by Linda Porter
The duke was a complex man. Naturally tolerant in religious matters, some people thought him a crypto-Catholic while others described him as being part of a ‘Presbyterian gang’. He quelled a rising in Yorkshire, where he was lord-lieutenant of the West Riding, in 1662 with minimum retribution and he was always popular with his men. He believed it was his birthright to be at the centre of affairs and was active on the Privy Council, yet he wished to serve as a volunteer on the duke of York’s flagship in the Dutch War of 1665 and was furious when he was given a ship of his own because York, perhaps anxious about the distraction Buckingham might cause, did not want him so close. His relations with the king’s heir remained awkward thereafter. While Londoners died in their thousands from the worst ever outbreak of bubonic plague and the seamen Buckingham had disdained to join starved through lack of pay, the duke was keeping the king, Lady Castlemaine and the court (removed to Hampton Court, at a safe distance from the epidemic) in stitches with his impressions. ‘His special talent,’ wrote Anthony Hamilton, ‘was for catching hold of and imitating in their presence anything that happened to be absurd in other people’s behaviour or any peculiarity of speech they had, without letting them notice it. In short, he was apt at counterfeiting so many different parts, and with so much grace and humour, that when he wished to make himself agreeable, it was difficult to dispense with his company.’24
After the Great Fire of 1666, Buckingham turned on those he had consorted with at Hampton Court the previous summer. In Parliament, he spearheaded opposition to the government, criticizing its management of the recent Dutch War, which had led to the destruction of the English fleet in the Medway and national humiliation, attacking its handling of finance and supporting the introduction of a bill to ban the import of Irish cattle, which he believed would be detrimental to his tenants in the north of England. In so doing, he managed to insult the Irish so badly that the duke of Ormond’s son, Lord Ossory, challenged him to a duel. Both men ended up spending time in the Tower of London. This episode caused a furious row between the king and Lady Castlemaine, who only the year previously had fallen out spectacularly with her cousin. It was described as ‘a mortal quarrel’. Yet better relations were swiftly established and Barbara pleaded Buckingham’s cause so persistently that the king grew angry, calling her ‘a whore and a jade’. He soon relented and was reconciled with Buckingham in Barbara’s apartments.25 But Buckingham’s reconciliation with his kinswoman was to prove only temporary and his assessment of her depravity would make Charles II’s outburst seem mild by comparison. Their alliance over Clarendon lasted only a few months. Buckingham did not necessarily view Barbara’s hold over the king as wholly advantageous to his interests and was keen to encourage the king’s enthusiasm for the theatre, and especially his monarch’s growing fascination with the actresses Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis.26 They were not the first alternatives to the monopoly of his cousin that he had sponsored, and his final judgement of her is made abundantly plain in the poem quoted earlier.
Soon Buckingham was involved in a scandal to match anything that Barbara had done. He began an affair in 1666 with Anna-Maria Brudenell, countess of Shrewsbury, a court beauty who had, like Barbara, made a career as a temptress and was perfectly accustomed to the adoration of men and their compulsion to fight over her favours. Her husband challenged Buckingham at the beginning of 1668 and, in the melee surrounding this winter duel, with three men fighting on each side, one person was killed and Shrewsbury himself seriously wounded. He later died of his injuries. Unabashed, the duke moved his mistress into his London residence, Wallingford House. When his wife objected that she could not live under the same roof as his mistress, Pepys reported that Buckingham replied, with casual cruelty, ‘Why, Madam, I did think so, and therefore have ordered your coach to be ready, to carry you to your father’s.’27 The affair damaged Buckingham’s standing and his decision to bury his illegitimate son by Anna-Maria in Westminster Abbey outraged public opinion. It would, in the end, contribute significantly to the collapse of his political hopes.
