The Dukes (21 page)

Even at the tender age of fifteen, Barbara had learnt to use her
body to seduce and obtain what she wanted. With rich auburn hair
and blue eyes and a flirtatious manner, she was not easily resistible;
neither the King nor her countless other lovers, both before and
after, can be blamed for succumbing to such obvious charms. In
1659, aged eighteen, she married an obscure person called Roger
Palmer, who is only remembered for having been her husband. He
was one of nature's cuckolds. Palmer was the father of not one of his
wife's numerous offspring.

In the spring of 1660 the King met Mrs Palmer and took a fancy
to her. It took no time at all for them to become lovers. Samuel
Pepys was audibly moved by the sight of her. "I sat before Mrs
Palmer, the King's mistress, and filled my eyes with her, which much
pleased me."
¹⁷
In February of the following year, a daughter was
bora to her; Palmer said he was the father, everybody else said Lord
Chesterfield was, but in time the King claimed that
he
was, and
Palmer dutifully climbed down. Barbara then began to ask for, and
get, the benefits of her royal liaison. Her quiet and obedient hus­band was made Earl of Castlemaine, so that she could proudly bear
a title, and special arrangements were made in the patent of creation
so that the title should pass to
her
male heirs, not his; this was tanta­mount to an explicit avowal that the affair was well and truly
launched, and that Barbara intended to bear other royal children.

Two years later, Catherine of Braganza arrived in England to
become Queen. Such an inconvenience was not allowed to interrupt
the King's uproarious love affair with Barbara. He stayed with his
mistress one whole week, every night and day, notes Pepys,
¹⁸
and
went so far as to spend his intended bride's first night in England
with the infamous Lady Castlemaine. Everybody knew, no attempt
was made to conceal either the affair or the insult to the innocent
Catherine, and Barbara was henceforth the object of public scorn and
reproach. Barbara was again pregnant, and she brazenly proposed that she
should spend her confinement at Hampton Court, while the King
and Queen were spending their honeymoon there. The King managed
to resist this indelicate suggestion, but resistance to the lady's demands
was becoming daily more difficult. She had a furious temper, could
shout and scream, thump and rant, and burst into tears at will. If
there was one thing the King could not abide, it was to see a woman
crying; he would grant almost any favour to ease her distress, hardly
stopping to reflect how simply a determined woman could (and can)
manufacture a tearful crisis. So Barbara nearly always got her way.

Her second child and first son was born in June 1662. Poor
Charles was torn again between his natural good manners towards
his bride and the powerful spell this pretty hot-tempered passionate
woman cast upon him. She begged him to make her a Lady of the
Queen's Bedchamber, unaware of or unconcerned by the inappropriateness of such a suggestion. Charles agreed. When the Queen saw
her name upon the list she struck it off in hurtful anger; she knew
enough by now to realise that Barbara was her rival and that
Barbara was winning. The Queen hardly spoke a word of English
and did not understand the curious way in which this libertine
Court operated. She had to capitulate. Charles insisted on keeping
his word to Barbara, and the mistress was duly appointed to serve
the wife.

Once Catherine had surrendered, she burdened Barbara with
marks of affection and esteem. Her change of attitude is easy to
comprehend when one remembers that she was deeply in love with
her husband and wanted above all things to please him. If treating
his loathsome and selfish mistress with respect would please him, then
that is what she would do. Charles, who hated difficulties, squabbles,
and tears, was delighted. He wanted everyone to be happy together
without creating problems. At Somerset House in September, only a
few weeks after the royal wedding, the King attended a party with
his wife Queen Catherine, his mistress Lady Castlemaine, and his
bastard son James Crofts by a previous mistress Lucy Walter, all in
the same carriage. Charles was content.
¹⁹

It was about this time that the unscrupulous and over-sexed
Barbara reputedly made a play for the beautiful thirteen-year-old Mr
Crofts, who was a kind of unofficial stepson to her. Pepys observed
that she was "always" hanging on him. Sensing danger, the King
married him off and created him Duke of Monmouth and Duke of
Buccleuch only a few months later, in order, it was said, to rescue
him from Barbara's attentions.
²⁰
The boy had been flattered, and was
too much in her company.

