Mistresses: Sex and Scandal in the Court of Charles II, by Linda Porter
Mistresses: Sex and Scandal in the Court of Charles II By Linda Porter Picador £20
In 1676, Honoré Courtin, the French Ambassador in London, excused his involvement in the raucous social life of the court. He wrote to his boss, Louvois, ‘One must be homme de plaisir in England or not come at all.’
In contrast to what he called the ‘ affectation de gravité’ in France, the tone of the English court rings out in the words that greeted the aged Duchess Mazarin when she met two other mistresses of Charles II: ‘Fancy we three whores meeting like this!’
The Earl of Rochester wrote of Charles II, in a satire that led to his banishment from court, ‘Restless he rolls from whore to whore,/a merry monarch, scandalous and poor,’ before describing the efforts required to rouse the jaded king.
Linda Porter provides an expert and entertaining guide to this lost world by relating the lives of the most prominent and persistent of the king’s lovers.
The first significant mistress, and the only one to create a dynastic strain as mother of the Duke of Monmouth, was Lucy Walter, a scion of Welsh gentry. The exiled prince encountered her at the court of his sister Mary at the Hague in 1648. She had been the mistress of an officer in his retinue and passed smoothly into the royal embrace. Both were 18.
The brevity of her tenure – a matter of nights, according to Porter – was a reflection of the degree to which the young prince, as a guest of foreign powers, was not his own master.
Charles acknowledged the child, and Lucy received a pension, but her behaviour became an embarrassment. She drew attention to herself,
quarrelled with other lovers, reacted with very public fury at an attempt to kidnap her son, and even tried to return to Republican England – only to be ejected after a spell in the Tower. Just before she died in Paris in 1658, royal servants succeeded in extracting the nine-year-old boy. Though healthy and intelligent, he couldn’t read or count beyond 20.
Charles’s involvement with Barbara Palmer followed the Restoration. The wife of a conscientious Oxfordshire gentleman, Roger Palmer, she had long been the mistress of the Earl of Chesterfield, who was close to the king. She became pregnant by the king almost immediately. This was only the beginning: physically robust, she had a string of further children without relinquishing her hold.
According to Gilbert Burnet, who described her as ‘of great beauty, but most enormously vicious and ravenous’, the King, while in her thrall, was ‘not master of himself nor capable of minding business’. Roger Palmer found himself raised to the Irish peerage as the Earl of Castlemaine, and Barbara later became Duchess of Cleveland in her own right. Brazen in her acquisitiveness and sexuality alike, she enjoyed upstaging the childless queen, Catherine of Braganza, and excited the court wits to pinnacles of obscenity.
Nell Gwyn has lingered longest in popular memory. As ‘the Protestant whore’, she sparred with her more aristocratic rivals and showed a sharp wit.
In 1660, Charles had overseen the re-establishment of London theatres and introduction of female players. Nell, who rose from orange-seller to leading actress, received rewards on a modest scale: jewels, a pension and a house on Pall Mall in which she entertained the king and his friends. Her eldest son was created Earl of Burford. ‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ Charles is supposed to have told his brother from his deathbed.
Louise de Kéroualle, later Duchess of Portsmouth, had been a maid of honour to Charles’s sister, Henriette d’angleterre, before crossing the Channel to serve Catherine of Braganza in 1670. Although half Charles’s age, she came nearest to being maîtresse-en-titre. She kept close to the King, who found her company relaxing, and her lavishly decorated apartments in Whitehall became a court within a court.
Some thought Louise baby-faced and, being French and Catholic, she was not popular. But Charles, who called her ‘Fubs’ – an allusion to her girth – named a yacht after her and showered her and her children with pensions and titles.
The woman whom Porter calls Charles’s last mistress, Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, niece to the cardinal, was famous in her own right as an adventuress. Although her connection with the ageing king was fleeting and remains hard to substantiate, she deserves a book of her own.