Mistresses Read online

  This foray into naval warfare was unsuccessful. Prince Charles never managed to land in England and was back in the Netherlands by September 1648, where he passed the remainder of the year as a helpless spectator of the final act in the drama of Charles I’s life. Yet if his sudden departure from Lucy had effectively ended their liaison almost as soon as it had begun, he could not quite brush it off altogether. For Lucy was pregnant and Charles acknowledged the child she was carrying as his own. Their affair may have been short but its repercussions were long – for the king, his brother, James, duke of York, and for the baby son who became the first of Charles II’s fourteen illegitimate children, the ill-fated duke of Monmouth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Trouble with Lucy

  ‘Before I take the liberty of writing to Your Majesty of Mrs Barlow, I did sufficiently inform myself of the truth of what I write, since I had the opportunity to save her from public scandal . . .’

  Daniel O’Neill to Charles II, February 1656

  IN THE DECADE following her son’s birth in April 1649, Lucy’s behaviour became increasingly reckless, leading to an irretrievable breakdown in her relationship with Charles II. Even during her pregnancy, the intention to keep her at arm’s length was clear. Charles may have been willing to acknowledge that he had fathered her child but there was no question of Lucy giving birth at Princess Mary’s court at The Hague. Instead, the future duke of Monmouth was born seventeen miles to the south, in the port city of Rotterdam. The child was given into the care of an English wet nurse and accommodated by a Dutch merchant who owned a house just along the coast, in Schiedam. Lucy, after a suitable period of recovery, was able to resume her life without inconvenience. She was young and healthy and would, no doubt, have hoped to remain close to her royal lover. Her son was called James, though we do not know who made the choice of name. Perhaps it was a compliment to the king’s brother, the duke of York. If so, it was one that the duke would not find gratifying. Young James was a healthy baby and grew into a strikingly handsome child. In his youthful portraits, we can see something of what his mother must have looked like, since no pictures of Lucy Walter, painted during her lifetime, survive.

  Whatever Lucy’s expectations that spring, her relationship with Charles was already on the wane. This was, in part, because circumstances made it difficult for him to remain in the Netherlands after the death of his father. Within weeks of his son’s birth, he was on the move, returning to his mother in Paris. The United Provinces of the Netherlands was a republic and politicians there, remembering the prolonged and bloody struggle for independence against the Spanish monarchy, did not share the Prince of Orange’s enthusiasm for monarchy. Charles was always rather good at realizing when he had outstayed his welcome. It has been specu-lated that he visited little James before his departure, though there is no firm evidence for this.1 Lucy certainly travelled to Paris herself later in the summer but whether this was on her own initiative or at Charles’s invitation is unknown. Given her subsequent behaviour, it is probable that Lucy was the instigator of this journey. The diarist John Evelyn, a royalist supporter, shared a coach with her on the way to Saint Germain, where Henrietta Maria and her sons were living on the grudging hospitality of the French court, and it was this enforced proximity that prompted his famous comments, quoted at the head of Chapter One, about her being both bold and insipid. He described her as the king’s mistress, a quasi-official appellation of which Lucy would have been proud, but does not mention whether she had brought her son to France with her. At this point, obviously keen to remind the king of her charms and probably show off her son as well, Lucy had no particular reason to suppose that he would try to separate her from James. A year later, she knew differently.

