by Linda Porter
Barbara’s first son with the king was born at Roger’s King Street house in June 1662, at a time when the court was celebrating the king’s recent marriage and anyone of any significance was at Hampton Court with the royal party.7 By this time, the brazen mistress was so confident of her position that she continued to attend the theatre until a few weeks before her delivery and Charles spent every night with her, though she was eight and a half months pregnant. Barbara even let it be known that she would give birth at Hampton Court, where the royal honeymoon was to take place. Whether her husband or her lover commanded otherwise is not clear but she did not leave London. The king attended an Anglican christening ceremony for the baby at St Margaret’s, Westminster on 18 June, in which the question of the child’s parentage was conveniently fudged and he was named Charles Palmer, Lord Limerick. What the king did not know, as he stood sponsor with Barbara’s aunt, Lady Suffolk, for his bastard child, was that Roger Palmer, preserving the fiction that the baby was his, had already had him baptized into the Catholic faith.
When Barbara found out, a tremendous row ensued and she left their home to go to her uncle, Colonel Villiers, at Richmond Palace. Barbara was good at creating scenes and this one had been a long time coming. According to Pepys, ‘she left her lord, carrying away everything in the house; so much as every dish and cloth and servant but the porter. He [Roger] is gone discontent into France, they say to enter a monastery.’8 As a reversal of the time-honoured trope of an errant wife entering a nunnery, it was rich that the blameless Roger Palmer should be thought a candidate for the religious life. Barbara did return to her husband’s house, but their marriage was over. Roger did, indeed, leave for Europe, where he travelled widely, honing his linguistic skills and deepening in his Catholic faith. In England he was pitied and laughed at but in Europe he could give full rein to his interests and abilities. He took service with the Venetian republic and sailed with the admiral of its fleet to the Middle East. Though the couple did not formally separate for another two years, Roger was prudent enough to ensure that he would no longer be held responsible for Barbara’s excessive spending. Before he left England, his wife’s uncle, the third Viscount Grandison, and her uncle by marriage, the earl of Suffolk, signed an indemnity which made them responsible for debts up to £10,000 contracted by Barbara. The pair remained in control of her financial affairs for many years.
Though she could no longer spend his money, Barbara continued to be an embarrassment to her husband. When he returned to England in 1664, he found that she had given birth to two more children using his surname – a son, Henry, and a daughter, Charlotte – though they were both fathered by the king. This impudence prompted Roger to seek a formal separation. For much of the rest of the decade of the 1660s, while his wife’s star was firmly in the ascendant at Charles II’s court, he continued to travel, going as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem. He also began a new career, as a writer and Catholic apologist, his lucid and elegant style earning him many admirers. His wife also converted to Catholicism in 1663, the result, it was said, of a brush with death rather than a close reading of the works of the man whose good character she had so flagrantly betrayed.
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HER POSITION AS the king’s mistress made Barbara an important public figure and she understood the need to enhance her visibility as much as possible. Her talents in this respect were outstanding. The hedonism of Charles II’s court gave her a platform for display that she exploited to great effect. At court balls, in masques, in theatrical productions and in the royal box, seated between the king and the duke of York, Lady Castlemaine was an almost constant presence, her occasional absences caused only by the demands of childbirth, and from that she always seemed to make a swift recovery, her figure scarcely altered, still radiant and enchanting. Pepys spotted that she partnered the young duke of Monmouth (by now a fixture at court and high in his indulgent father’s favour) at a ball on New Year’s Eve, 1662, at which the king, very aptly, called for the dance ‘Cuckolds All a Row’.9 Naturally, Barbara had to dress the part for these appearances. When she acted in a performance of Corneille’s Horace at Whitehall, the jewels she wore, which had been taken from the crown jewels in the Tower of London, were said by John Evelyn to be worth more than £40,000.10 Some estimates put their value much higher and she was said to have far outshone the new queen, Catherine of Braganza, whom Charles had married in May 1662. This ostentatious dazzling was repeated later in the same year at the queen’s birthday ball, where Barbara ‘appeared so glorious in jewels that she was the wonder of all that saw her’, in stones estimated to be worth £50,000.11 Her dresses were equally admired and all of this was provided by the king to show her off to his courtiers and to satisfy her own determination that she would eclipse any other woman who might attract his attention. The admiration of the news reports was shared by other commentators. Pepys, somewhat creepily, was driven into raptures by the mere sight of her underwear hanging on a washing line: ‘in the privy garden [of Whitehall] saw the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine’s, edged with rich lace at the bottoms, that I ever saw; and did me good to look upon them.’12
