by Linda Porter
*
CHARLES II HAD survived serious illness in 1678 but there was always going to be a price to pay for his overindulgence in sex, food and wine. His supporters gave him the nickname of ‘Old Rowley’ after one of his favourite stallions but even the most lively of horses cannot run forever. The king was not quite a glutton but he liked his food and was particularly fond of meat and game. He found the inability of his nephew, William of Orange, to hold his drink amusing, partly because he could consume large quantities of wine himself with little apparent ill effect. Yet increasingly gout troubled him and difficulties with walking reduced the mobility of a man who had always enjoyed walks in St James’s Park with his spaniels. To keep syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases at bay, he had self-dosed with mercury, unaware of its pernicious long-term effects on his constitution. He was still a tall and imposing figure but anyone who examined his face closely could not fail to remark the ravages of time. It is evident in some of his later portraits.
Still, his final illness came suddenly and shocked those closest to him. The attendants who always slept in the king’s bedchamber were aware of his restlessness on the night of 1–2 February but they and the suite of servants who came to dress him in the morning were unprepared for his ghastly pallor and apparent loss of speech. He looked gravely ill and when he collapsed in convulsions while being prepared for his shave, their fears were confirmed. Contemporaries described him as having had an apoplectic fit, but though this sounds like the effects of a stroke, modern interpretations of his symptoms incline towards severe kidney failure and its associated effects on his system as a whole.
Charles II’s physical bravery had never been in doubt and he certainly needed every ounce of it in the last, tortured days of his life. It is ironic that, unless they died suddenly, royal personages were subject to a medical cruelty in their final hours from which the majority of their ordinary subjects were mercifully spared. The king was subjected to the full panoply of medical barbarism – of bleeding, enemas, quack (and often poisonous) lotions and herbal remedies, as well as the gruesome habit of ‘cupping’ with scalding plasters – that was at the disposal of his increasingly desperate doctors. It says much for Charles’s fortitude that he withstood all this without complaint and even rallied briefly. It took him four days to die.
In such circumstances, protocol was strictly observed. Louise de Kéroualle, whose ascendancy in the last years of his reign was unchallenged, could not be allowed to see him. She had to lurk in nearby rooms and corridors, suddenly aware that his death would turn her own life upside down. The queen, Catherine of Braganza, at last accorded the respect that had so long been denied her, was the only woman allowed to enter his bedchamber. Catherine had always been an emotional woman and now, as she knelt in tears, rubbing the king’s feet to try to alleviate his sufferings, she swooned. It was a far more understandable reaction than her nosebleed on inadvertently acknowledging the smugly triumphant Barbara Palmer more than twenty years earlier. Steeling herself, Catherine returned but her distress was so great that her attendants removed her. She sent a message to the king asking his forgiveness for her weakness, to which Charles II, with a long overdue display of contrition, is said to have replied, ‘Alas! Poor woman! She begs my pardon. I beg hers, with all my heart.’9 At last, on the morning of 6 February, having asked for the curtains in his chamber to be pulled back so that he could see the sunrise one last time, the king fell into a coma and expired at midday. The previous evening, in circumstances of the utmost secrecy, he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Huddlestone, the priest who was one of many Catholics who helped him during his flight after the Battle of Worcester. Perhaps more than any other consummation, it was, after all, the one he most devoutly wished.
Charles II remains the most enigmatic sovereign of the British Isles. The hardships of his early life undoubtedly left their mark, while a natural disposition to pleasure and a weakness for women speak to both the French and Scottish sides of his ancestry. The blood of Henry IV of France, his maternal grandfather, and of James IV of Scotland, a more distant predecessor on his father’s side, ran strongly in his veins. Both were inveterate womanizers. Yet they were remembered as great rulers. Charles II is immortalized in the scabrous verses of the earl of Rochester, a boon companion who came to despise him:
Restless he rolls from whore to whore
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
It is for this and for Nell Gwyn, in truth, hardly the most important of his mistresses, that Charles II is remembered today, rather than for the deep divisions in his country that the restoration of the monarchy could not heal. It was a miserable time to be a religious dissenter, whether Catholic or Protestant. Scotland suffered greatly under the iron rule of the venal duke of Lauderdale, and the legacy of the Civil Wars festered in Ireland. Britain’s international standing could hardly have been lower, the result of ill-judged wars and a fawning attempt to stay on the right side of Louis XIV. The men who served Charles, often able politicians completely forgotten today, admitted that they could not read the king at all. ‘One great objection made to him was the concealing himself and disguising his thoughts,’ wrote George Savile, marquis of Halifax, who went on to add that, ‘he lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them but he did not love them.’ The great Whig minister, Charles James Fox, would, a century later, say that Charles II was a disgrace to the history of our country. This judgement may strike the modern reader, accustomed to celebrity gossip and a relaxation in sexual mores, as harsh. Historical reputations come and go and the largely indulgent view of Charles II has proved surprisingly enduring in the popular mind. Perhaps the last word should go to Savile: ‘If he dissembled, let us remember first that he was a king and that dissimulation is a jewel of the crown.’10 No one knew that better than the amorous king.
