The kings bed, p.17
The King's Bed, page 17
The penultimate scenes in the Chancellor’s fall were played out by the King, by Barbara Castlemaine his bitterest antagonist, and by that other old enemy the Duke of Buckingham. The Duke had given himself up to the authorities in July, with typical display arriving at the Tower in a splendid coach filled with drunken friends. Barbara immediately intervened with the King on her cousin’s behalf. She unleashed one of her infamous outbursts on her royal lover for jailing the Duke. For once Charles fought back, calling her a ‘jade, that meddled with things she has nothing to do with’. His Majesty was a fool, she screamed back, ‘for if he were not he would not suffer his business to be carried on by fools that did not understand them, and cause his best subjects and those best able to serve him to be imprisoned’.10
It is not clear exactly what happened next. Barbara, as so often, seems to have gone or been sent packing for a few days, but her intervention paid off. The Duke was brought before the Privy Council and quickly exonerated of the charge of treason. ‘It is said’, wrote Pepys, ‘that when he was charged with making himself popular as indeed he is, he [answered] that whoever was committed to prison by my Lord Chancellor or my Lord Arlington could not want being popular.’ Buckingham was released and readmitted to the Privy Council, where he now led the chorus telling Charles to disown the old, ailing and now allegedly incompetent Chancellor. James, the King’s brother and son-in-law of the Chancellor, fought to save him but in vain: ‘The friends of Lady Castlemaine openly told His Majesty “it would not consist with his majesty’s honour to be hectored out of his determination to dismiss the chancellor by his brother, who was wrought upon by his wife’s crying.’”11
The King is said to have taken the final decision on Clarendon during a meeting with Buckingham set up by Barbara in her apartments. Some accounts insist that Charles’s continued bitterness over Frances Stuart was a deciding factor: the King was thought to have accepted the allegation that Clarendon had promoted the young beauty’s elopement with Richmond so as to prevent the King from divorcing his wife and marrying Frances. As a result his attitude to Clarendon hardened into a violent and irreconcilable aversion’.12
On 26 August 1667, at ten o’clock in the morning, Lord Clarendon waited on the King at Whitehall. The portly, limping minister was still deferential but querulous too, with the tall, sallow monarch possibly embarrassed at what he had finally been persuaded to do. The burden of what Clarendon said to the King was why? Why was he being dismissed? What fault had he committed? Charles replied that no king ever had a better servant, but he couldn’t change his decision. The sacking of the Chancellor took two hours of polite prevarication, the discussion ending abruptly when Clarendon brought up Lady Castlemaine’s name and warned against her influence. In Clarendon’s own loaded phrase, Charles, ‘not being well pleased’, jumped up and left without a word. The meeting was over.
By jettisoning Clarendon, Charles mirrored the actions of Prince Hal casting off Falstaff- except that in this case, Charles was not the newly serious prince but the eternal playboy and Clarendon, if not old, the serious-minded man of state. Clarendon’s departure from the King took him through the Privy Garden past Lady Castlemaine’s chambers. It was about midday and Barbara was still in bed. She ran out in her smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall to watch the old man go, her maid chasing behind with her nightgown. Pepys described how the twenty-six-year-old courtesan ‘stood joying herself. A crowd of ‘gallants’ also gathered to see the great man’s fall, among them the Earl of Arlington and Baptist May. Clarendon’s only words to Barbara as he passed were said to be, ‘Oh Madam, is it you? Pray remember that if you live you will grow old.’13
The King justified Clarendon’s dismissal to the Duke of Ormond, who had interceded on the Chancellor’s behalf. Charles wrote: ‘The truth is his behaviour and humour was grown so insupportable to myself and all the world else that I could no longer endure it and it was impossible for me to live with it and do those things with the Parliament that must be done or the Government will be lost.’14
A few days after that final interview between King and Chancellor, Secretary of State for the South William Morrice collected the great seal from the Chancellor’s house. As Morrice handed the seal to the King later that day, Baptist May fell on his knees, kissed the King’s hand and said, ‘Now you will be king — what you have never been before.’15
Clarendon’s enemies weren’t yet satisfied. Led by Buckingham, a campaign began to have him impeached for treason. The grounds for this were generally feeble. Unable to stand up allegations of corruption, his opponents could only manage initially ‘That he hath in a short time gain’d to himself a greater Estate than can be imagin’d to be gain’d lawfully in so short a time.’16 At first, Clarendon was confident of carrying the day in any trial. But the King’s continued animosity helped persuade him not to risk it and in October he fled the country into exile in France.