These high-profile appearances were very much of the moment but Barbara was determined that her beauty and social prominence should be celebrated for posterity. She was an important patron of the arts and particularly of Sir Peter Lely, the leading court painter of the Restoration. Lely, a Dutchman by birth, was official painter to the court, as his countryman Anthony van Dyck had been to that of the king’s father, Charles I. Arriving in England at the start of the Civil Wars, he was favoured by grandees who supported Parliament, notably Algernon Percy, earl of Northumberland, who commissioned portraits of the younger royal children and the double portrait of Charles I with the duke of York. Despite Lely having painted Oliver Cromwell (the face probably based on a miniature by another artist, Samuel Cooper), the duke of York did not forget him, and York and his first wife, Anne Hyde, were Lely’s chief patrons during the 1660s. Lady Castlemaine was not far behind. And while Anne Hyde was commissioning a series of portraits of the leading ladies of the court (Barbara was included but was only one of eleven sitters), known collectively as the Windsor Beauties,13 the countess herself was keeping Lely and his studio busy with four portraits of herself, in classic and religious depictions. Barbara chose to have herself painted as Minerva, complete with elaborate feathered headdress, in a gold silk dress, staff in hand. As Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom and warfare, this was a bold statement. Barbara was undoubtedly intelligent and cunning but her intellect was not wide-ranging. The association with warfare, however, certainly sent a message that she was a lady whom rivals challenged at their peril.
It is the religious connotations of the other key Lely portraits that still have the power to shock. He painted Barbara as the saint for whom she was named, an early Christian martyr from the Middle East, supposedly executed by her own father and who may never have really existed. Untroubled by such questions of historical accuracy, Barbara was also painted as St Catherine, another popular female saint of the time. Most dramatically of all, she posed as St Mary Magdalene and as the Madonna. These two paintings have been described as audacious, scandalous and blasphemous. They still have the power to shock with their mixture of witty defiance of accepted standards and the mirror they hold up to how one woman personified a court glorifying in its own corruption. In the Magdalene portrait, a casually sexy Lady Castlemaine, her head tilted to one side, cheek resting on her right hand, hair loose and flowing, gazes sleepily at the viewer through those arresting come-to-bed eyes. The folds of her rich bronze dress hint at a trim but voluptuous figure, unchanged by pregnancy, while the stole carelessly draped around her shoulder is suggestively pulled across her groin, in a reminder that this is where her true power lies. It was probably painted around 1662, when she was an unstoppable force and her hold over the recently married king was absolute. It has been noted that ‘what the symbolic portraiture also capitalize
s on, outrageously, is the notion that the history of this whore and her royal lord might properly call to mind the story of Mary Magdalene and her Lord and Redeemer.’14 Two years later, Barbara and Lely went one step further in mocking the idea of good taste when she posed with her son, Charles Fitzroy, the baby her angry husband had hastily christened as a Catholic, in the guise of Madonna and Child.15
Barbara sits in the classic Renaissance pose for this subject, on the edge of a chair, with her little son, notably more like a real child than in many other depictions, on her left, leaning towards her while perched on a wooden bench. His chubby, handsome little face and red lips give him the air of a cherub. But Barbara is looking ahead, not at him, though one hand is on his waist, more to balance him in an otherwise awkward position rather than in any great show of maternal love. Her gaze is not devoid of tenderness but there is calculation behind it and a hint of triumphalism. She is dressed in red and blue, the colours often associated with Italian portraits of the Madonna and Child, her hair caught up in a carefully draped veil, which sets off its dark auburn colour. Nothing is left to chance in this picture and its lack of spontaneity makes it look rather stilted. Yet it is easy to tell that Barbara was very pleased with it. The heavy-lidded, almond-shaped eyes and long nose so admired by Lely are prominent features and the mouth has just a hint of a smile. She does not seem to have minded showing the world that she was already putting on weight, as her face at this angle cannot hide the beginnings of a double chin. The Restoration favoured plump women and it is unlikely that Barbara was concerned by a little broadening of her figure. And she was also, at the same time, broadening her interests. A woman as conscious of her status as Lady Castlemaine was always bound to take a lively interest in politics and to use her influence as effectively as she could.
