The kings bed, p.15
The King's Bed, page 15
Queen Catherine’s illness began a terrible three years for England. Calamity followed calamity as London was decimated by bubonic plague and then by fire, before the nation was humbled in the second Anglo-Dutch war, the greatest humiliation in English naval history.
The plague made surreptitious landfall in England shortly after Catherine’s illness. It is thought to have arrived from Holland to claim its first two victims in November 1664. There followed a break of several months before the infection reached London in the spring of 1665. The death count in London went from hundreds a week in June, to thousands a week in July, to as many as ten thousand a week in August. The dead were thrown into plague pits, those not yet dead left to fester in their boarded-up houses, guards posted outside to keep them there.
Sir John Reresby told one of the more ghoulish stories that circulated:
A bagpiper being excessively overcome with liquor, fell down in the Street and there lay asleep. In this condition he was taken up and thrown into a cart, betimes the next morning, and carried away with some dead bodies. Meanwhile he awoke from his sleep, it being now about daybreak, and rising up began to play a tune, which so surpriz’d the fellows that drove the cart . . . that in a fright they betook them to their heels, and would have it that they had taken up the Devil in the disguise of a dead man.5
In July the King, the Queen and the entire court fled the ‘pestilence’, decamping westward through the Middlesex countryside in an interminable caravan of coaches, hoping for safety at Hampton Court and in neighbouring villages. The stricken city which they left behind was described by Thomas Vincent, one of the non-conforming ministers, who stayed to brave the epidemic:
Now people fall as thick as the leaves in autumn when they are shaken by a mighty wind . . . there is a dismal solitude in London streets . . . shops are shut in, people rare . . . there is a deep silence in every place. No prancing horses. No rattling coaches. No calling in customers nor offering wares . . . Now the nights are too short to bury the dead.6
Hampton Court proved to be no sanctuary for the royal party. A sentry guarding the palace keeled over at his post bearing tell-tale buboes, the hallmark of plague, and the caravan took off for Salisbury. Officers were sent ahead to mark with chalk the houses where they were to be billeted. Residents busily scrubbed out the chalk and many tried indignantly to resist the billeting. A French envoy evacuated with the rest commented that he now understood the saying ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. The court nevertheless retained its happy abandon during its flight, especially the young ladies led by La Belle Stuart wearing masculine clothes, in a popular style that allowed young ladies to show off their legs. Pepys watched the King and Queen depart the red brick palace and was charmed ‘to see the pretty young ladies . . . in velvet coats, caps with ribbons and with laced bands, just like men’.7 They evidently didn’t have a care in the world.
Plague reached Salisbury about the same time as the royal refugees, and there were rumours that the Duke of Buckingham and the Duchess of Richmond had died. This wasn’t true but the court was quickly away again, this time to the spires of Oxford. There Charles hoped to celebrate two births, one by Barbara his mistress and, far more significant, the other by Catherine his wife. Both women were accommodated in Merton College, where Barbara was allotted lodgings in a fellow’s rooms and the Queen in the Master’s more expansive quarters. Twelve years earlier, Catherine’s mother-in-law Henrietta Maria had been lodged in the same quarters at Merton when she conceived her youngest child, Henrietta Anne. It may have seemed to augur well for the young Queen, but nothing came of it.8
On 28 December, Lady Castlemaine gave birth to a boy, George, whom Charles acknowledged and later made Earl of Northumberland. In contrast to that happy moment, the following month Queen Catherine delivered a stillborn child. The child’s gender is not recorded. While the Queen mourned, so did Chancellor Clarendon. He had thrown his weight behind the Braganza marriage and for his own standing needed the union to provide his King with an heir. As well as bolstering the dynasty, the arrival of an heir would, it was hoped, induce in Charles a more responsible attitude to his role as monarch. The Chancellor was no doubt among those who prayed for it to happen, though his enemies put it about that he counted on the Queen remaining childless so his own son-in-law, James of York, would succeed to the throne.
