by Linda Porter
Her marriage continued to be happy, though the duke of Richmond was frequently absent, visiting his estates or fulfilling military duties. He was undertaking extensive building work at Cobham Hall and left Frances in charge of its management. The woman once regarded as little more than an empty-headed decoration at court proved herself both capable and businesslike in handling Richmond’s affairs and he clearly trusted her judgement. His financial position remained precarious but he evidently considered that a man of his status could not be expected to economize or cut back on costs. He was accustomed to spending freely. His accounts show that, in 1662–3, he owed his London goldsmith more than £450 for ‘twelve dishes and thirty-six trencher plates of silver’, more than £57,000 today.9 His estates did not produce an income commensurate with such spending. Their upkeep and improvement were a constant drain and his gambling and love of horse racing only added to the difficulties he faced. In 1669, he spent six months in France following his recognition by the French government as the eleventh seigneur d’Aubigny. His uncle Ludovic Stuart had actually died four years earlier but Richmond now felt it necessary to make good his claim. During his absence, Frances worked hard to get him an English pension of £1,000 a year, as reparation for losses during the Civil Wars, but she was unwilling to apply directly to Charles II and grew embarrassed at having to importune friends. Her husband, though not a popular figure in the king’s immediate circle, was not without friends. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, later earl of Shaftesbury, was a prominent politician who took up Richmond’s cause, lobbying for the duke to be sent as ambassador to Poland. He did not succeed because, though chancellor of the exchequer, he was not close to the king and he was still recovering from a serious illness, which had nearly cost him his life the previous year when a cyst on his liver ruptured. Besides, the duke of Richmond had further compromised his already awkward relationship with Charles II by doing homage to Louis XIV in return for confirmation of his rights to the Aubigny lands. Nor did he help his overall image by becoming involved, in 1671, with the dukes of Monmouth and Albemarle in a fracas in Whetstone Park in London, which resulted in the death of a local constable who was only trying to keep the peace. The king was obliged to intervene personally to save his son and two of the country’s leading noblemen from being brought to trial for murder.
The incident seems to have caused Charles II and his advisers to reconsider Richmond’s request for a diplomatic posting, perhaps on the basis that he would be less of an embarrassment abroad than he was at home. Accordingly, he was appointed as ambassador to Denmark in February 1672. There never seems to have been any suggestion that Frances would accompany him, though it was certainly not uncommon for wives of ambassadors to do so. The couple decided that there were greater advantages if she remained in England. She continued to reside in their apartments at Bowling Green in the Whitehall Palace complex and to enjoy court life in the service of the queen. Her husband left her in charge of managing all his financial affairs, a complex, time-consuming task but one which Frances carried out with single-mindedness and aplomb. Richmond’s confidence in her was absolute: ‘I cannot so well leave money in any hands as yours,’ he told her.10
The duke found Denmark a major disappointment. He took with him a large entourage of servants decked out in new livery and two new coaches, one lined in crimson velvet, but he soon felt lonely and trapped under the leaden skies of the north. He had arrived in a rainy spring but even summer and its lighter days could not lift his mood: ‘Never man was so weary of a place as I am of this,’ he wrote of Copenhagen, ‘it being I think the least diverting of any place I ever came in.’11 He and Frances exchanged letters frequently, but the post was unreliable and she thought that his correspondence had often been opened before it got to her. But while there may have been little to do, Richmond, true to form, alleviated the boredom by amassing considerable debts and drinking too much. As a senior aristocrat representing the interests of his king to the Danish monarchy, the duke was not going to skimp on appearances. The goal of his mission was to encourage the Danes to join the Anglo-French alliance against the Dutch and, while he may have been unenthusiastic about his surroundings, he undertook meetings with Danish politicians in a committed and serious manner, without making any major diplomatic breakthrough. Danish foreign policy was directed by the chief minister of state, Count Peder Griffenfeld, who did not want to annoy either his powerful neighbour, Sweden, or France, but who was stymied by opposition at home.
Richmond’s mission ended in tragedy. Less than two weeks before Christmas 1672, wrapped up in the furs he had brought with him to keep out the cold of the Scandinavian winters, the duke had himself rowed out into the sound, off the coast of Elsinore, to go aboard an English frigate that was at anchor there. Ignoring advice that such an action might be interpreted as an insult by the Danish government, he decided to brave the heavy snow and freezing temperatures for the sake of a change to a wearisome routine and the prospect of some good company. Accompanied by Sir John Paul, the English consul in Elsinore, Richmond was entertained by Captain Taylor, in command of the ship, and it was, according to Paul’s perhaps rather tactful report, a very enjoyable occasion: ‘several healths were drunk but I cannot say to any great hight of drinking as I have seen his Grace at other times do . . . it’s true his Grace was a little merry but not to say much concerned.’12 The duke had, in fact, drunk at least a couple of bottles of wine but this might have been of less relevance were it not for the extreme cold. When he came to leave, disaster struck. Missing his footing, he ‘fell betwixt the ship and the boat and sank straight . . .’ The sailors managed to fish him out alive but a combination of shock and hypothermia were too much for a system already weakened by years of overindulgence. In the coach taking him back to Elsinore, he suffered violent convulsions and died in his lodgings that evening.
