The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  Fired up by the occasion and all it signified for him, Buckingham arrived at Barn Elms early. He had already dismounted, stripped off his riding cape and put on his duelling gloves by the time Shrewsbury arrived at the close. The duke’s seconds were his friend Sir Robert Holmes and the accomplished fencing master Sir John Jenkins. Shrewsbury had picked Sir John Talbot, a soldier, and Bernard Howard, a son of the Earl of Arundel.11 The combatants lined up opposite each other and stared across the frozen earth in tense expectation. This would be no token contest: the stakes were too high. At the agreed signal, all six engaged at once. Bernard Howard, Shrewsbury’s second, ran furiously at Jenkins, killing him instantly. On Buckingham’s other flank, his cause was more successful: Holmes severed John Talbot’s arm, leaving Buckingham and Shrewsbury to fight alone. The rivals squared up, their breath pluming white in the cold air, the ghost of Anna Maria between them. Their contest was over in seconds. Shrewsbury launched himself first, finally intent on proving himself a man. But Buckingham parried the attack, feinted and then straightened his arm. His sword pierced Shrewsbury’s right breast and came out through his shoulder. As Buckingham withdrew his weapon, Shrewsbury fell to the ground, blood pulsing from his wound. His manservant stripped off his bloodied shirt, hastily bandaged his chest and carried him to a house in nearby Chelsea. It was five days before Shrewsbury could be safely moved to Arundel House in the Strand to recuperate. Buckingham, meanwhile, suffered little more than a scratch.12

  For a while, it seemed that Shrewsbury would make a full recovery. Newsletters from London reported the opinion of surgeons, that ‘his wound doth now well digest, and … his spitting blood was a good sign of his recovery’,13 and Pepys was told by his apothecary that ‘Lord Shrewsbury is likely to do well’.14 However, in the first week of March 1668, Shrewsbury deteriorated suddenly and inexplicably and he died on 16 March. The doctor’s report concluded that ‘his heart had grown very flaccid, and his liver and entrails much discoloured and decayed’.15 ‘Seven of the most eminent of physicians and three surgeons’ examined the body and stated that Shrewsbury’s death had nothing to do with his duelling wound, which was ‘well, and fairly cured’.16 The verdict was important for Buckingham as it relieved him of direct responsibility for the death, but it seems unlikely that the wound had nothing to do with Shrewsbury’s deterioration.

  Now free to return from France, in public Anna Maria would have to adopt the demeanour of a grieving widow. In private, however, she and Buckingham were determined to begin a life of hedonism together on the banks of the Thames. Even though these pleasures would in fact elude them, Anna Maria and Buckingham, easily caricatured as a whore and a rake, were a pair of ‘star-crossed lovers’ who inaugurated Cliveden as a place of beauty, luxury, love and intrigue.

  Chapter 2

  ‘BEDS OF JEWELS AND RICH MINES OF GOLD’

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE Anna Maria married the Earl of Shrewsbury, the diarist Rachel Newport tartly wrote that Shrewsbury was ‘in motion to two sisters … the elder being unhandsome and crooked, the younger tolerable; it is thought he will not have the elder’.1 Newport was one of many women whose jealousy was aroused by Anna Maria. With cheeks unblemished by smallpox and chestnut hair curled into tight ringlets over her forehead, her features, although not those of a delicate beauty, were striking. Contemporary depictions show a woman with large, heavy-lidded eyes, an elegant, well-defined nose, and, just below her chin, a ‘soggiogala’ – a little swelling of extra flesh that was considered attractive among Restoration aristocrats. At the nape of her neck she would sometimes have sported two small curled locks of hair, known as ‘heartbreakers’.