Clarendon’s hold on power had looked unshakeable during the first two years after the Restoration. The King was increasingly irritated by the Chancellor’s nagging about his lifestyle, but he saw Clarendon as a master at handling Parliament and a brilliant administrator, and depended on him, so he stayed. Barbara and the clique around her were his most vehement opponents. She was a beacon to his enemies, who numbered some of the most ambitious and dissolute men in Whitehall. They included the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, the Earl of Lauderdale and Sir Charles Berkeley. The quieter but deadly Earl of Arlington must also be counted among the Castlemaine group. All of these men had various reasons for opposing Clarendon, some personal and some political. All too were cronies of the King, having mostly been so since his years in exile, and most of them regularly caroused with him now. All except Buckingham were regulars at the Castlemaine suppers. At one time or another at least three were Lady Castlemaine’s lovers.
The likes of Bristol, Arlington and Lauderdale could also be counted in the so-called Somerset House junto, the malcontents and Francophiles grouped around Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother, before she left England for good in 1665. No one was more vehemently opposed to Clarendon than the woman who had fought him for dominance over her son in the years of exile.
The power balance had begun to change in October 1662 with the dropping of Clarendon’s fellow veteran, the first Secretary of State Sir Edward Nicholas. The appointment of Arlington as Secretary of State, and of Charles Berkeley as keeper of the Privy Purse, meant, as Pepys put it, that ‘the old serious lords are out of favour’ at court and ‘the young men get uppermost’. The new appointees had the careerboosting advantage of being close to both the King and Barbara. In the words of William Cobbett, the two had ‘the management of the mistress’.9 There is no doubt that her voice in Charles’s ear hastened their rise and, eventually, hastened Clarendon’s fall.
The following year, the Earl of Bristol made a frontal attack on the Chancellor, attempting to impeach him. It was an ill-judged move. With no apparent sense of irony, Bristol accused the Chancellor of trying ‘to alienate the affections of his majesty’s subjects by venting in his own discourse . . . opprobrious scandals against His majesty’s person and course of life, such as are not fit to be mentioned’. At that stage Bristol’s friends among the Wits were creating opprobrious scandals across London. This may explain why the House of Lords lost no time in throwing out the impeachment motion.
Buckingham found a more subtle way of getting at the Chancellor – mockery. He made him a continual target for his notorious mimicry. His take-off of Clarendon became legendary:
Behold how he changes now. Villiers is no longer Villiers. He is Clarendon, walking solemnly to the Court of the Star Chamber: a pair of bellows is hanging before him for the purse; Colonel Titus is walking with a fire shovel on his shoulder, to represent a mace; the king, himself a capital mimic, is splitting his sides with laughter; the courtiers are fairly in a roar.10
Such performances caused royal laughter but also royal embarrassment, for the King was portrayed as taking orders from a buffoon – all of which sounds no more harmful than a bunch of schoolboys sniggering behind the teacher’s back, except that it went on for years, helping bit by bit to undermine Clarendon in his patron’s eyes.
Clarendon’s Achilles heel turned out to be a war that he opposed – the violent struggle over trade that became known as the second Anglo-Dutch war. The Earl of Southampton was also against the war, and initially the King was lukewarm. However, most of those associated with Barbara smelled profit or glory and were in the pro-war camp. On his visits to her suppers Charles would have encountered a chorus of anti-Dutch aggression from the likes of Lauderdale, Berkeley and Ashley as well as from Arlington and Barbara. A biographer of Arlington writes that ‘the war spirit reigned unchallenged at Lady Castlemaine’s suppers’.11
However, for ‘war spirit’ read ‘blind arrogance’. According to the French ambassador to England, the Marquis de Cominges, ‘the coming contest was seen as a sport: there would be, of course, some important battles, but they would be won; besides this, most of the game would consist in chasing the Dutch merchantmen; there would be a fine sport indeed, and spoils worth the risk.’ In March 1665, Charles declared war. He would come to regret it. So would Clarendon, of whom the King was to make a scapegoat after the country’s defeat.
