The kings bed, p.24
The King's Bed, page 24
Barbara bitched and mocked and tried to upstage the newcomer. Three days after the fake marriage at Euston Hall, Louise went to the races in the grandeur of the King’s coach and six, with two other coaches in attendance. Barbara responded by driving through the streets in a coach and eight and talked of laying on a coach and twelve. At the New Year’s Eve ball, Barbara made sure she outshone Louise – and no doubt everyone else – in the most glittering ensemble of the season, reportedly sporting £40,000 worth of jewellery.
Nell spread the rumour that Louise wore dirty underclothes and she lampooned her whenever she could. The cocky actress’s put-downs were quick and often savage. One of the most quoted arose from a chance meeting with Louise when Nell was dressed in ‘an exceeding rich suit of clothes’.
‘Why, Nellie,’ said Louise, ‘you are grown rich, I believe, by your dress. Why, woman, you are fine enough to be a queen!’
‘You are entirely right, Madam,’ Nell replied, ‘and I am whore enough to be a duchess.’9
In 1674, Nell commissioned a silversmith to construct the ultimate in bedroom furniture, a silver bedstead. As a symbol of her triumph over Barbara she ordered as one of the bed’s decorations a miniature figure of Barbara’s lover, Jacob Hall, ‘dancing upon a rope of wire work’. Barbara’s reaction is not recorded.
Louise was the one truly political animal among the rival courtesans, and was an amazingly rewarding agent for France. According to her French biographer, Henri Forneron:
To her, more than to any statesman, France is indebted for French Flanders, the Franche Comte [and] Alsace . . . During fifteen years she was holding Great Britain in her delicate little hand, and manipulated its king and statesmen as dexterously as she might have done her fan . . . She made that country a tool of Louis XIV’s policy.10
She worked not as a loud advocate of any particular policy but by pushing or undermining the advocates of certain policies, be they continuation of the Dutch war, religious toleration or Charles giving Louis XIV a free hand in Europe. Political careers turned, flourished or ended thanks to quiet words from Louise de Kérouaille.
Her rewards were enormous. There were gifts and pensions from both kings, plus all manner of pay-offs and bribes for favours done and favours promised. And there were honours in both France and England. The two kings each elevated her to the top of the aristocratic tree in their respective countries. Charles made her an English duchess and Louis made her the French equivalent. If the people of England hated her as a Frenchwoman and a Catholic – and they certainly did – the aristocracy in both countries hated her still more for lording it over them. In one spat over precedence in Tunbridge Wells, a relatively lowly English marchioness told Louise that she had no intention of giving way to a woman who lived from prostitution. Louise, who considered herself far above other ladies at court, was so mortified that Charles had to console her by dispatching a platoon of horse guards to escort her home in the style of a queen.
Louise’s first taste of serious politicking came with her involvement in the selection of a second wife for James, Duke of York, heir presumptive to the English throne. This issue would become a major factor in the growth of the anti-Catholic fury that was beginning to build in England and would eventually kill off the Stuart dynasty. It surfaced after James’s first wife Anne died of cancer in March 1671, revealing on her deathbed that she was a Catholic. Three months later her only surviving son with the Duke, the seven-year-old Duke of Cambridge, followed her to the grave. This put pressure on James to remarry quickly and sire a new male to come after him in a dangerously threadbare line of succession. Anglican England clamoured loudly for a Protestant bride while on the far side of the Channel, the King of France manoeuvred secretly for a Catholic one. James, as obsessed with sex as his brother, let it be known that whoever was chosen had to be beautiful. Ruinously, he also wanted a Catholic bride. A search lasting nearly two years began.
