Royal Marriage Secrets

by John Ashdown-Hill

  After the death of Amy Robsart, Robert Dudley had a relationship with Douglass Howard (Lady Douglass Sheffield), who in 1574 bore him a probably bastard son, also called Robert Dudley. The Earl of Leicester himself always treated this younger Robert Dudley as illegitimate. However, claims were made after the earl’s death that he and Douglass (who had been a widow at the time of their relationship) had been secretly married. Robert Dudley junior lost his early seventeenth-century legal battle to establish his legitimacy, despite the fact that his mother wrote a document claiming that she had indeed been married to Lord Leicester. The case was raised again in the nineteenth century in an attempt to revive the earldom of Leicester, but on that occasion too, the claim was dismissed.

  However there seems to be no doubt that in 1575 Leicester did engage in a secret marriage, this time with the queen’s cousin, Lettice Knollys, dowager Countess of Essex. The marriage took place at Leicester’s house in Wanstead, with only a handful of friends and relations in attendance. The reason for the secrecy was that Leicester did not want the queen to know what he had done, and for nine months the secret was indeed kept. This is interesting proof that clandestine marriages could remain concealed if the contracting parties so wished.

  Dudley’s chronology shows that from 1550 until 1560 he was unquestionably married to Amy Robsart – a marriage which the queen may have resented but could not undo. In the early 1570s he was entangled with (though probably not married to) Douglass Howard. Then from 1575 until his death in 1588 Dudley was married to the queen’s cousin, Lettice Knollys. Again, the queen was jealous and resentful, but the fact of Dudley’s marriage to Lettice seems certain.

  It follows that only between 1560 and 1575 could Dudley have seriously contemplated a marriage with the queen. Yet during this period the queen was entertaining the prospect of marriage with three successive French princes, with her cousin Lord Darnley (who eventually married Mary, Queen of Scots), and with an Austrian archduke.

  If the queen and Robert Dudley did ever go through a form of marriage, this would almost certainly have involved Dudley in bigamy. But the fact that in 1575 Dudley secretly married Lettice Knolly presumably shows that he was still free to marry at that time. All the evidence suggests that, whatever the true nature of the affectionate relationship between Elizabeth I and Dudley, it was never formalised as a marriage.

  13

  OLD ROWLEY

  AND MRS BARLOW

  * * *

  The Duke of Monmouth is in so great splendour at Court and so dandled by the King, that some doubt, if the King should have no child by the Queene (which there is yet no appearance of), whether he would not be acknowledged for a lawful son.

  Samuel Pepys, 31 December 1662

  * * *

  I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queene Caterine.

  Charles II, 1679

  * * *

  … we should immediately insist upon our title to the crowns of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, and the dominions and territories thereunto belonging, as son and heir apparent to Charles the Second, king of England, our royal father lately deceased.

  The Duke of Monmouth’s proclamation as King, 21 June 16851

  * * *

  Elizabeth I’s childless death in 1603 finally brought the so-called ‘Tudor’ dynasty to an end. She was succeeded on the English throne by the house of Stuart, in the person of her young cousin James VI of Scotland (I of England), son of Mary Queen of Scots by her second husband, Lord Darnley. By blood and descent, James I and VI was the next rightful heir to the English throne, but his succession had been contested during Elizabeth’s reign because he was a ‘foreigner’. Nevertheless, ultimately he did succeed. Despite his somewhat equivocal sexuality, James had a flourishing family, and all subsequent British monarchs have been his descendants.

  In due course James was succeeded by his second son, Charles I, whose heir, the subject of this chapter, and the future King Charles II, was born at St James’s Palace on 29 May 1630. He was the second son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France. Actually, an elder brother had been born about a year earlier, but he had died almost immediately, so that from the moment of his birth, Prince Charles was heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland.2

  Charles [II] grew up to be tall (6ft 2in in height as an adult), and dark. While not conventionally handsome, he had a striking and attractive appearance. In the 1650s, at the time when we are chiefly concerned with him, Mme de Motteville described the young prince as ‘well made with a swarthy complexion agreeing well with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure’.3

  Prince Charles’s youth had been overshadowed by the outbreak of the English Civil War, which began in 1642. At the age of 12, Charles had accompanied his father, King Charles I, at the battle of Edgehill, and he subsequently participated in the campaigns of 1645, when he was the titular commander of his father’s forces in the West Country. But early in 1646, when it became evident that the king was losing the war, Charles [II] left England, going first to the Scilly Isles and then to Jersey. Finally he sailed to France, where his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, had sought refuge two years earlier, following the birth of her last child, Princess Henrietta, in Exeter.

  After the execution of his father in 1649, Charles II spent eleven difficult years as an exiled and impoverished titular monarch, and it was during this period that his relationship with a girl called Lucy Walter developed. As we shall see, there are allegations that Charles married Lucy, who bore him a son, James, later created Duke of Monmouth.

  In 1660 Charles II (later affectionately known as ‘Old Rowley’) was restored to his thrones, and two years later he married Catherine of Bragança, the Infanta of Portugal. Sadly, that royal marriage remained childless. However, Charles II consistently resisted suggestions that he divorce his queen and remarry in the hope of producing an heir.

