Mistresses

by Linda Porter

  The five men who were closest to the king in the running of the country are known as the Cabal because of their initials but the term is misleading. Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale did not function coherently as a ministry and had varying personal agendas. The first two were allies but Buckingham had consistently ploughed his own furrow and, though still prominent in court circles, was excluded from the exercise of power. Anthony Ashley Cooper (later first earl of Shaftesbury) had started the Civil Wars as a royalist but changed sides and later served as one of Oliver Cromwell’s councillors. An ambivalent convert to the idea of restoring the Stuarts and a sympathizer with dissenters, he was chancellor of the exchequer in 1670 but the king still did not trust him sufficiently to give him a role in foreign affairs. He would go on to become a leading critic of the government in the late 1670s and play a crucial part in the early days of party politics in Britain. Lauderdale, the uncouth Scottish aristocrat who had so appalled Charles II’s courtiers while they were in exile, was the monarch’s formidable fixer, north of the border, able to tell the king triumphantly that no monarch had ever been so powerful there. Of these five, the man closest to Charles II between 1668 and 1674 was Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, the king’s secretary of state, often viewed as a nonentity but an able and cunning politician with a great taste for culture and display, as well as being a crypto-Catholic. By 1671, he certainly had his eye on a lady to replace the duchess of Cleveland as the king’s unofficial maîtresse-en-titre, and it was not Nell Gwyn.

  Nell gave birth to her first son, Charles, in mid-May 1670, at a time when the king was heavily involved in the diplomacy surrounding the mission of his sister, the duchess of Orléans, to England and the resulting Secret Treaty of Dover. Charles II’s affection for Minette was far greater than that he had ever felt for his mistresses, and as he already had so many other illegitimate children, he took little initial interest in the birth of yet another son. Nell’s child was born in a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He was christened on 7 June and both the duke of Buckingham and Lord Buckhurst were his godparents. It is unclear when his father first saw him, and for the first six and a half years of his life he had no surname, not even the customary one of Fitzroy that had been given to other royal bastards. His mother, who was not yet twenty, was offered the lease of a house at the unfashionable end of Pall Mall. The residence was on a par with what the king had provided for Moll Davis. This did not suit Nell, who was by no means as diffident as Moll. She wanted better. It has been said that her return to the stage at the end of 1670 in John Dryden’s play, The Conquest of Granada, was an attempt to embarrass the king into finding her more appropriate lodgings. If this was a ploy, it succeeded. A finer house, number 79 Pall Mall, was made available to her in February 1671, at which point she retired from the stage for good. Charles II was dilatory in purchasing the freehold for it, eventually doing so in 1677.

  The house, which had three storeys and attic rooms for servants, backed on to St James’s Park. Within a month of her taking up residence there, John Evelyn witnessed the king and Nell Gwyn chatting familiarly over the garden wall, ‘she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall and the king standing on the green walk under it.’ The encounter sounds charming and was depicted by the Victorian artist Edward Matthew Ward as such, with a nonchalant king leaning on his cane, his two spaniels at his heels, while he chats with a rather overdressed and implausibly virginal-looking Nell. Evelyn, however, was strongly disapproving. ‘I was,’ he said, ‘heartily sorry at this scene.’ He went on to add something that might not have pleased Nell Gwyn, had she known: ‘Thence the king walked to the Duchess of Cleveland’s, another lady of pleasure and curse of our nation.’4 Nell did not like Barbara’s superior attitude. On one occasion, when she was on the receiving end of the duchess’s froideur, Nell was reported to have ‘clapped her on the shoulder and said she perceived that persons of one trade loved not one another.’5 This was, of course, a reference to whoring, not acting. Barbara’s response, if she deigned to give one, is not known.

