The King enjoyed the outrageous side of his company and, where possible, shrugged off his excesses. There are many anecdotes of Rochester’s wildness. One of the most characteristic has Rochester wandering drunkenly in the Privy Garden at Whitehall; on spying the King’s favourite sun-dial, one of the rarest in Europe, he flung his arms around it and, quoting Shirley’s famous lines,
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
he added, ‘And so must thou!’ Whereupon he hurled it to the ground.3 That kind of zany dash and style had always fascinated the more cautious house of Stuart: one is reminded of the madcap pranks of the elder Buckingham, catching the eye of James I. In Rochester’s case the style included a genuine love of literature in many different forms.
These high-spirited gentlemen – the ‘merry gang’, as Marvell called them – diverted themselves at times with poetry, plays and literature in general, at times with sardonic comment on everything about them, couched, very often, in scabrous language. Their tendency to the latter has become more famous than their patronage of the former: yet it was to the Wits that much of the abundance of Restoration drama was owed, a more important achievement than their unprintable rhymes about the King’s mistresses. It did not harm the theatre that play-writing became a fashionable occupation, practised by aristocrats, aspired to by gentlemen. At least one play, Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, was saved by the applause of the Wits, as theatre-goers hesitated, uncertain of their own taste.4 Rochester was the friend of Aphra Behn and the model for Willmore, The Rover, in her play of that name. Buckingham himself wrote a play, The Rehearsal: an attack, full of humorous ingenuity, on Dryden and heroic drama in general. Its fame crossed the Channel: Louis XIV twitted his own prime minister on not being able to write a successful farce, as his cousin’s had done. It is still occasionally performed, if better known as the work from which Sheridan took his own play, The Critic.
Buckhurst loved drunken frolics, but his lyric on the eve of a naval battle against the Dutch in 1665, ‘To all you ladies now at land …’, represents courtly elegance; later in life he gave himself over to literary patronage. The notorious Sedley was also a great lover of the arts. Known to his contemporaries as ‘Apollo’s Viceroy’, he was the author of several plays as well as lyrics set exquisitely to music by Purcell. Baptist (‘Bab’) May, who became Keeper of the Privy Purse to the King, was a bon viveur whose appetite for life was matched by his appreciation of the arts. The brother of Hugh May, the architect who worked on the renovation of Windsor Castle, Bab May made a valuable collection of pictures in his own right.
In the eighteenth century the reputation of the Wits became further exaggerated, and Rochester in particular was the subject of gloating, frequently inaccurate, biographies.
While the King indulged himself with the company of these boon companions as a form of relaxation, he is definitely not to be identified with them. Far from being a ‘Wit’ himself, he could even be called their victim – along with anything else even remotely established which came within their sights. From time to time he issued reprimands: Grammont describes Rochester as having been sent away from Court at least once a year;5 the ‘profane’ Earl even had a spell in the Tower after eloping with an heiress, although he was subsequently forgiven. One suspects that the ‘merry gang’ had something in common with the lovely ladies of the Court: their irreverent company helped to dispel the unspoken melancholy lying within the King’s nature.
This was above all a liberal or, as we should now say, a permissive era. People of rank took their pleasures as they found them and made no secret of their practices because they saw no harm in them. ‘Is it not a frank age?’ asked the young blade Sparkish in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. ‘And I am a frank person.’ If it is accepted that the level of ‘sin’ remains roughly constant in human behaviour, then the difference between the age of Charles II and that preceding it – the so-called Puritan age of Cromwell – was this: after 1660 it was not considered necessary to hide these things. Naturally not everything which crept in under this permissive umbrella was equally desirable. Laxity towards moral behaviour at Court, in contrast to the rigidity of the Commonwealth period, meant that vice was able to take its chance with virtue and frequently – but not always – won.
In terms of the age itself, it was even more important that obvious laxity in high places – coupled with conspicuous extravagance at a time of national financial stress – antagonized, as it generally does, those in low places who were unable to share in it. Yet, pleasure-loving, easy-going as the Court of Charles II was, it was not a bad and certainly not an evil place.
