Most of the documents from Buckingham’s time at Cliveden were destroyed in a fire in the 18th century, but up until now, it has always been assumed that Buckingham started building the main house at Cliveden when he acquired the land in 1666. However, a previously unexamined document at the National Archives shows that construction of the house did not actually begin until a decade later. The account of John Goodchild, who was employed to oversee the work at Cliveden, indicates that the site for the house was only surveyed in August 1676, when ‘Buckingham did employ the Orator [legal representative] to view the said site and to draw up a plot on which said house should be built.’15
In the decade before the main house was built, there was still accommodation on the estate, in the form of two old hunting lodges where Anna Maria and Buckingham enjoyed many jaunts. But Buckingham had always imagined the site would become something much more than a hunting estate. On a practical level, Cliveden was intended as a replacement for Buckingham’s London mansion, York House, and was to play the same role in entertaining royalty, ambassadors and other guests of political significance. Without an impressive residence in which to entertain these dignitaries on the scale expected of an aristocratic host, he risked losing social and political standing.
But most importantly, Buckingham wanted to create in Cliveden a palace for his continuing affair with Anna Maria. By the early 1670s Buckingham’s close friends had begun to call Anna Maria ‘the Duchess’, while dutiful Mary had been relegated to the status of ‘Duchess-Dowager’.16 The estate was to be a haven where Buckingham and Anna Maria could receive guests, throw parties, and indulge their love of hunting. Even after his relationship with the duke and duchess collapsed and he became embroiled in an acrimonious legal dispute with them, John Goodchild was still willing to concede that Cliveden ‘was very Romantic’.17 Anyone who has taken in the view from the back of the house, along the parterre and down the wooded cliffs to the river, can be in no doubt that Cliveden was built by a man in love.
With so much at stake, Buckingham had to pick an architect with the imagination to understand his vision and the expertise to execute it. Captain William Winde was the ideal candidate for his pioneering project. In the 17th century there was no formal programme of architectural training, so Winde’s work experience was varied. He had worked with the Anglo-Dutch architect Sir Balthazar Gerbier, who remodelled York House for Buckingham’s father and curated the first duke’s art collection, and had also spent much time at Versailles, where he cultivated an interest in formal gardening and an appreciation of French building craft. He also had engineering expertise – while working in the military, he had assisted with the fortification of Gravesend Reach on the banks of the Thames. No doubt his experiences building this embankment would be useful in creating a stable platform for the house at Cliveden. Buckingham and Anna Maria would also have been familiar with Winde’s work at Ashdown House, owned by the bawdy courtier the Earl of Craven. Ashdown, built in the Dutch-classical style, stood three storeys high atop the Berkshire Downs. Like Cliveden, the estate at Ashdown had striking views and had been designed for the purposes of hunting and entertaining.18
Buckingham and Anna Maria shared a clear vision for Cliveden. Their house was to be a single block built of brick with four storeys and a hipped roof. At the back of the house a double staircase, flanked by 26 arches, would lead down from the terrace to the gardens, a full storey below.19 Guests would enter through an impressive hall, the central feature of which was to be a sweeping staircase, the mark of any truly fashionable home. John Evelyn would later remark that the staircase at Cliveden was ‘for its materials singular’.20 Two doors would lead out from the hall: one into a parlour, through which one could access the withdrawing room, where the men could retreat after dinner and smoke tobacco; the other into a salon, where the women could take tea. On the first floor would be bedchambers, closets and guest accommodation, and a great chamber, where all the lavish entertainments would take place. The second floor was to be taken up by a long gallery providing space to walk and exercise. This would be the ideal space to display Buckingham’s art collection, including, in pride of place, the Lely portrait of Anna Maria. Servants were to be quartered on the top floor. Careful consideration had been given to the layout of the bedrooms. A state bedchamber in the south-east corner of the ground floor was to be a public room where Buckingham would receive guests from his bed. Adjacent to this would be a magnificent boudoir in which Anna Maria would hold her levees.
