers have assumed that Charles resumed his relationship with Lucy when he returned to the Netherlands in September 1648, although the historical record is obscure … John Evelyn later recalled meeting Lucy at St Germain-en-Laye in August 1649, where she had come to be introduced to Charles’s mother, Henrietta Maria.35

  Lucy’s introduction to the queen mother in 1649 is another of the intriguing aspects of this story, and it was to have a sequel (see below). However, shortly after the meeting, Charles left for Jersey, so as to be in a better position to monitor developments in Scotland and Ireland, and a year later he embarked for Scotland, in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the royalist cause’.36
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  During Charles’ absence Lucy appears to have attached herself to Viscount Taafe, and in 1651 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary, of whom, as we have seen, Taafe was probably the father. At all events, Charles II never extended paternal recognition to Mary, although some have sought to argue that she may have been his daughter.37 When Charles returned to France following the royalist defeat at Worcester in September 1651, he made no attempt to revive his affair with Lucy.38 Lucy seems to have taken this badly, but her unpredictable behaviour merely strengthened Charles’s motives for dissociating himself from her. She began to create scandals and scenes, and it must have become evident to Charles now (if it had not already been so before) that Lucy had become something of a liability to his cause. By about 1653 at the latest, he seems definitively to have ended his relationship with her.39 This, Lucy clearly found very hard to accept. If she ever invented a private fantasy of having been married to Charles it may well have been at about this time, for had she believed herself married to him earlier her desertion to Lord Taafe would have been both reprehensible and dangerous, and would have provided good grounds for Charles to set her aside.

  During the 1650s we have what has been claimed as possible evidence that Charles’ elder sister, the Princess Royal,40 may have had dealings with Lucy Walter. This evidence comprises three letters from the Princess to her brother, all of which speak of ‘your wife’.41 For example, she wrote to her brother that:

  Your Mothere says that the greatest thankfulness she can show for the honour of your kind remembrance is to have a special care of your wife for feare her husband here may make her forget them that are absent. Your wife thanks you in her own hand and still though she begs me very hard to help her.42

  However, some authorities have questioned whether the word ‘wife’ necessarily carried the implication of marriage at this period, or whether perhaps the use of the word in this context might have been some kind of private code.43 The latter suggestion does certainly seem to be a real possibility, because the extract quoted above is strange in several respects. First, it refers to ‘your Mothere’ – as though Charles and his sister did not share the same mother. Secondly, it speaks as though the ‘Mothere’ in question was in The Hague with the Princess Royal when the letter was written. But Queen Henrietta Maria was actually in Paris at that time. The third strange point is the reference to the wife’s ‘husband here’. This is reinforced in a later letter, which informs Charles that:

  Your wife … thinks of another husband, and does not follow your example of being as constant a wife as you are a husband: ’tis a frailty they say is given to the sex, therefore you will pardon her I hope.44

  Unfortunately the letters mention no names, so that, as with so much evidence in this case, their testimony remains equivocal. Since a king is usually considered to be married to his kingdom, is it possible that the ‘wife’ was England, and that the letters were coded to contain some kind of news of political events? Alternatively it has been suggested that they may refer to the Princess Henrietta Catherine of Orange, with whom Charles was then in love.45

  Nevertheless, those who insist that Lucy Walter was meant can cite direct and indirect supporting evidence from three other quarters which suggests that in the 1650s Lucy may have been describing herself as Charles’s wife. The first evidence comes from English Government sources. In 1656, Charles seems to have acted firmly to rid himself of Lucy’s embarrassing presence. Supplied with a little money and a pearl necklace, she was embarked with both her children on a ship bound for England, where her arrival soon caught the eye of the Republican Government. It was at this time that Lucy and her children found themselves in the Tower of London – the closest that Lucy ever came to living in an English royal palace!

  During the summer of 1656, while Lucy was in detention, she and her son were seen by Oliver Cromwell, who referred to Lucy as the woman who ‘passeth under the character of Charles Stuart’s wife or mistress’.46 Cromwell’s warrant indicates that Lucy may have represented herself to her captors as married to Charles. Moreover, a later pamphlet produced by Monmouth’s supporters claimed:

  That there was in Olivers time, a Letter intercepted from the King to the said Lady, then in the Tower, superscribed, to his Wife. Nor is it unknown with what fear and homage the Kings party in England, at that time paid their Devotion and testified their Obedience to her. For as they addressed her upon the Knee, so by that and many other Symbols, they declared that they esteemed her for no less than the lawful Wife of their King and Master.47

