by Linda Porter
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EVELYN THOUGHT LOUISE an unhappy creature, a fallen woman whose life would be ruined by this apparently public loss of her virginity to a sexually incontinent man old enough to be her father. Louise had other ideas. She was almost immediately pregnant but the restrictions this put on her availability allowed her to demonstrate the other aspects of her personality that had attracted Charles in the first place. Her role was to be calm, charming, always ready to listen, to provide a pleasing, safe haven where the king could relax. She quickly honed social skills, some of which were no doubt innate and others learned in the household of Charles’s lost sister. Keenly aware that she could enhance her position by making herself useful to the right people in government, Louise exhibited a talent for what today would be known as networking. There was no point in being ashamed of who she was and what she had become. Now was the time to enjoy it and take advantage of the opportunities her new status offered.
Louise’s importance was soon underlined by her new domestic arrangements. She was given apartments in Whitehall and did not leave them during the king’s lifetime. Unlike his other mistresses, Louise does not seem to have demanded a large house of her own in London or in the country. Her place was at Charles’s side and she could make him feel more secure in her devotion by always being there. Before July 1672, when her son, Charles (later duke of Richmond) was born, she was established in lodgings at the end of the Matted Gallery in Whitehall. She soon set about enlarging and extending her domain, which eventually occupied twenty-four rooms and sixteen garrets. The apartments were considered to be far more luxurious than the queen’s but this may reflect a difference in style rather than substance, since Catherine of Braganza had, as noted earlier, brought many fine things with her to England. There was also a pejorative aspect to the descriptions of Louise’s surroundings and belongings, emphasizing that she was a spendthrift with pretensions above her station – she was, after all, merely the plaything of a dissolute king to her many critics. Even the sedan chair she ordered was said to be ‘the famousest chair that . . . ever was seen, beyond the king’s or queen’s by far.’8 Evelyn’s personal attacks on Louise never faltered. As late as 1683, when she was at the height of her influence, his disapproval was more marked than ever. In October of that year, he was present at Louise’s levée, the formal rising and robing of royalty that she had copied from the court of Louis XIV, proving that she and her lover considered her to be a queen in all but name:
Following his majesty this morning through the Gallery, I went (with the few who attended him) into the duchess of Portsmouth’s dressing room, within her bedchamber, where she was in her morning loose garment, her maids combing her, newly out of bed: his majesty and the gallants standing about her: but that which engaged my curiosity, was the rich and splendid furniture of this woman’s apartment, now twice or thrice pulled down and rebuilt to satisfy her prodigal and expensive pleasures . . . Here I saw the new fabric of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings; beyond anything I had ever beheld: some pieces had Versailles, St Germain and other palaces of the French king with huntings, figures and landscapes, exotic fowl and all to the life rarely done: then for Japanese cabinets, screens, pendulum clocks, huge vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, brasiers etc; they were all of massive silver and without number, besides of his majesty’s best paintings. Surfeiting of this . . . [I] went contentedly home to my poor but quiet villa. Lord, what contentment can there be in the riches and splendour of this world, purchased with vice and dishonour.9
A year after her son’s birth, Charles II created Louise Baroness Petersfield, countess of Fareham and duchess of Portsmouth, establishing her titles in the county of Hampshire, with which she had no connection and seldom visited. In 1674, she was able to arrange a marriage for her younger sister, Henriette Mauricette de Kéroualle, with Philip Herbert, the seventh earl of Pembroke. The Herberts had been courtiers since early Tudor days, though the seventh earl’s grandfather had been a supporter of Parliament during the Civil Wars and was, for a while, the guardian of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry, the two younger children of Charles I, who were left behind in London when their parents fled the capital in 1642. The marriage was a sign of Louise’s influence and allowed her sister, at least, to acquire the respectability that would always elude the new duchess herself.
Louise did not like confrontation and preferred to stay out of the queen’s way. She invented her own milieu and never felt the need to heighten her visibility by prominent participation in court events. In this, she was very much the antithesis of Barbara Palmer. Catherine was accustomed to her husband using her household as a recruiting ground for sexual partners, and though she had accepted that he would never change, she still disliked the new mistress intensely. Much of her determination to forge a separate identity and pointedly eschew all things French was a riposte to the king’s latest infatuation. As the years went by, she was even more hurt by the fact that this little maid of honour was not a temporary distraction but the recipient of a love that he could never feel for her.