  This confrontation, though amusing in the retelling, is indicative of one of Nell’s main difficulties as Charles II’s mistress. She was never really accepted at court. Despite her personality and wit, her background counted against her. It was not just the swearing or the inability to make friends of her own sex – apart from the playwright, Aphra Behn, Nell does not seem to have had many notable female friends – but the calculated desire to raise eyebrows. This may, of course, have been a defence. The satire ‘The Lady of Pleasure’ begins with the unforgettable lines:

  And now behold a Common Drab become

  The glorious Mate for th’English Monarch’s Bum6

  Even Ralph Montagu’s sister, the inveterate gossip and troublemaker Lady Elizabeth Harvey, who detested Barbara Palmer throughout her career as royal mistress, eventually deserted Nell Gwyn when she thought the actress’s hold on the king was slipping, hoping to replace her with Jenny Middleton, daughter of the court beauty Jane Middleton. This was a miscalculation, for, with the exception of Lucy Walter, Charles II never entirely abandoned the women in his life, retaining the same kind of easy affection for them – and especially their children – that he had by now developed for his own wife. At number 79 Pall Mall, he was able to mingle with guests at Nell’s social gatherings, listening to music, playing cards, dancing and chatting and enjoying a generous buffet supper, which, according to Nell’s accounts, could have included plover and larks (her favourite), herring, salmon and pike, as well as a vast array of meats. Foreign visitors to England were amazed at the sheer quantity of meat consumed and Nell did not stint on offering guests the staples of beef, pork, veal, lamb, bacon and mutton. She was similarly generous with wine, beer and cider. A party at her house reflected the hedonism and penchant for conspicuous consumption of the times.

  Nell also made sure that her furniture and accessories demonstrated her greatly changed status. Everyone knew about her extraordinary silver bedstead, her most prized possession, which she commissioned from master silversmith John Coques. Its design, which Nell worked on herself, was based on the king’s bed at Whitehall. Ornately decorated with heads of mythical figures, cherubs and even representations of Jacob Hall, Lady Castlemaine’s lover, and Louise de Kéroualle, Nell’s rival for the king’s attentions, the bed showed Nell’s sense of humour (as well as her cheerful vulgarity) and perhaps also hinted at her underlying vulnerability. It was meant to impress, amuse and encourage the king at a time when his virility, of which he had been so proud, was on the wane. The bed was also enormously expensive. The bill which Coques delivered at the end of 1674 came to over £1,000. In all, she spent the equivalent of £130,000 in today’s money on her bedchamber, with its blue satin curtains, re-glazed windows, silver-framed looking glass and dressing table covered with damask.

  On her wardrobe, Nell Gwyn also spent freely. She loved satin shoes and slippers, silk petticoats and nightgowns, pearl-coloured hose and the scented gloves that were so popular with ladies of the period. There are also bills for expensive hairdressing. Nell was not a great user of the dangerous cosmetics of the day, a number of which contained compounds of mercury and arsenic. Instead, she used scented waters, such as rose and orange water, which were often used as a substitute for washing with water in an age when sanitation left much to be desired and bathing was an infrequent occurrence.

  Nell liked jewels as much as any other society lady of the period and seems to have had a particular weakness for pearls. These would have suited her complexion and colouring. Her portraits show her wearing pearl necklaces and, in one by Sir Peter Lely, she has pearls in her hair. In 1682, after the death of Charles II’s cousin, Prince Rupert, she paid over £4,000, or £644,000 today, for a pearl necklace that the prince had given his mistress, Peg Hughes, herself an actress. It may have been one of the largest single purchases she ever made, greatly outstripping the cost of her famous bed. Where she got the money from is
an interesting question, since she was in debt when the king died three years later. It would have swallowed almost all her annual pension. Charles himself does not seem to have showered her with jewels, though he did give her a beautiful diamond cluster ring and a blue enamel and pearl watch set with rose diamonds, as well as a carnelian heart and a locket with a miniature of his father, Charles I. These were not showy gifts but they speak of his love for this girl half his age, whom Pepys called ‘pretty, witty Nell.’7

  Their second son, James, was born on Christmas Day, 1671. Like his brother, he remained merely a royal bastard without a family name. This irked Nell, though her own financial position was becoming more secure. She was given a pension of £4,000 a year in 1674, increased to £5,000 in 1676. At the end of that year, after a great deal of pestering, her elder son was finally given the surname of Beauclerk and created earl of Burford. Little James had to wait a few weeks longer to be allowed to use the new name. His mother was given Burford House in Windsor in 1680 and leases of lands in Bestwood Park, Nottinghamshire the following year. To her portfolio of property and grants were added £800 a year from Irish revenues and a grant from the customs paid on logwood. But while the earl of Burford and his brother, Lord Beauclerk, were given titles, Nell herself was not. Instead, she had to be content with an appointment, in 1675, as lady of the bedchamber to Catherine of Braganza, a post that the duchess of Cleveland had recently vacated. There is no evidence that Nell actually took up this role but she could at least consider herself a lady, even if not formally titled as one.

