Mistresses Page 4

  And then, as the year 1659 drew to a close, there came the first glimmer of hope in England. Richard Cromwell’s protectorate had not survived its first year and his fall brought into the open the long-running differences between the army’s leaders and republicans who favoured what they called the Good Old Cause and the supremacy of Parliament. Deprived of a strong leader, the republic looked unsteady. Hopes of a restoration of the Stuarts had been raised frequently during the 1650s but every ill-considered attempt at a royalist rising had been put down. When, on 1 January 1660, General George Monck, who commanded the army that effectively occupied Scotland, made the fateful gamble to march his men south, ostensibly to support Parliamentarians expelled by the army grandees, the course of history changed.

  Monck was probably playing a longer game, even at this stage, than he dared acknowledge but he had always been an opportunist and he needed to wait before his true motives became apparent. While presenting himself as Parliament’s saviour, he had been receiving letters from Charles II for some time, and his ultimate goal, if Parliament would go along with his call for new elections, was to restore the Stuarts. By the end of March 1660, it was apparent to the amazed and delighted Charles and his two brothers that they would, at last, be returning home. In the Declaration of Breda, issued on 4 April, Charles noted, ‘If the general distraction and confusion, which is spread over the whole kingdom, doth not awaken all men to a desire and longing that those wounds which have so many years together been kept bleeding may be bound up, all we can say will be to no purpose.’6 His hopes were never to be entirely realized during the twenty-five years of an increasingly fraught reign but, in the spring of 1660, they were easily understood and accepted by many, but not all. Charles’s restoration was not greeted with the universal rejoicing that royalist sympathizers claimed.7 But there was a general feeling of relief and widespread rejoicing. A new era of light-heartedness seemed to beckon.

  Yet even with the rumours and scurrilous tales that had been spread by his enemies while he languished in exile, it is unlikely that England was prepared for the extent of debauchery that would all too soon come to characterize the court and the monarch. John Evelyn, the diarist, wrote after the king’s death that he was ‘addicted to women’. And by the time of his restoration, Charles was involved with one woman in particular who would dominate both him and his court for the first decade of his reign. She was Barbara Palmer, née Villiers, and her extraordinary boldness, extravagance and beauty made her one of the most famous – and reviled – royal mistresses of all time.

  Part Two

  The Lady

  BARBARA VILLIERS

  1640–1709

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘That blooming beauty’

  ‘The idea I have of your perfections is too glorious to be shadowed either by absence or time’

  Philip, earl of Chesterfield to Barbara Villiers, 1656

  THE LADY WAS born into a powerful, if unpopular, family, still regarded as upstarts by some members of the old nobility. George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, favourite of both James I and Charles I, was her grandfather’s half-brother. When the infant Barbara was baptized at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 27 November 1640, her mother, Mary Bayning, was only fifteen years old, though her father, William Villiers, Viscount Grandison, was in his mid-twenties. The viscount had fought a duel for Mary’s hand, in Hyde Park, with Mary’s brother-in-law, who seems to have suspected that this member of the Villiers clan was more interested in the girl’s money than inspired by romantic love. And Mary’s fortune was considerable. She came from a mercantile family whose wealth had allowed them to buy a title, and she was regarded as a great prize. No doubt Mary’s status as an heiress added to her attractions but there does seem to have been a genuine affection between the couple. But they had married at a time when the sense of dislocation in England was palpable and the problems facing Charles I were accelerating. Whatever happiness they knew was destined to be short-lived.