It is hardly necessary to go as far as the classical comparison with ancient Rome. Let us take the Court of Louis XIV just across the water. It is not only that, mistress for mistress, Louis XIV matched his cousin. His Court was also marked by practices which would have been inconceivable at the Court of Charles II, including black magic and the celebration of the Black Mass for the King’s favour, degenerating into the widespread use of poison – horrific events which involved the King’s most flamboyant mistress, Madame de Montespan. Nevertheless, the grandiose formality so dear to the heart of Louis XIV has ensured that the Court of Versailles is not famous for such things. In the same way, the English Court takes its reputation from the easy-going nature of its own sovereign.
As a matter of fact, where Charles himself is concerned, his personal ‘debauchery’, as opposed to sheer love of women, does not appear to have been very great. In 1667 Pepys repeated a rumour that the King had expressed a wish to join with Barbara and Lord Jermyn in troilism; later Rochester spread rumours of his sovereign’s impotence, saying that only two ladies at a time could take care of this state – but impotence was a subject which obsessed Rochester, and the story probably tells us more about him than about the King.6 In an age beset by dirty rumours and innuendoes about the sex life of all and sundry, Charles emerged pre-eminently as a man of great physical energy who quite simply loved women.
He had after all ample opportunity to do so. Charles II had three great advantages where women were concerned. First, he was a king. And if he had little money himself, he was in a position to grant money, rank and other douceurs to his favourites: even Halifax admitted that ‘sauntering’ was a greater temptation to princes than to other people. Nor were such escapades held against them.
May not a man then trifle out an hour
With a kind woman and not wrong his calling?
exclaimed Jaffeir in Otway’s play, Venice Preserv’d. In the seventeenth century – and for many generations to follow – the answer was generally speaking ‘Yes’, when the man’s calling was that of King. It was a point of view expressed by the King himself in conversation with Burnet. God, he was convinced, would never damn a man ‘for allowing himself a little pleasure…’.7
Secondly, Charles II was extremely sexually attractive, or, as he put it more modestly to Sir John Reresby, ‘because that his Complexion was of an amorous sort’ women often offered themselves to his embraces. To the objection that the second advantage really sprang from the first – women were the aggressors, for mercenary reasons – it can be answered that there is plenty of evidence of this attraction. Barbara Castlemaine – who certainly knew what she was talking about – confided to a friend that the King was exceptionally well endowed physically to make love.8fn1
Thirdly, Charles II actually liked women. He enjoyed their company, not only for the purposes of making love to them, but to talk to them, to have supper with them, to be entertained by and to entertain them. He did not snub them or bully them, unlike many of his companions. He allowed them to have brains and talk politics – as a result of which he was of course criticized for subjecting himself to petticoat influence; nevertheless, to our ears such an attitude makes a refreshing change from the English masculine tradition of boredom in female company.
There is indeed something very modern in this appreciation on the part of Charles, this cap
acity of the King to turn his mistresses into friends. Even if it is again objected that this process comes easier to kings than to other people – since the aforesaid mistresses have much to gain from remaining at Court – it is still much to Charles’ credit that he wanted to do so.
Above all, he knew himself and was not hypocritical where women and his desires were concerned. His witty – but courteous – refusal to interfere with Barbara’s ‘soul’ has already been cited. There is another characteristic tale of this tolerant and humorous attitude to his own reputation. Passing through the Palace of Whitehall, Charles overheard a young lady singing a satirical ballad in her room, based on his prowess as a ‘stallion’– ‘Old Rowley the King’. Instantly the King knocked on her door. When she asked who was there, he replied with a flourish, ‘Old Rowley himself, Madam.’9
If a great lover is one who shows certain essential qualities of tenderness and appreciation for the opposite sex, rather than a sheer sexual athlete, then Charles can lay claim to the title. One may cite Louis XIV once more, who showed nothing like the same emotional generosity to his former mistresses. The incident at the French Court, where the Princesse de Monaco more or less had to retire because the key to her room was not found outside her door by the King (it had been confiscated by another admirer), could not have happened in England: Charles’ very public pursuit of Frances and his equally public rejection, while they caused him anguish and even rage, ended with her installed as a grand and respected duchess.