Epilogue
PARIS, NOVEMBER 1735
Louis XV had been king of France for twenty years when the chatelaine of Aubigny left her estates to journey to Paris that autumn. The French monarch was still a young man, having succeeded to the throne when he was just five years old, on the death of his great-grandfather, the Sun King. His personal life mirrored that of Louis XIV and his more distant cousin, Charles II of England, though a predilection for very young girls as he got older was an unhealthy amusement that neither of his relatives shared. There is no evidence that he ever met the eighty-five-year-old lady who set off from the small town in the rural heart of France, though his officials were well aware of her existence. She had often complained about the dilatory payment of her pension and applied to the French Crown for monies to cover essential repairs to the roof and chapel of the chateau at Aubigny. She could not throw off the habits of her earlier, lavish lifestyle and was constantly in debt.
Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, returned to France in August 1685, having secured a generous pension for herself and her son, the duke of Richmond, from James II. Aware of her unpopularity in England, she knew as soon as Charles II was dead that she would not be able to stay, but it was typical of Louise that she did not leave until she was financially secure. This allowed her to pay off most of her major debts, though some of her servants, to whom she had been a difficult employer, were left out of pocket. Once back in France, she got into deep water with Louis XIV by unwisely indulging in tittle-tattle about the woman he had secretly married, Madame Françoise de Maintenon. Only the fortuitous intervention of her old ally, Honoré de Courtin, prevented the issue of an order banishing her from Paris and the court. After this narrow escape, Louise learned to hold her tongue. She had been absent from the French court for many years and was unfamiliar with its dangers. Her importance in England had given her an unwarranted confidence. In France, she was just a dead king’s mistress, not the de facto first lady of the land.
Though she did return to England several times, Louise was not really welcome there. In 1688, she attended her niece’s wedding and w
as still in London to witness the furore surrounding the birth of a long-awaited heir to James II. More than a quarter of a century later, she returned following the accession of George I. A new dynasty had come to Britain in the final year of Louis XIV’s reign and Louise’s sense of time passing would not have been helped by a chance meeting with two other royal mistresses, Catherine Sedley and Elizabeth Villiers, at which the irrepressible Mrs Sedley exclaimed, ‘Fancy we three whores meeting like this!’
Constant financial difficulties and an ability to make enemies confined Louise more and more to her lands in Aubigny. During the long years left to her, the duchess’s main comfort was in her extended family. Her son, the duke of Richmond, turned out to be a major disappointment; although his loyal wife defended him to her mother-in-law, he frittered away his life in gambling and drink. Still, Louise was naturally grieved by Richmond’s early death in 1723. She did, however, have an affectionate relationship with her grandson, the new duke. They exchanged frequent letters in French, and Louise’s were full of concern for his welfare and that of his duchess and children. They visited her on several occasions and she was especially fond of her great-granddaughter, Caroline.
She took great care with her own health. The frequent illnesses of the 1670s were long behind her. Louise became a surprisingly robust old lady, her looks at the age of seventy still striking enough to attract compliments from the philosopher, Voltaire. He described her as having ‘a face still noble and pleasing, that the years had never withered.’1 The journey to Paris in the autumn of 1735 was, however, her last. She died in the French capital on 14 November, unremarked on both sides of the English Channel.
Louise outlived her most irritating rival, Nell Gwyn, by nearly fifty years. Nell was the first of the women who had shared Charles II’s bed to die after the king’s passing. She only survived him by two years, felled by a stroke in her house on Pall Mall in November 1687. She was buried in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Tradition has it that the king had, on his deathbed, implored his brother, ‘Let not poor Nelly starve.’ James II did indeed pay Nell Gwyn’s debts and kept up her pension. She did not live to see him deposed, but in her will, in a characteristic gesture of generosity and tolerance, she left money for poor Catholics.
Hortense Mancini died in London in the summer of 1699. Her accounts show the excessive quantities of alcohol she was consuming. One bill alone was for hundreds of pounds on gin.2 Moderation was never in Hortense’s nature. Saint-Évremond, who tried to counsel restraint, was deeply affected by her death. She asked him to write her funeral oration and he, of course, obliged with a lengthy, literary account of the life of this woman whom he called ‘the marvel of the world’. The unbalanced and obsessive duke Mazarin, whose wife had escaped him in life, was determined to keep her body with him, now she was dead, moving her coffin around France, as he had compelled her to accompany him to his various postings when they were first married. Not until after his own death, in 1714, was Hortense finally laid to rest in the Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris, where her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, was also buried.
The colourful life of Barbara Palmer, countess of Castlemaine and duchess of Cleveland, continued with all the drama of a modern soap opera. She returned from France in 1682 but was only occasionally at court in the last three years of Charles II’s life. In 1684, she began an affair with the actor Cardell Goodman, her junior by thirteen years. It was rumoured that she had a son by him to add to her remarkable tally of illegitimate offspring, but nothing is known of the child, if it ever existed. This relationship appalled her sons and took a sinister turn when Goodman was convicted of a plot to poison the dukes of Grafton and Northumberland. Undaunted, Barbara continued to see him, and their affair may not have finally ended until Goodman was forced to go into exile in 1696, when he was exposed as a Jacobite conspirator. And still Barbara was not done with scandal.