Richmond’s passing was a great blow to Frances and left her with problems that would take years to resolve. The duke’s extravagant lifestyle and the expenses of running so many properties in England, Scotland and France meant that his debts were huge. Even repatriating his body proved difficult and it was over a year before his remains were returned to England and his final resting place, in Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. If this was not distressing enough, his widow faced an uncertain future. Her childlessness was itself a problem. In such circumstances, the titles and estates of Lennox and Richmond reverted to the Crown. Charles II, his resentment of Frances and her behaviour towards him now firmly in the past, allowed her the use of the Lennox estate for the rest of her lifetime. The situation in England was not so straightforward.
The duke had made a will before he left for Denmark. He hoped that his lands and possessions, ‘a great personal estate consisting in money, jewels, plate, debts, leases, rich hangings, furniture, household stuff, cattle and several shares in several ships . . . a great part of which remained at Cobham, in Denmark, at Whitehall, at Duke’s Yard and at his house in St Martin’s Lane and divers places in England and other rents in Scotland and France’, would be ‘sufficient to pay his debts with an overplus.’13 But he was never very good with money and his executors found that, while the will might sound impressive, reality was something quite different. Frances was left £2,000 a year and the right to remain in Cobham Hall for life, provided she remained unmarried. On her death, it was to revert to his sister, Lady Catherine O’Brien.
Problems arose when Lady Catherine, who had never been on the best of terms with Frances, contested the terms of the will. She filed a lawsuit claiming that Frances should not have been given possession of Cobham Hall nor allowed to keep any of the jewels and personal gifts from the duke until all the debts had been paid. This would, in practice, have left Frances in straitened personal circumstances – not penniless, because she had her income from her position as lady of the bedchamber to Queen Catherine and she was still allowed to keep apartments at Whitehall, but she would hardly have been able to live as befits a duchess. The legal w
rangling dragged on for five years. Frances, with characteristic tenacity, filed a counter-suit against her sister-in-law, claiming that Catherine was intent on depriving her of her legacies. The dispute was finally settled in 1677, when Frances agreed to sell her life interest in Cobham Hall to Lady Catherine. In the same year, she resigned her interest in her husband’s French estates to the king in return for a pension of £1,000 a year, about £150,000 today. He would pass both the French and English titles that had belonged to Frances’ husband to his youngest illegitimate son, the product of his long-term affair with Louise de Kéroualle. Frances could not stand Louise but she needed the financial security that came from giving up the Aubigny estates. Her income was supplemented by collecting the aulnage (a duty on cloth) that had formed part of Richmond’s estate.
Frances lived on into the beginning of the reign of Charles’s niece, Anne, attending the new queen’s coronation in April 1702, six months before her death. Though a Catholic, she did not join James II and Mary of Modena in exile and was buried next to her husband in Westminster Abbey. Most of her estate was left in trust, the money to be used to purchase the Scottish estate of the Maitlands, where the house was to be named Lennoxlove and settled on the Blantyres, her father’s family. Today her portrait adorns the walls of Lennoxlove House, one of the finest homes in southern Scotland, a testament to an extremely clever woman who had kept the amorous king dangling on a string for years and eventually got away from him with her honour intact.
Part Five
The Stage and the Throne
NELL GWYN
1651(?)–87
CHAPTER ELEVEN
From Bawdy House to the King’s Bed
‘. . . saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock-sleeves and bodice . . . she seemed a mighty pretty creature’
Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1 May 1667
CHARLES II WAS enthralled by the theatre. It was in his blood, on both the Stuart and Bourbon sides of his heritage. Six weeks after the king’s return from exile, Sir William Davenant drafted a document for Charles’s signature which would give himself and fellow royalist Thomas Killigrew control of the public theatre in London. Davenant had been knighted by Charles I for his ‘loyalty and poetry’, and his career during the 1630s and the Civil Wars demonstrated both in abundance. As Prince of Wales, Charles II had watched his parents perform in the masques written by Davenant; poignantly, the only one they ever acted in together, in 1640, was the last written by Davenant before the troubles that engulfed the monarchy. Like Tom Killigrew, Davenant carried messages between Charles I and Henrietta Maria when the wars separated them. Both men were seasoned courtiers with a love for writing and experience in the production and management of plays and opera. Charles II had every reason to trust and support them, not just for their talents and unswerving loyalty, but because they were also a link with his past, being of his parents’ generation.
