A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (49 page)

Moll Davis

Shortly afterwards, perhaps hoping to compete with Moll, Barbara Castlemaine herself went on the stage, taking a starring role in a glittering court performance of Corneille’s
Horace.
The translation was by the Welsh prodigy Katharine Phillips, ‘the matchless Orinda’, another exceptional woman, a friend of the Ormonds and Boyles and the poet of friendship and devotion between women. Katharine had died of smallpox in 1664, aged thirty-two, and her translation of Corneille was published after her death. The play was a success, with magnificent costumes and superb dancing, but Barbara should have known that she could never match an actress on the stage. This spring she was parading with the actor Charles Hart, as if tossing her head at the king for taking an actress lover. But Charles could not really care. After the apprentice riots and
The Poor Whore’s Petition
, she had begun to seem coarse. ‘Paint Castlemaine in colours that are bold’, wrote Marvell, ‘Her, not her picture, for she now grows old.’ Even devoted admirers found she had lost some of her glamour. In early May 1668 Pepys watched her at the theatre, seated in the balcony with several great ladies. Not caring who was watching, she called to one of her women and borrowed a patch off her face ‘and put it into her mouth, and wetted it and so clapped it upon her own by the side of her mouth, I suppose she feeling a pimple rising there’.
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Less than a week later, Pepys heard that Barbara was to leave Whitehall. Charles settled a pension on her of £4,700, paid out of Post Office profits through her uncles, Viscount Grandison and Colonel Villiers. Her new home was Berkshire House, for which Charles borrowed £4,000 from the ever-obliging Edward Backwell. Ironically this was the very house where Clarendon had taken refuge after the Fire, on the other side of the Park from Whitehall, but directly across the road from St James’s Palace, the home of the Yorks, who seemed to have forgiven her for her scheming against Clarendon and were becoming her closest friends. Her two eldest children, Anne and Charles, now aged seven and six, were currently in Paris but the three youngest, Henry, Charlotte and baby George, moved across the Park with their mother. Charles dropped in every day to see them, ‘as a good friend’ only, reported Ambassador Ruvigny.
¹⁵

Barbara’s reign was over. At the end of the year, when the court attended a performance of
Macbeth
, Pepys was shocked to see Moll Davis lounging in a box just above the King’s. He watched Moll look down on Charles, and saw him look up at her, ‘and so did my Lady Castlemayne once, to see who it was; but when she saw her, she blushed like fire’.
¹⁶

In May 1668, between dismissing parliament and setting off on his summer journeys, when he pensioned off Barbara, Charles made a series of such personal decisions, an emotional clearing of the decks. The catalyst was probably not the actions of his mistresses but a problem with his queen. When Magalotti tried to fathom Catherine’s nature, he jotted down notes about her liking for playing ombre and chatting with her women, her constant praying and her habit of lauding Portugal above all other nations. But he also liked to think that there was a wild, sensual creature within this small, plain woman. Catherine, he wrote, was thought to be ‘unusually susceptible to pleasure’:

She finds the king provided by nature with implements most suitable for exciting it, and it is said that her ecstasy is then so extreme that after the ordinary escape of these humours that the violence of pleasure presses even from women, blood comes from her genital parts in such great abundance that it does not stop for several days.
¹⁷

If there were such alarming reports, and Catherine did bleed abundantly, this almost certainly says less about Charles’s performance than about her frail reproductive system. Charles never mentioned her miscarriage in Oxford in 1666, and may have believed that that pregnancy was a false alarm. But he had not yet abandoned hope of her bearing children and was delighted, early this year, when she announced that she was pregnant. Almost inevitably she miscarried, at dawn on 7 May. ‘And though I am troubled at it’, Charles told Minette, ‘yet I am glad that ’tis evident she was with childe, which I will not deny to you, till now, I did feare she was not capable of.’
¹⁸
He added that the doctors had put her on a course of physic, ‘which they are confident will make her holde faster next time’.

As if looking afresh at his life, within days of Catherine’s miscarriage Charles set aside Barbara. Later in the month, when the weather turned from cold wind and rain to sudden heat, he left for two days in Newmarket. Back in town, he was kind to his wife, who grieved bitterly over her lost child, yet although he dined with her often he had not really changed. Catherine, as usual, knew just what was happening. At the end of May, when Moll Davies was about to dance her jig during a play at Whitehall, Catherine rose and left the room, ‘which people do think it was out of her displeasure at her being the King’s whore, that she could not bear it.’
¹⁹

Charles’s affair with Moll would last on and off for the next six years and they had a daughter, Mary, in 1673.
²⁰
But she hardly touched his heart: in 1668 his deepest feelings were still for Frances Stuart. The previous year, after peace was proclaimed and he could write to Minette again, he had tried to explain why he acted so harshly towards Frances, whom Minette had been fond of since she was a girl in Paris:

I do assure you that I am very much troubled that I cannot in everything give you that satisfaction I could wish, especially in this business of the duchesse of Richmonde, wherein you may thinke me ill natured, but if you consider how hard a thing ’tis to swallow an injury done by a person I had so much tendernesse for, you will in some degree excuse the resentment I use towards her.
²¹

Before he wrote the word ‘tendernesse’ he first wrote ‘love’ then crossed it out. He saw Frances’s behaviour as a direct provocation, a breach of friendship and faith, ‘therefore I hope you will pardon me if I cannot so far forget an injury which went so neere my hart’. Minette begged him to take her into favour again, but his pride was hurt. A poem survives in his hand, an easy exercise in courtly pastoral:

This is conventional enough but with regard to Frances the sentiment rings true. Charles had loved her.

