The King's Bed Read online

  THE

  King’s

  Bed

  Sex and Power in the Court of Charles II

  DON JORDAN & MICHAEL WALSH

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To Dian and Eithne

  An excellent prince doubtless had he been less addicted to women.

  John Evelyn

  CONTENTS

  Preface to the American Edition

  1 The Last Soirée

  2 The Making of a Prince

  3 Exile and First Love

  4 The Fugitive

  5 The Life of an Exiled King

  6 Restoration

  7 The Bride’s Price

  8 The Dissolute Court

  9 Married Life

  10 Illness, Plague and Fire

  11 Rivalry and Betrayal

  12 Entrances and Exits

  13 Theatrical Rivals

  14 A Secret Pact

  15 The French Rival

  16 A Spy in the Bed

  17 A Sensational Encounter with the Past

  18 Plots and Alarms

  19 Death of the King

  Postscript: The King’s Descendants and their Legacy

  Appendix: Some Aspects of Sex in the Seventeenth Century

  List of Major Characters

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Index

  About the Authors

  PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

  The sexual revolution began in the sixties – the 1660s. When Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland ascended to the throne in 1660 he became pivotal to a sexual upheaval at the top of English society. The newly reconstituted royal Court of St James blossomed into a seraglio of pleasure. The Puritans’ emphasis on chastity was cast aside and the court threw itself into a vortex of giddy sensuality. At the heart of the revolution were Charles and his many lovers.

  While writing our previous book on Charles II, The King’s Revenge, we became aware of just how important the King’s mistresses were in the life of both court and monarch. When the people of London came out in the autumn of 1660 to watch the executions of some of those responsible for beheading the King’s father Charles I, Charles II was cavorting with his current mistress, Barbara Palmer, the irresistibly sexy wife of one of his close supporters. From this contrasting tableau of torture and pleasure we began to consider to what extent Charles’s mistresses had held power over his life. For example, had previous writers underplayed their importance? Contemporaries who wrote about their king certainly thought he spent too little time on affairs of state and too much time purely on aff irs. This being so, we wondered if it might be possible to unravel something of Charles’s character through these relationships. The result of these ruminations is the present book.

  Charles not only loved the physical allure of women, he also adored their company – their society and gossip, the games, the rivalry, the coquetry. He surrounded himself with women, keeping former mistresses on his payroll in the royal seraglio at Westminster long after passion had abated. Some of his mistresses held such sway over him that they were in control of the relationship. Th s influence went beyond the bedroom to affect foreign and domestic policy. Barbara Palmer, who dominated the fi st decade of his reign, worked as a spy for France and connived successfully to persuade Charles to sack the most important statesman of the Restoration. His last great paramour, the Breton noblewoman Louise de Kérouaille, was a French agent who helped pave the way for England to become a puppet of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

  We felt that if a king could allow his mistresses such power, then the way to the core of the man would surely be via his relationships. The King’s Bed traces the impact of women on Charles in an attempt to understand his personality. So many contrasting views have been provided as to his character – ranging from ‘essentially loveable’, according to Antonia Frazer, to ‘cold’, according to Professor Ronald Hutton – that we felt there was a case to reconsider this intriguing character in the light of the evidence provided by his private life.

  Whitehall became a palace of fun, frequented by men and women who delighted in kicking over the sexual constraints of previous times. The libidinous king and his licentious court were the most potent symptoms of sudden and profound social change within the higher sections of English society. The years of the Restoration constituted an era of sexual liberation for women as well as men. For those who wished, and who had sufficie t social standing, it was a time of increasing freedom and experimentation.

  The King’s Bed also tells the story of the role of Charles II and his many women within what has only just begun to be recognised – most notably by Professor Faramerz Dabhoiwala of Oxford University in his groundbreaking work The Origins of Sex – as a revolution which began during Charles’s reign and grew apace during the following century. Charles did not drive the revolution but he was its figu ehead. In an age when adultery and fornication were frowned upon, and in which the law and the church wielded severe sanctions against such behaviour, the fact that it became public knowledge that the King had a series of mistresses heralded a turning point. The new licentiousness even had its cheerleaders in the playwrights of the day. In Restoration comedies, what mattered was not that adultery was committed but that it was committed with style. Suddenly, the sin was not the sex but a lack of panache.

  Of course, up to this point, sexually promiscuous men like Samuel Pepys could, if they so wished, seek out and buy literary pornography, but they kept quiet about it. In the reign of Charles II, however, cracks in sexual discipline began to appear at the highest levels of society. Ultimately this led to the question being publicly posed – might not consenting adults do what they pleased, within reason? Put together with then-current ideas about sexuality, including the belief that women had to have an orgasm to conceive, the new freedoms Charles’s reign brought in provided a sexual playground, albeit one in which men continued to hold most of the advantages. And no one had more advantages – and more sexual partners – than the King.

  It became clear to us that Charles was not simply the randy king portrayed so often. It was more than that: women were an obsession with him. Among those he lusted after were some who became famous historical figu es, such as Lucy Walter, Nell Gwyn and Barbara Palmer. There were many, many more we don’t know about, one-nighters smuggled up from the river under darkness, then up a stairwell from a private jetty, for a quick fli g in an anteroom kept specially for the purpose. The women varied from the rumbustious to the mild-mannered, from the brazen to the calculating, from common prostitutes to actresses and aristocrats. They all played their part in the King’s sensuous dream world.

