PALACE OF SIN
Forget Christine Keeler. The stately home where she met Profumo has seen far worse sex scandals across the centuries
As one of the most lusted-after women at the court of King Charles II, Anna Maria Talbot was known for her thick chestnut tresses, two small locks of which she liked to curl seductively on the alabaster nape of her neck. Along with her full red lips, these ‘heartbreakers’, as such artfully arranged wisps were known, made her so alluring that many men duelled for her affections — and a duel, it is said, was what drew her to the banks of the River Thames near Putney, in south-West London, one freezing January morning in 1668.
on that occasion there was no sign of her distinctive ringlets because, i t was whispered, she had disguised herself as a pageboy so she could relish seeing her lover, the Duke of Buckingham, engaged in mortal combat with her husband, the earl of shrewsbury.
As a swordsman, the earl was no match for the handsome and athletic duke, dying of his wounds a few days later.
This c e mented Anna Maria’s reputation as one of the wickedest women of the era, as did rumours that she derived a macabre thrill from persuading the Duke to wear her dead husband’s bloodied shirt whenever they were in bed together.
Whatever the truth of such stories, there is no doubt that she exerted an extraordinary hold over her married lover. Indeed, his desire for a love nest in which they could be alone together led him to build Cliveden, one of england’s grandest stately homes, on the Thames near Windsor.
Three centuries later it would become notorious as the place where secretary of state for War John Profumo first frolicked with 19-year- old Christine Keeler, who was also consorting with a handsome Russian spy.
The resulting furore made Cliveden synonymous with scandal for an entire generation. But the Profumo affair of the sixties was far from the first time that it has been associated with racy goings-on, as Anna Maria’s story illustrates.
Her life is recounted, along with those of Cliveden’s other colourful mistresses, in a new book by historian nat al i e Livingstone, whos e billionaire husband Ian acquired the house in 2012.
Today, the grounds of Cliveden are owned by the national Trust and the house is run as a five- star hotel. But portraits of its fo r mer chatelaines still adorn its walls — none more commandingly than that of Anna Maria.
Her powerful attraction was such that she was seen as a threat even by nell Gwyn, the beguiling former orange- seller and actress who had established herself as Charles II’s long-term mistress.
once, nell denied Anna Maria access to a court function at which the king was present, declaring that ‘one whore at a time is enough for His Majesty’.
Anna Mari a’ s ch a r ms wer e apparent from an early age. The daughter of the earl of Cardigan, she was only 16 when, in 1658, her family arranged her marriage to the earl of shrewsbury.
The earl had a f ortune much greater than theirs but was almost 20 years her senior and proved no match for his pleasure- seeking wife, whose serial infidelity eventually drove him to that deadly duel with the Duke of Buckingham.
Having dispatched shrewsbury, Buckingham caused outrage by inviting the newly widowed Anna Maria to live with him and his wife Mary at their Westminster mansion while the house at Cliveden was being built.
The devoted Mary appears to have put up with this uncomfortable arrangement, and Anna Maria soon revelled in her role as Buckingham’s live-in mistress, aping the fashionable Continental practice of beginning each day with a ‘ levee’ (French for ‘rising’).
This involved inviting a stream of early-morning guests to gossip with her in her dressing room while she was still in her negligee.
To ensure she always looked her best during these supposedly informal sessions, she underwent a timeconsuming nightly beauty routine which included moisturising her face with boiled puppy fat and wearing
In bed, the Duke wore her dead husband’s shirt
gloves made of greased chicken skin to keep her hands smooth. The couple’s plans for Cliveden included a magnificent boudoir in which Anna Maria could continue to hold court at such levees. But, in fact, she would never get to live there, thanks to the family of her dead husband. In 1674, they petitioned the House of Lords in protest at the shame being brought upon them by her cohabitation with the Duke and his wife. Soon afterwards, in a move unthinkable today, the Lords decreed that Buckingham and Anna Maria should be forced to separate. While she went on to marry an army captain, Buckingham’s unfortunate cape Mary became the first chatelaine Cliveden, the house built for the wife rival whose picture occupied pride of place in its great hall and stared down on her every day. Eventually, it would be joined by a painting of another, far less beautiful woman. Elizabeth Villiers had a severe cast in one eye and was given the cruel nickname ‘Squinting Betty’, but she came to preside over Cliveden thanks to her rather unlikely success as a royal whore.
