Buckingham’s second and much larger London property was York House, which had been built for his father in the 1620s. The only part of the house remaining today is the Buckingham Watergate, which was the riverside entrance to the mansion. Due to the construction of the Thames embankment in the 19th century, the gate is now some distance from the river it was built to serve, and stands marooned at the edge of Victoria Embankment Gardens, east of Charing Cross Station. The Villiers coat of arms features above the gate’s central arch.
York House was built in the Italianate style popularised by Inigo Jones during the reign of Charles I. The painter Peter Paul Rubens had been a guest in 1629 and had given Buckingham’s father important works, some of which were among those that Buckingham sold in Amsterdam to finance his upkeep during his exile. The house had also been the site of infamous and dissolute court parties. At a party in 1627 attended by King Charles and his wife Henrietta Maria, guests were invited to dress up as vices and virtues; the first duke of Buckingham appeared dressed as envy, ‘with divers open-mouthed dogs heads representing the people’s barking’.11 The most notable feature of the property was the magnificent garden, in which a number of Italianate statues were exhibited.
Either house would have been a beautiful home for Anna Maria. But right from the start it was clear that she would be sharing it not only with Buckingham but also with Mary. Divorce was impossible: wife and mistress would have to live together with the man each loved in a bizarre ménage à trois.
This was a particularly uncomfortable arrangement for Mary. According to the Vicomtesse de Longueville, Buckingham’s wife had become ‘a little round crumpled woman’, utterly devoted to her husband, and delusional about their original courtship, attributing only sincere motives to his advances.12 Though she had previously been magnanimous to Buckingham’s lovers, the prospect of having to share him and his homes with Anna Maria was too much for her to bear. She was humiliated and angered by this arrangement. Besides being personally affronted, she would also have taken exception to the flouting of mourning convention, which showed deep disrespect for the late earl.
When Mary expressed her horror at the prospect of living with Anna Maria, according to Pepys Buckingham retorted, ‘Why Madam, I did think so, and therefore have ordered your coach to be ready, to carry you to your father’s.’13 A heartbroken Mary backed down, and was forced to accept this uncomfortable way of life. It seems that she shut her eyes to Buckingham’s infidelity; Brian Fairfax wrote that she ‘patiently bore those faults in him which she could not remedy’.14 For Mary, the relationship with Anna Maria was Buckingham’s most egregious error, but even this was not so great a betrayal as to diminish the affection she felt for her husband. She was forced to look on as Buckingham and Anna Maria cultivated the kind of relationship that she had never been able to nurture in ten years of marriage. In time, she and Anna Maria would become friends, and the painful love triangle of the late 1660s would mature into a singular and relatively peaceful domestic arrangement.
The reunion of Anna Maria and Buckingham provided fertile ground for the imagination, both for contemporaries and for later commentators. One perpetual myth that prevailed in 19th-century histories of the Restoration was based on a claim of Lord Peterborough’s that after Shrewsbury’s fall ‘the Duke slept with her [Anna Maria] in his bloodied shirt’.15 Given that there were four intervening months between the duel and the reunion, it seems unlikely that Buckingham still would have had Shrewsbury’s blood on his clothes for their first night back together. Nevertheless, stories such as this ensured that Anna Maria came to enjoy a reputation on a par with those of the royal mistresses, including Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kéroualle, as one of the most licentious, wicked women in Restoration history.
Anna’s Maria’s bloodlust may have become embellished over time, but the extent to which she revelled in her role as Buckingham’s mistress is indisputable. She embraced the part completely, imbuing her daily routine with drama and glamour of regal proportions. On occasions when she was entertaining guests, she began the day with the theatrical ceremony of a ‘levee’. This morning ritual, which involved aristocrats receiving visitors in their dressing rooms, had been imported from France to the English court by Charles II, and had transformed getting up into an elaborate spectacle. Like Louise de Kéroualle, Anna Maria admitted men as well as women into her dressing room.