  What was Charles’s attitude towards Lucy Walter and her offspring? It is unlikely that she was his first sexual adventure and the baby may not have been his first child. There were rumours of a liaison during his stay, in 1646, on the island of Jersey but he had never admitted to mistresses or paternity before. Yet his reluctance to keep Lucy with him on his travels is plain and, as she seems to have realized early on, absence, in the case of Charles II, did not always make the heart grow fonder. Given the nature of their encounter, Lucy’s history and Charles’s wandering eye (he would soon tell his cousin, Sophia, that she was more beautiful than Mrs Barlow), any expectation that the king would put their relationship on a more permanent footing was unrealistic. Perhaps she did dream of marriage, and Charles had his own parents’ fidelity and happiness as an example, but his mother was a Bourbon princess, not a Welsh adventuress with an already murky past. Even as a ‘maîtresse-en-titre’, as the other women in the lives of his French royal cousins were known, Lucy did not measure up. She was not an aristocrat. And besides, Charles well knew that his marriageability was a political asset, even for an impoverished exile. He was not likely to throw it away in a moment of romantic delusion. A more pragmatic woman than Lucy would have accepted that the best she could hope for was a regular source of income for herself and her son, and a measure of respect, if she conducted herself with decorum. Charles evidently did make some financial provision for James, though precise details are lacking and its regularity may have been dependent on his resources, which were always stretched. They would remain so until he could get his throne back. For the latter half of 1649 and the first months of 1650, he was preoccupied with the development of a strategy which would allow him to achieve this goal. Once his plans were made, Lucy Walter was effectively no longer part of his life.

  The fall of Ireland to the forces of the English republic ended all hopes that it could be used as a springboard for a royalist invasion of England. Instead, in March 1650, Charles received a Scottish delegation at Breda and discussed with them the terms of an agreement by which he would use their support. The talks were difficult, for though Charles demonstrated all the charm for which he would become renowned, as well as his uncanny knack for spotting divisions and differences among his opponents, he was unable, in the end, to exploit these to his benefit. It has been said that he summoned Lucy Walter and his baby son to Breda to show off his virility to the Scots but if this did happen it was surely a miscalculation. A group of Scottish Calvinists were unlikely to be impressed by the appearance of a bastard son of a monarch whose freedom of action they intended to curtail. It would merely have reinforced in their minds the need to keep him away from unsuitable companions, of whom they were already wary. Charles sailed for Scotland in June, leaving Lucy behind. Though she did not know it at the time, he intended the parting to mark a decisive end to their relationship. Nor did Lucy know of his intentions for little James, though she would find out soon enough.

  *

  THE FIRST ATTEMPT to kidnap the king’s son might have succeeded, since the plans for it seem to have been laid with care. Soon after Charles II’s departure for Scotland, the easily flattered Mrs Barlow, who had always liked the attention of wealthy and, preferably, titled men, was inveigled away to the Rotterdam Fair, perhaps by the earl of Craven. Not that the earl really desired Lucy’s company. He was part of a plot masterminded by John Eliot, one of Charles’s longest-serving grooms of the bedchamber, who had stayed behind in the Netherlands with instructions to remove little James from his mother. The king wanted custody but seems to have been unwilling, or, perhaps, unable to bring this about openly, with Lucy’s agreement. Evidently it had not yet crossed her mind that an attempt might be made to remove James forcibly and she was greatly distressed when, on her return from Rotterdam, she found the child gone. ‘She rent her apparel, tore the hair from off her head and whole showers of tears bewailed the greatness of her loss.’ If this was the first, it would certainly not be the last very public scene that Lucy would make in respect of her son. Her theatrics, however, were soon replaced by a more considered and organized response. She ordered horses and rode through the night to the port of Maassluis, presuming that her son was about to be shipped off, back to England. How she came by
such information is not clear but it was erroneous. Lucy made a great scene on the quayside, throwing gold coins at the local mayor and yelling that a royal child had been abducted. She certainly attracted a crowd but it was all to no avail, since her son was not there. Some ten days later, he was discovered in a village not far from The Hague, in the care of two of John Eliot’s accomplices, unharmed and apparently unaware of the furore surrounding his disappearance. He was returned to his mother but only, according to one source, after a lawsuit. And if Lucy had at first thought that the king’s enemies in England had ordered the abduction of her son, she now knew differently.2

  Acceptance of reality was never one of Lucy’s strong points and she seems to have clung to the hope, during all the time Charles II was away, that their affair could somehow be renewed. Even after the king’s return from the crushing defeat of the royalist cause at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, she tried to rekindle their relationship by going, once again, to Paris. But it was abundantly evident that her status was nothing like it had been two years previously. As far as Charles was concerned, she was part of his past and he did not like the rumours about her conduct that were becoming more insistent. He would try his best, in these straitened times, to support their son, but he did not want anything more to do with Lucy herself. Yet whatever provision the king had made for her and James, it was clearly not sufficient from her perspective. She would need to leave Paris for good and find support elsewhere. Her choices were limited, so The Hague beckoned again.