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BY THE LATE 1660s, Barbara’s relationship with the king was beginning to fade, though it was not yet completely over. She had seen off criticism from female courtiers such as Lady Gerard and Lady Harvey, both of whom had felt the king’s keen displeasure at their temerity in attacking his maîtresse-en-titre. This unpleasantness was more than women’s squabbles since both ladies, whatever their personal disapproval of Barbara, were the mouthpieces of political factions at odds with the king and court. And on occasion Barbara’s opponents resorted to more sinister methods. Not long after giving birth to Charlotte Fitzroy, her second daughter with the king, Lady Castlemaine was returning one evening to her apartments in Whitehall through St James’s Park, with only a maid and a page in attendance, when she was accosted by three masked noblemen who verbally abused her and threatened her with the same fate as Jane Shore, the unpopular mistress of Edward IV, whose body was said to have ended up on a dunghill. This was not the first such comparison, and it struck home. Normally so thick skinned, the countess was sufficiently shaken by the incident to pass out when she got back to her rooms and Charles II rushed to support her. His presence seems to have restored her equilibrium quickly, though the men who had menaced her were never caught, despite St James’s Park being swiftly sealed off.28
By now, the future of her children was a prime consideration for Barbara. She was confident that her bastards with the king would be acknowledged and given titles and lands. Her maternal instincts in this respect were strong, though whether she was a loving mother is another matter. When Charles questioned the paternity of her last child with him while she was still pregnant, she threatened to dash the baby’s brains out if he would not acknowledge it. Her other quarrels with Charles were about their mutual infidelities. Barbara’s name had long been associated with that of Henry Jermyn and she took other lovers, including the acrobat Jacob Hall and the actor Charles Hart. The king, meanwhile, had casual liaisons with Jane Roberts and Winifred Wells, though neither was a threat to Barbara. He was also, throughout this period, pursuing Frances Teresa Stuart, another of his wife’s ladies, and Barbara seems to have regarded her, at least initially, as a much more serious rival.29 For most of the first decade of Charles II’s reign, Barbara was dominant, using all her skills of networking (she did have female supporters, most notably her aunt, Lady Suffolk, and, towards the end of the decade, the duchess of York), sexual allure and self-promotion to maintain an unrivalled position at court. Her fame – or infamy, as others saw it – was hard won and came at a price, for the one court that Barbara never managed to capture was that of public opinion.
It could, of course, be argued that she cared nothing for what the population at large thought about her but the London crowd was a force that those in power ignored at their peril. The full extent of Barbara’s unpopularity and the popular criticism of the court and its decadent lifestyle became apparent in March 1668, in the Bawdy House Riots, several days of unrest in London, when apprentices, fed up with their conditions, attacked the brothels whose prices they could not afford and held pitched battles with the city’s militias who were trying to disperse them. There was a long history of riots on Shrove Tuesdays, with prostitutes being a common target, but the level of disaffection in 1668 amounted to something more serious. At first, the authorities tried to make light of this mob violence. Pepys reported that ‘the Duke of York and all with him this morning were full of the talk of the prentices . . . some blood hath been spilt but a great many houses pulled down . . . the Duke of York was mighty merry at that of Damaris Page’s, the great bawd of the seamen.’ The duke was less amused to have lost £15 a year in wine licences as the result of attacks on his property and Pepys himself sounded a more sombre note when he remarked, ‘it was said here that these idle fellows have had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses and did not go and pull down the great bawdy-house at Whit
ehall . . . this doth make the courtiers ill at ease to see this spirit among people . . . and then they do say that there are men of understanding among them, that have been of Cromwell’s army . . .’30 This last comment is a telling indication of the insecurity of England more than a decade after Cromwell’s death as well as reminding us that the enduring image of Charles II as a clever and popular monarch, whose peccadilloes were viewed as endearing by his subjects, is at considerable variance with reality.
The riots provided an opportunity for wider condemnation of the court and a full-scale onslaught on Lady Castlemaine herself. The Poor Whores Petition, addressed ‘To the most splendid, illustrious, serene and eminent lady of pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine’ and purported to come from ‘the undone company of poor distressed whores, bawds, pimps and panders’, is a satirical libel written by an unknown author. It may well have been sponsored by the two most wealthy and important bawds in London, Madam Cresswell and Damaris Page, but its underlying anti-Catholicism is significant and suggests the involvement of one of Cresswell’s influential clients in the City of London. It is a short document of just one page but effectively written. The petitioners begin by noting that they have ‘been for a long time connived at and countenanced in the practice of our venereal pleasures (a trade wherein your ladyship hath great experience and for your diligence therein have arrived to a high and eminent advancement for these last years.’ Proceeding to note that the loss of their trade might impede their ability to purchase medical help to recover from the various sexually transmitted diseases that went with their trade (a nasty hint that Castlemaine might suffer such inconveniences herself), they issued a veiled threat to Barbara’s safety, ‘For should your eminency but once fall into these rough hands, you may expect no more favour than they have shown unto us poor inferior whores.’31
However vexed Barbara might have been by the Poor Whores Petition, she must have been even more aggrieved by the equally satirical response, attributed to her, entitled ‘The gracious answer of the most illustrious lady of pleasure the Countess of Castel’. The writer, who evidently knew the countess well, wreaked further damage on her reputation by depicting her as greedy, ‘wonderfully decked with jewels and diamonds which the subjects of this kingdom have paid for’, sexually promiscuous and nepotistic. Frequently using the royal ‘we’, the countess is made to acknowledge that ‘we have always (without our husband) satisfied ourself with the delights of Venus; and in our husband’s absence have had numerous offspring (who are bountifully and nobly provided for).’ Moreover, and much more overtly than in the Poor Whores Petition, Lady Castlemaine’s supposed reply viciously attacked the Protestant sects while promising to give full support to the Catholic Church, whose ‘venereal pleasure, accompanied with looseness, debauchery and prophaneness are not such heinous crimes and crying sins’.32 Finally, the writer urged the poor whores not to worry because the French would come and deal with the apprentices – a comment likely to feed xenophobia.