Davenant’s draft of the royal warrant, dated 19 July 1660, announced that it was ‘our will and pleasure . . . that you prepare a Bill for our signature to pass our Great Seal of England, containing a grant unto our trusty and well-beloved Thomas Killigrew Esquire, one of the Grooms of our Bedchamber and Sir William Davenant, Knight, to give them full power and authority to erect two companies of players consisting respectively of such persons as they shall choose and appoint; and to purchase or build and erect at their charges as they shall think fit two Houses or Theatres.’1 Thus Restoration theatre was born, a shared monopoly between two men, whose managerial capabilities would prove very different, with Davenant’s Duke’s Company eventually absorbing Killigrew’s King’s Company in 1682, when financial difficulties overwhelmed the latter. Davenant was dead well before then but, like Killigrew, he had developed a fine troupe of actors – and, more importantly, actresses as well.
It would, in fact, be another two years before the employment of actresses to play women’s parts was made an explicit requirement in another document, known as Killigrew’s Patent: ‘and we do likewise permit and give leave,’ ordered the king, ‘that all the women’s parts to be acted in either of the said two companies for the time to come may be performed by women.’2 Before the Restoration, all female parts in public theatre performances were played by men, often good-looking boys who specialized in such roles, of whom the best known was Edward Kynaston. However, although it was not the custom in England for women to act in public, aristocratic ladies had been performing in masques and other similar entertainments at court and in private houses since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. Charles II’s grandmother, Anne of Denmark, had featured prominently in a number of Inigo Jones’s splendid creations for the court of James I, and his mother, Henrietta Maria, had acted in a court masque in 1626 as part of the celebrations for her sixteenth birthday, in the first year of her marriage to Charles I. The French had embraced the role of the actress much sooner than the English, who were characteristically outraged by the arrival of a troupe made up entirely of female performers in 1628. Charles II had, while in exile in France and Germany, attended a number of theatrical entertainments where women took female roles, and was clearly a supporter of the concept. He was determined that the style of the Restoration stage would reflect European practice. More than that, his patent to Killigrew was actually couched in moralistic terms to justify the change, claiming that the representation of women by men offended public morality and encouraged vice. Given that Restoration actresses would immediately find themselves viewed as sex objects and fair game by their male admirers, managers and playwrights, this seems more than a little disingenuous. ‘In practical terms, the freedom women gained to play themselves on the stage was to a large extent the freedom to play the whore.’3
The king’s enthusiasm for female performers would find its outlet in his bed as well as on the London stage but the identity of the first lady to tread the boards in a public capacity remains shrouded in mystery. Davenant had used a female singer, Mrs Coleman, in his opera The Siege of Rhodes in the late 1650s but though this was a non-speaking part in a private production, there were a considerable number of such entertainments throughout the republican period. The Protector himself, hardly a matinee idol, had participated in the revelries for the marriage of his daughter, Mary, to Viscount Fauconberg in November 1657, in a masque written by Andrew Marvell, in which he had appeared as Jove. Cromwell, who loved music, had certainly tolerated Davenant and his operas during the republican period and many of the Cromwellian elite were patrons of the arts. Nevertheless, there were no public performances for eighteen years, since the start of the Civil Wars, when Parliament closed the theatres. Reopening them would prove problematic; there were only three or four left in London, in a state of disrepair, and neither Killigrew nor Davenant saw trying to refurbish them as a viable option. In fact, it was not clear whether they could initially draw audiences at all from among the wider London population, unaccustomed as it was to the entire idea of public performance, and both men concentrated their first business ventures in more modest venues, using tennis courts with roofs, a common solution in Europe. These were quite confined spaces, seating no more than 450 people, and it was hoped that their very intimacy would appeal to the aristocratic audiences who had been deprived of theatre for so long. The demographic of Restoration theatre would change gradually as confidence and interest grew, with audiences encompassing a wide range of occupations. Pepys himself was a great lover of theatre, and though well connected, he was certainly no aristocrat.
The great diarist recorded that the first time he had seen a woman in a female role on the stage was at Killigrew’s temporary theatre in Vere Street. It had formerly been Gibbon’s tennis court and was poorly lit, with uncomfortable seating, no heating, no scenery and no refreshments, except the fruit offered for sale between acts by the orange girls who plied their wares in front of the stage. Despite the lack of creature comforts and the less-than-impressive performances of the ladies of the company, small t
hough their parts were, Pepys was entranced. It was 3 January 1661 and he wrote in his diary of that mid-afternoon performance in the gathering gloom of a midwinter’s day that it was ‘the first time that ever I saw women come upon the stage.’ The first time for him, but there had been other performances with women taking important roles, towards the end of 1660. Davenant had recruited six actresses almost immediately, and Killigrew four. Although we know their names, we do not know which of these ladies took the part of Desdemona in Killigrew’s production of Othello. Scholars of Restoration theatre favour Anne Marshall, who would soon specialize in tragic roles, as the most probable. The production was first performed on 8 December 1660. Though there are no surviving reviews, Killigrew may have sacrificed sophistication for speed, since it was apparent to Pepys a few weeks later that not all of the actresses had complete command of their lines. As the two theatre companies grew more confident in their productions, such teething troubles disappeared, so that by the summer of 1661 the actress was no longer a phenomenon, but an established and recognized part of the English stage.