  There, she took up with Viscount Theobald Taaffe, an Irish peer in his fifties, who had for some time been a dubious influence on the king. Charles enjoyed Taaffe’s company, conveniently overlooking his lax morals and military ineptitude because he was convivial and a good dancer. Taaffe was the ageing male equivalent of the good-time girl that Lucy, through inclination and inevitability, had become. Their mutual attraction was predictable. Lucy, relieved to have found a new protector, enjoyed her life with Taaffe. He treated her well and probably fathered her second child, a daughter named Mary. As much as he could, he tried to represent Lucy favourably to her former lover. There were rumours of a possible marriage (Taaffe was a widower) but no wedding took place. This was unfortunate for Lucy – and, indeed, for Charles II – because marrying off a discarded mistress was a time-honoured ploy for British royalty. Henry VIII had followed this course with Bessie Blount, and Charles’s Stuart ancestors, James IV and James V of Scotland, had found husbands for the mothers of their illegitimate children. We do not know why the Taaffe marriage never materialized but it may be that even the easy-going Taaffe was not in the end convinced that Lucy would make a faithful wife. For, much to the king’s unease, his erstwhile mistress’s reputation continued to go downhill.

  *

  BY THE MID-1650S, Lucy was becoming a serious embarrassment to Charles II. The well-travelled king was far away from her at that time, having tactfully removed himself and a small group of followers from Paris to Germany. The invitation from the Imperial Diet of Ratisbon at the end of 1653 allowed the king to leave France without losing face, a move made all the more pressing by the alliance of Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister to Charles’s young cousin, Louis XIV, with Oliver Cromwell, the undisputed leader of the English republic. A seething Henrietta Maria stayed on in Paris, despite the continued threat posed by the series of rebellions known as the Fronde. In truth, she had little choice. For Charles, the promise of a pension of £45,000 by the German states, and an extra £23,000 from Emperor Ferdinand III, offered an honourable way out. He left in the summer of 1654 and spent an idyllic few months with his sister, Mary, who had travelled from the Netherlands to be with him, visiting the Shrine of Charlemagne in Aachen, taking the waters at Spa and sailing down the Rhine. We do not know whether they discussed the woman whom Mary referred to in letters to Charles as ‘your wife’. Not too much should be read into this appellation; Mary was unlikely to refer to ‘your mistress’, though this reference has been used to bolster the claim that a marriage between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter had taken place earlier.3 But when the princess returned to The Hague, she would have been well aware of the continued problem Lucy posed, even if outwardly they remained on cordial terms.

  The king did not need his sister to remind him of Lucy Walter. At first, he had accepted the advice that Lucy would behave herself if adequate funds for her upkeep and the needs of her son were forthcoming. Charles duly authorized an annuity of 5,000 French livres, a sum roughly equivalent to £650,000 today. His intentions may have been genuine but he simply did not have adequate funds to meet such a commitment. Lucy never received anything like the amount promised and since she was convinced that the only real prospect of finding a man wealthy enough to support the lifestyle she craved, as well as her two children, was from among the royalist exiles at Princess Mary’s court, she was deaf to pleas that she should live quietly, away from public scrutiny. By May 1655, the king was imploring Taaffe to inform Lucy of his desire that ‘she goes to some place more private than The Hague, for her stay there is very prejudicial to us both.’4 Unfortunately for Charles, Lucy’s behaviour was providing just the sort of ammunition that his enemies in the English republic could use against him. He stood to lose, in the short term, the support of more strait-laced rulers, such as Philip IV of Spain, who was viewed as a potential source of desperately needed money. Philip presided over a stuffy and very proper court and was hardly going to hand over money to an exile whose former mistress was renowned for her continuing life of sin. In the longer term, the Cromwellian propaganda machine would delight in using this apparently never-ending source of smut to scupper any hopes he might have of restoration.

