The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  For this reason Catherine Sedley is the most personally fascinating among the numerous royal mistresses because as an heiress, the alternative of a good marriage was open to her in youth. Instead of the ‘dull manage of a servile house’ in Anne Countess of Winchilsea’s phrase, she chose the more testing career of mistress to James II, when Duke of York. Moreover the weapons at her disposal included neither beauty nor any other form of attraction evident to the outward eye; even in youth Catherine Sedley was not reckoned to be pretty. She had a long nose and an unfashionably big mouth at a time when the ideal was a delicate rosebud; her complexion was too pale, lacking the carmine tint which made the approved beauties a contrast of ‘white and red’; a cast in her eye enabled her enemies to describe her gleefully as squinting. Above all, she was considered much too thin at a time when the contemporary taste ran to the luscious: ‘Fubbs’ – for chubby – was Charles II’s tender nickname for Louise de la Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. ‘D’une extrême maigreur’, wrote the French envoy Barillon of Catherine, although he admired her vivacity.16 Skinny as a girl Catherine Sedley became positively gaunt as the years passed.

  Catherine Sedley conducted her campaign for a place – and a high place too – in society through her wits. In an age when both sexes combined to praise the dulcet female voice expressing softly modest feminine sentiments, Catherine Sedley triumphantly made herself feared by an exceptionally sharp tongue.

  This strong vessel was born on 21 December 1657, the only child of the poet, playwright and Restoration Wit Sir Charles Sedley and Lady Catherine Savage, the heiress daughter of Earl Rivers. The mother was wealthy but she was also unstable; a few years after Catherine’s birth she was mad enough to be placed under the care of a doctor – a Catholic because she herself, unlike her husband and daughter, was a Catholic. Catherine’s mother began to suffer from delusions that she was the Queen, having to be addressed by those who attended her as ‘Your Majesty’. She was finally confined in a Catholic convent abroad.17

  What was to become of Catherine, her father’s sole legitimate heiress and, in the conditions which made divorce and remarriage virtually impossible, likely to remain so? It was decided to place the girl at court as a Maid of Honour; after an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Queen’s household, Catherine was placed in that of Mary of Modena, then Duchess of York. Catherine seems to have made her mark early on along the path on which she intended to travel; in June 1673, when she was still only fifteen, Evelyn described her when she visited him at home as ‘none of the most virtuous but a wit’.18

  Still, the witty Catherine did have a portion of £6,000, according to popular repute, and a further £4,000 at her father’s death; there would have been more but for her father’s liaison with Ann Ayscough. Catherine Sedley’s arms when she reached the age of twenty-one described her as ‘sole daughter and heir’ of her father.19 Yet after a series of affairs Sir Charles had formed a permanent liaison with Ann, the penniless daughter of a Yorkshire gentleman, which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son. Catherine’s mother outlived her husband but Sir Charles firmly termed his relationship with Ann Ayscough a ‘marriage’ and called the boy his heir. In his own words:

  What a priest says moves not the mind

  Souls are by love, not words, combined.

  All the same £10,000 was no small sum as a portion. In 1677, for example, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were interested in the prospect of Catherine as a bride for their son John (later first Duke of Marlborough), to the disgust of his sweetheart and eventual wife Sarah Jennings. Barillon described Catherine then as very rich and very ugly; but Sarah, after Marlborough’s death, called her a ‘shocking creature’.20 This however being eminently an age when cash counted more than scandal, such a wealthy young woman, however provocative, could easily have secured a husband had she so wished.

  Instead, Catherine Sedley remained unmarried. When she did eventually take a husband nearly twenty years later, it was as a mature woman approaching forty with a remarkable past behind her; she also had a further sizeable fortune to accompany her, as a souvenir of that past. As an unmarried girl she was entitled to keep her post as Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York and that was certainly a position of which Catherine Sedley, unlike those other more sensitive plants in the same household, Anne Killigrew and Anne Countess of Winchilsea, made full worldly use. By the time she was twenty ‘Dorinda’, as she was nicknamed in satiric verse, was a celebrated if not popular character at court.