Louis XIV’s preferred choice was the widowed Duchess de Guise, a loyal cousin of his. He looked to his ambassador in London, Colbert de Croissy, to try to set up the match, and Colbert turned to Louise and a Catholic priest in the Queen’s entourage to use their influence. ‘I shall neglect no means to ensure success in this affair,’ Colbert assured the King. I hope to triumph over every difficulty through the Queen’s confessor and the new mistress.’11
The new mistress wouldn’t play ball. She had a candidate of her own and rubbished Madame de Guise, who was described as ‘of low stature’ and ‘ill formed’, certainly not the beauty whom James had specified. Louise had come to know the Duke well in her year at the palace and claimed that any attempt to foist Madame de Guise on him would send him flying into the arms of some German princess. Louise’s candidate was thirteen-year-old Marie-Eléonore, eldest daughter of a family friend, the Duchess of Elboeuf. Lobbying hard, Louise obtained portraits of Marie-Eléonore and her twelve-year-old sister and presented them to James. Colbert complained that Louise’s campaign had been so effective that ‘nobody will now listen to the praises of Madame de Guise’.
The Sun King was not amused. He instructed Colbert to sabotage any Elboeuf match. ‘I have reasons’, he said, ‘which would make such a marriage disagreeable to me and I therefore hope you will adroitly apply yourself to cause hitches so that it will never take place.’12 It didn’t.
King Louis, the master manipulator, if not always the wisest, prevailed. A shortlist of eleven royal women – all of them Catholic – was drawn up. Marie-Eléonore and her younger sister were excluded on grounds of age and a princess from a French client state, the Duchy of Medina, was eventually chosen. She was fourteen-year-old Mary Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Medina. A deeply religious Catholic, Mary was more inclined to become a nun than a queen and she had to be persuaded. It took an interview with Pope Clement X to do it. For the price of another Catholic chapel being allowed in the Whitehall Palace complex, the pontiff agreed to persuade the girl that her duty lay in helping with the conversion of England.
A striking part of the Elboeuf episode was Louise’s audacity. While she was risking the Sun King’s displeasure by wrecking the chances of his cousin the Duchess de Guise, she simultaneously pressed Charles to ask a huge favour of the French king on her behalf. In July 1673, Charles spoke to Colbert of ‘his desire’ that Mlle de Kérouaille should be granted the French crown property of Aubigny in Berry and the ducal title that went with it. The title would entitle her to a tabouret, the elaborately upholstered stool whose owner had the right to sit rather than stand before the Queen of France. It was the ultimate honour for a woman in the slavishly hierarchical palace of the Louvre. Granting it to Louise would have elevated her above almost the entire aristocracy of her native country. At this stage Louis wouldn’t go that far for her. Louise was granted Aubigny but not the full ducal title. That would come the following year.
After her display of independence, Colbert changed his view about Louise, and so did Lord Arlington. The ambassador rubbished her to his minister at St Germain and reported that Arlington shared his view. ‘Arlington’, wrote Colbert, ‘neither likes nor esteems Mlle de Kérouaille and reproaches her with having as soon forgotten the obligations he conferred on her, as any of the good dinners she has eaten.’
Despite the ambassador’s distaste for the Breton adventuress, there was no question of France discarding her, nor indeed of Arlington daring to do so. The years 1672 and 1673 were those in which the two kings, Charles and Louis, attempted to implement the secret undertakings agreed in Dover back in 1670, and King Louis was counting on Louise to help keep the slippery Charles to his commitments. (Not that the Sun King was any more trustworthy than his English cousin.) Charles, meanwhile, remained besotted with his twenty- two-year-old mistress. The partying went on.
At the beginning of January 1672, one of the consequences of Charles’s largesse to his favourites had emerged when he abruptly reneged on his debts to the banks. ‘The Great Stop’, as it was called, ruined numbers of bankers in Lombard Street. The government ceased repaying them capital and paid interest only. The money this saved for the exchequer — well over £1 million — was supposed to be used to complete construction of the fleet for the coming war with the Dutch. This short-term fix persuaded bankers the King was a bad investment; it would be more difficult for him to borrow in the future.
Three months after the Great Stop, the touch paper to war was lit. King Louis launched his long-planned invasion of the Netherlands with a force of 130,000 men, and Charles too declared war. He also took what seemed to be a big step towards Rome by issuing the Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the religious laws which had penalised Catholics and Dissenters since his grandfather’s time.
