King Charles II (81 page)

Absence was one test of the King’s affections. With her son, Louise paid a visit to France in the autumn of 1684; she secured the settlement of the Aubigny estates and dukedom upon the boy as a result of Charles’ intercession with Louis
XIV
. The King’s delight at her return was unqualified. He also passed that other test of love, the appearance of a rival. When stories were circulated of Louise’s dalliance with Philippe de Vendôme, nephew of Hortense de Mazarin, Charles had the presumptuous swain thrown out of the country. To celebrate her ascendancy, Louise had her own medal struck, embellished with a Cupid and bearing the legend:
Omnia Vincit
– it was a more flirtatious form of insolence than Shaftesbury’s.

It is impossible to be certain when – if ever – the sexual bond between King and Duchess ceased. In January 1682 there were rumours that the King had not slept with the Duchess for four months. Bruce’s testimony that the King supped with Louise ‘without intent’ is to be taken more seriously because of Bruce’s intimate position in the King’s household.
³¹
Yet no outsider can pronounce with complete confidence on such matters. Given the continued healthy vigour of the King, absolute cease seems unlikely. What is much more certain is that the domestic bond increased. In principle, King Charles, Queen Catharine and Duchess Louise created a master triangle in which all parties, for the first time in their lives, were roughly content with the status quo.

The King does not appear to have practised any form of birth control – there are no references to the topic by any of the interested parties. He also derived a great deal of happiness from his children. As far as one can keep track of them, the total of those that survived long enough to feature in the royal records was a round dozen. As Buckingham brightly observed, a King is supposed to be the Father of his People, and Charles
II
was certainly the father of a good many of them. These twelve known bastards were born from seven women: Lucy Walter, Elizabeth Killigrew, Catharine Pegge, Barbara Villiers (mother of five), Nell Gwynn (mother of two), Moll Davis and Louise de Kéroüalle. The King certainly did not suffer from that complex characteristic of some Casanovas who must claim the paternity of every child conceived within their orbit: to be cynical, he could scarcely afford to do so, since paternity for a sovereign was a serious (financial) business. At the same time he honoured his genuine paternal obligations with a mixture of love and liberality.

The royal accounts include payments which have a distinctly nursery flavour – rattles, cradles and so forth. As the children grew older, more substantial sums were disbursed. In April 1684 Lady Mary Tudor, daughter of Moll Davis, received a suite of tapestry hangings, a looking-glass, a little crimson damask bed for country use, a bed of druggett for her gentlewoman, and for her chambermaid, laundry-maid, page and footman 150 ells
of Holland to make six pairs of sheets. There were wedding expenses, which any father might expect to pay (the King’s heart was in the right place: as we have seen over the wedding of Anne Fitzroy, he accepted the responsibility, even if payment came at a characteristically slow pace). There were dowries and allowances. As late as 1693 Charles Duke of Southampton was still being allotted an allowance of £6,000 a year.
³²

Where the emotions were concerned, so affectionate were the relations of Charles
II
with his illegitimate children that it was all the more regrettable that he should lack legitimate heirs. The next century would see disputes between royal father and son become the norm, not the exception. Since children tend to reproduce the family pattern they have experienced, a terrible chain reaction was set up. King and Prince of Wales were in constant conflict. The boy dreamt of by Queen Catharine in her delirium would have had a happier fate, since Charles
II
had always enjoyed delightful relations with Charles
I
. For that matter, Charles
I
had been greatly loved by his own father. The Stuarts, for all their weaknesses in other respects, made good parents; unlike the Hanoverians, they were characterized by warm family relationships. Charles
II
would have been an excellent father – within the marriage bond.