  Dorinda’s sparkling Wit, and Eyes

  United, cast too fierce a Light,

  Which blazes high but quickly dies

  Pains not the Heart but hurts the Sight …

  wrote the poet and Wit Lord Dorset, playing on her alleged squint. Dorinda’s personal Cupid was said to be no ‘wingéd God’ but ‘a Black-Guard Boy’ – one of the troop of insolent urchins loosely attached to the lower ranks of the royal household.21

  Most important of all, at the beginning of 1678, Catherine Sedley became the mistress of the Duke of York, supplanting Arabella, the sister of her proposed suitor, John Churchill. The mistresses of the Duke became a legend for their ugliness, once King Charles II had ventured the sly opinion that they must have been prescribed for his brother by his confessors. In fact several of those favoured by the Duke gave the lie to the joke: Susan Lady Belasyse was an acknowledged beauty, while the doe-eyed Elizabeth Countess of Chesterfield (she whom her jealous husband carried off to The Peak) was one of the loveliest women ever to be painted by Lely. It was a combination of the King’s wit with Catherine Sedley’s own which gave rise to the legend. For Catherine was one of those clever women who created a style out of her own lack of conventional attractions. Dorset hammered the point of her plainness in verse (Dorset’s especial venom towards Catherine Sedley was probably due to the fact that she rejected his advances, hell having no fury like a satirist scorned):

  For tho’ we all allow you Wit

  We can’t a handsome face.

  Then where’s the pleasure, where’s the Good,

  Of spending Time and Cost?

  For if your Wit be’ent Understood

  Your Keeper’s Bliss is lost.

  But Catherine made the same joke herself with more economy: ‘We are none of us handsome,’ she declared of the Duke’s harem, ‘and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.’22

  The crudity of some of the Wits’ printed attacks on women of the court who had incurred their displeasure make them literally unprintable: Sir Carr Scroope, merely describing Catherine as being ‘as mad as her mother and as vicious as her father’, was using language which under the circumstances was comparatively mild.23 A vein of morose dislike for womankind – ‘the silliest part of God’s Creation’ in Rochester’s words – except during the act of sexual congress, runs through their works, including poetry as well as lampoons. And if it can be argued that the maddening feminine silliness referred to earlier (see p.401) provoked some of it, it is noticeable that Catherine Sedley, an undeniably intelligent woman, provoked even more.

  None of this prevented James Duke of York from falling passionately in love with his wife’s Maid of Honour. Sir Charles Sedley once inquired of a new arrival at court whether she would turn out to be ‘a Beauty, a Miss, a Wit, or a Politician’. Catherine Sedley triumphantly combined the activities of a Miss and a Wit without the helpful attribute of being a Beauty. Sometime before March 1679 she was known to have borne a daughter, known as Lady Catherine Darnley, whose paternity was officially ascribed to the Duke. Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, was said to be ‘very melancholy’ at this news, especially as the Duke was presently being obliged by the course of Exclusionist politics to leave England. The satirists too marked the event: ‘little Sid, She who lately slipped her Kid’.24

  Catherine was to bear several other children to the Duke, including a son, James Darnley; none of them survived infancy. There seems however some doubt as to whether the Duchess’s melancholy over th
e arrival of little Catherine Darnley was fully justified. To Colonel James Grahame, another member of the Duke of York’s household – he was Keeper of the Privy Purse – was also ascribed the honour of her paternity; in later years Lady Catherine Darnley bore a strong physical resemblance to his legitimate daughter. As the wife of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and in 1703 created Duke of Buckingham, Lady Catherine Darnley was so haughty as to be nicknamed ‘Princess Buckingham’ but according to Walpole there were still those who muttered that she was nothing but old Grahame’s daughter.25 Grahame, who was Catherine Sedley’s confidant in her intrigues and remained so, was almost certainly also her lover. However, Mary of Modena never displayed any of that kindly tolerance towards her husband’s mistresses which so signally marked the wise character of Charles II’s wife Catherine of Braganza. Perhaps it was because she was so much younger than her husband – nearly twenty-five years – or perhaps it was because Mary of Modena was herself a very pretty young woman. By the summer of 1680 she was declared to be once more ‘very melancholy’ on the subject of Mrs Sedley by her women: ‘She prays all day almost.’26

  Alas, piety was not necessarily the best way for an ‘Honest, Chaste’ woman to combat the attractions of a ‘Wanton and free’ one. It was said of Catherine Sedley that ‘there was no restraint in what she said of or to anybody’.27 Like Nell Gwynn, she was a licensed jester, wit in their mistresses being one taste the two Stuart brothers had in common. As a Protestant herself, she regularly made jokes about the Duke’s Catholic priests which one suspects secretly delighted the middle-aged royal roué, torn between guilt and concupiscence.