  Born on 25 March 1642 to Robert Brudenell, 2nd Earl of Cardigan, and his second wife, Anne Savage, Anna Maria had grown up in a period of political and religious turmoil. Continental Europe had been wracked by religious wars, as the Protestant Reformation struggled for hearts and minds, land and power with the Catholic Counter-Reformation. England had itself undergone a prolonged and difficult transformation from Catholic to Protestant nation in the 16th century and debate over doctrine – especially the extent of the religious toleration – continued to rage throughout the 17th century. Like Shrewsbury, Anna Maria’s family were prominent Catholics – a faith viewed in Protestant England not only as theological error, but also as a dangerous political force. Catholics owed their allegiance to the Pope in Rome in religious matters and it was felt that this undermined the politico-religious authority claimed by the monarch as head of the Church of England. Moreover, the papacy claimed the right to depose ‘ungodly’ princes, and was backed by the military might of the Holy Roman Empire. Talk of Catholic plots – both real and fictitious – abounded. English Catholics risked persecution for their faith and, before Anna Maria was born, her family had already been charged with recusancy, the failure to attend worship in the Anglican Church.2

  Just months after Anna Maria’s birth, England descended into a chaotic period of civil war that pitted the king, Charles I, and his Royalist supporters against the Parliamentarian forces who believed that Charles’s monarchy of personal rule had descended into tyranny. The conflict lasted almost eight years. On 30 January 1649, when Anna Maria was six years old, the king was executed at the command of a radical Parliamentarian minority. This horrified most English people – Royalist and Parliamentarian alike. To kill a king, it was said, was next to killing God. One of those who signed the death warrant was Oliver Cromwell. He became the leader of the new regime, first as head of the Council of State that ruled in what was known as the Commonwealth period, and later as the first holder of the office of Lord Protector, which afforded him greater personal power. Cromwell eventually died in 1658, a few months before Anna Maria’s wedding. His son Richard Cromwell proved an inept successor and so the monarchy was restored in May 1660, in the person of the beheaded king’s son, Charles II. Anna Maria came of age in the wake of the Restoration.

  Her wedding to Shrewsbury was an arranged match, bringing together two Catholic families and offering her status, security and wealth. Shrewsbury, a widower 20 years her senior, would never ignite her passion. The epithalamium – a poem in celebration of a marriage – included an appeal to Hymen, the Greek god of wedding ceremonies:

  May Hymen’s torch burn clear as your Desires

  Lighted in heaven with pure Promethean fires…

  Fit for a Husband who hath practised Love

  Whose Beds of Jewels and rich mines of Gold

  Are lodged within, to be enjoyed, not told.3

  Shrewsbury did bring ‘rich mines of gold’ to the marriage, in the form of his sizeable estates, but although married previously, he was far from practised in the ‘art of love’. At the age of 36, he was staid, sombre and reserved. After the Restoration, he shunned the decadence of Charles II’s court, devoting himself instead to managing his land. He brought a daughter, Mary, from his first marriage, and on 24 July 1660, when Anna Maria was 17, she gave birth to the couple’s first son, Charles. Although they were to have a second son, Jake, it was Anna Maria’s relationship with Charles, Shrewsbury’s heir, which would in time define her future. Soon after his birth, Anna Maria began to evince an interest in dancing and music and drifted into the frenetic social whirl of Restoration society. After a straitened and often traumatic childhood during the Civil War and the puritanism of the Protectorate, she was ready to throw herself into the new culture of hedonism. If Buckingham was fascinated by the culture of the duel, Anna Maria was captivated by the role of the mistress.

  After his father was executed, Charles II had spent some of his exile at the French court of Louis XIV, whose mistresses were well known. At the Restoration, French fashion, culture and music became prevalent at the English court. The musician Louis Grabu was brought over from France and appointed ‘Composer to His Majesty’s Musique’, the French style for ornamental interior design became popular in aristocratic households and, during the first five years of the monarchy, lace coats became more elaborate
and sleeves more voluminous in imitation of the French mode.4 Along with these other Francophile imports came the cult of the mistress. Like most court fashions, the trend for mistress-keeping arose in imitation of the monarch’s own behaviour. Charles II had married Catherine of Braganza in 1662, but the match did not prevent the king from courting other women: he already had a number of other lovers and, while he and Catherine were on their honeymoon, his mistress Barbara Villiers (a cousin of Buckingham’s) gave birth to their second child at Hampton Court Palace.5 In Whitehall, the king was supplied with young women by the redoubtable team of William Chiffinch, Page of the Royal Bedchamber, and his wife. Using bribery, blackmail and flattery, the Chiffinches sourced royal mistresses from the streets of London, from the stage, and from within the court itself. Although the paramours of Charles II did not have the quasi-constitutional powers of their Continental counterparts, they were given wealth and titles and could contribute – albeit informally – to political debate. Villiers’ apartments in Whitehall, which were maintained by the government and included an aviary, doubled up as a political arena where both office and reputation could be made and broken. She was given land in Ireland, conferred the title of Duchess of Cleveland and endowed with sufficient resources and influence to deliver patronage of her own.

