Mistresses

by Linda Porter

  The Cromwellian England to which Lucy returned was by no means the sterile military dictatorship depicted by the Lord Protector’s opponents. Literature and music flourished, private performances kept the theatrical tradition alive and coffee houses in London were thriving social hubs. Charles II and his threadbare courtiers, roaming the smaller cities of Europe, could not hope to match the English republic’s standing in the eyes of the world. No longer a small northern European country riven by civil war, the republic was an international power. But it was a suspicious city to which ‘Mrs Barlow’ returned, watchful of new arrivals, especially those with royalist connections. Lucy was naive if she thought that she and her little party could pass unremarked through its streets. Within two weeks of her arrival in June 1656, Lucy discovered that Thomas Howard could not protect her – or, indeed, himself – from the well-oiled machinery of Cromwell’s spy network, controlled by Oliver’s self-effacing but extremely competent secretary, John Thurloe. Having watched her lodgings in the Strand and followed her every movement, Thurloe’s net closed in. Lucy’s group, including her children and maid, were detained and taken to the Tower of London for questioning.

  This frightening episode is glossed over in the hagiographic biography of James, duke of Monmouth, which was published thirty years later, when Lucy’s son was desperately trying to mend his relationship with his father. The grovelling author of this work would have his readers believe that Lucy’s time in London was a triumph: ‘. . . the Cavaliers carried themselves towards her with a profound reverence and awful respect, treating her as a sacred person, serving her on the knee.’7 Lucy’s contacts in London before her arrest are unknown but her interrogation in the Tower was led by John Barkstead, a hard-line regicide not known for his gentle treatment of prisoners. He was more likely to have viewed Lucy as a royalist whore than a ‘sacred person’. Under his initial questioning, Lucy claimed to be the widow of a Dutch sea-captain, explaining that she had returned to England to claim her mother’s legacy. That part of the story was true but Barkstead knew that the rest was a pack of lies. Was she not, in fact, Charles Stuart’s mistress, he asked, and the mother of his son? Cornered, Lucy did not deny that she had given birth to the king’s child but claimed that he had died. The two children accompanying her now were the offspring of the conveniently dead Dutchman.

  Barkstead was not fooled for one minute. From Lucy’s blabbermouth maid, Anne Hill, the authorities had already learned all they needed to know. Howard was not a chance acquaintance encountered on the North Sea crossing but Lucy’s lover and the boy was indeed the son of Charles Stuart. Their suspicions confirmed, the Lord Protector and his advisers now considered what to do with this unexpected opportunity. The conclusion they came to was that Lucy was not a royalist spy and that they would be better off deporting her. The damage she could continue to wreak on Charles Stuart’s reputation was far greater if she was free than if she was detained in England. Accordingly, the order was given, signed by Cromwell himself: ‘Lucy Barlow, prisoner in the Tower, to be sent back to Flanders with her child’.8 The child, in this case, meant the seven-year-old James, there being apparently no interest in his young half-sister, Mary. The document describes Lucy and her son disparagingly, as ‘Charles Stuart’s lady of pleasure and the young heir.’9 Mercurius Politicus, the official newspaper of the republican government, was quick to point out to the regime’s royalist enemies that they were ‘already furnished with an heir apparent.’10 Lucy was lucky to escape from this ill-advised return to her native land without far more serious consequences. Her dreams of using her mother’s money and Howard’s continued largesse to buy a coach lined with red velvet had been met with a rude awakening, but much worse was to follow.

  *

  SCANDAL AND LUCY Walter were always close companions. A more placid woman might have been content with her fine house outside Delft but though she drew up plans for renovation with her brother, Justus, whose tastes for lavish living matched her own, Lucy’s capacity for getting into trouble had not been contained by her sojourn in the Tower of London. She became embroiled in a dispute with a local wine merchant (the precise causes of which remain unclear) and ended up in jail. She was eventually released but ordered to leave Delft. No help was forthcoming from Thomas Howard, so Lucy, with the unexpected assistance in this extremity of Robert Sidney, decided to sell her splendid house with most of its contents and move to the Spanish Netherlands. If the affair with Thomas Howard was already cooling, it now descended into acrimony as Howard disputed Lucy’s right to sell off the house’s contents, most of which, he claimed, belonged to him. Deserted and wondering if she had been played for a fool all along, Lucy’s thoughts turned to revenge. She would make Howard pay, and not just with money – for there seemed to be no more of that forthcoming – but with his life.