Not everything went well for Lady Castlemaine in the mid and late 1660s. These were the years when she became the great hate figure of the newssheets and ballads sold in the streets of London denouncing the dissolute court. A typical example was a note about her pinned to the door of her Merton College lodgings during the court’s sojourn in Oxford. It ended:
The reason she is not ducked?
Because by Caesar she is fucked.
Unlike the waylaying of Barbara in St James’s Park by three masked gentlemen, this apparently trivial incident wasn’t kept quiet. The King offered a large reward for information leading to the capture of whoever wrote the Merton College verse. This produced nothing.
In London, the plague had abated sufficiently by February 1666 for King and court to return from Oxford. Pepys’ diary suggests that, for a brief moment at least, some courtiers attending the King were chastened by the immensity of an epidemic that would leave one in five Londoners dead. Creel, one of the diarist’s court informants, reported finding ‘all things mighty dull at Court . . . they now begin to lie long in bed; it being, as we suppose, not seemly for them to be found playing and gaming as they used to be.’ If the Buckinghams and Digbies did pull in their horns, it didn’t last. At the end of the year a despondent Pepys called it ‘a sad, vicious, negligent Court, and all sober men there fearful of the ruin of the whole kingdom this next year’.
One great change was that the Queen who returned from Oxford was no longer the muted bystander of her first year in England. In the continued attempt to win her husband’s heart, the once demure Portuguese girl presented as a different woman, wearing the latest, most daring décolleté fashions from Paris, covering herself in jewels, and revealing a passion for dancing and masques that attempted to rival Barbara’s entertainments. ‘She entered all the extravagance of the court,’ wrote Burnet. Almost every afternoon she held receptions in her withdrawing rooms overlooking the Thames. Almost every evening there was another, more gripping function for favoured members of the court to go on to – Barbara’s suppers. You were always assured of a good meal there, the French ambassador informed the Sun King.
But poor buck-toothed Catherine was no competition for Barbara, and Barbara would probably have been no competition for Frances Stuart had the girl slept with the King. Charles could not keep his hands off Frances, who remained unwilling, and the King’s pursuit went on for months, stretching into years, his ardour continually fanned by her coquettish teasing. Frances still let Charles touch her, caress her and kiss her – anything but make love to her. He was driven wild with desire. It reached the point where the Queen felt inhibited from walking in certain parts of the palace, including her own quarters, lest she happen across the fondling couple. In Pepys’ words, ‘the good Queen will of herself stop before she goes sometimes into her dressing room, till she knows whether the King be there for fear he should be as she hath sometimes taken him, with Mrs Stuart.’12
Barbara’s relationship with the King was attended by incessant rows, but despite these and his obsession with La Belle Stuart there were constant signs that Barbara’s magic still worked for him. He had celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday dancing all night at a ball she threw in his honour. He refurbished her quarters in the palace extravagantly in the French fashion. He gave her the Christmas presents sent to him by peers in the Upper House. He continued to pick up the tabs for her jewellery and gambling debts. At a minimum he spent one night a week with her, but more usually four nights. Most striking of all, she could still insult him and have him, the King, apologise, perhaps self-mockingly but nevertheless on his knees.
Members of a high-powered French delegation sent to London in 1665 to try to stave off the looming Anglo-Dutch war learned first hand of Barbara’s continued standing. They called her ‘La Castlemaine’ in dispatches to Louis XIV and in them described how Charles acted like the host at her establishment, how ‘the most secret affairs of state [were] freely discussed’ there and how one day when the French ambassador faced Charles and Clarendon in a last attempt to secure peace, the King brought negotiations to an abrupt end so as not to be late for supper at Lady Castlemaine’s.13 That illustration of the King’s priorities must have had the watching Clarendon grinding his teeth.
Barbara’s continuing power over Charles has been attributed to her sexual prowess but in large part also to her being the mother of his children. Indeed, had Queen Catherine presented him with a legitimate heir, his attitude to her and the whole balance of power between her, Barbara and Frances would have been transformed. As it was, the Queen’s failure to deliver a live child was to undermine her throughout the rest of the decade and beyond. The malicious rumour the Spanish had put about years before in an attempt to scupper the royal marriage was turning out to have some substance.