  Grandison’s behaviour might suggest a greedy and hot-blooded nature yet, though these and much worse criticisms were to be aimed at his daughter, he seems, in fact, to have been a serious young man, known for his piety and deep commitment to the royalist cause when the Civil Wars broke out. When Charles I left London after his disastrous foray into the House of Commons to arrest the five men he believed were the opposition ringleaders, Grandison accompanied him as he rode north to York. Serving the king was a duty and the viscount acknowledged the need to put personal consideration aside: ‘If he had not understanding enough to know the uprightness of the cause, nor loyalty enough to inform him of the duty of a subject, yet the very obligations of gratitude to the king, on the behalf of his house, were such as his life was but a due sacrifice.’1

  Whether his young wife was quite so enthusiastic about the possibility of losing her lord on matters of principle is doubtful. She came from a family who put business acumen above fine phrases but, sadly, her husband’s words were to prove prophetic. He had been involved in various engagements in which he had acquitted himself honourably, and had risen to the rank of colonel when, in the summer of 1643, he left his wife and child at Oxford, the royalist headquarters, to join Prince Rupert’s forces in the siege of Bristol. On 26 July, in a muddled assault on part of the city’s defences that was typical of the ill discipline of royalist forces, Grandison was shot in the leg. He was taken back to Oxford, a considerable journey for a wounded man, where he lingered for a month before the gangrene that infected his wound killed him. At the age of just eighteen, Viscountess Grandison found herself facing an uncertain future with a three-year-old daughter. There was not even a male heir to carry on her husband’s name and the title passed to his brother.

  Barbara Villiers commemorated her father, many years later, by erecting a monument of marble over his grave in Christ Church, Oxford. She had none of his self-effacement or sense of duty but perhaps she cherished, from the mists of her early childhood, fond memories of a gallant gentleman.

  *

  WE KNOW NOTHING of the next five years of Barbara’s life. They were passed as the Civil Wars engulfed England and were times of some financial hardship. Lady Grandison’s estates were in eastern England, an area firmly under Parliamentary control, and she could not recover the rents from them or the substantial loans her own father had made to the Crown. In 1648, she married again, to her late husband’s first cousin, Charles Villiers, earl of Anglesey.

  Evidently, she thought that a continued alliance with the family would be beneficial for herself and little Barbara, though it did not prove of much financial help, since the earl’s property was also sequestrated by the king’s opponents. However, the couple did not flee abroad after the execution of Charles I but stayed in London. It is unclear what part of the city they lived in or whether it was in a house owned or rented by Lord Anglesey. Their straitened circumstances made exile unappealing and they survived, as many other royalists did, in an uneasy acceptance of the republic that replaced the fallen king. Barbara’s education must have continued during these years, though nothing is known of it beyond the fact that she was obviously literate, as would have been expected of all young ladies of her background. Emphasis on social graces and attainments, such as dancing, music and conversation, generally formed a more important part of a girl’s upbringing than academic study. Barbara’s letters are lively and well expressed, characterized by the archaic and inconsistent use of vocabulary typical of an age when there were no accepted conventions in spelling. She probably learned French, since foreign languages were considered an appropriate attainment for ladies, and many years later she would reside in Paris when life in England became uncomfortable. Her one recorded usage of French indicates that she could not spell in that language, either.

  Scholarly shortcomings were of no real significance to the teenage Barbara Villiers, who soon learned how to enjoy life in Cromwellian London. Girls like Barbara, at the centre of royalist society, knew how to have fun, passing
their days in a heady mixture of secret assignations and love affairs, cocking a snook at the Puritanism they despised. By the mid-1650s, Barbara was an established figure on the social scene, where her physical attractions and strong personality pushed her to the forefront of attention: ‘Being left destitute of both a father and a fortune, when she first came to London she appeared in a very plain country dress; which being soon altered into the gaiety and mode of the town, added a new lustre to that blooming beauty, of which she had as great a share as any lady of her time. Thus furnished by bounteous nature and by art, she soon became the object of divers young gentlemen’s affections.’2 At the age of sixteen, Barbara had blossomed into a gorgeous, self-confident young woman, whose magnificent auburn hair, full figure and arresting dark-blue eyes made her impossible to ignore. All this attention went to her head but one admirer, in particular, won her heart. She fell madly in love with a man described as ‘the greatest knave in England’. He was Philip Stanhope, second earl of Chesterfield, the first of many men of dubious morals and an air of disrepute who would share this uninhibited lady’s bed.