While Anna Maria planned for her life in the country, verses about her continued to circulate at court. In November 1673, the Duke of York’s second bride arrived in England from Italy, surrounded by a vast entourage of ‘signiors’. One poet, most likely Buckingham’s friend the Earl of Rochester, wrote a satirical ballad about one fictional member of the Italian party, ‘Signior Dildo’. A whole stanza of the satire was dedicated to Anna Maria. It dredged up old allegations, and predicted, in typically lewd terms, her future abandonment:
The countess o’th’Cockpit (who knows not her name?
She’s famous in story for a killing dame),
When all her lovers forsake her, I trow,
She’ll then be contented with Signior Dildo.21
Anna Maria and Buckingham would be separated, but it wouldn’t be a desertion. The couple’s world was about to be torn apart by forces beyond their control.
Chapter 7
BETRAYALS
CHARLES TALBOT FELT cruelly abandoned by his mother. He was eight years old when Anna Maria had gone to live with Buckingham, choosing her lover over her sons. Now a young man of 14, Charles had come to understand and resent the events surrounding her departure. His trustees, who had long been hostile to Anna Maria, harnessed this sense of betrayal for their own purposes. On 7 January 1674, they presented a petition to the House of Lords, stating that Charles ‘becomes every day more and more sensible of the deplorable death of his father, and of the dishonour caused to his family by the wicked and scandalous life led by George, Duke of Buckingham, with Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury’.1 The petitioners claimed they would not have complained ‘had the offenders employed the usual care to cover their guilt and shame, or had they given any outward show of remorse or amendment’. Instead, they said, the couple ‘ostentatiously persist in their shameless course of life, in defiance of the laws of God and man’. Being branded a shameless woman must have humiliated Anna Maria, but more hurtful still was the reference the petition made to her dead child, ‘buried in the Abbey church at Westminster, with all the solemnities under the title of the Earl of Coventry’. The petitioners pleaded with the House to ‘take the honour of [Charles Talbot] the orphan peer under their protection’.
The petition also had serious political ramifications for Buckingham. Among the measures demanded to protect young Charles’s honour was the removal of Buckingham from ‘the king’s presence, and from his Employment’.2 The duke’s political position had incurred further damage since 1671. Parliament held him responsible for the French treaty that had bound England into the protracted disaster of the most recent conflict with the Dutch. Clarendon’s career had been ruined by the Second Dutch War, and now Buckingham’s credibility had been seriously damaged by the Third. Before Parliament opened, Buckingham had resorted to meeting MPs individually, endeavouring to win their favour and transfer their hostility onto his old foe, Lord Arlington. But his transparent attempts to canvass support had been noted. On 2 January 1674, Sir Gilbert Talbot, a brother of Anna Maria’s deceased husband, had written to Sir Joseph Williamson, describing Buckingham’s manoeuvres:
[H]e hath so personally courted all the Members in town, the debauchees by drinking with them, the sober by grave and serious discourses, the pious by receiving the sacrament at Westminster, that he thinketh he hath gained a strong party of friends … his greatest endeavor with all men (next to the clearing of his own innocence) is to characterize the Lord Arlington for the most pernitious person in his Majest
yes Counsailes.3
Talbot’s letter also confirmed that the petition was the culmination of a larger political plan. ‘I hope we shall spoil his designe,’ he wrote, ‘for we have a petition to be presented against him in the Lords House for the death of the Earl of Shrewsbury and the scandalous cohabitation with his wife’. Buckingham was outraged that his private life had been brought into the public domain in such a brutal and humiliating manner.
But matters were only to get worse. As Buckingham set about composing a riposte to be delivered in the Lords, he, along with Arlington, became the subject of serious charges in the Commons. Various kinds of political misconduct were alleged to have been perpetrated by Buckingham, but the matter of greatest concern was his close relationship with the French, which had for a long time been seen as treacherous. Buckingham was now in the unenviable position of having to defend himself to both houses.