  The death of Charles II in early February 1685 transformed the lives of James and Mary of Modena, now King and Queen of England. A few days later a message to Catherine from the new monarch broke the news that her life too was to be transformed: warned by his brother’s example, King James had decided to lead another kind of life. It was to be a life without Catherine Sedley. She should therefore either go abroad or depart for the country; he would provide for her ‘but he would see her no more’.28

  Catherine however refused to go. Her emaciation at this point struck all observers; there was nothing else frail about her. In the end a compromise was reached by which Catherine was installed in a house which had belonged to the King’s former mistress Arabella Churchill, and for which he now paid £10,000: No. 21 St James’s Square. (The locality was considered sufficiently removed from the royal palace at Whitehall.) She also received a pension of £4,000 from the Privy Purse. Armed with this, Catherine, who had a taste both for music and the arts, proceeded to employ the finest sculptors and painters to adorn her new residence.29

  It is not known precisely how long the King’s good resolution lasted. Little James Darnley, born the previous September, died on the eve of the King’s coronation. One story connected the King’s resumption of the affair with his remorse at the child’s death. James Darnley was certainly given a royal burial. He was placed in the vault at Westminster Abbey created for Mary Queen of Scots, where the King’s many legitimate dead infants were already buried, along with such august personages as Elizabeth of Bohemia and Rupert of the Rhine; the plate on his coffin described him as ‘natural son to King James the second … Aged about eight months.’30 At any rate before very long Catherine Sedley was being conducted up that notorious Privy Staircase leading to the King’s apartments in Whitehall which had more than justified its existence during the previous reign.

  Was Catherine Sedley also ‘a Politician’ as well as ‘a Wit’ and ‘a Miss’? At one point the Protestant faction were accused by Lord Sunderland of using her to forward their interests with the King just because Catherine was a ‘Protestant whore’, as Nell Gwynn had once insouciantly termed herself. But the allegation was unfounded, according to James II’s biographer, John Miller.31 The next real drama in Catherine’s life concerned rank rather than politics. In mid-January the King took the decision to make his mistress Countess of Dorchester and Baroness Darlington in her own right. (Henry Pierrepont, the irascible Marquess of Dorchester who was the father of Lady Anne Roos, had died in 1680 without male heirs – his second wife, Katherine Stanley, daughter of the heroic Countess of Derby, had no children – and the title was extinct.)

  There was uproar at the court. The rumour that Catherine would also be granted the convenient apartments which had once belonged to Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, maîtresse en titre of Charles II in his last years, did nothing to allay the Queen’s fury. On 19 January, shortly after ‘Mrs Sedley (concubine to—)’, as Evelyn discreetly called her in his diary, was officially created a Countess, the diarist noticed that Mary of Modena neither spoke nor ate during the course of two dinners.32 King James was weakly astonished when his wife threatened to enter a convent if Catherine was not compelled to quit the court.

  Catherine for her part had very different plans for herself. She was determined to be received by the Queen in her new rank as a countess. She was in fact already dressed to attend the formal royal reception known as the Drawing-room, when a message came saying that she was refused admittance. ‘The hearts of all virtuous ladies and honest wives were filled with inexpressible joy,’ wrote a contemporary. The King’s act generously attested ‘their matrimonial privileges’.33 The King had once more bowed his head to the pressures of his wife and his priests; he indicated that Catherine should go, and did not even grant her that final interview which she had once made him promise would precede any final parting.

