A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Read online

  He grew up enjoying the company of women of wit and intelligence, and they abounded in his close circle. In the bitter winter before the news of his father’s trial arrived, he danced and flirted in the Hague with the good-looking, effervescent women of the House of Orange, and his talented cousins, daughters of Elizabeth of Bohemia. Charles, however, was already in love. On a brief visit to the Hague in July 1648 he had met Lucy Walter. They were both eighteen. Lucy’s parents were Pembrokeshire gentry who had separated when she was young, and she and her mother had lived in London, mingling in the down-at-heel royalist circles during the Civil Wars. In her teens she became the mistress of Algernon Sidney, the youngest son of the Earl of Leicester. The Sidneys, like so many families, had divided allegiances, and when Algernon went to fight for Cromwell Lucy turned to his royalist brother, Robert. She moved with him to the Hague, changing her name to ‘Mrs Barlow’, ‘a browne, beautiful, bold but insipid creature’, according to Evelyn.

  Lucy and Charles became lovers and their son James – later Duke of Monmouth – was born in Rotterdam on 9 April 1649. It was a genuine love affair, but when Charles left for Jersey and then Scotland in 1650 Lucy had no means of support and soon turned to other men. After Charles returned, and told her their affair was over, she made ceaseless demands for money and caused numerous public scandals. At one point she came to London where she was arrested as a spy and sent to the Tower – causing much mirth in the newssheets – before being despatched back to the Netherlands. Worried for his son, Charles tried various means of inveigling him away, and even tried to abduct him by force. Lucy fought hard but eventually, in 1658, one of Charles’s spymasters, Ross, snatched the nine-year-old James while her back was turned. He was brought to Paris, to the household of Henrietta Maria, where he took the name of James Crofts after his guardian, one of Charles’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, William Crofts.

  Lucy Walter, Mrs Barlow, in the late 1650s

  Lucy followed her son to Paris, where she died a year later, supposedly from syphilis. She was twenty-eight. She made a deathbed confession to John Cosin, later Bishop of Durham, declaring that she was Charles’s legal wife, a claim that was never proved but would cause much trouble in years to come.

  During his exile various unsuccessful schemes were set in motion to marry Charles off profitably and form useful alliances. The boldest and most hopeless was Henrietta Maria’s attempt to force him on her niece, Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, known as ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’ and one of the wealthiest women in Europe. Charles, who was half-hearted anyway, had no chance of such a prize. Among the duchesses and princesses of his relations his own first choice was his cousin Sophie. She was curly-haired, clever and completely natural, but also wise enough to see that such a marriage would be foolish. When Charles told her, as they walked by the canals in the dusk, that she was more beautiful than Lucy Walter, she slowly withdrew and their evening walks ended. In her memoirs she admitted that ‘he had shown a liking for me with which I was most gratified’, but she had ‘sense enough to know that marriages of great kings are not made up by such means’.1

  Whispers of affairs followed Charles as he moved from place to place. In Paris he became briefly infatuated with Isabelle-Angelique, duchesse de Chatillon, whose young husband had died in the wars of the Fronde in 1649. The engaging ‘Bablon’ was a charming widow with many admirers. When Charles visited her in the country, this ‘raised a confident rumour that he was married to that lady’, sighed the exasperated Hyde, just as his liaison with Lucy had done.2 But his suit was never serious. The Duchess became a close friend of Minette and Charles remained fond of her. Her name often appears in his letters to his sister: he helped her to get a licence to import alum into England, which was used in the chalky make-up of court beauties; he worried about her second marriage to a German prince (which did not last long); and he assured Minette that ‘upon any occasion that lies within my power, I shall ever be ready to serve Bablon’.3

