by Linda Porter
The affair with Chesterfield went on regardless. If attempts were made at first to conceal it from Roger Palmer, his suspicions were not long in coming. In the same year that she was married, Barbara wrote a letter which combined disdain and desperation to her lover:
My Lord,
Since I saw you, I have been at home, and I find the mounser [monsieur] in a very ill humour, for he says that he is resolved never to bring me to town again, and that nobody should see me when I am in the country. I would not have you come today, for that would displease him more; but send me word presently what you would advise to do, for I am ready and willing to go all over the world with you, and I will obey your commands, that I am whilst I live, Yours7
Chesterfield did not call to see her when she caught the smallpox in London shortly afterwards. She was well enough to write in her habitually dramatic turn of phrase that the doctor believed her to be in a desperate condition and that only her fear of never seeing him again was keeping her alive. She would, she assured him, ‘live and die loving you above all other things.’ Ever the drama queen, Mrs Palmer not only survived, but her looks were unimpaired. And as the English republic teetered towards self-destruction, royalists like the Palmers and Chesterfield began to glimpse a very different future.
Royalist conspiracies in the late 1650s had foundered on disorganization, petty rivalries and betrayals. One of the leading lights of the royalist movement in England was Alan Brodrick, a distant cousin of Barbara’s, who was always eager to recruit new agents for the cause and was delighted when Roger Palmer offered the king £1,000 at the beginning of 1660. He was equally pleased to have secret access to the deliberations of the Council of State via Roger’s sister, Catherine, whose brother-in-law was principal clerk to the Council. How important this latter connection turned out to be in reality is debatable, since by this time General Monck’s grip on power in London was tightening and he was already in communication with the exiled court of Charles II in Brussels. Brodrick was, though, keen to impress on Edward Hyde the absolute commitment of Roger Palmer and, indeed, the sacrifices that his family had made during the Civil Wars. To which he added the following shrewd analysis of Roger’s overall situation: ‘I must presume to whisper to your lordship his condition: a gay wife and great expense to a slender fortune in possession, the main of his estate being in lease for some years to come.’8 The term ‘gay’, in the mid-seventeenth century, did not have modern connotations, but the inference that Barbara Palmer was both expensive and flighty would not have been lost on Hyde. He was yet to meet her but they grew to dislike one another intensely and she would play her part in his eventual fall from grace.
In the spring of 1660, Charles II was in Brussels and Roger Palmer was standing in the elections that were to be the death knell of republican England. Cautiously confident at last, the king wrote to Chesterfield that he hoped ‘the time is at hand that will put an end to our calamities.’ It has been speculated that Barbara Palmer was used as a messenger to the exiled court, but there is no evidence of this. We do not know her movements at this time, nor do we know when she first met the king, though it was subsequently asserted that she was already his mistress by the time he returned to England and that he spent his first night in London with her at Whitehall Palace. Even if they had not met before the Restoration itself, their affair started very shortly afterwards and soon became common knowledge. The diarist Samuel Pepys, whose lustful adoration of Barbara from a distance mirrors the celebrity worship of our own time, first refers to her connection with Charles II on 13 July 1660, saying that there had been ‘a great doing of music at the next house . . . the king and the dukes there with Madam Palmer, a pretty woman that they have a fancy to make her husband a cuckold.’ But the deed was already done, although another year passed before Pepys referred to her openly as the king’s mistress.
By the autumn of 1660, Barbara Palmer knew she was pregnant. Whether she had any real idea who was the child’s father is another matter. Her daughter, Anne, was born on 25 February 1661 and though acknowledged by Roger as his own, the king later acknowledged Anne as his child. Gossip at the time speculated that Chesterfield might even have been the father. The overactive earl accompanied Charles II back from Breda in the Netherlands, having been forced to flee England for some months at the start of 1660 when his penchant for duelling resulted in the death of the son of a London doctor. Chesterfield did not like being replaced in Barbara’s affections by the king and apparently hoped his liaison with her might continue, although he himself took a second wife in September 1660. She was Lady Elizabeth Butler, daughter of the leading royalist exile, the duke of Ormond. This blue-eyed blonde, petite but with a good figure and, if the admittedly often colourful memoirs of Anthony Hamilton are to be believed, no great adherent of fidelity herself, was a good match for Chesterfield.