  Passivity under stress was as alien to Catherine’s nature as discretion in triumph. Once more she declined point-blank to move, posing as a martyr to the machinations of the Jesuits because she was a Protestant. A joke went the rounds that Catherine was taking her stand on her rights under Magna Carta and was refusing to be deported without her consent. Meanwhile ‘L’Affaire de Mademoiselle Sidley’ as the French envoy called it, continued to preoccupy not only the court Wits, but also the King’s various advisers who, even if Catherine had played no political role, saw in her departure ‘a trial of their interest with their great Master’.34

  At one point Catherine either suffered or pretended to suffer a miscarriage to delay matters. She also clamoured loudly against the prospect of being exiled to any Catholic country, saying that Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin had warned her against all convents, and she feared to spend the rest of her life among nuns. (Her mother’s fate must have played some part in heating up her imagination on this subject.) Lastly she discovered a neat way of circumventing another proposal to send her to Holland: if she went there, Catherine said, she would insist on being received there at court by James’s married daughter, Mary Princess of Orange.35

  In the end the lot fell upon Ireland. Here Catherine did have some friends and she also had some lands granted to her by the King. This made Ireland in her opinion ‘the less invidious as well as the more obscure part of the world’. Catherine left on 17 February in a retinue of four coaches-and-six; by March she was installed in Dublin, posing a problem for English officials. They feared to receive her too courteously lest they incur the Queen’s displeasure (as it was, even their sketchy greetings offended Mary of Modena).36

  It was not long, however, before rumours of the volatile Countess’s imminent return, fuelled by the refurbishment of her St James’s Square house, were causing the Queen’s ‘pious mind’ to be thoroughly ‘discomposed’. Catherine wondered aloud in letters to her English friends why the Queen worried so much over her supposed powers of fascination: ‘She thinks much better of me than I deserve.’ All the same Catherine pined for England and good English gossip: ‘Send the news true or false, I care not. I love an English lie …’ As for Ireland: ‘The English have generally a humour I do not approve of, which is affecting to like nothing but their own country; so were it possible, I would commend this place.’ Unfortunately she found it intolerable. ‘I find them not only senseless, but a melancholy sort of people,’ she wrote tartly, ‘and speak all in the
tone of the cripples of London.’37 (Many of whom were of Irish origin and thus begged in an Irish accent.)

  November 1686 saw the Countess back at court once more, taking her place unchallenged and with her usual aplomb. She also bought Ham House near Weybridge from the widow of the sixth Duke of Norfolk. Although her influence with James was considered to have declined, Mary of Modena at Windsor could still be relied upon to weep if the King was late returning, convinced that he had been with the Countess of Dorchester.

  The revolutionary events of 1688 and 1689 which resulted in the displacement of King James by his son-in-law William and daughter Mary placed Catherine, at least in theory, in an extremely awkward position. Catherine herself was certainly frank enough about it: ‘Nothing curbs me in wishing well to the present king [William] but the fear his success may turn to my rueing.’ It was true. On the one hand her royal protector had vanished; on the other hand the new Queen Mary was liable to look but coldly on her father’s erstwhile mistress. Meanwhile the fact that Sir Charles Sedley was a prominent supporter of William of Orange gave a joyous opportunity to the Wits:

  But Sidley has some colour for his Treason

  A daughter Ravished without any Reason …

  And she to keep her Father’s honour up

  Drinks to the Dutch with Orange in her Cup.38

  ‘Never anybody, sure, was so unfortunately misunderstood as me,’ wrote Catherine. The trouble was that Catherine’s letters to King James abroad, asking for money for herself and her daughter, were liable to be misunderstood as Jacobite plotting; especially as she was obliged to use the Jacobite conduits to dispatch them, including the network headed by Lord Preston, brother of her confidant Colonel Grahame. No evidence has been found that she took a more active part in the Jacobite conspiracies than seeking money; and the counter-suggestion that she was placed among the conspirators as a Williamite spy is equally unproven.39 What is clear is that Catherine’s prime instinct was for survival, that instinct which had already carried her along successfully on her somewhat perilous course for fifteen years. ‘My lord,’ she wrote to the Williamite Earl of Nottingham in September 1689, whose aid she implored, ‘I can’t travel with a bundle under my arm tho’ the King [William] is pleased to use me like a woman of that rank.’ By December 1689 she was desperately refuting any suggestion that she had meddled in politics: ‘knowing myself very unfit for it’.40