  Despite the difference in their religions, the Catholic Queen Catherine seems to have been fond of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s son by Lucy Walter. There are even reports that the queen herself believed that her husband may have been secretly married to Monmouth’s mother.4 After Charles II’s death, when Monmouth attempted to claim the throne and was defeated by his uncle, King James II, it was to Queen Catherine that the young duke appealed for help. The Queen Dowager tried to save Monmouth’s life – but to no avail.

  The case of Charles II differs from many of the other cases we are considering, in that while a secret marriage is alleged against him, this involves no imputation of bigamy. This is simply a matter of dates. Lucy Walter, whom Charles is alleged to have married secretly prior to his accession, died in 1658, while Charles did not marry his queen, Catherine of Bragança, until four years later. A marriage between Charles and the Infanta Catarina-Henriqueta of Portugal had, indeed, first been proposed by the latter’s father, King John IV, in 1644. However, the alliance was at that time rejected by the English court. Thus it was not until after the Restoration, in 1661, that Charles’s Portuguese marriage was finally settled. The nuptial mass was celebrated in Lisbon on 23 April 1662. The wedding was re-enacted in Portsmouth on 21 May 1662. Thanks to the chronology of events there is no possible reason to doubt that the marriage between Charles and Catherine was valid, whether or not the king had previously been married to Lucy Walter.

  In another respect, however, the case of Charles II shares a feature we have encountered in other instances of disputed royal marriage, in that the allegation of a secret marriage with Lucy Walter did not arise in a vacuum. It must be understood in the context of at least three other reported clandestine weddings in Charles’ wider family. The first and most important of these was that of Charles II’s younger brother, James, Duke of York [James II], to Anne Hyde. The secret marriage between James and Anne allegedly took place at Breda in the Netherlands, in 1659, and this wedding has been variously dated to eith
er the month of November 1659 or to Christmas Eve of that year. Prior to the supposed marriage Anne had reportedly been James’s mistress.5 It was also in the Netherlands that Charles is usually said to have perhaps married Lucy Walter – possibly in 1648.

  The alleged secret wedding of the Duke of York and Anne Hyde was not the only one of its kind in the Stuart royal family. One of the most celebrated of Charles I’s army commanders in the Civil War had been the king’s nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, one of the numerous children of Charles I’s elder sister, Elizabeth (Princess Royal, and subsequently Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia). Prince Rupert was unmarried during the war years, but in the early years after the Restoration he formed an alliance with Frances Bard (1646–1708), the daughter of another Civil War veteran. Frances later claimed to have been secretly married to Rupert in 1664. Like his first cousin, Charles II, Prince Rupert denied the secret marriage allegation, although – again like the king – he recognised the son whom Frances bore him in 1666, Dudley Bard, alias ‘Dudley Rupert’. Later still Rupert lived with his actress mistress, Margaret Hughes, and there was some talk of the possibility of a marriage between them. However, no such marriage ever materialised, although Margaret bore the prince a daughter, Ruperta (later Ruperta Howe).

  Moreover, in 1685, at the very time when the possibility of a marriage between Lucy Walter and Charles [II] was very much on people’s lips in England, a third and very famous secret marriage was contracted by Charles II’s first cousin, King Louis XIV of France. In the summer of 1683 Louis had lost his royal wife, Queen Marie-Thérèse, and at some point during the winter of 1685–86 he allegedly contracted a secret morganatic marriage with his companion, Françoise d’Aubigné (Mme de Maintenon). Although there is no documentary proof of such a marriage, it was universally credited at the time, and (unlike many of the other secret royal unions which we have been considering) the marriage between Louis XIV and Françoise d’Aubigné is also generally accepted by historians.

  Various and divergent accounts of Charles [II]’s alleged secret marriage to Lucy Walter exist, and although attention focuses chiefly on the Netherlands in 1648, several other locations and dates have been suggested. In fact, the stories about this alleged wedding are many, varied and mutually inconsistent. In themselves, however, such contradictions do not disprove the notion of a marriage since, as we have seen, even in respect of James [II]’s secret marriage to Anne Hyde a great deal of doubt and uncertainty remains. Thus some authorities doubt whether a secret ceremony between James and Anne ever took place at Breda, believing that Anne Hyde was simply James’s mistress until 1660. However, following the Restoration of the Monarchy, there is no doubt that the marriage between James and Anne was privately but officially (re-?)enacted on 3 September 1660, at Worcester House in London, thereby giving their relationship a status beyond question. The London ceremony has been described by one writer as ‘a shotgun wedding’,6 Anne being large with child at the time. But of course, if the couple had already married in secret, Anne’s pregnancy would have been perfectly legitimate.7

  The alleged secret marriage between Charles and Lucy could never have been made official in the same way as that of James and Anne, Lucy having died before the Restoration. Nevertheless, the fact of the wedding between James and Anne Hyde, coupled with the uncertainty about when and where their marriage actually took place, the rumours of a secret marriage in the Netherlands and the lack of surviving documentation in relation to that supposed event, all helped to strengthen the notion that, despite the lack of surviving evidence, a similar secret union might possibly have taken place some years earlier, also in the Netherlands, between Charles [II] and Lucy Walter. When similar stories began to circulate in 1664 about Prince Rupert, that only served to fan the flames.