Catherine of Braganza was not the kind of woman to take pleasure in another’s misfortunes, and though Charles never gave a fig for her feelings, at least he spared her one ‘gift’ that would cause Louise considerable suffering. In 1674, the king contracted a sexually transmitted disease (sometimes described as syphilis, though we cannot be sure exactly what it was) with which he proceeded to infect the duchess of Portsmouth. Always a dabbler in matters scientific, Charles treated himself with mercury and was, at least initially, only slightly discommoded by the effects of years of careless indulgence, though the cure he used may have weakened his system over time. Louise was not so lucky. She became very ill and was plagued thereafter by recurring bouts of ill health. She and Charles had no more children and it is not clear how long the sexual side of their relationship lasted. For her, this would have been no great loss. In her own eyes, she had achieved a great deal. Now she needed to ensure that she held on to it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mrs Carwell
‘I should do myself wrong if I told you that I love you better than all the world besides, for that were making a comparison where ’tis impossible to express the true passion and kindness I have for my dearest, dearest fubs’
Charles II to Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth
LOUISE SWIFTLY ATTAINED a status akin to that of a queen consort. Charles II adored her, finding comfort in her apparent pliability, her desire to please, her French good taste and even her increasing girth. ‘Fubs’ was an old English word for someone who was plump and the king used it as a term of endearment. He underlined his devotion by naming a new royal yacht The Fubs. If Louise was less than flattered by this very public reference to her expanding figure, she knew better than to protest. She had what amounted to her own court in Whitehall. English politicians scuttled to find favour while the French ambassadors smiled in satisfaction at the rising power of one of their countrywomen. Charles II’s financial generosity to Louise made her wealthy, though it was not until the autumn of 1676, five years after her arrival in England, that she was given a regular pension, amounting to £8,600 a year. This sum was later increased and, by the end of the reign, her overall pension and additional payments came to £20,000 per annum, or £59 million today. This is an astonishing figure given the permanent difficulties in raising money for the Crown that the king faced. And while it gave Louise security and a great deal of perceived influence, it also made her a target for sustained and vicious criticism. The English people detested her. Their hatred and scorn were made public in satire and scurrilous verse, in mock dialogues with Nell Gwyn and in accusations that the baby-faced Bretonne was nothing more than a very expensive French spy. They insulted her pride by anglicizing her surname. To her many detractors, in raucous hostelries and the coffee houses Charles II would eventually ban as hotbeds of sedition, she wa
s always ‘Mrs Carwell’.
Piqued by this torrent of vituperation, Louise strove mightily to be accepted. She reached an early accommodation with her conscience about her role. Nell Gwyn may have been content with the knowledge that she was a royal whore but Louise was far too precious about her status to accept such an appellation. We do not need to accept the ridiculous story that she is alleged to have said, in pantomime English, ‘Me no bad woman. If me thought me was one bad woman, me would cut my own throat,’ to understand the aggravation caused by lines pinned to the door of her apartments which read, ‘Within this place a bed’s appointed for a French bitch and God’s anointed.’1 At a court full of jealous, preening ladies, the duchess of Portsmouth had more to contend with than a clever comic actress’s scathing wit. Two noblewomen, in particular, frowned on Louise de Kéroualle. Elizabeth, duchess of Ormond, the wife of the leading Irish aristocrat and one of the key supporters of Charles II during his exile in the 1650s, was the most implacable of these ladies. The duchess was now over sixty years old and had consistently made her disapproval of the king’s mistresses known. She had pointedly never visited Lady Castlemaine, to Barbara’s great annoyance, and when Louise tried to call on this elderly guardian of court morals, she was permitted an interview, though none of the duchess’s female relations were allowed to be present.
More dramatic was a confrontation between Louise and Mary, marchioness of Worcester, which took place in Tunbridge Wells in the summer of 1674. This went beyond personal slights in private to a very public and, according to one source, physical altercation. The dispute was over rooms that Lady Worcester had rented from under Louise’s nose. The duchess of Portsmouth, pulling rank, told the marchioness that she should give way. By now Louise was accustomed to getting what she wanted but she had met her match in Mary. ‘The marchioness told her she had better blood in her veins than e’er a French bitch in the world and that the English nobility would not be affronted by her, calling her tall bitch. There might you have seen their towers [headdresses] and hair flying about the room, as the miserable spoils of so fierce an encounter. The Marchioness beat her upon the face, got her down and kicked her, and finally forced her out of doors.’ Her husband had stood by during this fight and threatened anyone who tried to part the struggling women. Lady Worcester, emerging victorious, defiantly ‘bid the said Portsmouth go to Windsor and tell the King what she had said and done.’2 The incident does not seem to have done the Worcesters any harm. The marquis was later created first duke of Beaufort and his wife is remembered as a keen gardener and botanist, though a domestic tyrant to her servants.
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AMBITIOUS POLITICIANS VIEWED the duchess of Portsmouth very differently, though it took some time for her to establish her credit with them. By the mid-1670s, they accepted that she was a conduit to Charles II and made sure that they frequented her apartments, where they could enjoy exquisite soirées, tasteful musical entertainment and fine dining while socializing with the king in a relaxed atmosphere. The true extent of Louise’s political influence on her royal lover may well have been considerably less than his ministers imagined, but that did not matter. Her importance lay in the fact that they believed her to have his ear. Certainly, Louise saw herself as a political player, entering the fray with a confidence that was far from justified, given her unfamiliarity with English politics. The attentions of Charles II’s ministers flattered her sense of self-importance and buoyed up her confidence through bouts of recurring illness and Charles’s dalliances with other women. She wanted these men who sought high office to understand that she had her own kind of power. There is no way of knowing whether Louise generally initiated discussions with the king about appointments, or if he ever directly sought her views on such matters, but there was a widespread belief that the duchess of Portsmouth was such an indispensable part of his life that the best route to advancement was to gain her goodwill.