  Chesterfield had just the sort of colourful background, tinged with sadness, to attract women and his good looks merely added to his appeal. He was, at the age of twenty-three, already a widower. His wife, Lady Anne Percy, the daughter of the earl of Northumberland, guardian to the younger royal children during the Civil Wars, had died of smallpox after two years of marriage. The baby son she had given birth to shortly before her death only survived her by a few weeks. This double tragedy hit Chesterfield hard and he decided that he would leave England to travel in Europe, departing in the summer of 1655. Such a move seemed natural to him. He had been brought up and educated in the Netherlands as the result of his mother’s second marriage to a Dutch nobleman, and spent time at the court of Princess Mary Stuart in The Hague, where his mother was the close confidante of Charles I’s eldest daughter. He had also spent time at Henrietta Maria’s exiled court in France and he knew Paris and Rome, as well as the other great cities of Italy, and had travelled in Germany. Chesterfield was just as much at ease on the continent as he was in England. This sophisticated background, his personal misfortune and a penchant for duelling made it hard for ladies to resist him and he was perfectly happy to bask in their adoration. Of course, he was looking for a new wife and one who could bring both money and connections. Few royalist ladies could offer these prospects and there was talk of him marrying the Protector’s youngest daughter, Frances Cromwell, and also Mary Fairfax, the only child of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the lord-general of the Parliamentary army, who had retired from public life in 1650 and was a great landowner in Yorkshire. But while not wishing to fall out with the rulers of republican England, the earl’s political sympathies lay with the royalists and when Barbara’s cousin, George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham, stole the affections of the impressionable Mary Fairfax from under Chesterfield’s nose, after the banns for their wedding had been read three times, the earl stepped aside. Mary Fairfax would come to regret her choice bitterly but, for the present, Chesterfield was content to pursue his hedonistic lifestyle as a single, highly desirable man.

  Barbara was not his only mistress at the time and their affair had its ups and downs, but both were caught up in the passion of it, as can be seen from the frequent exchange of letters between them. Chesterfield strove to be the complete lover, in romantic prose – even, occasionally, in slightly awkward poetry – as well as in the bedchamber. The extent of Barbara’s longing and her openness in acknowledging it can be sensed in her replies. The first letter in the sequence between the two lovers is from the gentleman and clearly follows a lovers’ tiff that had caused both parties some distress:

  Madam, cruelty and absence have ever been thought the most infallible remedies for such a distemper as mine and yet I find both of them so ineffectual that they make me but the more incurable; seriously, Madam, you ought at least to afford some compassion to one in so desperate a condition, for only by wishing me more fortunate you will make me so. Is it not a strange magic in love, which gives so powerful a charm to the least of your cruel words, that they endanger to kill a man at a hundred miles distance; but why do I complain of so pleasant a death, or repine at those sufferings which I would not change for a diadem? No, Madam, the idea I have of your perfections is too glorious to be shadowed either by absence or time: and if I should never more see the sun, yet I should not cease from admiring his light; therefore do not seek to darken my weak sense by endeavouring to make me adore you less.

  Warming to his theme, the earl finished off his epistle in verse:

  For if you decree that I must die,

  Falling is nobler than retiring,

  And in the glory of aspiring,

  It is brave to tumble from the sky.3

  The letter was written from Chesterfield’s house in Bretby, Derbyshire, probably in 1656. His tone is very much that of the wronged lover wishing to restore himself to his lady’s favour but there is a playful undertone that gives the reader the impression he believes that, in the game of love, this type of high-flown sentiment is more to be expected than believed. He may also have been afflicted by the more prosaic inconveniences he referred to when writing to a friend at the end of the same year, when he complained of ‘such a cold as I think is attended with a legion of devils; I mean head-ache, tooth-ache, cough and defluction [discharge] in my eyes; which makes me often wish that there was somebody now, as there was formerly, that could send them all into a herd of swine.’4 In both cases, Chesterfield’s wit and ability to express himself are readily apparent.