None of it went to plan. On land, the Dutch stopped the French armies and then turned them back. At sea the brilliant Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter bested the Anglo-French navies in successive battles. And at home the Declaration of Indulgence fuelled an anti-Catholic paranoia that would become the dominant force in English politics for decades. In abrogating laws enacted by Parliament, the declaration also raised fears that Charles aimed at absolutist rule on the pattern of his cousin at the Louvre.
The paranoia focused first on the Duke of York. His choice of another Catholic to be his wife fed suspicions that he, like his first wife, was a secret Papist. Anglicans shivered at the thought that England was only one life away from Papist rule. Apprentices demonstrated against the match, effigies of the pope were burned, furious broadsides circulated. A report to the incoming Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, judged the public mood ‘to be as bad against the Duke as ever it was against his father in the height of his troubles’.13
Such was the clamour that with the New Year of 1673 the King reversed his position on Catholics. In February he rescinded the Declaration of Indulgence and in May signed the savagely anti-Catholic Test Act. Subtitled ‘An act for preventing dangers which may happen from Popish recusants’, the Test Act required every servant of the crown to take the oath of supremacy, recognising the King as head of the church, swear allegiance and disavow the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. For good measure, they were also ordered to attend an Anglican service to take a Protestant sacrament.
The King’s U-turn secured him £1.2 million from Parliament for the war – more than he expected – but failed to stem the anti-Catholic tide. Parliament demanded a stop to the York marriage. When informed that a proxy ceremony had already taken place in Italy, MPs attempted to prevent the marriage being consummated. Their efforts were futile. The new Duchess, now aged fifteen, landed in England in November 1673 to be greeted by her forty-four-year-old husband. A long wait now began for her to deliver a son.
After the Test Act was passed into law, the Duke resigned as Lord High Admiral, so confirming suspicions about his religion. A second prominent Catholic casualty was a member of the so-called Cabal, Sir Thomas Clifford, the Lord Treasurer. He resigned his post and a few days later he was found dead. He is believed to have hanged himself.
The next casualty, and the most surprising, was the Duke of Buckingham. An eager promoter of the French alliance, Buckingham realised that he could be cast as scapegoat for the war. In a disastrously incoherent speech of self-justification from the bar of the House of Commons, he targeted his bitterest rival Arlington as author of the worst decisions. Together with his supporters, Buckingham sprayed around allegations of treason and corruption on a colossal scale, accusing unnamed individuals of creaming off hundreds of thousands of pounds. MPs were unimpressed by his performance. The Commons voted to ask the King ‘to remove the said Duke of Buckingham from all his employments that are held during His Majesty’s pleasure and from the Councils for ever’. Charles was forced to dismiss his oldest friend.
Buckingham was also humiliated in his private life. Relatives of the Earl of Shrewsbury, killed by Buckingham in a duel, brought an action against him and the dead man’s widow for their ‘wicked and scandalous life’ and ‘the insolent and shameless manner’ of their existence. Neither fought the action, but instead they submitted to a committee of bishops, which drew up a deed, binding the guilty pair to a lifetime separation under forfeit of £10,000 each to the King. They complied, with the Countess retiring to a nunnery in France. Buckingham went back to his wife, who amazingly cried with joy.
Back in the political world, Arlington was desperate to inherit the Treasury from Sir Thomas Clifford. Both Louise and Barbara lobbied Charles on his behalf. Charles, who had so often accepted his courtesans’ nominations when made by one or the other on their own, said no to the two of them acting together. Not regarding Arlington very highly, Charles was astute enough on this occasion not to listen to his mistresses and demoted Arlington to the less important position of Lord Chancellor.
The Treasury went to a tall, lean Yorkshireman who was assumed wrongly to be in Buckingham’s pocket. This was Sir Thomas Osborne, later Earl of Danby. Louise quickly made him a friend and, according to rumour, made him her lover too. Her practice was always to be close to the men of power. Osborne was one of the most capable administrators of the age and did much to put the affairs of state on an even keel. Years later, after his fall, Louise would make allies of his rivals and successors, the Earls of Sunderland and Shaftesbury. The one significant player she never made up to was the Duke of Buckingham. She always remembered how he had left her stranded in France.