  The names were beginning to form a longish list. One of Charles’s mistresses in exile was Elizabeth Killigrew, sister of the Killigrew brothers and now the wife of Francis Boyle, another son of the Earl of Cork. They met in the Dutch Republic, where Elizabeth was in the household of Mary, Princess of Orange, but when Elizabeth became pregnant she was swiftly bustled back to Ireland. Their daughter was born there, named Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Fitzcharles. After the Restoration Charles made Elizabeth’s husband Viscount Shannon, and she spent the rest of her life on their country estate.4 Another affair was with Eleanor, Lady Byron, whom Evelyn marked down, with grand exaggeration, as ‘the king’s seventeenth whore abroad’.5 Yet another was with Catharine Pegge, daughter of a Derbyshire royalist, with whom he had two children, Charles Fitzcharles, nicknamed ‘Don Carlos’, later Earl of Plymouth, and a daughter, Catherine. After he returned to London he installed this small family in a house in Pall Mall.

  Still, the hunt for a respectable wife went on. In the early years of his exile, the possibility was raised of his marriage to Princess Louise, a daughter of the Orange stadtholder Frederick, and sister to the future William II, his sister Mary’s husband. Seeing no advantage, the House of Orange quickly declined the offer. But ten years later Charles’s strongest, and last, love abroad was Louise’s sister, the lively Henrietta Catherine. This was a genuine, reciprocal passion, squashed by her grandmother Amalia, the elderly Dowager Princess of Orange, who was convinced of the hopelessness of Charles’s quest to be king and probably equally put off by his philandering.6 (Henrietta then sensibly married the safe and solemn German prince.)

  Charles was not really as wild as the Dowager Princess thought, preferring long, easy relationships to perpetual hunt and chase. He had strong feelings, and if not faithful, he was loyal. But he had great charm, and when women flung themselves at him, as they often did, or were steered into his path by ambitious courtiers, he certainly responded with great sensual pleasure. In Halifax’s view, his ‘inclinations to love were the effects of health and a good constitution, with as little mixture of the seraphic part as ever man had’.7 A couple of months before his return he enclosed a note in a letter to Lord Taaffe – who had been his emissary in his exchanges with Henrietta – asking Taaffe to give it to ‘la petite souris’ and adding, ‘there is here a very pritty sourie but the divell ont is the dame is so jealous that it must be a very good mouser that can take it.’8

  The prize that he did take, and would cling to over the coming years, was Barbara Villiers, Mrs Palmer, whom he met in Flanders just before his return. Barbara was another ravishingly beautiful and spirited young woman with impeccable royalist credentials. Her grandfather came from the powerful Villiers clan, and was half-brother to the first Duke of Buckingham. Her father, Viscount Grandison, had died of wounds received at the siege of Bristol in 1643, when she was three, and her uncle Ned Villiers was a founder of the resistance group the Sealed Knot, and one of Hyde’s most valued agents. The Grandisons lost everything in the service of the crown, while her mother’s merchant family, the Baynings, squandered their wealth on grand drainage schemes in the fens. And although her widowed mother married the Earl of Anglesey (her late husband’s cousin and yet another Villiers), his estates too were sequestered. Like Lucy Walter, who was only two years older, the near-penniless Barbara shifted as best she could in the royalist circles of Interregnum London.

  Like Lucy, too, she took a rich lover: she was ‘a little lecherous girl when she was young’, Pepys heard. At sixteen she became the mistress of Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, an affair that continued even after she married the worthy but rich Roger Palmer in 1659. Discovering the affair, Palmer threatened to remove his wife from town completely (always the worst fate for women in Restoration drama). He was resolved, she wailed to Chesterfield, ‘that nobody shall see me when I am in the country’. Her letter was almost an invitation to an elopement: ‘for I am ready and willing to go all over the world with you, and I will obey yo
ur commands, that am whilst I live – Yours’.9

  Chesterfield did not rise to the bait, being immersed in the disastrous plans for royalist uprisings that summer, which saw him imprisoned six times. In January 1660 he fled England for Paris after killing a man in a duel. At the same time, Roger Palmer joined those royalists who gambled on getting a good post at the hoped-for restoration by making a donation to the cause, in his case a substantial £1,000. He also acted as an agent, supplying Hyde with information about debates in the Council of State. Barbara may therefore have gone to Brussels, not aiming to reach Chesterfield in Paris, as has been suggested, but as an inconspicuous messenger. Meanwhile Hyde worked to get Palmer elected to the Convention Parliament, and Charles himself took an interest in his case, prompted perhaps by mentions of Palmer’s ‘gay wife’. There is no definite mention of their meeting, but when they did meet, Charles fell fast.