In order to receive guests, Anna Maria had to ensure she looked her best. Beauty rituals in the 17th century required much planning and preparation. Cleansing and moisturising was a time-consuming affair. Every evening in the kitchens, fat from a puppy dog was boiled in water to prepare a beautifying emulsion for the face, while gloves fashioned from chicken skin and lined with almond paste and egg yolk were worn overnight to keep hands smooth. In the dressing rooms, the odour of the skins would have been overpowered by the smell of Hungary water, and perfumes such as red chypre, which was rose scented. Anna Maria’s dressing table would have been crammed with tonics, powders and creams: there was pomatum, a scented oil to dress her hair; ceruse, a powdery foundation which would be mixed on a palette with egg white and applied to the skin with a damp cloth; and rouge, which was made from an acacia shellac, to be dabbed on dampened cheeks. There was also a fashion for women gluing black taffeta spots onto their faces, on the cheek or next to the mouth.16
To affirm her status as a high-society mistress, Anna Maria commissioned a portrait by Sir Peter Lely, the most sought-after painter at the Restoration court. Many important courtiers of the time sat for Lely, who was known for his idealistic depictions of female beauty. Although he often painted his female subjects as saints or goddesses – Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s mistress, was depicted as Venus – Anna Maria was painted in a loose morning garment and her signature pearls. Something of her vibrant personality comes across in her expression, but because Lely’s paintings were always rather generic, he fails to fully capture her enigmatic charm. The portrait still hangs in Cliveden today.
Court mistresses were given licence to enjoy many entertainments from which courtiers’ wives, including Mary, were excluded, and Anna Maria quickly developed a reputation as one of London’s most dazzling and daring social luminaries. She and Buckingham turned ‘day into night and night into day’ with their 12-hour party marathons.17 The couple were particularly fond of attending masquerade balls. The vizard – a black velvet mask – might be worn in any number of public places, such as the theatre or park, but it came to be most closely associated with the masquerade ball, a type of party popularised by the king and court. Though masquerades were beloved of fashionable society, they were also a source of great fear and moral anxiety, due to the lewd and disorderly behaviour that was ‘released’ when revellers’ identities were disguised. The London papers abounded with stories about challenges and assaults at masquerades: perhaps the most sensational of these came in February 1671 when it emerged that the killers of Peter Vernell, a beadle who was murdered after a masked ball in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were not thugs or lowlifes, but Viscount Dunbar, the Duke of Monmouth and the Duke of Albemarle.
Anna Maria was in her element at a masquerade. One can imagine her enrobed in a silk mantua laced with ribbons and richly adorned with gold brocade, scanning the room through the eyes of her black velvet mask, contemplating what opportunities for mischief lay ahead. Dainty Fidget, a character in William Wycherley’s play The Country Wife, expressed the sexual freedom women were able to enjoy once their faces were hidden: ‘women are least masked when they have their velvet vizard on’.18 This was one iteration of a popular witticism of the time: that a masked face was barer than a bare one.