As it was, he did make an excellent father – but outside it. His blood courses down through the veins of the English aristocracy into the body of English life. His descendants, if not quite as numerous as the sands of the sea, are at any rate numerous enough for the line to be unlikely to die out. ‘Six bastard Dukes survive his luscious Reign’: so Defoe summed up the King’s achievement; and it is a point often made today in attacks on the hereditary House of Lords that so many dukedoms derive from the
amours
of King Charles
II
.
^fn6
Such critics would undoubtedly approve the contemporary satire of Marvell on the subject:

The misses take place, each advanced to be duchess

With pomp great as queens in their coach and six horses,

Their bastards make dukes, earls, viscounts and lords,

With all the title that honour affords …

In fact, six of the King’s sons received nine dukedoms: Monmouth and Buccleuch for Lucy Walter’s son; Southampton, Northumberland and Grafton and Cleveland, on her death, for Barbara’s three boys; St Albans for Nelly’s surviving son; Richmond and Lennox (joined together) for Louise’s only child.
^fn7
Monmouth’s marriage to Anne Duchess of Buccleuch in her own right, led to the pair being created Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch in England jointly. After his death, Duchess Anne was allowed to retain her own Scottish Buccleuch title, although that of Monmouth was swallowed up in her husband’s disgrace.

But Charles’ daughters were not forgotten. Some were married off to lordlings, who were then further ennobled. Mary Tudor was granted the rank and precedence of a Duke’s daughter at the same time as her step-brothers gained their coveted dukedoms. Two of the King’s sons made political alliances – Henry Duke of Grafton married Arlington’s daughter, and Charles Earl of Plymouth married the daughter of Danby.

Taken all in all, they were an agreeable bunch, with no real black sheep amongst them – unless one counts Monmouth. Out of a dozen children, that was not a bad record. It is true that none of them showed the exceptional calibre of their father, and what one must suppose to have been the exceptional talents of their mother in one direction at least. But then exceptional parents rarely breed exceptional children. Charles
II
’s extraordinary qualities had been largely forged by adversity: these children enjoyed quite a different upbringing.

Nor can it be argued that the children of Charles
II
were noted for their waywardness. Charles Duke of Southampton and later Duke of Cleveland on his mother, Barbara’s, death,
was described by her in one of her accesses of maternal disgust as a ‘kockish idle boy’ while at Oxford; and she sent for the Dean of Christ Church to tell him so.
³³
But such undergraduate behaviour must be regarded as the rule, not the exception. Some of the girls were flighty: not only Anne Countess of Sussex but Mary Tudor, who married the Earl of Derwentwater, caused her husband distress. Yet such infidelities were hardly above the average for well-born ladies during this period. As for the King’s favourite, the solace of his later years, Charlotte Countess of Lichfield, her sweetness and impeccable virtue bore out a pleasanter axiom: that an amoral mother will often produce a paragon of a daughter – for she was the offspring of the hot-tempered Barbara Duchess of Cleveland.

Charlotte Countess of Lichfield is one of those characters whose goodness survives differences of style and period to charm us still. Her appearance was appealing rather than beautiful: her mouth (like her father’s) was too large and so were her eyes; her face and chin were too small. It was her personality rather than her looks which won hearts. Whether bearing and rearing her enormous family (at the age of nineteen she had four children and gave birth to a total of twenty), playing basset, crimp or billiards, going riding, adorning her houses, her attitude to life recalls that of Queen Charlotte a hundred years later: she wanted each day to bring its own pleasure.

She was married off in 1677 at the age of twelve, her husband being rewarded with the Lichfield title. The new Earl also received the more spiritual reward of great happiness. Together the Lichfields enjoyed a married life of forty-two years. Their shared monument in Spelsbury Church commemorates the fact that ‘at their marriage they were the most grateful bridegroom and the most beautiful bride and that till death they remained the most constant husband and wife’.

To King Charles
II
, in a series of fond if scribbled notes often enclosing money, she was his ‘dear Charlotte’, as once Madame had been his ‘dear sister’.
³⁴
He was her ‘loving’ and at other times her ‘kind’ father. There is a vignette of Charlotte tickling the King’s bald pate as he took his post-prandial nap. Other glimpses of family intimacy include fatherly advice on
Charlotte’s building plans for a new house, which should not disturb those of her sister Anne, but ‘I think it a very reasonable thing that other houses should not look into your house without your permission.’ When Charlotte is pregnant, the King is delighted and hopes to see the child ere long; when they are apart, he is sorry he will be so long deprived of seeing his ‘dear Charlotte’.