  So this is not a book simply about Charles; it is also about his women. We cannot hope to tell the stories of all of them – the identity of many is simply not known. But we do know a good deal about many of them. The most important were the subject of constant gossip, appearing in bawdy ballads sold for sixpence a pop, in memoirs, diaries, letters and even – such was their prominence – offi al diplomatic reports. And all these and more were the sources for this work.

  We decided we must recount what fi ally became of Charles’s major mistresses and his numerous children. Without them, British life would be less varied and certainly less interesting. Together, the women and their off pring have created a surprising legacy that has come down to us today. Thanks to them, Charles’s personal life is now more relevant than ever.

  Britain is on the threshold of having its fi st monarch descended from Charles II’s illegitimate line. At the time of writing, we have yet to experience the ascent of Charles III, yet it seems the nation can hardly wait for the coronation of King William V, descended from C
harles II through his mother via two illegitimate blood lines.

  In the meantime, the memory of Charles, the man, stays with us to amuse, infuriate or be venerated. We hope that this examination of his personal life will add something to the understanding of this most enigmatic of public men, while at the same time entertaining the reader. It is hard not to envisage him still, with his dark, knowing eyes evaluating how he might seduce a lady or escape a tedious meeting of council, his long legs anxious to be off, tearing out of the palace on his long legs as if the devil was at his tail, loping towards St James’s Park or leaping onto a horse or into a coach to take him to Newmarket or his latest mistress. Whatever one thinks of him, Charles was never dull. In an age when there was much to fear, including the pox and the plague, what Charles feared more than anything was to be bored.

  1

  THE LAST SOIRÉE

  It all unravelled so quickly. As on most evenings, he strolled through the palace after supper to visit his mistress.1 Leaving his private apartments beside the river, he walked north through the maze of the old Tudor buildings and came to the entrance to another suite of rooms directly ahead of him. Behind this door lay the Queen’s personal apartments.2 There had been a time when he would have gone straight in, but a dozen or more years had passed since then. Their marriage had soured early on when it became clear that the Queen, though she could conceive, could not bear children that survived to full term. The Queen now spent an increasing amount of time at her other apartments in Somerset House, half a mile downstream. He turned away from her door and headed west towards the Privy Garden. As always, his spaniels ran ahead, knowing their way. They considered the palace to be theirs as much as the King’s, even breeding in the King’s apartments and permeating the palace with the sour perfume of their milk.3

  It was the evening of Sunday, 31 January 1685. King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland was four months off his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a little the wrong side of his prime but still generally jovial and relaxed. For the last twenty-four years he had enjoyed life in the old palace of Whitehall. The palace had grown in spontaneous fashion, his father and grandfather, and before them Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, all adding to it until it became a sprawling collection of buildings of evolving styles along the banks of the Thames. It was home to a vast array of residents: royal relatives, both near and distant, mistresses current and passed-over, court favourites, amusing confidants, tedious advisors, well-fed Beefeaters, bawdy laundresses, gentle seamstresses and household and kitchen staff of all varieties, along with the King’s personal herbalist, his chemist, pimpmaster and pox doctor. All these and more lived cheek by jowl, a whole city crammed into a palace.

  Zigzagging through the maze of interconnecting rooms, the King passed through an ornate doorway and into the Long Gallery – a grand sweep of two hundred and ten feet of faded grandeur. The once-lovely Holbein ceiling was pockmarked with ad hoc repairs, but the vista ahead of him was still one of graceful, even regal beauty.4 The gallery ran along the east side of the Privy Garden, whose austere Tudor formality Charles had enlivened with statuary and ornaments, including one of his most prized objects, a fabulous French sundial embellished with glass orbs and painted portraits of himself, the Queen, several of his mistresses and all of his twelve recognised illegitimate children.* It had been a monument to his love of science and women, and to his pride in his progeny. The sundial was missing now, destroyed by that mischief-maker, the Earl of Rochester. Returning from a drunken night on the town, Rochester had taken exception to the dial’s unfortunate phallic shape, or perhaps to the portrait it bore of the King. Shouting, ‘What, doest thou stand here to fuck time?’ he laid into the offending dial with his sword, reducing it to splinters.5 The next day, the Earl fled from London, but he was eventually forgiven and returned to court. Five years later, syphilis and alcohol took him away for good. Charles would never need to banish or pardon his infuriating friend again.

  On the other side of the garden lay the rooms of another intoxicating personality the King had at one time or another banished and pardoned. This was the most sensational of his many lovers, Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, whose voracious sexual appetites had once thrilled him with all the ‘tricks of Aretin’, alluding to an Italian writer of bawdy poetry.† Some said Charles had starved his fleet of resources to lavish money upon her, leading to a humiliating military defeat in 1667 when the Dutch navy sailed up the River Medway and surprised the English fleet at anchor.6 Despite past difficulties, including amorous indiscretions, the Duchess was now back in the palace but no longer in the royal bed. The woman who held that honour had rooms at the southern end of the Long Gallery, towards which the royal spaniels were leading the way.