In her capacity as Buckingham’s mistress, Anna Maria also attended many banquets. Charles II was a great fan of French cooking and had summoned the Gallic masterchef François Pierre de la Varenne to Court. Varenne favoured herbs and pepper over spices, and moved away from the sweet palette that had since Tudor times dominated aristocratic cooking. The rich savoury
flavours of ragouts, soups and French sauces became de rigueur. Elaborate fricassees combined a myriad of ingredients: pigeons, peepers, lamb, sweetbread, hard-boiled eggs, bone marrow, and even tortoise started making appearances at noble tables. Great emphasis was placed on the presentation of food; a huge variety of dishes were required to be ‘landscaped’ across the dining table. The most spectacular act in this gastronomic drama was the entrée, in which platters were arranged in a geometric order, the large and substantial surrounded by the small and delicate. Bone-marrow fritters, rissoles, stewed stuffed tongues, steamed bass, poached salmon, peacock, quail, and game pies adorned the table; sparkling French wines, including champagne, which had recently been imported for the first time, were liberally dispensed. Many guests brought along their own servants, who walked to and fro around the table ferrying their masters’ preferred food – asking for a dish to be passed personally was virtually impossible on such a heavily laden table. Since the Restoration, the sweet course had more often been known by its French name, dessert. Crystal jellies flavoured and perfumed with rose water, sugar, ginger and nutmeg glittered, while extravagant mountains of fruit threatened to eclipse diners’ views of each other across the table. Tarts and pies, their pastry tops cut with Euclidean precision, were brought out ceremoniously and arranged in interlocking patterns along the table. Society hostesses often became competitive about the content and presentation of their events. Many hired professional napkin folders to transform starched fabric into fanciful pleats, elaborate scallop shells, and even the family coat of arms.19
Despite immersing herself in revelry, Anna Maria remained vigilant on the subject of her honour. Henry Killigrew returned from Paris in 1668 an unreformed character. While abroad, he had been convicted of rape and was only spared the death sentence at the behest of the French Queen Mother.20 On his arrival back in London, he was still aggrieved by the relationship between Anna Maria and Buckingham and continued to harass his former lover. According to the memoirs of Count Grammont, ‘he let loose all his abusive eloquence against her ladyship. He attacked her with the most bitter invectives from head to foot: he drew a frightful picture of her conduct, and turned all her personal charms … into defects’.21 Killigrew was warned several times to desist, but, as had happened at the theatre in the summer of 1667, he continued his slanderous attacks until they provoked a violent response.
On the night of 16 May 1669, Anna Maria wreaked her revenge. Killigrew had been at the apartments of the Duke of York in St James’s Park and had fallen into a drunken sleep in his coach en route to his house at Turnham Green, when he passed a black mourning coach, drawn by six horses, at the side of the road. Four footmen, armed with knives and cudgels, leapt forth, stopped his coach, broke inside and stabbed him repeatedly. The French ambassador, Charles Colbert, recalled Killigrew’s bloody fate: ‘he was awoke by the thrust of a sword, which pierced his neck and came out at the shoulder. Before he could cry out he was flung from the vehicle and stabbed in three other places’.22 In other accounts, Killigrew suffered nine wounds and was left bleeding at the roadside. The mourning coach was unmistakably Anna Maria’s. Once again, blood had been spilt in the name of her honour.23
Wild rumours spread about the extent of her malice: some people suggested she been at the duel at Barn Elms dressed as a pageboy, and had taken great pleasure in watching her husband stabbed; others whispered that she had brought her two young sons along as spectators to the brutal attack on Henry Killigrew.24 The next year Friar Nicholas Cross dedicated his work The Cynosura, a religious tract on the subject of penitence, to the ‘Countess of Shrewsbury’ and urged her to return to the ‘Christian vertues’ of ‘humility, purity, temperance’. ‘Fear not to take up the arms of penance,’ he wrote, ‘they will not blemish your fair hand, but prove your advantage in what posture so ever you stand with your dear Creatour.’25 To the same extent as Barbara Villiers some years earlier, Anna Maria’s name had become synonymous with the vices of lust and violence.
An investigation was launched into the incident, and once again, Buckingham was willing to put his own career and reputation at risk to defend Anna Maria, maintaining to the king that, although she was responsible for the attack, murder was never her intention. The Duke of York, a political opponent of Buckingham’s, confided to Pepys that the duke’s allegiance to Anna Maria might ‘cost him his life in the Lords’.26 Though at the time this may have been mere hyperbole, later in the decade York would be proved right.
Buckingham’s declining favour with the king, for whom the duke was becoming something of a liability, would provide unexpected inspiration for his building project at Cliveden. In late July 1670, he was sent to France to represent Charles II at the funeral of his sister, who had been married to the Duc d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIV. Buckingham believed that the political purpose of his visit was to negotiate a treaty between England and France, but in fact the secret and deeply controversial Treaty of Dover, an agreement in which Charles pledged to publicly convert to Catholicism as part of a new alliance between the two countries, had been signed on 22 May without Buckingham’s knowledge. Despite this political deception, Buckingham was inspired by Versailles. A sumptuous play was performed for him, with music provided by 300 instrumentalists, and a choir of 100 women and 100 eunuchs. Ballets and banquets followed, and the visit culminated in the French king presenting Buckingham with a sword and belt set with pearls and diamonds.27 Buckingham returned to England enchanted by French showmanship and the scale of their entertainments. He wanted this lavish style to be replicated at his country pleasure palace, Cliveden, whose terraced gardens would bear a striking resemblance to those of Versailles.