  It was rumoured that when Charles left Whitehall, exhausted, on the night of his triumphant return to London, he went to bed, not in his palace, but with the mesmerising Mrs Palmer. The report was typical of critics who saw her malign influence everywhere, right from the start of the reign. But certainly, they were lovers within a month of his return. Barbara had piles of dark hair – rich auburn in some lights – ‘alabaster skin’, blue, near-violet eyes, and conversation-stopping sexual allure. And from the start her relationship with Charles had a political edge. She was no tool, being too intelligent and fiery to be used lightly. But her relations, especially her Villiers uncles, and her uncle by marriage, James Howard, Earl of Suffolk, prepared her for her role. They knew Charles’s weakness for women, and believed that one path to power was through his bed. Halifax would later write that the placing of a mistress was ‘No small matter in a court and not unworthy the thoughts even of a party’:

  A mistress, either dextrous in herself or well instructed by those that are so, may be very useful to her friends, not only in the immediate hours of her ministry, but by her influences and insinuations at other times. It was resolved generally by others whom he should have in his arms, as well as whom he should have in his councils. Of a man who was so capable of choosing, he chose as seldom as any man that ever lived.10

  But Charles did choose. He ignored some offerings, took others casually and a few so seriously that his very government was affected.

  In the summer of 1660 Roger Palmer moved into King Street, across the Privy Garden from Charles’s apartments in Whitehall. Like a conjuring trick, a house had suddenly become available when Cromwell’s cousin, Edmund Whalley, fleeing vengeance, sailed as fast as he could for New England. On 13 July the Palmers invited the king and the Dukes of York and Gloucester to a musical evening. Pepys was working late next door with Sandwich, when they heard music through the wall and stood listening at the old connecting door between the lodgings. They gathered that the king and his two brothers were there, ‘with Madam Palmer, a pretty woman that they have a fancy to, to make her husband a cuckold’.11

  For several months the affair was kept quiet and any gossip was quickly hushed up by Hyde. But by the autumn everyone in court circles knew the truth. Charles took Barbara with him to the races, and showed her off in the park. Courtiers ingratiated themselves with her in the hope she would say a word in their favour. Her family, above all, kept as close as they could, particularly Buckingham. Hyde’s dislike of Barbara was partly due to her alliance with this cousin, whom he had blamed so often for distracting Charles in exile. He was also anxious, even in these early months, that the court’s reputation for wildness would undo all his diplomacy. He forbade his own wife to call on her and refused to mention her name, referring to her from now on as ‘the Lady’.

  The summer was festive, but in the dog days, the mood at court darkened. In late August Charles’s brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, caught the smallpox that had spread through London in the heat. His doctors thought it mild, and his family were horrified when he died suddenly, on 13 September. At the age of nine Henry, with his sister Elizabeth, had been the last of the family to see their father, Charles I, on the eve of his execution. When he arrived in Paris five years later, he was incorrigible and wild after his long imprisonment, but he grew into a youth of great sweetness. Charles was badly shaken by the loss of this favourite brother, aged only twenty. As was the custom, his body was carried by barge after sunset from Somerset House to Westminster stairs, with torches flaring on the dark, lapping waters. He was buried at midnight in the Henry VII Chapel in the Abbey, the flaming torches being extinguished at his grave.