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THE POLITICIAN WHO suffered most from Barbara’s relationship with Charles II was the king’s veteran councillor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The return of the king in 1660 vindicated all that Hyde (who was made earl of Clarendon in 1662) had endured and struggled for in the years of exile, and his position at first seemed inviolable. Believing that the rule of law and justice within a monarchical framework, together with the restoration of the Church of England, were the keystones of the English constitution, Hyde received the office of lord chancellor almost as if he was divinely ordained for it. His capacity for hard work, exceptional powers of drafting and incisive legal mind gave him the edge over potential rivals at the outset of Charles II’s reign. His political acumen, however, was less highly developed. Believing that dedication to office would raise him above court faction was a vain hope and his experience of the squabbles of the royalists during and after the Civil Wars should have better prepared him for what might follow when the world had turned again. Yet he could be excused for not anticipating the one development of 1660, affecting his own family, which would complicate and even compromise his position within months of the Restoration. Hyde was almost the last to learn that his daughter, Anne, had become pregnant by the duke of York and was so appalled by the news that he initially opposed the idea that James should marry her and, in a notable display of paternal rejection, suggested she be put in the Tower of London and even executed. The elevation of Princess Mary Stuart’s maid of honour to become a member of the royal family was genuinely not what her father desired. It laid him open, at a difficult time, to charges of seeking to enhance his role in an underhand way and even that he might be aiming, through Anne, to put his own descendants on the throne. Charles II was in good health but it would only take an accident or an unpredictable illness, such as the smallpox that had carried off Princess Mary and Prince Henry, for the duke of York to become king and his offspring with the new duchess to inherit in the future. Though the son born to Anne Hyde, given the title of duke of Cambridge, died as a child, her daughters, Mary and Anne, would both become queens regnant.
Clarendon’s enemies, notably the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, and two of the duke of York’s servants, Charles Berkeley and Henry Jermyn, cast aspersions on Anne’s good name while James, who had married her secretly in September 1660, dithered over whether to repudiate her. His brother informed him that he must honour his commitments and so the chancellor’s daughter entered into the highest echelons of the royal family, a role which she took to with aplomb, though her husband never entertained the idea of being faithful to her and seemed to wish to emulate Charles as much as he could in this respect. All of this the countess of Castlemaine, whose name would soon be linked with that of Henry Jermyn, watched with interest. She does not seem to have felt threatened in any way by Anne and later in the 1660s she would ally herself closely with the Yorks, but she soon became an enemy of Hyde’s for other reasons.
The truth of the matter was that Clarendon and the earl of Southampton, his chief ally on Charles II’s council, disapproved of Barbara from the outset of her liaison with the king. He refused to let his wife visit her and certainly never tried to get her to influence Charles on his behalf. She reciprocated his hostility in the dramatic way that was so typical of her. In September 1662, it was reported to the duke of Ormond that she had publicly stated she hoped to see Clarendon’s head on a stake outside Westminster.16 Ill feeling between the pair inevitably seeped into the sphere of court appointments. Barbara, recognizing that the best way to remain prominent at court was to have an official role of her own, was well aware of the chancellor’s reluctance to support her appointment as lady of the bedchamber to the queen in the same year.17 Her obvious course was to continue to side with Clarendon’s opponents, who included the rising politician Sir Henry Bennet, soon to be ennobled as the earl of Arlington, a supple operator who had ingratiated himself with Charles II during the royalist exile. Bennet was working with Berkeley to isolate Clarendon and remove the old advisers who had given so much to the king in the previous decade. Sir Kenelm Digby and Sir Edward Nicholas were both removed from office. Barbara did not always succeed in her political machinations. Her support of the earl of Bristol, who tried to get Clarendon impeached in 1663, nearly caused a rift between the countess and the king, who was also jealous of Bristol’s frequent visits to Barbara’s house. Undeterred, Barbara continued to let her home be used as a meeting place for the chancellor’s opponents. The French ambassador believed that the ‘debauches’, as he called them, which took place there every evening, were part of a concerted plan to destroy Clarendon.18 Whatever really happened at these rowdy dinners, frequented by the louche duke of Lauderdale, Charles II’s enforcer in Scotland, and Anthony Ashley Cooper (later earl of Shaftesbury), we do not know, but dislike of Clarendon was common to those who attended.