Barbara Palmer’s star, however, was very much in the ascendant. As soon as she had recovered from her daughter’s birth, she was back at the king’s side, accompanying him to the theatre, to outings and dinners. Her hold over Charles II grew stronger and for much of the 1660s she was a powerfully disruptive force at the Restoration court, wrecking her own marriage and that of the king, while her greed and shrillness intensified. She was never a woman who set out to be liked, and in that respect her success would be complete.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Royal Whore
‘It was beyond the compass of art to give this lady her due, as to her sweetness and exquisite beauty’
Sir Peter Lely, portrait painter, on Barbara Villiers
THE KING RODE into London with his two brothers, the duke of York and the duke of Gloucester, on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660. Huge crowds had greeted him along the way with a mixture of cheerfulness and curiosity, since few had ever seen him before and they knew little about him. Charles himself was wryly amused by his reception, remarking that it must have been his own fault he had stayed away so long, since he was evidently very popular with the English people. A Kentish gentleman, Sir Edward Dering, voiced the general delight of long-suffering royalists when he claimed, ‘there never was in any nation so much joy both inwardly felt and outwardly expressed as was in this kingdom from the day of his majesty’s landing at Dover to his coming to London.’1 The earl of Leicester, disgruntled with both sides during the Civil Wars, hurried from his Penshurst Place estate in Kent to wait on the king, though he sounded a less effusive note than Dering in his diary: ‘The king, Charles II, made his entry into London and passed to Whitehall, where the House of Peers and House of Commons severally met and saluted his majesty and welcomed him with orations by the Speakers . . . I saluted his majesty among the rest and kissed his hand, but there was so great disorder and confusion that the king scarce knew or took particular notice of anybody.’ The lack of organization and sheer unfamiliarity with many of those present clearly distracted the king. He wanted to be seen and his grasp of the importance of public display was acute, but despite the aura of bonhomie that he sought to exude as his reign progressed, he was never truly a man of the people. The pushing and shoving of his first official function in his capital was not forgotten. In the future, such events would be handled in a way that preserved his majesty in a more fitting manner.
Not everyone shared Sir Edward Dering’s rosy view of the king’s restoration. ‘There is none that love him but drunk whores and whoremongers’, claimed Margaret Dixon of Newcastle upon Tyne. Margaret’s outburst encompassed detrimental remarks about Charles II’s Scottish heritage as well as his morals. She demanded to know whether there was ‘not some Englishman more fit to make a king than a Scot?’ She did not think much of the Stuart dynasty and feared that the new monarch would ‘set on fire the three kingdoms as his father before him has done.’2 The Civil Wars could not so easily be forgotten for Margaret or a considerable number of others, both Puritan and Catholic. They had, as yet, nothing specific to fear, since the king’s promises in the Declaration of Breda, signed shortly before
he left the Netherlands for England, were so vague that no firm political or religious direction could be read into them. It is hard to avoid the impression that, on his restoration, neither Charles II nor his country had much idea what to expect of the other. His reputation, when it came to women, preceded him. Pretty much everything else was a blank canvas.
Though not obvious to his subjects, the experience of exile had profoundly affected him. Charles left England as a handsome boy in 1646, to be thrown on the mercy of quarrelsome courtiers and an interfering mother. For the next fourteen years, he had wandered around Europe, living on the grace and favour of other rulers, chronically short of money, clinging to the rites of kingship without the reality and keeping his views – if, indeed, he had any – very much to himself. The Restoration changed his physical circumstances but not his personality. He returned as a man no longer in the first flush of youth, swarthy but still impressive in appearance, full of superficial goodwill, relieved to have finally regained his throne. He was weary, cynical and apparently without an agenda, apart from enjoying the benefits of luxury and power. His pursuit of these related goals would define his reign, yet he could not escape their concomitants – the need for money, managing the competing ambitions of advisers in whom he actually had little confidence, the relationship between the Crown and Parliament, and the vexed questions of religion and the succession.
In the summer of 1660, he seemed generally well intentioned, though not towards the men who had been responsible for his father’s execution, whom he was determined to pursue to the grisly end that the law meted out to traitors. Beyond that, he was giving little away. Marriage was, of course, an inevitability, but he could afford to wait to find the most advantageous bride, and why would he hurry, when there was such easy access between his Whitehall Palace and Mrs Palmer’s house on King Street? It has been said that Charles II’s approach to kingship was ‘the politics of pleasure’, that he deliberately set out to undermine conventional morals, to demonstrate his power and virility through the number of his mistresses and illegitimate children while presiding over a court famed for its debauchery.3 He could, perhaps, have eventually justified his behaviour in this way, but as a deliberate policy it seems unconvincing. It would make him one of the most wayward, even anarchic monarchs in British history, a man who was trying to destroy the established order rather than restore it. Charles was certainly careless of his own and his country’s reputation but time would show that he held fast to the idea of legitimate dynastic descent and that he concealed a deep-seated preference for the Roman Catholic religion of his French predecessors and also of the brave men and women who helped him escape from England after the disastrous defeat at Worcester in 1651.
History has Charles II confidently treading his first steps on the primrose path of pleasure at the start of his reign, the ravishing Barbara Palmer on his arm. She may have offered sexual distraction but it was also a time of intense personal sorrow. The king lost his beloved younger brother, Henry, duke of Gloucester, and Mary, the Princess Royal, his nearest sibling and frequent companion in exile, to smallpox within three months of each other. Charles was not the sort of man to be told what to do by anyone but their influence was missed and he mourned them greatly. Their deaths may have strengthened Charles’s need for Barbara because, though pregnant, she provided diversion at a difficult time. The king’s relations with his surviving brother, James, duke of York, were never easy and were complicated in 1660 by the fact that James was obliged to marry Anne Hyde, daughter of the chancellor, who was carrying his child. The baby was a boy and the existence of what was, in effect, an alternative royal family, complete with male heir, was not lost on commentators at the time. Charles’s other surviving sister, Princess Henrietta, had been brought up in France by her mother and was soon to marry Louis XIV’s younger brother, the duke of Orléans. Barbara, always keen to the threat posed by rivals, must have soon realized that Minette, as Charles called his sister, was the woman he cared for most in all the world and that her influence on him was considerable. But she lived in Paris and only came to England twice during her brother’s reign, so in all practical respects she was not to be feared.