While Buckingham plotted and James pursued a wife, the King had begun to pay for the decades of debauchery. In 1674 he is said to have suffered at least three of what were described as apoplectic fits. The first ‘took him in the Duchess of Portsmouth’s presence’, a careful phrase pregnant with innuendo. Courtiers urged him to take it easy and Louise apparently begged him not to come to her at nights. We have no knowledge of when or where the second fit took place but the third occurred in the Privy Garden. The fits may have been the first signs of the health problems that would recur in future years.
Ill health marked the coming winter too. The Queen once more took to her bed in February 1674, this time with a serious bronchial infection. Her illness plunged her into her own paranoia. The Venetian minister in London, Girolamo Alberti, reported in dispatches that Catherine had talked of being poisoned and expected to die. She was said to have complained to one of her ladies of the king’s amours and claimed that ‘he had killed her’. But by March she had recovered and in September the king was briefly cohabiting with her, a practice he had abandoned for years. Needless to say this didn’t last, and the following year she was so ‘tormented with jealousy’ at the ‘flaunting of his mistresses’ that she couldn’t disguise it.14
The King and Louise were also laid low, but with another kind of infection, described as the ‘pox’. It was probably syphilis. Details of their infection were relayed with relish in diplomatic dispatches to France. In May 1674, Ruvigny, one of the special envoys King Louis sometimes dispatched to England, wrote to the French Foreign Minister de Pomponne:
I have a thing to tell you monsieur, for the King’s information, which should remain secret as long as it pleases his majesty to keep it so, because if it gets out it might be a source of unseemly raillery. Whilst the King was winning provinces, the King of England was catching a malady which he has been at the trouble of communicating to the Duchess of Portsmouth. That prince is nearly cured; but to all appearance the lady will not so soon be rid of the virus.15
The envoy went on to say: ‘She has been, however, in a degree consoled for such a troublesome present by one more suitable to her charms – a pearl necklace, worth four thousand Jacobus, and a diamond worth six thousand, which have so rejoiced her that I should not wonder if, for the price, she were not willing to risk another attack of the disease.’
The King recovered quite quickly but Louise suffered miserably for nearly eight months, and the infection may well have been the cause of her later persistent ill health. She travelled to Bath and Tunbridge Wells and possibly Epsom for the waters. She tried one fearful remedy after another. She didn’t let the King forget the episode. More than two years later another French ambassador, Honoré Courtin, was to inform French Foreign Minister Louvois that he had witnessed a confrontation between King and courtesan over the former’s behaviour: ‘I tell you privately’, Courtin wrote, ‘how three days ago the Duchess of Portsmouth in my presence attacked the king about his infidelities. She did not hide from me what she had suffered from his misconduct with trulls; and he himself then described to me how his head doctor had prescribed for her.’16
The head doctor alluded to was most likely Richard Wiseman, the King’s chief surgeon, who was an expert on treating the pox. Following the best knowledge and practice of the time, Wiseman knew the patient must be purged and bled. Both these actions were essential if the body’s controlling ‘humours’ were to be restored to equilibrium. Bleeding involved opening a small vein with a knife and drawing off a small amount of blood. Purging involved administering various potions designed to make the patient vomit and excrete until both stomach and bowels were empty. Even then the purging was not complete. The patient was sweated – wrapped up in sheets and blankets and placed in a bed surrounded by hot bricks in a sealed room. How Louise must have loathed the discomfort, let alone the indignity, as her usually cool countenance was reduced to that of a beetroot sticking out of a blanket.
Along with this savage regime, Wiseman administered opium and various herbal mixtures laced with gold and mercury. The opium would certainly make the patient feel better but the mercury was the sole part of the treatment that actually worked on the infection. For reasons not then understood, the skin ulcers that were an early symptom of syphilis could be cleared up by the application of mercury. Only the wealthy could afford this treatment. The less well-off would suffer the horrors of London’s many dedicated sweating houses, then, when the ulcers vanished of their own accord in a matter of days or weeks, believe themselves cured and pay their fees, only to suffer in years to come from more terrible symptoms such as dementia as the syphilis entered its final stages. Thanks to Wiseman’s mercury, Charles and Louise were given a chance of a cure, though it was little wonder Louise complained to the ambassador.*