  Incidentally, it is interesting to compare the social status of Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, with that of Lucy Walter. Lucy has often had a bad press and was described by the contemporary diarist, John Evelyn, as ‘a strumpet’ and ‘the daughter of some very mean creatures’.8 While her eventual way of life may have invited censure, Lucy was actually quite well-born – the daughter of gentry and the descendant of aristocrats and kings. As for Anne Hyde, she was the daughter of gentry families on both her father’s and her mother’s side.9 At first sight her background appears superficially similar to that of Lucy. Unlike Lucy, however, the Duchess of York enjoyed no known royal descent, and had no family connection with earlier generations of royal consorts.10

  Lucy Walter, then, was a girl from Wales who had a relationship with the future King Charles II in his youth, during the troubled period of the English Civil War and Commonwealth. She bore Charles a son who, in his early childhood, was known as James Crofts. However, he was later given the surname Scott, and created Duke of Monmouth. Lucy subsequently had a daughter, Mary, but Charles refused to acknowledge paternity of this second child, and took no interest in her. Mary’s father was probably Lord Taaffe, who subsequently adopted her. These basic facts are generally accepted.

  Despite the increasing use of condoms in the seventeenth century, and the fact that these devices reputedly gained their name from a member of Charles II’s household or circle, Charles II is, of course, famous for the number not only of his mistresses but also of his illegitimate progeny.11 There would therefore be no particular reason for Lucy and her son to stand out above the rest were it not for the fact that in the 1670s and 1680s, when Lucy herself was long dead, the Duke of Monmouth was put forward by the Protestant Whigs as a rival heir to the throne, in opposition to his Catholic uncle, James, Duke of York [James II]. Monmouth’s supporters were deeply interested in the question of whether or not his parents had been married to one another. If they had not, Monmouth was simply one of Charles II’s many illegitimate children.12 If, on the other hand, Lucy Walter had been married to Charles then Monmouth was a legitimate son and a valid claimant to the throne. Indeed, he would have been the king’s only legitimate child, since his father’s subsequent marriage to the Portuguese Infanta produced no offspring.

  While those who supported the Duke of Monmouth claimed that Lucy Walter had been not Charles II’s mistress but his wife, the rival supporters of Charles’ younger brother, the Duke of York, vigorously opposed this claim, and did all in their power to denigrate Lucy. For this reason it is particularly important, in studying Lucy Walter, to distinguish clearly between two kinds of historical sources: those contemporaneous with the events to which they refer, and those which were written later, with hindsight, and with an ulterior motive. Anything written about Lucy and her children in the 1670s, the 1680s or later is almost bound to be slanted, either in favour of the Duke of Monmouth or in favour of the Duke of York. Such material must therefore be used with caution, taking careful note of its likely bias. Material which is contemporary, on the other hand, while not necessarily free from bias of some kind, is more likely to be trustworthy. In historical writing the distinction between contemporary and later source material is always significant. In the case of Lucy Walter, however, this distinction presents itself in a particularly extreme form.

  Supporters of the Duke of York did their utmost to undermine Lucy. They described her as of low birth, a brunette of some cunning but of limited wit, a girl who lived by the sex trade and who ultimately also died by it, having contracted a sexually transmitted disease of some kind.13 However, the legend that Lucy was of low birth is very easily disproved by reference to authentic source material in preference to partisan narrative. Actually, Lucy was born into the Welsh landed gentry. She had relations in the ranks of the aristocracy, and was herself of genuine Plantagenet royal descent, via the dukes of Norfolk (see Family Tree 3). It remains to be seen whether the remainder of the partisan, pro-James II account of Lucy’s career will stand up any better than the story of her low birth when the spotlight of contemporary sources is turned upon it.

  Lucy was probably born in Wales, at Roche Castle, Pembrokeshire, in about 1630.14 Although no speci
fic evidence seems to exist proving this to have been her birthplace, the assumption is not unreasonable, since her father certainly held Roche Castle (though he also had another house at Ravensdale).15 Lucy’s parents were William Walter and his wife, Elizabeth Prothero. Both belonged to the Welsh gentry. Lucy’s mother was the niece of the first Lord Carbery, and on her mother’s side she was one of the great-granddaughters of Lady Catherine Howard. Lady Catherine herself had been the daughter of Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk. She was therefore the aunt of Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and a descendant of Edward I and his second wife, Margaret of France. Thus Lucy was by no means the low-born creature that some of her enemies later represented. She was, in fact, a first cousin (albeit at four generations’ remove) of Anne Boleyn, one of the subjects of a previous chapter. Lucy also had links with Eleanor Talbot, since Eleanor’s sister had been a duchess of Norfolk. Moreover, the mind of a Restoration playwright would draw specific parallels between Lucy’s position and that of Eleanor (whose name had, in the seventeenth century, only recently been salvaged from the oblivion into which Henry VII had striven with might and main to cast it).16 In addition, of course, Lucy and Eleanor shared royal descent from King Edward I.