  The court wore deep mourning for six weeks, and the opening of the new theatres was delayed until November. The family, however, still planned to spend Christmas together, the first time for twenty years. In late September Mary, Princess of Orange, arrived from Holland, barely escaping shipwreck off the Kent coast. Charles sailed down from London in his yacht to meet her at Margate, and escorted her regally up the Thames.12 Although they had sometimes quarrelled, he was devoted to his brisk, strong-minded elder sister. But this was an awkward meeting since Charles had failed to persuade the Dutch States General to have her young son William made stadtholder, captain-general of the republic. She felt angry and betrayed.

  More family troubles lay ahead. The court spread outwards from Whitehall, into the streets nearby, to the great mansions with their gardens running down to the Thames. One of these, Hyde’s current home, Worcester House in the Strand, was the site of the first great court scandal of Charles II’s reign. At twenty-six, James, Duke of York, had never been thought serious in his affairs, but it now transpired that on 3 September 1660 he had secretly married the twenty-three-year-old Anne Hyde, the Chancellor’s daughter. Anne had been a maid of honour to Mary, Princess of Orange, since 1655 and had met James during a visit to Paris the following year. When the exiled court was based in Brussels he visited her often, fell in love and in late 1659 agreed a marriage contract. To his alarm – since the sudden hope of a restoration made his chances of a noble marriage brighter – in the spring of 1660 she became pregnant. A few months later, the marriage contract was solemnised.

  At first Charles refused them permission to marry, but he finally gave in. The ceremony took place at dead of night in Worcester House. In place of her father, Ormond’s eldest son, the Earl of Ossory, gave the bride away. James’s own chaplain Dr Joseph Crowther conducted the service, and the only other witness was Anne’s maid, Ellen Stroud. The secret marriage did not surface into public knowledge for a while, but it was another source of anxiety while Charles was preoccupied with his Privy Council and parliament, with the settlement of affairs in Scotland and Ireland, the failure of his hopes for agreement about the Church and the imminent trials of the men who had signed his father’s death warrant. James himself kept silent, denying all rumours, but when Anne gave birth to a son, on 22 October, and claimed repeatedly during her labour that they were married, he finally admitted the truth.

  By then the news had been buzzing around the court for weeks. The marriage was a blow to the royal family. It threw away the diplomatic advantages to be gained by dangling the possibility of marriage to the duke before foreign nobility. Moreover Anne was a commoner, and the Stuart family stock fell with an alliance to the daughter of a Wiltshire lawyer. People joked that Anne smelt of her father’s green lawyer’s bag. Worse still, her baby son would now be second in line to the throne. Yet Charles’s immediate reaction was one of loyalty to his old adviser. He knew that people would think Hyde was implicated, but he also recognised that the Chancellor adored his daughter and that her pregnancy and furtive marriage would outrage his stiff principles and pride.

  Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, engraving

  As Hyde himself said later, in this crisis Charles acted with generosity and understanding. Realising that he knew nothing, he sent for Hyde’s old friends, Ormond and Southampton, and told them to arrange a meeting for him with the Chancellor, but to break the news first, before he came in. Hyde was, as Charles
expected, upset to the point of frenzy, threatening to turn his daughter out of his house as a whore, shouting that she should be sent to the Tower, impeached and executed and that he himself would sign her arraignment. He was full of fear that people would think (as many did) that this was a plot on his part, to get closer to the royal family and the succession. When Charles entered, Southampton told him there was no point talking to his raging Chancellor, ‘Whereupon his majesty’, wrote Hyde, looking upon him with a wonderful benignity, said, ‘Chancellor, I knew this business would trouble you, and therefore I appointed your two friends to confer first with you upon it, before I would speak with you myself: but you must now lay aside all passion that disturbs you, and consider that this business will not do itself; that it will quickly take air; and therefore it is fit that I first resolve what to do before other men presume to give their counsel: tell me therefore what you would have me do and I will follow your advice.13