It can even be argued that in the first seven or eight years of his reign Charles was something of a ‘one-woman man’. Pepys, in conversation with Evelyn in that period, accepted that the King never kept two mistresses at the same time.10 Obviously this paradoxical fidelity, in which ‘a faith unfaithful kept him falsely true’, as Tennyson wrote of Lancelot, did not last for ever. The seventies were a different matter.
Louise Duchess of Portsmouth and Nell Gwynn unquestionably shared his official favours in the early years of the decade. There were shorter-lived parallel romances. Not only was there the affair with Moll Davis, but there was also a fling with one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, Winifred Wells, whose attractions included the ‘carriage of a goddess and the physiognomy of a dreamy sheep’ (but Barbara compared her to a goose), and Mrs Jane Roberts, daughter of a clergyman, who died young ‘with a great sense of her former ill life’. The singer Mrs Knight, whose angelic voice Evelyn and others so much admired, figures in the royal accounts; as does another Killigrew, Mary, the widowed Countess of Falmouth, who subsequently married Lord Buckhurst, and Elizabeth Countess of Kildare. Then there were the nocturnal visitors introduced up the Privy Stairs by William Chiffinch, the King’s confidential servant, and Page, Keeper of the Privy Closet. Their numbers, like their identities, remain unknown to history.fn2
Nevertheless, Pepys’ conversation with Evelyn should not be totally dismissed. For one thing, Pepys was an acute observer of sexual matters in general, because he was so interested in them. Then Evelyn was a reliable source on the subject of the King in particular because he had close contact with him over so many years. Pepys’ Diary entry pointed to an important strand in the King’s character: Charles was not by conviction promiscuous, whatever the temptations offered to a king in a permissive age.
He did not share the attitude made fashionable by his friend Rochester:
If I, by miracle, can be
This live-long minute true to thee
’Tis all that Heaven allows.
He liked settled relationships. He believed in them.
Frances had declined the honourable post of King’s official mistress with what Barbara ungratefully described as ‘the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman Stewart’: as a result, Barbara’s own star remained artificially in the ascendant until the late 1660s. This was a remarkable achievement when women were said to be ‘at their prime at twenty, decayed at four and twenty, old and insupportable at thirty’, in the words of Etherege’s Dorimant. Barbara tended to agree with Rochester on the subject of fidelity (although violently denying it). When she was accused of intriguing with Harry Jermyn in July 1667 – that same Jermyn who had caused a flutter in the breast of Mary of Orange – the King was deeply upset. Jermyn was obliged to leave the Court for six months. As late as 1668 (when Barbara was nearly thirty), the Crown Jewels were said to have been taken from the Tower to adorn her for an amateur performance of Katherine Philips’ version of Horace at court. The public opinion of her reign, somewhat less glamorous, was expressed in the infamous fictional ‘Whores’ Petition’ of March 1668. Some London apprentices, in a fit of morality or malevolence, had pulled down certain brothels in the Moorfields area. Both the ‘Whores’ Petition’ and Barbara’s alleged reply to ‘the rest of the suffering sisterhood’ were highly scurrilous, not to say disgusting, in content.11 The most interesting references are those to her Catholicism (she had recently been converted): these display another even stronger popular prejudice.
Then the appearance of a pert young professional actress named Nell Gwynn signalled that Barbara’s era was over. Barbara was asked to remove herself from her convenient Whitehall apartments. It was true that in August 1670 she was created Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Southampton and Baroness Nonsuch; all this was however in the nature of a golden handshake. About the same time, at least in Marvell’s version, the King had a ballad sung under her window beginning, ‘Alinda’s growing old …’. Marvell himself contributed his own drop of vinegar:
Paint Castlemaine in colours that will hold
Her, not her picture, for She now grows old…
Barbara’s own version of the King’s dismissal of her, quoted back to him afterwards without contradiction, was less crude if equally wounding. The King said, ‘Madam, all that I ask of you for your own sake is, live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.’12
Two years later Charles pointedly refused to acknowledge Barbara’s sixth child, a daughter. The baby began life as Barbara Fitzroy, the surname borne by her five quasi-royal brothers and sisters. Then she was consigned the simpler patronymic of Barbara Palmer, a name to which, like her mother, she brought some colour; for she entered a convent and then left it to bear an illegitimate child.