  These later comments must be treated with some caution, of course, first because we have no direct evidence to support them, and second, because it seems somewhat strange that Charles, who had apparently terminated his active relationship with Lucy in 1651, should have written to her as his wife in 1656, particularly in view of his later very firm denials. Nevertheless it seems probable that the later recollections of those witnesses who recalled Lucy herself as claiming, in the 1650s, to have been married to Charles may have voiced neither more nor less than the truth. It is also alleged that Lucy’s own mother referred, at this period, to her daughter’s marriage with ‘the king’.48

  Lucy’s visit to England with her children in 1656 was of short duration. After a period of detention the government in London clearly saw that she represented no danger to them. At the same time they perceived that she might be used to embarrass the exiled Charles. They therefore shipped her back to the Low Countries.

  The second source of evidence for Lucy’s married status in the 1650s comes from France, and the exiled court of the queen mother. We have already seen that Henrietta Maria received Lucy in 1469. Subsequently ‘she allowed Lucy to be present at her sick bed which was a very great honour indeed’.49 Moreover, the queen mother, who showed no interest whatever in Charles [II]’s other bastards, also took a unique interest in her grandson, Lucy’s son, ‘taking him to stay with her outside Paris and treating him with the honour and esteem normally reserved for a prince of the blood. In Paris he had even publicly been greeted as Prince of Wales’. 50

  The third piece of evidence in support of a marriage, dating from the 1650s, is contained in a letter from Daniel O’Neill, Charles’ Groom of the Bedchamber. On 8 March 1654 he wrote to Charles that:

  … if he [Ormonde] had been here when he was expected, which was two moneths ago, in all likely hood you might have been at home with your wife and children now peaceably.51

  As usual, there are no names mentioned, so the precise meaning of this letter is open to interpretation. Possibly ‘at home with your wife and children’ was merely being used as an idiom in this case, with no specific or personal reference to Charles’ matrimonial status. Alternatively it has been suggested that, once again, a code to which the key is now lost was being used in this letter.

  Back in Brussels, after her return from England, Lucy tried to make use of her growing son against the boy’s father. A prolonged period of strife then ensued, during which Charles sought repeatedly to rescue the boy from his mother’s increasingly disorderly and stressful household. Lucy was finally persuaded to surrender the child. This was in 1658, by which time she was already sick. Later reports suggest that she was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease of some kind. However, these accounts are imprecise and unsubstantiated. Towards the end of 1658, Lucy died, apparently in Paris, where she was said to have been buried, but even these final points of her story are the subject of some uncertainty.52

  Although witnesses may accurately have reported Lucy’s claims to be married to Charles, in itself that does not guarantee that those claims were true. It nevertheless constitutes evidence of a kind, seeming to permit three possible explanations. The first is that, while the witnesses were truthfully and accurately reporting what they had heard and seen, Lucy herself had been lying, or fantasising. The second possibility is that Lucy had been telling the truth as she saw it, but that she was in fact mistaken. The third possibility, of course, is that there h
ad indeed been a marriage of some kind between her and Charles.

  Rather like the case of the alleged marriage of Eleanor Talbot to Edward IV (see above), which was discussed much more after Eleanor died than it ever was during her lifetime, the alleged marriage of Lucy Walter to Charles II became a major topic of conversation after Lucy’s death. Nor is this retrospective reference to Eleanor Talbot’s story merely a whim of the present author. During the seventeenth century the first attempts were being made to rescue Eleanor from the oblivion into which Henry VII had cast her, and although her story was still little-known and not entirely understood, possible parallels between her case and that of Lucy Walter were actually noted and commented upon at the time.53

  Since Lucy had died in 1658, two years before the Restoration of the Monarchy, it was, of course, impossible to invite her comments on the question of her marriage with Charles during the 1670s and 1680s, when this became a very important issue politically. However, Charles II was alive, and he maintained firmly and consistently that he had never been married to Lucy. The king even went to the length of writing out in his own hand, and signing, the following statements:

  There being a false and malicious report industriously spread abroad by some who are neither friends to me nor to the Duke of Monmouth, as if I should have been either contracted or married to his mother; and though I am most confident that this idle story cannot have any effect in this age, yet I thought it my duty in relation to the succession of the Crown, and that future ages may not have any further pretence to give disturbance on that score, or on any other of this nature, to declare, as I do declare, in the presence of Almighty God, that I never was married nor gave contract to any woman whatsoever, but to my wife Queen Catherine, to whom I am now married.