  On 24 August 1657, a young cousin of Lucy’s, Charles Bursfield, who had arrived from England to support her, attempted to assassinate Howard in Brussels. His earlier attempt to challenge Howard to a duel, a time-honoured way of defending a lady’s honour, had been met with derision and so he resorted to a surprise attack with a stiletto dagger in an alleyway, not far, as it turned out, from where the king himself was lodging. The attack, like much else attempted by Lucy Walter, failed, though Howard suffered a severe arm wound. Charles II and Edward Hyde were left shaking their heads over this latest exploit involving Lucy Walter. They were already plentifully supplied with other damaging titbits. For the past two years, Daniel O’Neill had been gathering more information about Lucy’s unsavoury life. He learned of abortions, plots to murder a maid who talked too much; in short, he had a full portfolio of dirt on ‘Mrs Barlow’ to add to the escapade in Brussels.

  Still, Charles hesitated. At his behest, Lucy had been lodged with Sir Arthur Slingsby, a royalist living in Brussels, who was supposed to keep an eye on her and suppress the possibility of further damaging behaviour. But Lucy had by no means exhausted her options and, having already sold letters Howard had written to her, revealing his activities as a royalist conspirator, she now announced her intention to ‘post up’ Charles’s letters to her, in full public view, in the Grande Place in Brussels, unless her pension was increased. This threat prompted the king to arrange another attempt to kidnap his son. Slingsby was to remove him from his mother and take him to a secure place. The plan was put into action on a cold evening in early December 1657 but was, once again, thwarted by Lucy. She ran, screaming, into the street, causing a huge scene that naturally drew onlookers. The violence of Slingsby’s attempts to restrain and quieten her brought the gathering crowd firmly on to her side. This bungled attempt proved a great embarrassment for Charles II. The Spanish ambassador to Charles’s exiled court in Brussels, Don Alonso de Cárdenas, described Slingsby’s behaviour as ‘most barbarous, abominable and most unnatural’. He offered Lucy and her son his protection. The incident threatened to derail the relationship between Spain and the Stuarts, which had been so painstakingly established.11

  The king, providentially away in Bruges when the kidnap attempt took place, could not afford to lose Spanish support. Equally, he could not let Lucy Walter continue to damage his international reputation by her shenanigans. He needed to tread carefully in his response to her latest aggravation and to get the Spanish on his side, not hers. Accordingly, he wrote a carefully worded letter of explanation to Cárdenas, explaining his side of the story. His concerns, he explained, had always been for the child, and, indeed, for Lucy herself. He needed Spanish help to prevent Lucy’s ‘mad disobedience to his pleasure’ and settle matters once and for all. It would, he said, ‘be a great charity to the child, and to the mother herself, if she shall now at length retire to such a way of life (that) may redeem in some measure the reproach of her past ways.’12 The Spanish accepted this explanation and agreed to assist Charles in containing Lucy. She spent Christmas under the watchful eye of Cárdenas. Meanwhile, Daniel O’Neill told Slingsby to make sure that the potentially damaging letters tha
t Lucy had so unwisely shouted about be removed from her possession as soon as possible and returned to the king. Like so much else connected with Lucy Walter and the written evidence of her relationship with Charles II, they conveniently disappeared.

  It was now just a matter of time before she lost her last bargaining chip, her nine-year-old son. In April 1658, while his mother was in another part of the house, James was successfully removed from her custody by two of Charles’s servants, by the simple expedient of distraction. For all her faults, Lucy was a stout-hearted woman and she immediately began to search for James. This time, however, she would not succeed. For months she tried, first in Brussels and then following James to Paris, where he eventually ended up in the care of William Crofts, a royalist politician who was on friendly terms with the king. But Lucy never saw James again. She was already ill when she arrived in Paris and now, in the autumn of 1658, she faded fast. The cause of her illness cannot be identified with any certainty. James, duke of York, subsequently claimed that she had contracted venereal disease because of the life she led but he had every reason to wish to blacken the reputation of a woman who was no longer able to defend herself. Whatever killed her, it is clear that, as she faced death, Lucy had regrets and expressed them in a confession made to John Cosin, the chaplain to the Protestant exiles in Paris, whom she had probably met on previous visits to the French capital. He, at least, did not judge her as her life ebbed away.