The Queen made desperate efforts to conceive. ‘Nothing will be left unattempted to give an heir to the British crown,’ the French ambassador reported.14 Catherine consulted soothsayers and doctors and was advised to take the spring waters at Bourbon in France. For some reason, perhaps financial but probably political, she went instead to the English springs at Bath and Tunbridge Wells; the waters of the latter were said to ‘make a barren woman as fruitful as a coney-warren’.
On her subsequent regular excursions there, Catherine was sometimes accompanied by the King, sometimes only by her ladies. At Tunbridge she dispensed with formalities and arranged dancing on the lawns lasting late into the night. The name of the town would one day be synonymous with staid Victorian sobriety, but not in the 1660s. Catherine’s courtiers brought with them the habits and morals of Whitehall and Tunbridge Wells became, if it wasn’t already, one of the raciest places in Europe. As one contemporary chronicler said, the spa town was not only a place to cure one’s ailments, but to shop and find other amusements: ‘Here is, likewise, deep play and no want of amorous intrigues.’15 The memoirs of the Comte de Gramont describe it as ‘the general rendezvous of all the gay and handsome of both sexes . . . constraint is banished . . . joy and pleasure are the joint sovereigns . . . Never did love see his empire in a more flourishing condition than on this spot.’ In his poem ‘Tunbridge’, Rochester was less effusive. He called the place ‘the rendezvous of fools, buffoons and praters, cuckolds, whores’.
In Whitehall, the Queen’s position became a loudly whispered issue after her illness. During the weeks when she had been at death’s door, speculation had it that on her death the King would lose no time in marrying Frances Stuart. With Catherine’s recovery and continued failure to bear a child, the gossip focused on how to get rid of her so Charles could marry again. George Villiers and George Digby pushed the idea of annulment or divorce, and over the next half dozen years various grounds for questioning the validity of her marriage to the King were explored. Had the marriage been fully consummated? Had Catherine taken a vow of chastity? Was it true that she was judged incapable of motherhood before she married? The Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, was approached but turned the subject to one Charles did not want to deal with: ‘Sir,’ he told the King, ‘I wish you would put away the woman that you keep.’16
Charles reportedly accepted a scheme by which ‘the queen’s confessor persuade her to leave the world, and embrace a religious life’. The Pope, who was secretly consulted, was unsurprisingly anything but enamoured of the proposal to retire a Catholic queen. Strangely, Barbara was the main obstacle to the plan. Fearing that she might fall victim to any new queen, she is said to have opposed the proposal so fiercely that it was dropped.
The second major disaster of the 1660s was the Great Fire of London in September 1666. The King first heard details of the fire from the diarist Samuel Pepys, who was alerted to it before dawn by a fearful woman servant, and scaled the highest point in the Tower for a bird’s eye view. He saw parts of the city already consumed in flames and no one fighting the fire. Instead everybody was endeavouring to remove their goods, and ‘flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off shore’ or ‘staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another’. Post haste, Pepys took the frightening news to Whitehall and was summoned before Charles. He told the King ‘that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire’. The King told Pepys to find the Lord Mayor and ‘command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way’.
The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, had fatally delayed. ‘Pish! A woman could piss it out,’ was his reaction when first told of the fire at 2 a.m. that morning, and then he went back to bed. Thereafter the fire proved unstoppable. Strong winds, a tinder-dry summer and people resisting demolition of their houses saw it rage for three days. Another diarist, Pepys’ friend John Evelyn, wrote of ‘ten thousand houses all in one flame’ and described the noise of ‘crackling flames . . . the shrieking of Women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches’. About 13,200 houses were destroyed and 87 of the city’s 109 churches. Among them was the medieval cathedral of St Paul’s, which was being propped up by wooden scaffolding. Melted lead from the cathedral roof covered the ground around the ruined church, glowing red from the heat. No one could get near for days.