  When Taaffe failed to secure Lucy’s cooperation, Daniel O’Neill, a groom of the bedchamber who was one of the most influential and loyal of Charles II’s followers and effectively the king’s spymaster, stepped in to try to bring a decisive end to the problem of Lucy Walter. O’Neill, an Irish Protestant, had spent the early years of exile on the move, dividing his time between Paris, The Hague and the Spanish Netherlands and was well regarded in all three places. The king’s chief minister, Edward Hyde, nicknamed him ‘Infallible Subtle’. It was an apt epithet. O’Neill’s informers had been watching Lucy for some time and initially he had thought her little more than a nuisance who could be contained, paid off with a dribbling allowance. By 1656, he knew that this was not a viable option. Convinced that she posed a growing threat, O’Neill’s tactics were ruthless. He was unswerving in his advice that Lucy must be negated as a threat to the reputation of Charles II. Nothing could be expected from Spain, he warned, if rumours concerning Lucy’s wild behaviour continued to circulate. He had been told that ‘one of the greatest exceptions the ministers of Spain had, was that there was nothing a secret in your court.’5 In other words, Charles’s private life must not be made public by the antics of his erstwhile mistress. Cutting Lucy off, both financially and morally, was an absolute necessity. It would also be necessary to gain permanent custody of young James, her son.

  Deprived of what little money she had received from Charles II, Lucy followed what was, by now, a predictable path and found another lover. Thomas Howard, the younger brother of the earl of Suffolk, was Mary’s master of the horse and had been at her court for some years. His wife, Walburga van der Kerckhoven, was governess to Mary’s son, the future William III of England. He must have seemed an ideal beau, with his aristocratic connections and refined manners. Lucy was evidently smitten by Howard’s attentions and his expensive presents. He was even willing to set her up in a house of her own outside Delft, at a tactful distance from The Hague. Howard was certainly a catch. Yet it may be that Lucy was the one who had been ensnared.

  There is indirect evidence that Princess Mary had dangled Thomas Howard in front of Lucy Walter deliberately, in a bid to free her brother of an increasingly troublesome woman, and that Howard knew very well what was expected of him.6 Whether this was part of Daniel O’Neill’s wider
strategy for neutralizing Lucy is not clear. The cynicism of such a scheme is as distasteful as its crass immorality. Could Howard’s wife, for example, really have been a party to such a plot, or was she as taken in by it as Lucy Walter? The idea was also inherently risky, as an unexpected development would soon show. Before Lucy could even move into her new house at Delft, she was heading back to republican England and the king’s son was going with her. Unable, apparently, to dissuade her, Howard decided that he had better go along as well. Instead of enjoying the discreet and ladylike life offered by a mansion in the Dutch countryside, Lucy was about to be lodged in an altogether different venue: the Tower of London.

  *

  IF LIFE HAD taught Lucy anything, it was that opportunities for financial security should never be overlooked. So, when her brother, the soberly named Justus Walter, arrived from England to inform her that their mother had died in February 1656, leaving all of her estate to their aunt in the Netherlands, Lucy did not need much convincing to return to England with him to contest the will. The plans to contain her were suddenly thrown up in the air and the difficulties that might ensue with someone so unpredictable being let loose in Cromwellian England caused consternation. The level of anxiety may be gauged by the fact that Charles II, recently arrived in the Spanish Netherlands as a pensioner of Spain, had a brief meeting with Lucy on 22 May in Antwerp, shortly before she sailed. Since Antwerp was something of a detour from Flushing, the port Lucy was to depart from, this was not a chance meeting. We do not know who instigated it or what passed between them. Charles may have wanted an opportunity to see his son and perhaps to suggest that James remain with him while Lucy went in search of her inheritance. He could have ordered and imposed such an outcome if met with resistance, but, mindful of Lucy’s talent for causing a scene, he would not have wished a scandal to reach the ears of his new hosts within days of his arrival. It was ironic that fate should have brought Lucy and Charles together again when he had been trying to put as much distance as possible between them. Both were now in their mid-twenties, with difficult years behind them and uncertain futures ahead. The summer of 1648 seemed a world away. Yet for all the tension that hung in the air, neither could have known that this brief encounter would be their last.