The king’s response to this embarrassment was to buy a property for Barbara, Berkshire House, which backed on to St James’s Park, and grant her a pension of £4,700 a year, paid out of post office funds and managed by her uncles, Viscount Grandison and Colonel Villiers. This looks like complete royal defiance of public opinion but it was also a way of drawing a line in their relationship. Their affair had cooled. Charles II understood very well his mistress’s rapaciousness. If things were to end without tantrums and further public disaffection, he needed to let her down gently. He had one last gift to bestow.
CHAPTER SIX
The Duchess
‘Paint Castlemaine in colours that will hold
(Her, not her picture, for she now grows old)’
Andrew Marvell, ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’, 1667
WHEN MARVELL WROTE these and the excoriating lines that follow, Barbara was, in fact, only twenty-seven years old and many thought her beauty undimmed. But she knew that she had never had a complete monopoly of the king’s affections. She was well aware of the other women he pursued or who were dangled in front of him by courtiers jealous of her hold on the monarch. Expectations of exclusivity were not part of her calculations, nor, indeed, of his. The thing that bothered Charles II most about Barbara’s behaviour was not her infidelity but her lack of discretion. ‘Madam,’ he told her, ‘all I ask of you for your own sake is, live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.’1 He could have put it more crudely (and perhaps did, in person), for Barbara had not really been in love since her affair with Chesterfield and that was more teenage infatuation than genuine devotion. What Barbara wanted from her royal lover, as the new decade of the 1670s approached, was assurance that her future outside his bed would be generously funded and that her status in society acknowledged by a title greater than that of a mere countess. She was rewarded in August 1670 by being made Duchess of Cleveland in her own right. In the same year, Barbara’s financial situation was improved through the award of a series of grants, including the office of keeper of Hampton Court and the ownership of one of Henry VIII’s favourite palaces, Nonsuch in Surrey. Though this did not completely mark the end of her influence, or her appearances at court, her physical relationship with the king had run its course.
As for Charles II himself, it is easy to think that sex was always his major preoccupation because this is how the ‘Merrie Monarch’ is remembered. The reality, as the king contemplated the second decade of his reign, was much more complicated. He had survived plague, fire, war, riots and the occasional uprising. By 1670, his stock abroad, which had plummeted, was recovering, and the scruffy duke of Lauderdale, his near-tyrannical lieutenant in Scotland, had reduced this troublesome kingdom to complete subjugation. Even relations between the king and the House of Commons were improving. Yet his finances remained inadequate, his politicians corrupt and quarrelsome, and his subjects, not to mention his own immediate family, divided over religion. His hopes of having a legitimate heir had disappeared and the issue of the succession would haunt him till his death. The ability to manage people was perhaps his greatest asset, while keeping his own counsel was, by now, second nature. His most recent biographer called him a gambling man and Charles certainly knew how to keep his cards close to his chest.2 If he examined them closely, he must have realized that they were not very good ones. He would be obliged to improvise and, essentially, to make policy himself while encouraging his politicians to think that they were influential by playing them off against one another. But most of all he needed money. The Dutch Wars of the 1660s had bankrupted the exchequer and, since Parliament could never be relied upon to vote for taxation without attaching strings, the king had no scruples about obtaining it from other sources. Unlike his father, who had resurrected ancient laws to fund himself in the 1630s, Charles II decided to look elsewhere for financial backing.
France, home to his beloved sister, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, and ruled by his cousin, Louis XIV, was rich and always in search of allies in its struggles with other European powers. It seemed the most promising source of funds and Louis had made the first approach. French support would, though, come at a price and that price would need to be kept secret from all but a very few trusted advisers at home. It might also bring him into conflict once more with the United Provinces of the Netherlands, where his nephew, William III of Orange, was recovering the power of the hereditary office of stadtholder in a carefully choreographed dance with his country’s commitment to republicanism. Charles, mindful of his promise in 1660 to his dying sister, Mary, that he would look out for his nephew’s interests, always tried to separate his policy towards the Dutch government from professions of personal regard for the young man. This convenient distinction was often lost on William, who increasingly saw himself as a figurehead for the Protestant cause against the might of Catholic France. He would have been even more disenchanted had he known of the secret treaty concluded between England and France on 22 May 1670, which
committed the English to support France in a war against the Dutch, with the sole objective of destroying the republic. Given the fraught nature of Anglo-Dutch relations for much of the mid-seventeenth century and the Sun King’s overweening ambition, this stipulation was predictable. England was also to provide 4,000 infantry and sixty ships to bolster the French military capacity.