The kings bed, p.12
The King's Bed, page 12
The year ended with an event that would have made Clarendon’s blood boil. This was the grand New Year’s Eve ball at Whitehall Palace. From the very first dance, the assembled crowd of merrymakers was treated to a display of the unconventional nature of Charles’s family arrangements. As was customary, a line formed for the first dance. As the music began, the line advanced into the middle of the floor, surrounded by admiring lords and ladies of the court, maids of honour and young blades. Naturally, the King and Queen led the line, with the Duke of York in second place accompanied by his wife Anne who, embarrassingly, was not only a commoner but the daughter of the increasingly irritating Lord Chancellor. But the truly shocking pairing came in third place with the king’s mistress, the Countess Castlemaine, partnering Charles’s bastard son – now known as James Croft – by his early lover, Lucy Walter.
The procession formed a surreal tableau vivant, revealing how much the ruling house of England, Scotland and Ireland had changed from the court of Charles I. To those present, it was clear that the entity now inhabiting the throne of the three kingdoms was not the reincarnation of the mythic, divinely anointed king of old, but something altogether more earthy, knowing, worldly and, above all, carnal. They had wished for a semi-divine figurehead. What they got was a man. By this public display of his domestic arrangements, Charles marked his disdain for Puritanism and his desire for a new, more tolerant and broad-minded order.
* For example, from late 1661 to late 1662, the King’s income from Parliament was £1.2 million. He spent £1.5 million.
8
THE DISSOLUTE COURT
With her husband gone for good, Barbara was able to consolidate King Street as not only the home of a society lady, but an alternative court. However, the absence of a husband made Barbara more vulnerable. Without her husband’s protection and wealth, she would have to work harder to ensure her many enemies who felt there was no place for such a public whore in the life of their King did not undermine her position at court. Therefore Barbara worked hard at promoting the interests of her supporters and the attractions of her soirées. A French envoy reported that at the Countess’s house one could rely on getting a good dinner. One would probably also meet the King and hear all the hottest gossip.
At the King Street house, Barbara used all her charms to entertain those with power and influence. She was too astute not to realise that her place in society should not rest purely on her being the King’s whore. With a keen knowledge of the dynamics of high society, she saw it was important to place herself in a position where she would not be an object purely of gossip and ridicule. To that end, she set out to embrace that section of court life that could cause her reputation most damage: the court wits. These were well-bred and well-heeled young men who fancied themselves as exponents of the art of facetious humour and particularly the art of the put-down. Among them were the King’s childhood friend George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, his sybaritic friend from exile, Henry Bennet, the equally louche Sir Charles Berkeley, and Henry Killigrew, son of the theatre impresario Thomas Killigrew, who made himself a sort of unofficial court jester.
As a group, the Wits were generally of some learning, and many of them had literary ability. But they were, above all, high in humour and low in morals. They spent much of their time in debauchery and in debunking their peers, especially those they thought too serious or steeped in affairs of the state. When not cuckolding lax husbands and seducing young women, they made up bawdy and satirical rhymes and the more able among them even wrote plays. Their talents were put into playing a part, in being exemplars of wit and flair. What they were creating was life presented as artifice. In their plays, their lifestyle was presented on the stage. They rebelled against the violent and uncertain history through which they had grown up by hardening themselves against compassion and ethics. Clever conversation and heartlessness were their armour against what many of them saw as a meaningless world, although the critic and historian Vivian de Sola Pinto has suggested that in fact they lived their lives with an eye for posterity.1 They were their art.