  At the end, Lucy Walter was a lonely figure, attended to her grave in Paris (long since lost) by a spy from Charles II’s exiled court. Nor has time been kind to her reputation. It might justifiably be argued that Lucy brought many of the difficulties that beset her on herself. She was ambitious, headstrong and overconfident, and relentlessly combative, mindful of her son’s usefulness to her but completely neglectful of the education of someone who was a royal child. Crofts was astonished to discover that his new charge, though intelligent and willing to learn, could not read or count beyond twenty. But Charles II had never been able to make provision for a proper education for his son and probably would not have trusted Lucy Walter with the money while James remained with her. Her death, at the beginning of December 1658, relieved Charles of a thorn in his side. Very few people have spoken up for Lucy since and attempts to do so have been unconvincing.

  There remains, of course, the intriguing question of whether Charles II, as a teenage prince in The Hague, did indeed go through some form of marriage ceremony with Lucy Walter. He denied it throughout his reign and his brother, challenged by Lucy’s son for the succession, made sure that her memory was vilified. The papers which Lucy is said to have entrusted to John Cosin during her last days in Paris have never been found. Probably they were destroyed, if anything of any note ever actually existed. Cosin’s extensive library and correspondence can now be consulted in the libraries of Durham University and Durham Cathedral and it may be that, among their pages, a surprised researcher could, one day, discover something that escaped the suppression of Lucy Walter’s papers and will vindicate her brittle and sad life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Marking Time

  ‘For I cannot choose but say she is the worthiest to be loved of all the sex’

  Charles II reveals his admiration for Princess

  Henrietta Catherine of Orange, 1658

  THE EXILED KING had readily found a succession of ladies willing to succumb to his considerable charms by the time Lucy Walter met her cheerless end in Paris. Nor was young James Crofts his only child, though it is unlikely that Lucy’s son knew he had, by 1658, three half-siblings: two sisters and a brother. The first of these, Charlotte Fitzroy, was born in 1651 to Elizabeth Killigrew. Known as Betty, Elizabeth Killigrew was a member of Henrietta Maria’s household in Paris and the sister of playwright Thomas Killigrew. The Killigrews were a well-connected royalist family (Thomas acted as a diplomat for Charles II in northern Italy during the 1650s) and Betty had been married to the Irishman Francis Boyle, later made Viscount Shannon, since before the outbreak of the Civil Wars. She was eight years older than Charles, which has sometimes been taken as an indication of his weakness for older women, though the king’s very varied taste in women does not really support this interpretation. Her marriage appears to have survived this affair and her daughter was the first of Charles’s illegitimate children to be given the surname Fitzroy in acknowledgement of her parentage. Charlotte was not, however, one of Charles’s favourite children.1 Her existence was kept quiet for almost twenty years.

  Betty Killigrew was not Charles’s only conquest in Paris. Eleanor Needham, the widowed Lady Byron, also shared the young king’s bed. The 1664 portrait of her by Sir Peter Lely in the Royal Collection shows a dark-haired, good-looking woman, who was then in her late thirties but looks younger. There were no children of this liaison but Eleanor was, nevertheless, determined to get a pension out of the king in recognition for having slept with him. She doggedly pursued the collection of the considerable monies promised her but received very little.