His performance failed to impress the Commons, who voted to request his removal from offices held at the royal pleasure, and exclusion from the ‘Royal Presence and Councils’. The same day, the House of Lords debated the Talbot petition. Mary Villiers was deeply distressed by the public humiliation: Lord Conway reported that she was ‘crying and tearing herself’. But even so she offered Anna Maria and Buckingham her unwavering support, soliciting on behalf of both her husband and his lover.4 Self-sacrifice was at the core of her being, and her capacity to express it within this love triangle was seemingly endless. Anna Maria’s father, the Earl of Cardigan, also tried to diffuse the anger of the Lords, citing a letter he had received from his daughter, in which she admitted to doing wrong and ‘begged she might not be made desperate’.5
Buckingham’s woes in the Lords and Commons may not have taken on such monumental significance had the king been willing to intervene on his behalf. But Charles II had finally tired of his old childhood friend. The range and severity of the charges raised during cross-examination in the Commons made it clear that Buckingham was a political liability and could not be trusted to handle any affairs of state. The king assented to the Commons’ request that the duke be stripped of his positions on the Privy Council, the Council for Trade and Plantations, and the Admiralty Commission, as well as losing his Lord Lieutenancy of the West Riding. In a desperate letter to Charles, Buckingham revealed the extent of his personal suffering, recalling their shared childhood and the sacrifices he had made for his friend and monarch:
Consider, I beseech you, that I had the honour to be bred up with your majesty from a child; that I lost my estate for running from Cambridge, where I was a student, to serve Your Majesty and your Father, at Oxford, when I was not thought of age sufficient to bear arms, and for that reason was sent away from thence to travel. That after the end of the wars, returning into England and having my whole estate restored to me by the Parliament, without composition, a few weeks after my return, there happening to be a design laid to take up arms for Your Majesty, my brother and I engaged in it, and in the engagement he was killed.
That after this the Parliament voted my pardon in case I would return within forty days; that I being concealed in London, chose rather, with the hazard of my life, to wait upon Your Majesty in the Fleet, where I found you, than to stay, possessed of my estates upon condition of having nothing more to do with Your Majesty’s fortunes:… I humbly ask Your Majesty’s pardon for this trouble I have given you, and beg of you to believe that nothing shall ever separate me from my duty and allegiance to Your Majesty; as I cannot despair but that one day Your Majesty will find the difference between those that truly love you and those that serve you only for private ends of their own.6
The letter had little impact. Of his own volition, Charles removed Buckingham from the Chancellorship of the University of Cambridge, and launched an investigation into his financial conduct as Master of the Horse. Buckingham’s political career lay in ruins, but worse was still to come.
On 5 February, the debate in the Lords was resumed and the House resolved – in a move that would be unthinkable in modern society – that Buckingham and Anna Maria be forced to separate. They were ordered ‘not to converse or cohabit for the future’ and to ‘enter into security by recognizance to the king in £10,000 each’.7 Anna Maria moved out of the house she had shared with Buckingham and Mary. Buckingham was beleaguered and humiliated, and worst of all, his dream of a life with Anna Maria at Cliveden lay in ruins.