At King Street, the Wits were given free rein to show off their talents. Their drollery was matched by their ‘smoking’ (leg-pulling) those who could not match their banter. They would smoke anyone, including the most exalted in station or in learning, even favourites of the King. One of their targets was Thomas Hobbes the philosopher, who was himself no slouch when it came to amusing conversation. Hobbes became known as ‘the Bear’ as on the occasions he came to court, the King would exclaim, ‘Here comes the bear to be baited.’2 Hobbes enjoyed the raillery of the younger men and allowed them to co-opt him as a sort of demiurge who had helped create their world. Hobbes’s view of humanity was well attuned to that of the Wits. He saw humanity as brutish, with each person out for himself or herself in a selfish scramble.3
Although the Wits’ self-image was very much one of refined tastes and exalted behaviour clothed in impeccable manners, the reality could be very different. When not at court or at King Street, the Wits spent a good deal of their time in the taverns of Covent Garden, where they felt they could give full rein to their abilities. To see why, we need only consult the anonymous authority of The Character of a Tavern, published in 1675: ‘A tavern is an Academy of Debauchery, where the Devil teaches the seven deadly sins instead of sciences, a Tipling-school, a degree above an ale house, where you may be drunk with more credit and Apology, ‘tis the Rendezvous of Gallants, the Good Fellow’s Paradise, and the Miser’s Terrour.’ Taverns were exciting places. A fight could break out, a combatant might assault another by breaking ‘a Candlestick or Bottle over his crown’ while in another corner, an habitué might repeat ‘scraps of Old Plays or some Bawdy Song, all with loud hooting and laughing’.
Within Barbara’s circle, there was sufficient wild behaviour to keep Restoration playwrights well stocked with plot lines for decades. According to the Wits’ code, any woman married to an older man was entitled to take a lover. After all, the fun of cuckolding husbands had caused laughter since Chaucer’s time and had been a staple on the London stage since the beginning of the century, when Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (1604) was performed to generous applause. Inevitably, philandering would give rise to jealousy and revenge. A notorious case involved the Earl of Carnegie, who suspected his wife of having an affair with the King’s brother, the Duke ofYork. In revenge, he plotted to pass the clap to the Duke via his wife. According to Anthony Hamilton, only the first part of the plot went to plan:
He [the Earl] went to the most infamous places, to seek for the most infamous disease, which he met with, but his revenge was only half completed; for he had gone through every remedy to get quit of his disease, his lady did but return him his present, having no more connection with the person for whom it was so industriously prepared.4
Outside this rakish circle, older and more staid rules applied, especially for women. Society was being pushed too far, too fast. According to the etiquette of the time and beyond, a woman could not be seen to pursue a man. Only the man could make the running. If a woman was seen to be making overtures it revealed an immoral and corrupt nature. This was complicated by the fact that it was understood that a woman should experience the same degree of delight in sexual pleasure as a man – indeed, sexual pleasure was thought necessary for conception to take place – but despite this, for a woman to instigate a sexual relationship was an example of ‘whorishness’.5
Barbara saw the circle of Wits as suitable allies in her exalted yet precarious station in life. She ensured the house in King Street was their headquarters.6 Here they could gather in the evenings after spending the afternoon at nearby Whitehall or in other social pursuits in the fashionable houses of the area, or perhaps head back to after attending a performance at the theatres of Covent Garden, only a short coach ride away. At the theatre, they might meet up with the King and his brother, who were both keen theatregoers, before heading back for what Hyde contemptuously called ‘a late congregation’ at the Duchess’s house which could include music, gambling and more intimate pursuits.7 Often, the Wits’ coaches would not drive away until dawn. George Villiers and his friends were not simply wastrels; they wielded influence and Villiers himself was, like his cousin Barbara, a sworn enemy of Clarendon.
Increasingly, the century’s new ideas were to be found among educated, wealthy, tolerant men, not especially interested in religion, who felt that people should be free to live as they pleased. This was not entirely a new phenomenon thrown up by the Restoration. There had even been men like it among those who had opposed Charles’s father and the monarchy.