  Barbara Villiers was well aware that she was not the only woman besotted with the earl. The earliest of her surviving letters to him begins with her regret that she had not seen him at church that morning but that she was not allowed (for reasons she does not give) to attend. Lady Anglesey was clearly not able to put a stop to the liaison but she may have resorted to other tactics to prevent her daughter behaving too obviously in public.5 So a lovelorn and rather possessive Barbara stayed at home, writing to Chesterfield: ‘I am never so well pleased as when I am with you, though I find you are better when you are with other ladies; for you were yesterday all the afternoon with the person I am most jealous of, and I know I have so little merit that I am suspicious you love all women better than myself.’ She went on to say that she had written the previous day as well, hoping to convince him that she ‘loved nothing besides yourself, no will I ever, though you should hate me; but if you should, I would never give you the trouble of telling you how much I loved you, but keep it to myself till it had broke my heart.’ Other letters, in a similar vein, followed, telling him of her regret in not seeing him and suggesting assignations at his private lodgings in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  Barbara did have one friend with whom she was perfectly willing to share Chesterfield’s attentions. This was Lady Anne Hamilton, the wayward and promiscuous daughter of the second duke of Hamilton. In the year that Oliver Cromwell was offered, and refused, the crown, Chesterfield was the recipient of a saucy letter, from both girls, suggesting an assignation: ‘My friend and I are just now abed together contriving how to have your company this afternoon. If you deserve this favour, you will come and seek us at Ludgate Hill, about three o’clock, at Butler’s shop, where we will expect you . . .’6 It is unlikely that the young ladies had coffee and cake in mind for their afternoon’s entertainment, and this may be the earliest recorded invitation to a threesome in English history. Anne Hamilton went on to become the mistress of James, duke of York, while he was married to Anne Hyde, and was reported to have numerous other liaisons. During the first decade of the Restoration, she and Barbara continued their friendship and their rivalry in trying to outrage their husbands by their serial infidelity and brazen behaviour.

  Chesterfield had never made any secret of the fact that he was, in his own words, ‘making love to five or six at a time’ and Barbara was not the foremost in his thoughts. Indeed, th
e earl’s diary must have been rather complicated. By 1658, he had added Lady Elizabeth Howard to his conquests, though she assured him that she had never spoken lightly of their affair to her friends, ‘being always careful of that for my own sake as well as yours’. Barbara does not appear to have exercised such caution, despite now having a serious suitor for her hand in marriage.

  He was Roger Palmer, the second son of a respectable minor aristocrat, Sir James Palmer of Dorney Court, near Windsor. Sir James did not approve of his son’s determination to marry a young woman of such dubious reputation who had no fortune of her own. The Palmers were a royalist family of probity and rectitude, and it is hardly surprising that their patriarch did not want his well-educated and serious son to ally himself with a girl who had nothing to recommend her beyond her undoubted beauty. It was true that she was a Villiers, but she came from a junior branch of the family. It has been said that Roger Palmer was seeking to marry above him but that was not really the case. He had been well educated, at Eton and Cambridge, and was a lawyer at the Inner Temple. Possessed of intelligence, a pleasant appearance, outstanding linguistic ability and a modest inheritance on the death of his father in 1658, Roger pressed his suit to the eighteen-year-old Barbara, who had seen rather less of Chesterfield since the earl, who loved duelling almost as much as women, had been temporarily confined to the Tower of London for wounding one Captain Whalley. Whether through the encouragement of her mother or her own calculation that it might be time for marriage, Barbara Villiers agreed to accept Roger Palmer. Their wedding took place at St Gregory’s Church, near the Angleseys’ home on Ludgate Hill, on 14 April 1659. It would bring intense unhappiness, humiliation and, eventually, self-imposed exile to a decent young man, who soon discovered that he had every cause to regret ignoring his father’s advice, for the new Mrs Palmer had no intention of changing her lifestyle. Marriage vows meant nothing to Barbara.