During Buckingham’s time in France, an unlikely alliance had formed between his wife and his mistress; the tensions between Anna Maria and Mary Fairfax had dissipated. Perhaps Mary had come to feel something bordering on affection for the woman with whom she shared such close quarters. Or else she had grown accustomed to their peculiar love triangle. By the summer of 1670, Anna Maria was pregnant again and, in a show of remarkable emotional strength, Mary had made it her mission to care for and support her. Indeed the pair, growing frustrated with Buckingham’s prolonged absence, conceived a plan to meet him in Calais. They set sail for France but bad weather forced them back into port at Margate. They ended up staying together in Dover, awaiting Buckingham’s return.28
In late February 1671, Anna Maria gave birth to Buckingham’s son. Despite the nascent bond between Anna Maria and Mary, this must have been a source of great sadness to Mary, who bore Buckingham no heirs over the course of their marriage. The baby was christened George Villiers, after his father, and Charles II was persuaded to act as godfather. Tragically, the child died just a few days after the christening. On 12 March Buckingham arranged for him to be buried, ‘with all solemnities’ and under his second title of Earl of Coventry, in the Villiers family vault at Westminster Abbey.29
Illegitimate children were not uncommon and the birth of Anna Maria’s child would have caused nothing more than idle gossip had it been handled discreetly. The king had always taken an active interest in the children of his own mistresses – his eldest illegitimate son, James, lived at court, while his two children by Catherine Pegge were set up in a house in Pall Mall. Royal bastards were not treated dissimilarly from legitimate children, and were often given titles and almost always well provided for. But this was an exclusively royal prerogative and aristocrats who had children outside marriage were not expected to confer on them familial privileges. By unilaterally bestowing a title on little George and burying him in the family vault, Buckingham was assuming for himself royal powers, and for this he was widely condemned. It was a particularly sensitive issue, as Buckingham had previously been accused of harbouring hubristic aspirations – Pepys had recorded the duke’s alleged desire to overthrow the king and Parliament, and seize the crown for himself.30
Buckingham, of course, viewed his actions as a tribute to his son and
to Anna Maria and not a bid for princely power. As was so often the case with the duke, his political judgement had been clouded by personal passion and it had not occurred to him that the burial would appear seditious in its intent. The controversy over the burial would rear its head again a decade later when Buckingham was fighting for his political survival.
Chapter 5
THE DRAMA OF POLITICS
AFTER THREE YEARS of living with Anna Maria, Mary had come to accept her husband’s mistress as a mainstay of her life. Even though she was still very much in love with Buckingham, Mary acknowledged that her feelings were not reciprocated. She had made the decision to embrace the object of Buckingham’s passion and remained silent on the subject of her own loneliness. Anna Maria, meanwhile, was grateful for Mary’s continued support and encouragement. She felt considerable pity for Mary, who was unable to transfer her affection from her husband to another man. Buckingham, for his part, had expected Mary to rebel against his relationship with Anna Maria, a sentiment he expressed in his dialogue The Militant Couple: ‘[if a husband] violates the original contract it is as natural for wives as for subject to rebel’.1 Although all his sexual desire for his wife had dissipated, Buckingham admired Mary’s stoicism and always retained a platonic affection for her. Both he and Anna Maria would go to great trouble to make Mary feel welcome at Cliveden: the gates of their riverside mansion would always be open to Mary. In 1670 however, the grand house at Cliveden was yet to be built, and from January that year the three of them lived together in a set of apartments in the Cockpit, an extension to Whitehall Palace.2
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 5