And there were women like it, too. While women such as Barbara Palmer might choose to live as courtesans, others leading more conventional lives also felt the new tide of liberal thinking sweeping through the salons of the elite. Though barred from the universities, women were not prevented from reading about or discussing the latest thinking on philosophy, politics and the social order. The polymath Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, might have been a rare Renaissance figure among seventeenth-century women, but she was far from alone in her interests in literature and the natural sciences.* While the developments gave rise to what is today seen as the typical Restoration rake, women are often ignored in the sexual changes that were taking place, the incorrect assumption being that they were always merely pliant receptacles for the advances of philandering men. Women such as Lucy Walter, Barbara Palmer and others would give the lie to this, for they exhibited a healthy sexual desire allied to the ability to pursue their male quarry, rather than being passive creatures waiting to be chosen.
As for the men at court, there were three main types: the men of state, like Clarendon, Thomas Osborne (later the Earl of Danby) and the Earl of Southampton, who ran the machine of government; the Wits, those men of fashion known for their savoir-faire and intellectual ability to hold sustained entertaining conversation allied to the morals of an alley cat; and the fops, lesser men of fashion with little wit but who tried gamely to ape the Wits. Some could move from one group to another. There were Wits and rakes in the machinery of government, while some among the Wits, like Buckingham and Bennet, aspired to hold high office. Not all groups were solely from one social class. Among the Wits were not only men of independent means or high social status but also theatrical managers and playwrights who by dint of their abilities could join in the fun at court.
From these three groups, the King favoured men who fell into the second category. The men of state were generally far too solemn, with some notable exceptions such as Arlington and Lord Halifax, while the fops were merely the chorus line or spear-carriers in front of whom the Wits could shine. The King was dismayed by earnest men: ‘Serious men terrify him, merry and amusing ones make him laugh,’ reported the French ambassador.8 Opposite in temperament and in philosophy to the serious politicians, the Wits, or Merry Gang, had grown up and ‘lived high under Oliver’,9 but had taken no part in the political disputes that had led to the breakdown of Charles I’s rule, nor in the long hostilities which followed. By the time of the Restoration, they had developed a cynical, irreligious view of the world in which the only values were a ready wit and a studied indifference. With Charles’s view of life hardened by exile and disappointment, it is little wonder that the King and these young men should find an affinity. They were those that the Duke of Ormond had complained about to Clarendon, declaring, ‘The King spent most of his time with confident young men, who abhorred all discourse that was serious, and, in the liberty they assumed in drollery and raillery, preserved no reverence towards God or man, but laughed at all sober men, and even on religion itself.’10
The role the Wits fulfilled was that of jester or clown. They cavorted, joked and pricked the pompous in order to entertain the King. No one fulfilled this role better than Barbara’s second cousin, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. When George was just seven months old, an assassin murdered his father, the famously handsome 1st Duke, at a Portsmouth inn. George was fostered by Charles I and raised among the royal children in the royal household. He was the chief bond between the Wits, the King and Barbara.
The trouble with Buckingham was that Buckingham was trouble. Though highly intelligent, he was born into such wealth and power that his self-assurance led him to make fantastic gaffes and misjudgements. He was a rumbustious and unruly child. As young boys, Charles and George were taught mathematics by Thomas Hobbes. George thought the lectures so tedious that he masturbated during geometry lessons.11 His father, the 1st Duke, had been James I’s lover – his ‘sweet child and wife’.12 Young George inherited his father’s libidinous nature, though not his sexual orientation, nor indeed his good looks. But George grew to have style and was as congenial as his father had been handsome.
When the Commonwealth Parliament sequestered the enormous family estates, young Buckingham had left for the Continent. To support him, his advisors arranged for the family art collection to be sold in Antwerp. Luckily for Buckingham, his father had amassed one of the greatest collections ever seen. With revenues from the estates put at around £20,000 a year, he had collected a reputed nineteen paintings by Titian, seventeen by Tintoretto, two by Giorgione, thirteen by Veronese and three Leonardos, among many more. He had bought Rubens’s own collection for £10,000.13 With the cash liberated from this fabulous collection, Buckingham led a congenial life in Europe (much in contrast to the impoverished lifestyle of his boyhood friend Charles). He soaked up the more hedonistic traits of European society and with his natural propensity for pleasure, unsurprisingly grew up to be one of the greatest libertines of the Restoration. He was helped in this by having swagger, grace and wit. His contemporaries remarked on it.14 Being two years older than Charles, he had fought in the second civil war and became a cavalier hero after an episode when he held off six Roundheads with his back to a tree. Later, he fought alongside Charles in the disastrous battle at Worcester.