  As the King made his elaborate progress, an older, more austere figure was also heading for the same suite of rooms: John Evelyn, the polymath and diarist, a man of Renaissance abilities who managed to be both a trusted ally of the King and a stern critic of his rule by the simple expedient of confiding his censures solely to his diary. Evelyn was one of the founders of the Royal Society and had made his name as a horticulturalist. He wrote on many scientific and religious topics and was trusted with important work for the government. A strongly religious man, Evelyn did not like the profane life in Whitehall.7 In a court filled with vice and licentiousness, he cut an incongruous figure.

  By this time of the evening, Evelyn would have preferred to be seven miles away down the river at Deptford, where he lived at Saye Court surrounded by his books and two hundred acres of gardens. This evening, business had detained him at Whitehall, requiring him, as it so often did, to stay on and attend the court soirées. If Evelyn had a fault, it was that he had a saint’s delight in seeing how sinners lived and in recording the scenes for posterity.8

  The King’s progress through the Long Gallery was slow. Years of over-indulgence had taken their toll and he was no longer as vigorous as before. An attack of gout clung on tenaciously and he had an abscess on his heel that refused to mend.9 Nor were the contents of the gallery what they had once been. In his father’s day it had held more than a hundred paintings, including the finest works by Correggio, Titian and Raphael. Following his father’s execution the paintings were sold and scattered across Europe. With limited resources he had attempted to restore the collection. Though the best were gone for ever, he rescued some favourites. One was a family portrait by Van Dyck, depicting his father and mother, his sister Mary, aged one, and himself at the age of two. He had been Prince of Wales then, heir to three thrones. Of the family group and its painter he was the sole survivor. His father had gone first in 1649, dying at the age of forty-eight on a scaffold scarcely two hundred feet from the entrance to the gallery. His mother died in 1669, possibly of an accidental overdose of the opiates she took for her bronchitis. His sister Henrietta Anne, to whom he was very close, died next in 1670, at the age of twenty-six, possibly poisoned by her husband Philippe, the openly homosexual brother of Louis XIV of France. Charles had been king now for twenty-five years and for all of those he had sought consolation for his family’s calamities in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.10

  In the apartment at the end of the gallery a sociable crowd had gathered. She was at its centre – Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, his mistress-in-chief, holding sway over a court within a court. From the moment she awoke in the morning her role was to be beautiful and available. More than that, she had to be on display. Before dressing, she would sit before her mirror and pose, her nightclothes artfully arranged to show off her beauty – including a good deal of flesh – to advantage. Courtiers and young gallants came to her boudoir as if to a tableau vivant, to gaze upon her. Maids fussed around, brushing her lustrous dark hair, discussing her selection of clothes and jewellery and her appointments for the day ahead.11 Her sexual power irradiated the room. Once, another woman had held this position, that of chief courtesan, the King’s consort in everything but title. This woman, the beautiful and voluptuous B
arbara Villiers, whose marriage to Roger Palmer had resulted in his being cuckolded by the King and given an earldom in return for his wife, had ultimately been dropped from favour, but not before she had given the King five children. Well over a decade had passed since Louise had replaced Barbara, causing a sensation across the country, as she was notoriously both Catholic and French.

  Most mornings, he was among her admiring visitors, basking in the flattering remarks – for to flatter her was to flatter him. Her morning ritual was a piece of theatre reinforcing her position as the most alluring, the most desirable, the most radiant woman in the land. As the King’s mistress she was an object of greater desire and envy than the Queen, wielding power and influence over the King and with access to his wealth. For those who had hoped that the King’s return from exile would mark a return of the monarch as a living symbol of divine rule, here was the all too fleshy refutation of the myth. If anything was a symbol of the human appetites and mortality of the King, it was the image of his mistress in her palace within a palace, an emissary from the powerful court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who bankrolled his cousin’s inferior court in London. In all her pomp and display, Louise was the embodiment of the failure of Charles’s reign to allay the religious fears of his subjects, to reconcile the divided aspirations of those he ruled over, or to become a viable symbol of the national self-image.

  With his short but painful journey at an end, footmen bowed and swung open the doors, and King Charles II entered his own earthly paradise. Its perfection had been achieved at huge expense – he had paid for these rooms to be torn down and rebuilt three times before she had been satisfied. The Queen had to make do with rooms on which little or nothing had been spent in twenty years.12 The grand salon was decorated in the style of a French palace, which was hardly surprising, as its furnishings had largely been donated by Louise’s other benefactor, Louis XIV. The apartment was described by John Evelyn as ‘ten times’ more magnificent than that of the Queen. Rich tapestries covered the walls, depicting landscapes in which sat French royal palaces including Versailles and the Louvre. Each tapestry was ten feet high and nearly seventeen feet long. Hanging in a room beside the flat banks of the Thames, the tapestries provided a window onto a rolling Arcadian, and very French, dreamland. One tapestry even depicted the Sun King himself hunting boar in parkland in front of the incomparable Chateau de Monceau.13