Barbara's reputation suffered more when it was noticed that in
addition to her other sins, she was a cruel and heartless mother. She
treated the new baby with such contemptuous irritation that the poor
boy was permanently damaged, and grew up mentally deranged.
²¹

Her temper grew more and more fierce. She was frequently heard
shouting at the King. She called him a fool in public. Pepys was
present on one occasion among many. He wrote in his diary:

"how imperious this woman is, and hectors the King to whatever
she will. It seems she is with child, and the Kings says he did not
get it; with that she made a slighting 'puh' with her mouth, and
went out of the house."
²²

Since she was openly having an affair with Henry Jermyn, and
sleeping with him more often than with the King, the latter's
suspicions can hardly be said to be unjustified. Her second son,
Henry, was born on 20th September 1663; this is the boy later to be
created Duke of Grafton, whose descendant is the nth and present
Duke. The King refused to acknowledge the infant as his own. She
badgered, screamed, fought with extreme violence, until in the end
he relented. "God damn me, but you shall own it!" she shouted.
But the circumstances of the infant Duke's birth remain questionable.
Again in 1667, another quarrel erupted over the birth of her third
son. She threatened that unless the King acknowledged the new child,
she would take it to Whitehall and dash out its brains.
²³
Pepys says,
"She did threaten to bring all his bastards to his closet-door, and
hath nearly hectored him out of his wits."
²⁴

Meanwhile, Lord Castlemaine (Mr Palmer that was) found him­self paterfamilias of an ever-increasing brood with whose birth he had
nothing whatever to do. The French Ambassador wrote of the Earl's
worried look at finding two unexpected additions to his family.

When Barbara was converted to Roman Catholicism, Stillingfleet
remarked, "If the Church of Rome has got no more by her than the
Church of England has lost, the matter will not be much."
²⁵
The
diarist John Evelyn was yet more laconic. She was "the curse of our
nation".
²⁶

At this distance, it is difficult to see what her attraction was, unless
it be the wild, impassioned, impulsive and unpredictable nature
which some men find compelling. There was also, of course, her
sexual athleticism; Charles is reported to have said that she knew
more positions than Aretino.
²⁷
Charles was beginning to tire of her;
he was weary of the constant scenes and quarrels, which were not at
all to his taste. He was loyal to the extent that he would still see her
regularly, dine with her, receive her at Court, but her influence and
magic faded. It was easier now to give in to her material demands,
causing only financial problems, which were nothing compared to the
emotional problems her earlier antics created. Besides, they kept her
quiet. She was given a residence in London, furnished at vast expense
to suit her lavish taste; she was given an annual grant of £4700 from
the Post Office, a lump sum in ready cash of £30,000, jewels and
priceless plate from the royal collection, and the beautiful palace of
Nonesuch near Epsom. This palace, standing in its own handsome
park, was built by Henry VIII and was a favourite house of his
daughter, Elizabeth I. Barbara received it as a gift, and characteristic­ally, she plundered it, sold its contents, and gambled away the proceeds.
She allowed the house to fall into such decay that it completely
disappeared, and its foundations were only recently discovered by
archaeologists. Although Barbara received thousands and thousands
of pounds for her charms, she never kept a penny. She was seen one
day wearing £40,000 worth of jewellery; on another, she lost nearly
£20,000 at gambling. She insisted that her station required a coach
drawn by eight horses, which Londoners rushed in crowds to see pass
in the street, and she even took money from the royal purse to support
her successive lovers.

In 1670 she was created Duchess of Cleveland. The normally
sedate
Complete Peerage
is aroused to a passionate footnote by
this title which was, it says, "conferred as actual wages of her pros­titution and one which had stunk in the nostrils of the nation during
the forty years she enjoyed it; one, too, which had not been redeemed
from the slur thus attached to it by any merit of her successors, of
whom the one was a fool and the other a nonentity".
²⁸

By the time Barbara was made Duchess, the King had already
diverted his favours to other mistresses, especially the actresses Moll
Davis and Nell Gwynn. Money and honours were lavished on Barbara
to compensate for her demotion from the royal bed. Her subsequent
history is no less rapacious. She had about ten other lovers, including
the playwright Wycherley, John Churchill (later Duke of Marl­borough), Ralph Montagu (later Duke of Montagu), and a fashion­able rope-dancer called Jacob Hall. The King on his death-bed asked
his brother to be kind to her. In old age she was trapped into a
second marriage for which only lust can have been the motive. She
chose her male counterpart, the notorious rake "Beau" Feilding, who
"had only to give the lady a sight of his handsome person he
designed to lay at her feet".
²⁹
Alas, Feilding had married another
lady, Mary Wadsworth, only
two weeks
before the marriage with
Barbara, and had ditched her when he discovered she had no for­tune. He was tried for bigamy in 1706, when the Old Bailey heard
such evidence of lechery as it seldom suspects. Letters written by the
Duchess are now in the British Museum, and are said to be among
the most indecent which that mausoleum of dusty pornography pos­sesses.
⁸⁰
She moved to a house in Chiswick Mall (now called Walpole
House) where she died of dropsy in 1709.