Buckingham was the sempiternal rake, a man who drew the line at drawing the line. Nothing was off limits for George. In 1661, he had been entrusted with the delicate task of accompanying Charles’s favourite sister, the seventeen-year-old Henrietta Anne, to Paris for her marriage to Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe, Due d’Orléans. Henrietta was the apple of her older brother’s eye. She was young, sparky and very pretty. Inevitably, Buckingham was smitten by her. Rumours flew that they had an affair. Charles, who should have known better than to trust Buckingham with such a task, indignantly recalled the unruly gallant in disgrace.
Here was the Duke’s problem in a nutshell: he was talented, he was witty, he was fun, he was a nuisance. Among his detractors was John Dryden, the future Poet Laureate. Dryden had reason to hate Buckingham, whose play The Rehearsal, first performed in 1671, satirised one of Dryden’s heroic dramas in which characters spoke in a grandiloquent manner. The Rehearsal well and truly punctured Dryden’s balloon and he later dropped his high-flown style. Years later Dryden took his revenge in a satire in which the Duke was likened to a biblical prince who was a womanising buffoon, ‘stiff in opinions, always in the wrong’.15
Among the others regularly found at Barbara’s soirées was one of Buckingham’s protégés, George Savile, later Lord Halifax, clever in government and famed for writing The Trimmer, a bible for high office and the art of compromise (a word hardly understood by any of his friends and contemporaries, who were always galloping away on their high horses). As already mentioned, there was Henry Killigrew, one of the King’s gentlemen of the bedchamber who could always be relied upon for a jolly quip, and Sir Charles Berkeley, soldier, keeper of the Privy Purse, an ardent plotter against Clarendon, and a close confidant of both Barbara and the King. According to Pepys, he not only pimped for the King but also for Barbara. Berkeley’s subsequent death in the second Anglo-Dutch war, when his head was split open by gunshot, led to a tasteless quip that the injury ‘gave the first proof that he had brains’.16
There was Baptist May, groom of the bedchamber. He became keeper of the Privy Purse after Berkeley’s death, though he had no real control over payments. He was one of Charles’s boyhood friends, always ready to divert him from matters of business, and also known to be one of his pimps. May had a truly unique relationship with the King. Not for him the sycophantic ‘Yes, you are indeed correct, Your Majesty’. May openly differed with Charles on all the burning issues of the day – he was anti-French, hated Catholicism and opposed arbitrary government – but he was great fun. Then there was Fleetwood Shepherd, agreed by everyone to be a pleasant and clever man. He enjoyed good company and a good joke and lent his support to John Milton when the Puritan got into hot water because of his republican views.
Contemporary accounts tell us who all the men were, but we hear little or nothing of the women who must have been present at least at some of the soirées at King Street. Of course, Barbara would have wished to be the central figure in her own court, and so rival beauties were not to be encouraged. Even so, in general, contemporary accounts of court life only mention women when they are referred to as someone’s daughter engaged to be married, who got married to so and so, or ran off with or was seduced by yet another so- and-so. Their absence from the drama indicates how they were viewed by their male chroniclers very much as secondary characters in the play. This was an age when, despite the example set by those such as Margaret Cavendish, women were struggling to exert their potential beyond the domestic sphere. The trouble was, the spheres into which they might expand were extremely limited. A society woman could not become an actress, but she could become a writer (though most likely to remain unpublished) or a mistress (though whether or not she had any greater control in the relationship than in her married life rather depended upon the personalities involved).