Chapter 8
‘YOUR MOST UNHAPPY MOTHER’
PERHAPS FOR THE first time, Anna Maria began to question the choices she had made. She understood that young Charles’s guardians had significant influence over his behaviour and hoped that reconciliation with the Talbots would give her a chance to mend her fractured relationship with her son. While Charles may have judged Anna Maria severely for her conduct with Buckingham and her involvement in his father’s death, he retained a sentimental attachment to his mother. He longed to see her, but had to negotiate the difficult family dynamics. The Talbots were resolute that Charles should have as little contact as possible with any relations of Anna Maria and had discouraged him from visiting his grandfather, Robert Brudenell, or his aunt, the Countess of Westmorland. Sensing that the young earl was anxious to see his mother, John Talbot made arrangements to send Charles away to enjoy the distractions of Paris with his tutor.1
Anna Maria was frustrated by the Talbots’ intransigence and decided to appeal to her son directly. In a letter, one of the few surviving documents written in her hand, she conveyed her wish to see Charles so that she could: ‘express to [Charles] (by the assistance of God’s holy spirit) the true sense of my former errors and sorrow for those high provocations and injuries done to your deceased father now with God, whose excellent virtues I hope you will ever imitate’.2 She lamented the years that had been wasted, chastised herself for her failure to appreciate her husband – only too late, she wrote, had she realised that Shrewsbury was ‘a blessing given me by heaven greater than I knew how to prize’ and conveyed her ‘firme resolutions for the future never to err’ as she had done in the past.3
In the final paragraph of her letter, Anna Maria deferred to Charles’s evident moral fastidiousness by offering to renounce any of her company of which he disapproved. ‘I am informed that you have taken umbrage at some women which have and some that do resort to me,’ she wrote, ‘I do hereby promise you I will neither see converse nor correspond with either Mrs Knight or any other men or women that you shall disapprove of.’ She concluded with a vow that she would obey Charles as a wife was expected to obey a husband: ‘I will make haste after you into France to put my self into such a retirement that you will not be displeased at and which may afford me a better life than that of your most unhappy mother.’ Anna Maria’s final sentence contains two crossings-out that show she had originally intended to sign off as ‘your most unfortunate Shrewsbury’.
While some historians have seen Anna Maria’s letter as evidence of her contrition and part of a clear-cut morality tale in which a shamed woman acknowledged her sin and begged forgiveness, the reality is more nuanced. Anna Maria may have come to deeply regret her behaviour and clearly longed to see her son, but she also would have been acutely aware that the thawing of relations with the Talbots was essential for her future. The Talbots had confiscated Anna Maria’s jointure before she returned from France in 1668, and since then Buckingham had provided her not only with a place to live, but also with an allowance. Now that the couple had been forced to separate, she would again find herself in straitened circumstances. The king assisted her with an annual pension of £1,600, but she would need further financial support from the Talbots.4 An emotional chameleon, she quickly adapted to her changed circumstances, describing Buckingham as ‘the unhappy author of my injuries’ in her letter to Charles. In doing this and expressing sadness about her treatment of Shrewsbury, she was beginning to create some much-needed distance between herself and her old lover.
By the autumn of 1674, Anna Maria had returned to the conve
nt in Pontoise, while Charles was staying in a pension near the college of Navarre, where he was to study. Away from the controlling influence of John Talbot, they began to spend time together. Although Charles recognised that he had yet to come to terms with his abandonment, he was eager to get to know his mother and believed that she had suffered enough for her transgressions. In a letter to his guardian, Talbot, he wrote: ‘I will be as kind to her as any child can be to a mother… I do assure she has gone through a part of purgatory since she came hither.’5 He craved his mother’s attention and resented the presence of others. After one visit during which Anna Maria’s time was divided between him and his grandfather, Charles noted his frustration with the situation: ‘I wish with all my soule my Grand Father was with you in England that I might have my mother to myself’.6
Charles’s letters to his guardian during this period record Anna Maria’s attempts to make amends. He noted presents of a diamond ring and a pair of silver candlesticks, but saw her changed attitude as far more important, and felt that Anna Maria was finally behaving towards him as a mother should: ‘Her kindness and behaviour is such that all the world, as well as myself, ought to be satisfied’.7 He often visited her at Pontoise and read to her letters from London. On one occasion, certain that he had come across an anecdote about his mother’s scandalous behaviour, he broke off reading aloud. Anna Maria, sensing the subject of the letter, fell to her knees crying and begged his forgiveness.8 She confessed that she had formerly done very ill, but said that for the future all she desired from Charles was that he should be kind to her, as she believed she deserved.9 It seems that, despite their difficult history, Anna Maria and Charles managed to develop an understanding in the months that followed. In June 1675, Anna Maria went to see Charles in his lodgings and the pair visited the ‘house and the waterworks’ at Versailles, the palace that had done so much to inspire Cliveden. Recounting the trip to his guardian, Charles again noted his mother’s ‘kindness … and sorrow for what is past’.10
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