What, then, was the nature of the relationship between Charles and Barbara? Politically and culturally, their affair was an important underlying element of the first decade of the Restoration and it took place against a backdrop of plague, fire, political upheaval and war. These were tempestuous times for Britain, and the character and behaviour of Barbara Palmer reflected them to perfection. From the teenage angst of being one among many of the earl of Chesterfield’s lovers, she found herself, at the age of twenty, the mistress of an unmarried king. Untroubled by the fact that she herself had a husband, she saw clearly the advantages that could be derived from this situation. The world was at her feet. Money, jewels, titles were all things she could and did expect, as well as patronage, rewards for her wider family (the Villiers did not forget their own) and, above all else, fame. Barbara knew the importance of visibility and how it was fundamental to keeping her position. Other famous royal mistresses, from Rosamond de Clifford to Alice Perrers and Anne Boleyn, had all sought to exploit their success but Barbara Palmer made it an art – quite literally – through her love of public display and the portraits of herself she commissioned. Her desire for celebrity and defiant flouting of convention make her a recognizably modern woman. That she was heartily disliked by almost everyone who had dealings with her seems to have scarcely bothered her but even today’s celebrities, accustomed to the viciousness of Twitter, might be shocked by the obscene verses and pamphlets aimed at Barbara. Few women can have had their genitals and sexual proclivities referred to quite so often in print and in such disgusting ways. A poem attributed to George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the most highly born of her relatives but with whom she eventually fell out, reveals the level of contempt that male courtiers felt for the royal whore. She had been, according to him, a nymphomaniac while still in her mother’s womb:
She was so exquisite a whore
That in the belly of her mother
Her c—t she placed so right before,
Her father f–cked them both together.
Had she been male as female, without doubt
She’d acted incest at her coming out,
And least her Daddy shou’d not f–ck it home
She frigged his pintle in her mother’s womb4
For though women had found a voice and a role during the English Revolution, it was not necessarily one that Restoration society, still at root patriarchal, wanted to hear too loudly. Sexual liberation was viewed as acceptable for men but not for any respectable female. Barbara became, very quickly, the royal whore and a natural target for condemnation. Determined as she was to be her own woman, Barbara knew that her future depended on the king. She would need to get as much as she could from him because only then could she become self-reliant.
The affair was often stormy because Barbara was strong willed and passionate, prone to outbursts and threats. Clearly, she was not afraid of Charles and she knew her power over him. Others knew it, too. The historian and churchman, Gilbert Burnet, described Barbara as ‘a woman of great beauty but most enormously vicious and ravenous; foolish but imperious, very uneasy to the king and always carrying on intrigues with other men, while yet she pretended she was jealous of him. His passion for her and her strange behaviour towards him did so disorder him that often he was not master of himself, nor capable of minding business, which at so critical a time required great application.’5 But knuckling down to governmental business was never going to be Charles II’s strong point, though the rest of Burnet’s characterization is almost that of an abusive relationship in which the king, and not his mistress, was the victim.
They were both naturally highly sexed and were drawn to each other by lust as much as love. Yet there must have been at least a degree of underlying affection. None of Barbara’s letters from this period survive, but one written muc
h later, in 1678, when Barbara’s eldest child, Anne (then countess of Sussex), was causing her mother a great deal of trouble, does reveal a deep and long-lasting affection. Referring to the wayward Anne, Barbara wrote, ‘Your majesty may be confident that as she is yours I shall always have some remains of that kindness I had formerly, for I can hate nothing that is yours.’6 In the early years, before their mutual infidelities and Barbara’s moods began to undermine the relationship, the besotted king complied with most of his mistress’s demands. At the end of 1661, she and her husband were granted the title of earl and countess of Castlemaine, in County Kerry, in Ireland. His ennoblement, and the knighting of his elder half-brother, Philip Palmer, brought the unhappy Roger little comfort. The warrant describing his title heaped humiliation on him, made out, as it was, ‘for Mr Roger Palmer to be an Irish Earl, to him and the heirs of his body gotten on Barbara Palmer his now wife.’ Pepys observed in his diary that everybody knew the reason that only Barbara’s heirs were to be honoured. The reference to ‘his now wife’ was an unsubtle indication that the marriage was unlikely to last. Roger Palmer did not want this insulting ennoblement, the final proof, though he did not acknowledge it immediately, that his marriage was a disaster. He never took his seat in the Irish parliament but he found solace in conversion to Catholicism, the faith of his mother. His new religious zeal would, the following year, prove the final straw in his relationship with his wife.