  Mistresses were not only able to attain political influence – they also stood to gain widespread popularity. Many of the lovers of Charles II became national celebrities in their own right. A healthy market sprang up for woodcuts and mezzotints depicting this elite tribe of women. Those looking for images of the king’s most famous mistresses such as Nell Gwyn and Barbara Villiers had at least a dozen different prints to choose from, and portraits of the less famous courtesans still enjoyed successive editions, at a price of at least six pence.6 Court mistresses were not forbidden from enjoying their popularity, and the more successful ones kept lovers of their own. Barbara Villiers, whose insatiable sexual appetite became the stuff of legend, stood out in this regard. Villiers counted the playwright William Wycherley, Jacob the rope-dancer, and the actor Cardonnell Goodman among her exotic and energetic coterie of bedfellows.

  There was a tension between the sexual availability of these women and the way they were portrayed in contemporary art, often as saints, penitents or goddesses. Barbara Villiers was herself painted as Mary Magdalene, and as St Agnes the shepherdess, the patron saint of virgins. Sir John Reresby described her as ‘the finest woman of her age’.7 Samuel Pepys, who bought a copy of her portrait, was mesmerised by the sight of her smocks and pretty linen petticoats drying in the Privy Garden: ‘Did me good to look on them’, he wrote in his diary.8 Pepys exemplified the way in which court mistresses were at the same time idealised for their beauty and disparaged for their moral frailty when, reflecting on her disrespectful behaviour towards her husband, he commented, ‘for her beauty I am willing to construe all this for the best and to pity her wherein it is to her hurt, though I know she is a whore’.9 This mix of desire and contempt was not simply a product of Pepys’s sexually tortured mind. The same celebrity that inspired penny ballads, woodcuts and mezzotints could also inspire downright hostility, and even public disorder. The first significant political riots of Charles’s reign centred on London’s brothels, haunts of many courtiers, and symbols of the sexual corruption that was supposedly abetted by the monarch himself.10 However much power and wealth and celebrity a mistress enjoyed, and however effectively she revenged herself against aggressors at court, in the public arena she was still ‘a whore’. Her reputation, for good and for ill, depended on her sexuality.

  Anna Maria quickly learned that the way to achieve recognition within the court was to wield her sexual power. She understood how her beauty and allure could be harnessed to further her personal fortunes and political influence. Embarking on numerous affairs, she soon became notorious to the extent that court satirists even cast aspersions on the integrity of her mother, the upright Lady Anne Brudenell. One poem depicted her as having experienced a sort of Damascene conversion to vice and pimping.

  Brudenell was long innocent,

  But for the time she has misspent,

  She’ll make amends hereafter.

  Who can do more,

  Than play the whore,

  And pimp too for her daughter?11

  A rivalry developed between Anna Maria and Nell Gwyn. On one occasion, Anna Maria was denied an invitation to a house-warming party hosted by Nell, who quipped that ‘One whore at a time is enough for his Majesty’.12 A contemporary recorded with incredulity the cult-like behaviour displayed by men who had become infatuated with Anna Maria: ‘there are three or four gentlemen wearing an ounce of her hair made into bracelets, and no person finds any fault’.13 She was also the cause of many duels, some of them fatal. ‘I would wager she might have a man killed for her every day’, wrote Anthony Hamilton in his Memoirs of Count Grammont, ‘and she would only hold her head the higher for it.’14