The Chancellor’s eclipse was a triumph for the Villiers cousins, Barbara and Buckingham, but Barbara’s own position in 1667 was increasingly precarious. The King had always seemed relaxed about her affairs, but his sticking point was her long-standing relationship with Harry Jermyn. According to the Comte de Gramont, the King ‘did not think it consistent with his dignity’ that his mistress should appear chained to the ‘most ridiculous conqueror there ever was’.
Charles secured a promise from Barbara to give Jermyn up. Typically, she did no such thing and carried on the affair without much attempt to hide it. When rumour reached the King that Barbara was entertaining her old lover, Charles’s remonstrances led to another furious row. The Gramont memoirs reported, ‘The impetuosity of her temper broke forth like lightning. Reproaches against his promiscuous and low amours, floods of tears and the Medea-like threats of destroying her children and burning his palace followed.’ According to the memoirs, peace was finally achieved after Charles promised to make Barbara a duchess in return for her giving Jermyn up and promising ‘to rail no more’ against his other women. Barbara would have to wait several years before Charles kept his side of the bargain.
* Attributed to John Denham, MP, courtier and poet.
12
ENTRANCES AND EXITS
Though Baptist May felt that Charles, now rid of Clarendon, could do as he wished, in reality the King’s options were limited. The capital was in ruins with much of its population scattered into outlying towns and villages. Christopher Wren’s vision of an orderly capital city spread along imperial boulevards could not be afforded. But plans were in train for St Paul’s to be rebuilt and for houses to be built in stone, with wider roads and alleyways to separate them. In the meantime, thousands were homeless and often starving. For much of London’s population in 1667, home was a shanty town.
Thanks to the crushing war with the Dutch, trade was in peril. The exchequer was depleted, taxation was down, and relations between the Crown and Parliament more fraught even than usual. Against such a desolate scene, almost the sole beacon of power and exuberance was the King’s lust. The reason for the renewed burst of virility was that with Clarendon gone, Charles could, as Baptist May had purred at his feet, rule as he wished – or, more correctly, attempt to rule as he wished. Parliament was still tight with money and anxious about how state power was apportioned. More than ever, Charles wished to rule via his own cadre of supporters together with the Privy Council, though he had good reason to mistrust some of those who served in it.
The two most important people in government after the King were now Buckingham and Arlington, who despised one another. The King knew he needed them both on his side to keep the ship of state from running onto any more rocks. Due to his influence in both houses of Parliament, Buckingham was a necessary if uncomfortable ally. Despite his open hostility and resentment. In a poem entitled The Cabin Boy’, Buckingham lampooned the King’s abilities, disparaging his love of sailing and his seafaring skills, saying they were only as good as those of any cabin boy, while his knowledge of affairs of state was worse:
But not one lesson of the ruling art
Could this dull blockhead ever get by heart.
In a way, Buckingham’s jest had weight. The King had never been schooled in the art of leadership. Any chance he might have had was left scattered in the courts of Europe while he was a penniless prince living on charity. A more studious and ambitious man might have used exile as an opportunity to refine his understanding of statecraft, as Machiavelli had done during his exile from Florence, but young Charles had chosen to dull the pain of exile in carnal pursuits. Though not lacking in intelligence, Charles was not a bookish man. His lack of education on matters of state, coupled with a mind that was not the most enquiring, put him at a disadvantage when dealing with more accomplished men.