  Nell’s past could not entirely be forgotten, especially when her alcoholic mother died, in July 1679. One newspaper of the time reported that she had been sitting by the riverside at her home in Chelsea, fell into the water and was drowned. Other reports, that she was drunk on brandy and fell into a ditch, were more explicit, if not necessarily accurate. True to character, Nell refused to be embarrassed by the manner of her mother’s demise. With Buckingham’s help, she organized a splendid funeral, riding in her coach with her sister, Rose, through the streets of London from Covent Garden to St Martin-in-the-Fields, where her mother was to be interred, and receiving the support of crowds of well-wishers along the way.

  For in this, Nell was very different from Charles II’s other mistresses. She was a popular figure, liked for her humble origins, her successful stage career, her generosity and ability to flout convention even after wealth and fame had come her way. And the most famous saying attributed to her, ‘Pray be silent, good people, I am the Protestant whore,’ when her coach was surrounded by a hostile crowd in Oxford, in 1681, shows how successfully she had positioned herself as quintessentially English and a good Protestant at a time of virulent anti-Catholicism. Though the saying may itself be apocryphal, Nell was being referred to in satires at this time as ‘the Protestant whore’. Her sexual morality mattered much less than her religion to a country enflamed in 1678 by the fantasy woven by the disreputable ex-navy chaplain and sometime Catholic convert, Titus Oates.

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  THE POPISH PLOT, as it was known, was based on a series of revelations by a man with a very murky past, who touched on a raw nerve in both the political class and the general public. No one who really knew anything about Oates’s background would have seriously credited a word he said. He was unprepossessing in appearance and character. The historian Tim Harris has written that, ‘his pastimes included lying, cheating, blasphemy and sod-omizing young boys.’8 Oates, the son of a Baptist preacher, was a twenty-nine-year-old who had never settled at anything. He left Cambridge without a degree, was dismissed from Anglican orders and a brief stint as a navy chaplain, before converting to Catholicism. His new religious allegiance took him to the English College at Valladolid in Spain but he had not completed his studies there before he was asked to leave. Not one to be daunted, Oates decided to make mileage out of his time in Spain by awarding himself an imaginary doctorate from the university at Salamanca. In June 1678, he was still trying to join the Jesuits at the college at St Omer in France, but the new English head of the seminary there kicked him out, something that must have been becoming wearyingly familiar to Oates by then. His thoroughly unpleasant character and vile temper counted against him at every turn and successive rejections merely added to his sense of resentment.

  Yet, almost as soon as he returned to England, penniless and desperate, he was able to add to this catalogue of deceits and dishonour by renewing his acquaintance with an older, vehemently anti-Catholic former clergyman, Dr Israel Tonge. As Tonge lent an eager ear, encouraging Oates to write down his revelations, the younger man began to turn his desire for vengeance against Catholics in general, and Jesuits in particular, into a plausible story of Catholic designs against the throne and British liberties. Charles II was to be murdered and there would be rebellions in Ireland and Scotland. The Jesuits, Oates claimed, had recently held a secret meeting in London, in April 1678, at which he himself had been present and where treasonable designs were discussed. His web of fabrications and half-truths stunned an already skittish nation and played into the hands of the king’s opponents, notably the earl of Shaftesbury, who saw in them a means of allowing Parliament to thwart any attempts by the Crown to introduce a French-style absolutist government, to force the king to divorce Catherine of Braganza and to prevent Charles being succeeded by his brother, the duke of York, who had acknowledged his conversion to Catholicism five years earlier.