  Chapter 3

  ‘HE CAME, HE SAW AND CONQUERED’

  WHEN THE CIVIL War broke out in 1642, Buckingham was 16 and his brother Francis 15. Given the family’s close connections to the Crown, they naturally signed up to fight for the Royalist cause but, fearing for their lives, Charles I sent them abroad, and for the next few years they lived in Italy and France, ‘in as great state as some of those sovereign princes’.1 In Rome and Florence, they received tuition from some of the most remarkable thinkers of the time, including Thomas Hobbes – although Buckingham clearly did not acquire his mentor’s distaste for duelling. But the brothers could not bear to stay away from England and, six years after leaving home, they returned to fight. Francis lost his life in a skirmish near Kingston in 1648 and Buckingham fled once more to the Continent, this time to Charles II’s court in exile in Holland. Parliament offered him a pardon and an opportunity to keep his estates if he returned to the country within 40 days, but he decided to stay with the king, sacrificing his vast estates in London, Rutland, Essex, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Nottingham, Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire. He was received with ‘great grace and kindness’ by Charles, though without the income from his lands, he was forced to sell some of his father’s paintings in order to finance his lifestyle.2

  When Charles I was executed in 1649, Buckingham was officially branded a traitor and banished, but nevertheless he returned to England again in 1657. With the country still under the control of Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, he disguised himself in various extravagant costumes in order to escape recognition. Buckingham set up a stage at Charing Cross and, donning some days a wizard’s mask and others a hat with a fox’s tail, performed his satirical ballads to passing crowds, who were unaware that this lowly busker had practically shared a cradle with the Stuart prince.3 During this time Buckingham nurtured his talent for performance, showmanship and satire – skills that would make him an invaluable addition to court life in the Restoration.

  A letter by the spy Colonel Bamfield reported Buckingham’s presence in England and conjectured that he was ‘about some desperate design, either for some rising in the City or some attempt upon the Protector’s person’.4 In fact, Buckingham’s reasons for staying in England were not so seditious. He was determined to reclaim his sequestered land. His estates had been given to Sir Thomas Fairfax, Cromwell’s one-time commander-in-chief. The total value amounted to £10,000 in cash and lands worth £4,000 a year.5 He resolved to seduce the ‘spiritless but amiable’ Mary Fairfax, daughter and heir of the former Parliamentarian leader. Theirs was to be a strangely complex relationship – and one that also shaped the life of Anna Maria.

  Fairfax doted on his daughter, whom he called ‘Little Moll’, but his military service had entailed long absences from home.6 Mary was left in the care of her mother, Anne, a plain and deeply pious woman, whose childhood in Holland had encouraged her Presbyterian religious beliefs. Partly because she was not as charming as other ladies of her status, partly because of her open Presbyterianism, and partly
because she was widely considered to have ideas above her station, Anne was unpopular at the Cromwellian court. A further source of tension was the fate of the king. Though committed to the Parliamentarian cause, Thomas Fairfax felt profoundly uneasy about the trial of Charles I. In this, Fairfax sided with the majority of Parliamentarians, who believed they were fighting against the tyranny of a particular ruler rather than the fundamental evil of monarchy itself. He refused to take his seat beside his more radical contemporaries, Cromwell among them, as a judge at Charles’s trial and was horrified when the king was executed. His wife is said to have shouted from the public gallery, ‘Oliver Cromwell is a traitor’.7

  Buckingham’s long-suffering wife, the ‘spiritless but amiable’ Mary Fairfax.

  In the wake of the trial, Fairfax abandoned politics and the family spent most of their time at their favourite house, picturesque Nun Appleton, built on the ruins of a former nunnery in North Yorkshire. There Mary enjoyed an unusual childhood for an aristocratic girl. She was not only Fairfax’s daughter but also his heir. Aged 12, Mary began to receive instruction from a private tutor, as though she were a boy. Her teacher, Andrew Marvell, was to become one of the most noted poets and political writers of the later 17th century. While at Nun Appleton he taught Mary languages, as well as writing his own poetry inspired by the house and its owners.