The sinister looking but clever and agreeable Arlington, who had been appointed one of the two Secretaries of State a few years before, now carried more of the burden of government than ever. Buckingham, despite being appointed Captain of the King’s Horse, had no substantive position in government. It was better, reasoned Charles, that Buckingham was inside the tent of state rather than outside making a nuisance of himself. It seemed Charles had, after all, learned some lessons of the ruling arts.
Apart from Arlington and Buckingham, three others made up what became known as the Cabal. They were Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury), a man of erudition and dangerously republican sentiments; Lord Clifford, who along with Ashley was one of the new Treasury commissioners; and the Earl of Lauderdale, the Scottish Secretary of State. By chance, the so-called Cabal spelled out the initial letters of its members’ names: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale.
This was no close-knit group of men pulling heartily together to drag the ship off the rocks. It was a group of self-promoting individuals each with his own views and strengths. Taken individually and together, the Cabal was not Clarendon. Together they allowed the King to rule without any one constraining influence. Individually there would be no one beady eye keeping watch over him. Charles could relax and try to recover the libido he had lost during war with the Dutch. When the Dutch navy triumphantly towed the Royal Charles down the Medway the King’s libido went out with the tide. According to Pepys, he had not been able to keep an erection except by masturbation: ‘The King’s greatest pleasure hath been with his fingers, being able to do no more,’ he scribbled salaciously.
In 1667, Charles and Barbara had an explosive row – perhaps their most serious to date – over Barbara’s latest pregnancy. She already had five children by Charles, three boys and two girls.* Although she was not the most constant of companions, Barbara claimed this child was also the King’s. Charles was not so sure. He had not, he said, slept with her in six months. Lord Halifax, who keenly observed the King’s habits and character, noted that when it came to his lovers’ infidelities, Charles generally ‘had wit enough to suspect and he had wit enough not to care’. But with the matter of a child it was clear Charles did care. Barbara threatened that when the child was born she would bash its brains out in the palace and parade the King’s other bastard children outside the palace gates. The row was so severe that Barbara moved out of Whitehall to stay with her friend Elizabeth, Lady Harvey, the flamboyant bisexual society hostess. There has been speculation that Barbara and Elizabeth became lovers. Though there is no evidence one way or the other, it is interesting that of all the friends she could have run to she chose Harvey. The row only ended when the King, as usual, backed down, went to Lady Harvey’s and kneeled to ask forgiveness of his wayward lover.
Charles’s behaviour here is quite peculiar. If he had truly cared for Barbara and suffered the pangs of jealousy when faced with evidence of infidelity, he might have found reason to end the relationship. Halifax wrote, ‘It is a heresy, according to a true lover’s creed, even to forgive an infidelity, or the appearance of it. Love of ease will not do it where the heart is much engaged.’ In other words, a true lover would not have forgiven as easily as Charles. If Halifax is right, then Charles was not in love with Barbara but merely lusted for her.
As it happened, no child materialised from the pregnancy; either Barbara was mistaken and she was not pregnant or the baby did not survive into childhood – there is no record to tell us. Charles was not a man to dwell for long on domestic mishaps; he turned for distraction to one of his passions, the theatre.
Mercifully, the great fire had not destroyed the theatres, for they had been built to the west of the city so as to be convenient for the rich of St James’s and Pall Mall. In the theatres was to be found amusement and escapism. The company Charles himself sponsored, the King’s Company, had its home in a new state-of-the art theatre in Drury Lane (on the site of the present Theatre Royal), while the Duke’s Men, sponsored by the Duke of York, were a stone’s throw away at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
With the vogue for female actors, the theatre had become a hunting ground for the King, his brother James and their fellow rakes. According to Elizabeth Knepp, a member of the King’s Company, the King had first been smitten by Elizabeth Weaver, another member of his Company, shortly after the theatres reopened in 1661. When tired of the choices available among the latest batch of young women acting as attendants to the Queen, the Duchess of York or other ladies of the court, or when all those they wished to seduce had been seduced (or, like Frances Stuart, had resisted), the new corps of actresses, often little better than prostitutes with some singing or dancing ability, were there for variation. The more professional sort of female actor was often available for apres-theatre fun, as the world they inhabited was one of bohemian tastes, where what would later be termed bourgeois habits were spurned and multiple partners accepted.