Duchess Barbara’s latest career was not so happy. Having lost her youthful bloom, she did not lose her rapacity: there was an ugly incident when the Viceroy of Ireland, the Earl of Essex, had to defend Phoenix Park, Dublin, against her covetousness. Nor indeed did Barbara lose her equally demanding sensuality. Quite possibly she owed her latest daughter to the attentions of her young lover John Churchill, the future warrior Duke of Marlborough. In 1676, after the Test Act had forced this Catholic Magdalen to renounce her position as Lady of the Bedchamber, she flounced off to Paris. She returned three years later, but at this point she passes out of the romantic history of Charles II.
The King’s new mistress was familiarly known as Nelly Gwynn. On the subject of her official nomenclature, the various royal accounts suffered from some confusion, calling her variously Mrs Hellen Gwynn, Mrs Ellen Gwynn and Mrs Elinor Gwyn, ‘spinster’. She was known as Madam Ellen on play bills after she received the King’s favour. Nell was virtually illiterate. Appointing an attorney for herself in 1680, Nell managed a very large and childish EG: so that obviously some version of Eleanor was correct; other receipts for payments for herself and her son were also signed with an ill-formed EG.13
Nell was introduced to the King by Buckingham some time before January 1668. She remained on fond terms with the Duke, visiting him in the Tower during one of the periods of his disgrace. Nell was not the only actress to entrance her sovereign. Moll Davis also succeeded in doing so by singing a particular song, ‘My lodging is on the Cauld ground …’, after which, as John Downes commented, her lodging was in the royal bed. Castigated by Mrs Pepys as ‘the most impertinent slut in the world’, Moll Davis was praised by other kindlier tongues for the especial grace of her dan
cing. Pepys thought her a better actress than Nell Gwynn. Richard Flecknoe was moved to address to her the following lines, which breathe sincerity if not poesy:
Dear Miss, delight of all the nobler sort,
Pride of the stage and darling of the court…
Moll Davis was a member of Sir William Davenant’s troupe at Lincoln’s Inn. In return for the King’s presents, said to include a ring worth £600, a house and even a pension, Moll presented him with a daughter, known as Mary Tudor.
But the relationship was not enduring. Whether or not the evil tale is true which has Nell Gwynn lacing Moll’s sweetmeats with julap (a purgative) when she was due to sup with the King, Moll fell from favour comparatively soon.14 She took refuge in another less lucrative passion – for cards and high play.
Nell Gwynn was made of sterner stuff, as was her connection with the King; one way and another, it would only end with his death some seventeen years later. Nell was of Welsh extraction. One story connects her birth with Hereford, a place with a great acting tradition. It is more certain that she spent her early years working in the London establishment of her mother, old Madam Gwynn; this, if not precisely a brothel or ‘bawdy-house’, was something pretty close to it: Nell served drinks – ‘strong waters to gentlemen’ – there, and later graduated to being an orange girl in the theatre, another profession which existed in the exciting, nebulous territory just outside acknowledged prostitution.
The first reference to her as an actress in the King’s Players occurs in 1664 (when she would have been fourteen). Her early lovers included the actor Charles Hart, Charles, Lord Buckhurst,fn3 and the playwright Thomas Otway, who would remain a true friend through life; he was given power of attorney in her business affairs twenty years later. By 1670 Nell had achieved that guarantee of an establishment, pregnancy by the monarch; she gave birth to the first of her two sons and was set up in consequence in a little house at the east end of Pall Mall, later closer to Whitehall. Throughout 1670 and most of 1671 she reigned supreme.
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