The chancellor survived until 1667, when the king asked him to resign. Pepys wrote that his downfall ‘was certainly designed in my lady Castlemaine’s chamber.’19 The king’s surgeon told Pepys that ‘when he went from the king . . . she was in bed (although about 12 o’clock) and ran out in her smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall garden, and thither her woman brought her nightgown and [she] stood joying herself at the old man’s going away. And several of the gallants of Whitehall (of which there were many staying to see the Chancellor’s return) did talk to her . . . telling her she was the Bird of Paradise.’ Clarendon himself told the story rather differently. He recalled that, as he left Whitehall, he saw Barbara, Arlington and Baptist May, who had been appointed keeper of the privy purse at Barbara’s suggestion, looking ‘out of her open window with great gaiety and triumph, which all people observed.’20 He did not add the observation, attributed to him by Nathaniel Crew, that, on looking up and seeing this leering trio, he said, ‘O, Madam, is it you? Pray remember that if you live, you will grow old.’21
Clarendon intended, at first, to fight on and he had the support of the duke of York. Charles II, tired of his faithful supporter, easily swayed by the ill-intentioned clique with which he surrounded himself, wanted him gone. Impeachment proceedings were begun in Parliament, where an unexpected d
egree of support for this great servant of the Crown surprised his enemies and led to a procedural stand-off with the House of Lords, who brought in a charge of high treason. Deserted by the king, the fifty-eight-year-old Clarendon left England in November 1667. He hoped to return from his banishment in France but he never did, dying in Rouen in 1674, but not before he had written his Life, a more personal version of the History of the Great Rebellion, which he had begun on the Isles of Scilly in 1646. The History is the first great narrative history of its kind in the English language, still one of the major primary sources on the Civil Wars despite its inevitable partiality for the royalist side.
Barbara had seen off the most distinguished of her enemies but the unreliable Arlington soon deserted her for good. Nor would she recover the support of her cousin, Buckingham, with whom she had a volatile relationship throughout the 1660s.
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BUCKINGHAM WAS ONE of the great wits of Charles II’s court but his personality and beliefs made him a dangerous ally. He shared many personality traits with his Villiers cousin; they were both flamboyant, even outrageous, keen to be at the centre of power and not afraid to speak out. He believed that his birth warranted the highest office but was often at odds with other politicians, who were suspicious of his motives and uncomfortably aware of his powers of oratory as well as the effectiveness of his writings. Though the king laughed heartily at Buckingham’s side-splitting mimicry – no figure in public life or at the court was safe from the duke’s wicked ability to depict them, always to their disadvantage – Charles II never entirely trusted him and Buckingham had, in the past, been as contemptuous of him as he was of many others, remarking that, after the Battle of Worcester, the king was probably ‘lying hid with some gent and lying with his wife more happy than if he were on his throne.’22 His sneering may be partly explained by the king’s refusal to appoint him as commander-in-chief of the royalist army in 1651. There were questions over his return to England in the 1650s, his connections with the Protectorate and his marriage to Mary Fairfax. Buckingham courted Mary with all the zeal of a Cavalier poet. If even Bishop Burnet found Buckingham ‘a man of noble presence and that has an air that at first strikes all that see him; he has a flame in his wit that is inimitable’,23 it is hardly surprising that the rather plain Mary Fairfax, educated by Andrew Marvell and brought up in a pious Presbyterian household, was eager to give him her hand. The first years of their marriage, in which Buckingham was a dutiful son-in-law and affectionate husband, gave no indication of how his subsequent behaviour would break her heart.