In 1705, just four months after her husband, Roger Palmer, died, Barbara married again. Or, at least, she thought she had. It transpired that her new spouse, Robert ‘Beau’ Feilding, was nothing more than an adventurer and conman who was already married; the union was bigamous. To cap it all, Barbara’s granddaughter, Charlotte, who had taken refuge with her to escape her own marriage, began an affair with the apparently irresistible Feilding, causing further havoc in Barbara’s chaotic household on Bond Street. When the real Mrs Feilding (who had, ironically, deceived Beau into thinking that she was a rich widow) revealed all to Barbara in June 1706, the infuriated duchess of Cleveland confronted her ‘husband’. Producing a gun, he threatened to shoot her and she was obliged to call for help through an open window. The marriage was annulled the following year, after a sordid legal battle at the Old Bailey. This debacle was enough to keep even Barbara quiet for the remaining two years of her life. She died in Chiswick in the summer of 1707, leaving her grandson, the duke of Grafton, as her heir.
Queen Catherine, who had forged her own identity in England within the constraints of an unenviable position during her time as Charles II’s wife, found it far harder to go home to Portugal than she could ever have anticipated. James II tried to use her Catholicism to support him, both as king and in exile. She was more useful to him in England than back in her native land. Catherine’s brother, King Pedro, never more than lukewarm in his support, found endless excuses to delay her departure. Her discomfiture after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was considerable. William of Orange and his wife Mary, now joint monarchs of Great Britain, were Protestants with little sympathy for her plight. Mary, in particular, was cold and hostile towards the aunt who had shown her much affection when she was a girl.
It was not until 1692 that Catherine was finally given permission by her brother to make the journey home. She chose to go overland, through France, travelling at a leisurely pace. In a country that she had always regarded as inimical to her interests, she was pleasantly surprised to discover that Louis XIV’s gracious attitude towards her far exceeded the kind of consideration she might have expected. A number of her English servants, including Lady Tuke, whose furnishings had so impressed John Evelyn, accompanied her and witnessed the joyful response of the citizens of Lisbon when she was welcomed home, in January 1693.
Catherine lived quietly in Portugal for twelve years, until her brother’s increasing ill health meant that he could no longer rule. She became regent for her young nephew in 1705. Although she only held the office for a year before her death, at the age of sixty-seven, she proved a popular and able ruler, negotiating an important trade treaty with England which ensured that French influence in the Iberian peninsula, which had greatly increased when Louis XIV’s grandson became King Philip V of Spain, was balanced by the renewal of ties with Portugal’s long-standing ally. In her will, she named Philip, earl of Chesterfield, lord chamberlain of her English household, as executor for her remaining financial interests in England. Barbara Palmer’s first lover was then too infirm and gout-ridden to accept such a responsibility. He begged to decline. He did, however, wish to put on record that, in his eyes, Catherine of Braganza was ‘one of the greatest and most illustrious princesses in the world.’ Age had not diminished Chesterfield’s way with words and he was ever the ladies’ man. Yet no contemporary offered such an unqualified tribute to Charles II, the husband Catherine had loved, not wisely, but too well.
Notes
Abbreviations
BL
ODNB
TNA British Library
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The National Archives, Kew
Chapter One
1It is now a luxury hotel and wedding venue, the website of which makes no mention of its association with Lucy Walter.
2J. Clarke, The Life of James II, vol. 1, p.492, quoted in Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (1988), p. 118
Chapter Two
1Anna Keay, The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth (2016), p. 14
2For a fu
ller description of this episode, see An Historical Account of the Heroick Life and Magnanimous Actions of the Most Illustrious Protestant Prince, James, Duke of Monmouth (1683), pp. 9–12, and Keay, The Last Royal Rebel, pp. 17–19
3See here and also Chapter Fifteen passim
4Quoted in Mark R. F. Williams, The King’s Irishmen: The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 (2014), p. 220
5Thomas Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq., vol. 1, no. 684 (1742)
6Keay, The Last Royal Rebel, pp. 24–5
7An Historical Account of the Heroick Life and Magnanimous Actions of the Most Illustrious Protestant Prince, James, Duke of Monmouth, p. 9
8M. A. E. Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Interregnum, vol. 5 (1656–7), p. 4
9Quoted in A. I. Dasent, The Private Life of Charles II (1927), p. 53
10Mercurius Politicus, 10–17 July 1656, p. 318
11Clarendon State Papers, vol. 56, f.280 (Bodleian Library)
12Quoted in Keay, The Last Royal Rebel, p. 32
Chapter Three
1This first daughter born to Charles II is easily confused with the other Charlotte Fitzroy, born in 1664. She was one of the king’s six children with Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemaine, and was adored by her father.
2I have been unable to find the original source for the date of Catherine Pegge’s death and it seems to have become received wisdom by others who have written about Charles II’s mistresses. Thomas Pegge’s will can be found in TNA, ref. PROB 11/363/469.