  During his time in Bruges, the king formed a relationship over several years with Catherine Pegge, the daughter of royalist exile Thomas Pegge of Yeldersley near Ashbourne in Derbyshire. She was said to be a great beauty but little is known of her beyond the fact that she bore Charles a son and a daughter, in 1657 and 1658. The son, Charles FitzCharles, was nicknamed Don Carlos, either because he was born in the Spanish Netherlands or because of his dark good looks. It took fourteen years for his father to acknowledge him formally and he had to wait until 1675 to be given a title, when he was made earl of Plymouth. His sister, named Catherine after her mother, died young. The complete opposite of Lucy Walter, Catherine Pegge obligingly stayed in the shadows. It is not clear what, if any, financial support Charles gave her. She was eventually married to Sir Edward Greene of Great Sampford in Essex, in 1667, and they had one daughter. It has been said that Catherine died a year after her marriage but her father’s will, made in 1676, clearly shows that she was still alive then, as she and her sister are named as his main beneficiaries.2

  Attempts to justify Charles II’s sexual adventures during the period of his exile as being unremarkable for a young aristocrat in the mid-seventeenth century overlook the fact that his behaviour was in stark contrast to that of his own father, whose example he was clearly not inclined to follow. His lifestyle was also grist to the very productive mill of Cromwellian propaganda, playing into the hands of his enemies in England by allowing them to represent him as a sleazy playboy, unfit to rule. Edward Hyde and other advisers were seriously worried about the effect this would have on Charles’s chances of regaining the throne. The king was certainly aware of how he was being represented in the English news-sheets. Referring to reports of his amours in England, Charles noted, with an air of wearied amusement, ‘they have done me too much honour in assigning me so many fair ladies as if I were able to satisfy the half.’3 But after Cromwell’s death in 1658, he began to think seriously of the advantages that a marriage might bring. His choice fell on a girl he had known for some time. She had the right credentials of both birth and religion and he was also fond of her. The young lady in question was the twenty-one-year-old Princess Henrietta Catherine of Orange Nassau, sister-in-law of Mary Stuart, the Princess Royal.

  Charles had got to know Henrietta Catherine during his time in the United Provinces and may have genuinely believed himself in love for a while. Letters exchanged between the king and the ever-obliging Viscount Taaffe refer to a young lady that Charles was keen to woo. They gave her the code name ‘the infanta’, and some historians believe that this mysterious but evidently desirable lady was, indeed, the Dutch princess.4 At the beginning of 1658, Charles reported a meeting between himself and ‘his friend, where he was very well satisfied and finds that absence hath wrought no ill effects, there passed many kind expressions between them, and I think I know him so well [Charles was here referring to himself in the third person] that I may say he loves her if it were possible every d
ay more than any other and truly I find he has reason for I cannot choose but say she is the worthiest to be loved of the sex.’5

  His enthusiasm is understandable. The Dutch princess was an attractive and spirited girl, who had raised eyebrows by refusing point-blank to marry the stolid Friesian cousin picked out for her in childhood, on the grounds that she found him physically repellent. At a time when the voicing of such attitudes by female aristocrats was almost unheard of, Henrietta Catherine was clearly not afraid to speak her mind. This combination of a pleasant appearance, independence of outlook, and suitability made Henrietta Catherine an appealing prospect as a bride. But whatever the couple’s feelings for each other, the match was not to be. The ambassador of the English republic at The Hague, Sir George Downing, soon stepped in to inform the Dutch States-General that such a marriage would offend the regime in London. Nor was the formidable Amalia von Solms, Henrietta Catherine’s German mother, convinced by the idea. Charles had earlier expressed an interest in another of her daughters and nothing had come of it. She did not believe that the alliance of Orange and Stuart had been of any benefit to her family. Having taken against the Princess Royal almost from the moment Mary had arrived at the Dutch court as a bewildered child bride in 1642, the relationship between the two as Mary grew to womanhood had become utterly poisonous. Amalia had no wish to cast one of her own daughters into the arms of a libidinous (and penniless) Stuart, a family that she despised. Whether the marriage, had it taken place, would have been a success, no one can say. Charles had already much too much of a wandering eye and could not change his essential nature. It seems unlikely that Henrietta Catherine would have accepted his serial infidelities. She would, though, have given him children; she had ten with the husband she married in 1659, the count of Anhalt-Dessau, seven of whom survived childhood. The restored Charles II would have given much to have such a fertile wife. For the present, his prospects looked as bleak as ever.