  Oates, who had never had any influence or credibility before the summer of 1678, now discovered that his imagination, coupled with a powerful sense of grievance, had brought him a welcome pension of £20 per month and lodgings at Whitehall. The lifelong outsider had become a national hero. People listened to him and his confidence grew. Soon he was accusing the duchess of York’s former secretary, Edward Coleman, a prominent Catholic who wanted to return Britain to the old religion, of treasonable correspondence with Louis XIV’s confessor. For good measure, he threw in accusations against the queen’s physician, Sir George Wakeman, and Catherine of Braganza herself, claiming that Wakeman had been offered £10,000 to poison the king’s medicine and that Catherine had supported this attempt on her husband’s life.

  The king was incensed by the accusations levelled at his innocent, long-suffering wife, who had been living quietly at Somerset House as public sentiment against her grew. Fearing for her safety, and to demonstrate his commitment to her, he suggested that she move back to her apartments in Whitehall. He cross-examined Oates himself, noting how the man got into difficulties describing an allegedly overheard conversation in which the queen had sanctioned poisoning her husband. By this time, Oates had to contend with a rival informant, William Bedloe, who threatened to steal some of his thunder. Combining their stories, the onslaught on Catherine continued and, at the bar of the House of Commons, both accused her of high treason. The Commons’ response in these fevered times was not to defend the queen but to demand that she and her household be removed from Whitehall. In her distress, Catherine wrote to her brother, Dom Pedro, in Portugal, asking for advice and assistance. There was fury in Lisbon, where the ministry insisted that those who spoke such lies against Catherine should be severely punished. In fact, Dom Pedro did very little to help Catherine and the affair led to a misunderstanding which could have caused a serious rift between the siblings. The marquis de Arouches, Portuguese ambassador to The Hague, had been sent across to London to help Catherine but the two had not got on and Arouches mischievously reported to Dom Pedro that his sister was displeased with him. Catherine wrote in sorrow to her brother about her husband’s support at this distressing development: ‘The king will speak on my behalf, and as many as know me, who know that there is no one on earth whom I value more highly than the Prince of Portugal, my brother.’ She went on to lament that her enemies were ‘practising to take away my life with pure grief.’9 Assailed in London, doubted in Lisbon, Catherine was at least confident, at last, that Charles II would not desert her. She rode out the s
torm.

  Titus Oates was responsible, in his perjury and venom, for the execution of more than thirty men whom he had falsely accused. Charles II and the duke of York immediately saw right through him but were unable to persuade other members of the Privy Council and an antagonistic House of Commons to their way of thinking. He was tried for perjury before Judge Jeffries at the beginning of the reign of James II, in 1685, and committed to the King’s Bench Prison. After James II fled England, three years later, Oates was released. He married, probably more for her money than love, Rebecca Weld, the daughter of a wealthy London draper and, having soon run through her fortune, died in obscurity in 1705, bringing to an end a career of opportunism and lies that is one of the most unusual in British history.

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  GIVEN THIS POISONOUS climate, it is hardly surprising that Nell Gwyn was happy to be viewed as the Protestant whore. She spent some of her time with the king at Windsor and Newmarket during the Popish Plot and its aftermath. Charles still loved horse racing and his visits to Newmarket were one of the great pleasures of his life. But it was at Windsor, where Nell had joined him, that he fell seriously ill in the summer of 1679 with a high fever and, for a while, it was believed he would die. As she had no official status, Nell was not allowed to see him and had to be content with messages conveyed to and fro by her elder son, Lord Burford. Though her life was quieter and she herself was no longer in the bloom that had characterized her as a teenage actress – as unkind commentators were eager to point out – she remained close to Buckingham and also supported the duke of Monmouth. The Popish Plot had led to a deeper crisis about the succession and Nell became involved when Monmouth returned, without permission, from The Hague, to great popular acclaim but the continued displeasure of his father. She offered him a safe haven in her home in Pall Mall and pleaded with the king to forgive his son. Charles would not give way. After acting as hostess to Monmouth for several months, during which time he was a demanding and difficult guest, Nell was obliged to ask him to leave. Her own health was no longer good and the death of James, her younger son, at the age of eight, in Paris, presumably added to her distress, though she had never made any effort to go over to France to see him and it is not clear why he was being schooled there while his brother remained in England. The location of the child’s grave is not known.