One politician who soon discovered that Louise de Kéroualle’s support could be fickle was the man who is credited with having pushed her into Charles II’s bed, Arlington himself. She dropped the earl in 1674, when he was the chief victim of a concerted campaign against the king’s ministers, prompted by England’s failure in the third Anglo-Dutch War. Charles II never seemed to be overly concerned by the abject (and very expensive) foreign-policy mistakes made during his reign, but blood was up in the House of Commons and they wanted a scapegoat. In mid-January 1674, Arlington was impeached after Buckingham laid the blame for the regime’s policies squarely at his door. He defended himself successfully in what was acknowledged to be a brilliant piece of oratory, something for which he was not known, but his period in high political office was over. He chose to leave government for the post of lord chamberlain in the king’s household, a role which still allowed him considerable influence as well as the opportunity to develop the royal image of power and magnificence along the lines of the French monarchy. He remained close to Charles II and retained the king’s friendship but Louise no longer saw him as a useful ally. Her failure to realize the extent of Arlington’s power in his new role, or how it might be used to the advantage of the French, is an indication of the brittle nature of her political understanding. Instead, Louise chose to bestow her friendship on the coming man, Thomas Osborne, the recently created earl of Danby.
Like Arlington, Danby is a name largely forgotten to English history, though he played a significant part in the politics of four reigns. He was a hard-headed Yorkshireman who had served a long apprenticeship in local politics as a client of the duke of Buckingham. Proud and ambitious, he had entered the national arena as member of Parliament for York in 1665. He soon became aware that the duke’s capacity to stir up trouble was greater than his reliability as a patron and that it would be prudent to develop other links, as well as ensuring that he had areas of his own expertise to offer. Accordingly, he attached himself to the duke of York and the Navy Office, where he learned a great deal about foreign policy, as well as demonstrating a talent for accounting and financial management in the role of joint treasurer to the navy. By 1673, he was in the important government post of Lord Treasurer for the country as a whole and had to make some hard decisions about national finances based on his understanding of the damage caused by the Dutch Wars. A convinced Protestant, he was committed to steadying and improving the country’s badly damaged finances and weaning Charles II away from his support of the French. Danby was concerned that the king’s own inclinations put him in danger of losing the support of his subjects, at least as these were represented in the House of Commons. He wrote:
Nothing is more necessary than to let the world see he [Charles II] will reward and punish and that no longer time must be lost therein, for that people begin already to think he will do neither. Nothing can spoil his affairs at home but unsteadiness of resolution in those steps he has begun and want of vigour to discountenance all such as pretend to others . . . Till he can fall into the humour of the people [the king] can never be great nor rich and while differences continue prerogative must suffer, unless he can live without Parliament.
And he went on to note that, ‘the condition of his revenue will not permit that.’3 This advice, some of the soundest Charles II ever received, had uncomfortable overtones of the difficulties that had beset the king’s father, Charles I, before the Civil Wars.
Given Danby’s support of the Church of England, which he saw as a vital ally in achieving his aims, and his antipathy to the French, it is, on the face of it, somewhat extraordinary that Louise should have shown any interest in working with him. Whatever their personal dissimilarities – Danby, as a faithful, loving husband and devoted father to a large family, must have found more than a little to dislike in the king’s simpering French Catholic mistress – they managed to forge a relationship of mutual benefit. There was little real friendship in it, as time would tell, but much of Louise’s attitude towards someone that she recognized was set to become a powerful politician was based on her need for
money. Despite his concern for the king’s finances, Danby did not question Louise’s increasingly generous pensions.
They also cooperated in a dispute over the government of Ireland when an attempt was made to remove the earl of Essex as Charles II’s lord lieutenant there. Essex, the brother of the belligerent marchioness of Worcester, was a conscientious and moderate man, who found, as many had before him, that trying to govern Ireland was a thankless task. His attempts to improve the rotten state of Irish finances brought him into conflict with leading Irish politicians, who feared Essex would undo the lucrative practice of tax farming that made a few of them very rich. Among those who benefited from Irish monetary grants was Louise herself, so her support of Essex was far from altruistic. Essex realized that the support of someone like the duchess of Portsmouth was a double-edged sword, writing to his secretary, William Harbord, who had remained in England to protect his employer’s interests:
For my own part I cannot desire the friendship of any of that sort. To keep fair with them and all the world I shall be glad to do but to make any such friends so as to be useful, or a support to me, will necessarily oblige me to be assistant to them in finding out money . . . and if once I should begin there would be no end to it . . . as for what you write concerning the duchess of Portsmouth . . . I conceive the only use to be made [of her] is to learn a little of what is doing, but by no means will I fix my reliance upon little people.4