As for the boys, the King was proud of his fine brood of dukelings: Evelyn’s wry pen gives a portrait of him receiving communion at Easter 1684 with Richmond, Northumberland and St Albans, ‘sons of Portsmouth, Cleveland and Nelly’, three boys on his right hand – and three bishops on his left. Barbara’s second son, Henry – ‘Harry’ – Duke of Grafton, was rated the handsomest; he also pursued a career as a sailor. These two attributes were sometimes in conflict. ‘Your brother Harry is now here and will go in a few days to Holland,’ wrote the King to Charlotte. ‘By the time he returns, he will have worn out in some measure the redness of his face, so as not to fright the most part of our ladies here.’ Charles Earl of Plymouth – ‘Don Carlo’ – much resembled his father. Said to be ‘a fine youth’, he was authorized to raise Plymouth’s Foot for Tangier; he died there in October 1680 before his promise could be fulfilled (he also left a mass of debts including tailors’ bills, so his promise was not entirely military). But the Duke of Northumberland, Barbara’s third son, he who had been born so festively at Merton College, Oxford, was generally considered to be the most like Charles – at eighteen he was ‘a tall black man like his father the King’. Because he was also ‘well-bred, civil and modest’, Evelyn rated Northumberland the ‘most accomplished and worth the owning’ of Charles’ children.
³⁵

Nelly’s sons, one of whom died at the age of nine, and Louise’s boy, belonged to a later period. They were duly ennobled after the frantic efforts of their mothers – Louise’s son was only three when he was raised to the peerage – but were still only in their early teens at the time of their father’s death.

In general, all the bastards were easily and unselfconsciously treated by their legitimate relatives, whether they pursued the Whig connection of William and Mary or the Jacobite one of
James. Their Stuart Christian names emphasized rather than diminished the connection: no fewer than four of the King’s sons were named Charles, two of them James, and Barbara’s third son, like the third son of King Charles
I
, was christened Henry and nicknamed Harry. The girls were Charlotte, a name otherwise hardly known in England at that date,
^fn8
or Anne or Mary, the names of Stuart princesses. The King’s daughter by Elizabeth Killigrew was named Charlotte Jemima (for James) Henrietta Maria, a Stuart mouthful. Surnames employed were unashamedly royal: Fitzcharles, Fitzroy, Tudor. The name of Crofts, taken from his guardian, was only used for Monmouth in the desperate days of exile, when a royal connection was not necessarily blazoned. (On his marriage to an heiress, Monmouth took his wife’s surname of Scott.)

The Duke of York was particularly devoted to his niece, Charlotte Lichfield, and corresponded with her while he was in Scotland;
³⁷
he also favoured Harry Duke of Grafton. Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Fitzroy had a daughter by her first marriage, Stuarta Howard, who became a lady-in-waiting to Mary of Modena. Mary Tudor was the mother of the two Jacobite Earls of Derwentwater, who died respectively in 1715 and 1745 in the cause of their Stuart relations; they had been brought up as companions to James Edward, the so-called Old Pretender. Harry Duke of Grafton, on the other hand, supported William of Orange and was rewarded by being integrated into the Whig establishment; he died as a soldier under Marlborough’s command in 1690.

The King was also extremely fond of Charles, Earl of Burford and then Duke of St Albans, surviving son of Nelly. He too was ‘very pretty’ in youth. There is evidence that Charles worried over Burford’s education more than that of his other children: as though Louise, the
bien née
, could be trusted with that of her son (in fact she gave him the playwright Wycherley, Barbara’s former lover, as a tutor), but Nelly, the girl of the people, could
not. In 1682 George Legge, the King’s intimate, commented on the King’s fondness for the boy: now he was of an age ‘to be bred into the world’, he was to be trusted to Lord Preston in France. Here the King wished him to study mathematics and the art of fortification (two of his own preoccupations), as well as observing the progress of Louis
XIV
(another of them). Nelly herself was torn between coveting this glorious future for her boy, and not wanting him to leave England before ‘some settlement’ had been made upon him.
³⁸
Later Burford justified his father’s faith by fighting the Turks in Hungary – his colonelcy was not to be regarded as a sinecure – and his mother’s by marrying an heiress.