Born in 1657, she was the treacherous childhood friend of Charles II’s niece, the future Queen Mary II.
In 1677, 15-year-old Mary had been married off to Prince William of Orange, an unprepossessing member of the Dutch royal family who was twice her age and had a long, crooked nose and short legs.
When the newlyweds moved to the Netherlands, Mary invited Elizabeth to accompany her as a j unior lady-in-waiting.
This arrangement worked well for the next eight years, but then Mary heard rumours that her husband was having an extramarital dalliance with Eli z abeth, who, al t hough f ar from conventionally attractive, was very bright and had become his closest confidante.
Mary’s suspicions were confirmed one evening when she pretended to go to bed but hid near the stairs that led to Elizabeth’s apartment. At two o’clock in the morning she caught her husband emerging from within and furiously ordered Elizabeth to return to England.
Eventually, she forgave her friend, but more betrayal was to come when William and Mary were crowned joint rulers of England in 1689.
When they moved to London to take up their thrones, the new King re-ignited his affair with Elizabeth. This continued until 1694 when Mary caught smallpox. Her final words to her husband before she died were a plea for him to break off all contact with his paramour.
He did so — but not before bestowing on Elizabeth gifts of money and land which made her one of the wealthiest women in the country.
In 1695, William arranged for her to marry impoverished Scottish aristocrat George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney. It was a straight trade: he needed money and she craved the respectability a title would bring.
In 1696, the couple bought Cliveden, the Duke of Buckingham being long dead and his widow Mary finding it too costly to maintain.
Ensconced in her magnificent new home, ‘Squinting Betty’ had been given a fresh start in life — but some in aristocratic circles could never forget how she came by her fortune and ridiculed her to the last.
By the time she reached her 70s she had grown fatter, and at the coronation of King George II in 1727 was described by the writer Lady Mary Wortley as ‘ a mixture of fat and wrinkles’ with ‘a considerable pair of bubbys a good deal withered’.
Withered ‘bubbys’ or not, Elizabeth had by then turned Cliveden into an informal political salon for some of the leading figures of the day.
They included George II’s eldest son Frederick, Prince of Wales, who first visited Cliveden in 1729 and later took it on as his summer residence, along with his pretty and very longsuffering wife Augusta.
Shortly before their wedding in 1736, the 18-year-old German princess had been advised by her future mother-inlaw, Queen Caroline, that her wedded life would be all the happier if she could learn to tolerate Frederick’s notorious philandering.
Augusta took this advice to heart. Marriage certainly did not end her husband’s many affairs, or his numerous visits to whorehouses, but she learnt to put up with it all, even agreeing t hat t he catering at Cliveden should be supervised by the brother of one of Frederick’s longest-standing mistresses.
She and Frederick enjoyed many happy summers at Cliveden, playing rounders and cricket in its gardens with their children, among them the future George III, who was to become famous as the ‘Mad King’.
He came to power only because of the premature death of Frederick, who succumbed to a blood clot in his lungs in 1751.
Two weeks after his funeral, Augusta moved out of Cliveden and it slowly fell into dilapidation before being rescued by Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, who was Queen Victoria’s closest friend.
It was Victoria who raised the al arm when a bl aze engulfed Cliveden shortly after Harriet and her husband bought it in 1849. Spotting the flames from Windsor Castle, she dispatched the royal fire engines but unfortunately they arrived too late and much of the original house was lost.
After it had been rebuilt, the Queen became a frequent guest, on one occasion i nviting herself f or a ten- day stay, along with her entourage of 90 people.
The house continued to welcome the rich and famous for many decades after Harriet’s death in 1868. From 1906 onwards it was the family home of Nancy Astor, Britain’s first woman MP, and her thousands of guests over the years ranged from Rudyard Kipling to Gandhi, and from Winston Churchill to Charlie Chaplin.
Despite being an enthusiastic hostess, Nancy Astor steadfastly refused to have a swimming pool built at Cliveden.
‘Disgustin’ — I don’t trust people in pools,’ she cautioned — and history might have been different had her son Bill heeded her advice.
For it was by the swimming pool he installed that, on a hot July evening in 1961, John Profumo first met Christine Keeler.
The Mistresses Of Cliveden: Three Centuries Of Scandal, Power And Intrigue In An english Stately home, by Natalie Livingstone, is published by hutchinson at £25.
‘One whore at a time is enough for His Majesty’