Thanks to a series of events designed to depress the royal spirits, those who habitually searched out new blood to distract the royal loins now turned to the belles of the stage. Among those who habitually procured such new delights were the Duke of Buckingham, Sir Charles Berkeley, Baptist May and the King’s servant William Chiffinch.
Chiffinch was so omniscient, so omnipresent, that his role was known far and wide. Samuel Pepys knew him well and wrote about Chiffinch taking him into the King’s private rooms to view a Variety of brave pictures’. It was Chiffinch who had informed Barbara that Frances Stuart was entertaining a suitor in her rooms in Whitehall Palace while pretending she had a headache.
Looking around for possible young flesh for the jaded King, the pimps went into action. According to Pepys, Buckingham had become the leading light in the procuring exercise. He had a motive: he and his cousin Barbara had fallen out. She had not promoted his interests sufficiently with the King and Buckingham felt it would be better if her influence were terminated by the installation of a younger and more malleable model.
The pimps whittled a list of young actresses down to three. For a while, the King dallied with a dancer named Jane Roberts, though their acquaintance seems to have lasted very little time. That left two contenders. Buckingham favoured a young actress from the Duke’s Men named Mary Davis. She was known as Moll, or according to some sources, Mall. Moll was reputed to be the illegitimate daughter of Thomas Howard, 3rd Earl of Berkshire, who was said to have helped pimp his own daughter to the King. According to another account, she was the daughter of a blacksmith employed by the earl on his estate.
Moll was aged about nineteen and, although billed as an actress, was what we might call a song and dance girl. She lodged with one of the company’s two leaders, the venerable Poet Laureate Sir William Davenant, who according to John Aubrey was Shakespeare’s unacknowledged son. This was quite possibly true, for Shakespeare was known to have had several illegitimate children. True or not, the rumour suited Davenant very well. It amused him to report that people thought he wrote with ‘the very spirit of Shakespeare’. Davenant’s personal taste in theatre stretched from Shakespearean tragedy to lewd contemporary comedy. He therefore recognised the importance of his young lodger to help fill the seats. Moll’s chief attributes were her great figure, fantastic singing voice, a wonderful ability to dance provocatively and her easy morals. In 1667 she was the chief female draw for the Duke’s Men.
Moll had a rival, for there was a faction among the King’s pimps who favoured the female star in the King’s Company – and anyhow, it was better His Majesty had a choice. This was Nell Gwyn, who was not as beautiful as Moll but made up for it in her character and her great ability not only to dance and sing but to make an audience laugh. The two actresses were rivals for the hearts of the London the atregoing crowd.
Those in the know made comparisons between the rivals. On 7 March, Samuel Pepys – who was addicted to the theatre – went to see the Duke’s Men and reported on Moll’s performance dressed in boy’s clothing, that fashion of the day embraced even by the Queen: ‘Little Miss Davis did dance a jig at the end of the play . . . and the truth is there is no comparison with Nell’s dancing the other day at the King’s house in boy’s clothes and this, this being infinitely beyond the other.’ In August, Pepys confided to his diary that he and his wife were greatly pleased by Moll dancing dressed as a shepherd.
Her opponent in the competition to be the King’s mistress was younger, at just seventeen. There are many varying accounts of Nell Gwyn’s early life. Although she is one of the most famous characters in English history, very little is known about her for certain. She is variously reported as having been born in London, Oxford and Hereford in 1650, although her descendant Charles Beauclerk has ungallantly suggested she might have been born in 1642. It is possible she was a teenage prostitute, following her father’s death and the family’s descent into poverty. Her father may have been a soldier. Some credibility is given to this by an entry in official papers according to which a Rose Gwyn, who was likely to have been Nell’s sister, petitioned one of the Duke of York’s officials to help gain her release from Newgate gaol where she had been thrown for theft. She wrote that her father had ‘lost everything in service to the late King’. This evidently worked, for Rose was released and went on to a career as a prostitute before marrying a highwayman.