Frances spent the months after her marriage looking after the Richmond estate at Cobham in Kent, while her husband raised troops in Dorset amid the fears of a French invasion.
²²
After the war ended the couple thought of going to France, where Richmond, as duc d’Aubigny, had estates in Berry, and where Frances could attach herself to the household of Henrietta Maria. But in the end Frances decided to come to London and join her mother at Somerset House. When she arrived there at Christmas 1667, her old friends from court flocked to see her. Charles, however, scotched any rumours of a reconciliation. ‘You were misinformed in your intelligence concerning the Duchesse of Richmond,’ he told his sister. ‘If you were as well acquainted with a little fantastical gentleman called Cupide as I am, you would neither wonder, nor take ill, any sudden changes which do happen in the affaires of his conducting, but in this matter there is nothing to be done in it.’
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And then, in the early spring of 1668, Frances contracted smallpox. His anger forgotten, Charles dashed to see her.

Frances’s illness hardly marred her beauty and it saved her friendship with Charles. In May, the month of Catherine’s miscarriage and Barbara’s move from Whitehall, Charles appointed Richmond Lord Lieutenant of Kent. Pepys noted that while the King supped nightly with Catherine, it seemed that he was ‘mighty hot upon the Duchess of Richmond’.
²⁴
One night, rather than taking a coach to see her at Somerset House, he impetuously took a scull and rowed downriver alone. Since the garden door was shut, he climbed over the wall to see Frances. There was no talk of an affair, but Charles admitted to Minette that being with her, and worrying about her illness, made him completely forget to write, ‘and I must confess this last affliction made me pardon all that is past, and cannot hinder myself from wishing her very well’.
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With affectionate concern he fretted about Frances’s scars and problems with her eyes and hovered over her progress to recovery.

Catherine had always remained friends with Frances, and later that year, after the Richmonds gave ‘a grand dinner for their majesties’, she appointed her a Lady of the Bedchamber.
²⁶
The Richmonds moved into rooms by the bowling green in Whitehall, and Frances was back among her friends and family. (Her sister Sophia, a dresser to Henrietta Maria, also became one of Catherine’s attendants, and married the son of Charles’s Master of the Household.) Barbara was said to be so furious at her reinstatement that she refused to have supper with the king, who took to dining instead with Monmouth, Buckingham and Rupert at the Duchess of Monmouth’s. (He was always kind to Monmouth’s young duchess, who had dislocated her hip while dancing at court and walked with a limp for the rest of her life.)

Visiting Frances became one of the few untroubled areas of Charles’s life. Her husband, however, remained a problem, intemperately demanding overseas posts and getting into brawls. In 1672 Richmond was sent to Denmark as ambassador, where he splashed out on furs, ran up debts and complained loudly of the dullness of the Danes. After a few months, in the winter snows, despite everyone’s advice, he rowed out for a drunken evening with the captain of an English frigate moored off Elsinore. In the darkness he missed his step between ship and boat and plummeted into the icy waters. He died the same evening. Frances did not remarry, but stayed at court with the queen. Since she had no children, after her husband’s death the Richmond and Lennox title reverted to the crown: in 1675 Charles would bestow it on his son by his mistress of the next decade, Louise de Kéroualle.

Charles’s many children were all dear to him, although his favourite was always Monmouth, now a handsome, wayward and easily influenced teenager. In early 1668, when Monmouth was in Paris, Charles asked Minette to look after him for, he confessed, ‘I do love him very well’. He was anxious that she should keep him from joining Louis’s army in Flanders, where he might be plunged into a ‘hot campaign’. When Monmouth went back again to France in June, he wrote an amused paternal letter: ‘He intendes to put on a perriwig againe, when he comes to Paris, but I believe you will thinke him better farr, as I do, with his short haire.’
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James, Duke of Monmouth, in his glamorous teenage years

For the last two years rumours had been circulating that Charles was thinking of making Monmouth legitimate and even of acknowledging a marriage with Lucy Walter, a course strongly urged by Buckingham and Ashley. These hints caused friction between Charles and James, who were never as close as they had been after Clarendon’s fall. Here was another split around which factions could grow. James’s anxieties about the succession were also heightened by Charles’s sudden interest in divorce. In 1669 he personally attended the hearings in the House of Lords when John Manners, Lord Roos, appealed for a private act of parliament to obtain a divorce from his wife Anne. Roos had already won an ecclesiastical separation on the grounds of Anne’s adultery, and a private act bastardising her children. But a civil divorce would mean that he could remarry and produce a legitimate heir. The case gripped the news-devouring public, firstly because of the revelations about Anne’s promiscuity, but also because an act allowing the husband to marry again would set a crucial precedent, challenging the indissolubility of marriage. The bill was promoted in the Lords by John Wilkins, now Bishop of Chester, who pointedly remarked that divorce might be granted not only for adultery but also for ‘immundicity of the womb, which is given forth to [be] the queen’s condition’.
²⁸
Charles’s influence undoubtedly helped the passing of the bill in 1670.