A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (27 page)

If Catherine died, Charles might marry again, and Frances’s name was already being canvassed. But slowly Catherine’s fever calmed, although she was left temporarily deaf and so weak that she could not walk for weeks. She too had her fragile dreams, her toppling card houses. In her delirium she harked back constantly to childbirth. At one point she thought she had three children, at another a little girl who resembled Charles. Once she told him sadly that her baby boy was ‘very ugly’. ‘No, it’s a pretty boy,’ he soothed her. ‘If it be like you,’ she said, ‘it is a fine boy indeed.’
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And even when she recovered, her first question was ‘Where are the children?’

WHEN THE NEW FRENCH AMBASSADOR
Cominges reached London in late 1662 his master in Paris, the foreign minister Lionne, advised him to write an ‘official’ letter to Louis keeping him informed of political developments and anything that might affect French policy, and also to forward ‘on a separate sheet the most curious of the Court news’.
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Cominges did his best, but he hardly spoke a word of English and his spelling was interestingly phonetic: the king went to ‘Ouindsor’, the queen to ‘Bristau’ or ‘Qinzinton’ and court moved splendidly to ‘Omptoncourt’. In official life this mattered little since everyone spoke French except Clarendon, who used Bennet as an interpreter, but it did hamper Cominges’s gleaning of gossip. A better informed, though less reliable witness was the comte de Gramont, to whom Cominges sometimes appealed for explanations of odd English ways and words.

The traffic between the French and English courts was constant, as Charles’s letters to Minette make clear. After her marriage Minette, now ‘Madame’, had become a popular figure, a keen participant in ballets and masques. She was befriended by the brilliant women of court, like Mme de Sevigné and Mme de la Fayette, and became a powerful patron of writers and artists. Racine dedicated a tragedy to her, and she stood sponsor to Molière’s son and protected him from slander in the arguments over
Tartuffe
. In his dedication to
L’Ecole des Femmes
Molière praised her charm and sweetness, and the characteristic ‘
affabilité genereuse
’ that made people warm to her, as they did to her brother.

A string of courtiers went back and forth to Paris and even Charles’s apothecary, Le Fèvre, acted as a messenger to Minette when he went to France to buy new potions. Whitehall had its own handful of resident Frenchmen, usually reluctant exiles from the Sun King’s radiance. One was Charles de St Evremond, the influential critic, essayist and populariser of Montaigne in England, who had been banished for a satire on Cardinal Mazarin and was now living on a pension from Charles. He longed to return but would never set foot in France again, dying in London at a great old age, in 1703. Another was the comte de Gramont, who had been dismissed from court after pursuing one of Louis’s mistresses. He arrived in late 1662, quickly working out the factions and attaching himself to Barbara Castlemaine. A high-spending gambler, within months he had trebled the money he brought with him from France, only to lose it all again.
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The card sessions would last all day, ending with a select supper party at his own house, almost always including St Evremond. Gramont also chased the women, showering them with notes and presents, diamonds and brilliants from the London jewellers, and trinkets forwarded weekly from Paris: ‘perfumed gloves, pocket looking-glasses, elegant boxes, apricot paste, essence and other small wares of love’.
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He pestered them to give in and persecuted them still more when they said no.

Aiming for a rich marriage in Britain, he soon fell for Elizabeth Hamilton, Ormond’s niece and one of three sisters of the courtier James Hamilton. Charles gave his consent and promised to find some sort of pension, but the constant ups and downs of their courtship caused great amusement. Eventually they married and returned to France in September 1664, shortly after the birth of their son. They would have left earlier except that Gramont had lost so much money on cards and sporting bets and was anxious to recoup some of it before he sailed. This vain desire continued to the very last day, prompting an amused note from Charles, given to the comte to carry to Minette:

This bearer has been so long resolving to leave this place, that I did not believe he would goe, till now I see his bootes are on, and he has taken his leave of me, and he gives me but a moment to write this letter, for tis not a quarter of an houer since he was looseing his mony at tennis, and he should have been gone two howers ago. I am affraide he comes very light to you, for though his wife has her loade, I feare his purse is very empty, having lost near five thousand pounds within these three months.
⁴

Elizabeth Hamilton was beautiful as well as satisfyingly wealthy. The previous December, just before their wedding, Lely painted her, tall and big-bosomed, with brown ringlets and a dimple in her chin, in the pose of St Catherine. This was one of a small fleet of St Catherine portraits, homages to the queen, who had already been painted in this role by Jacob Huysmans. The court, however, was far from saintly. It was a hard place, particularly for women, if one reads between the lines of Gramont’s memoirs, concocted by another of Elizabeth’s brothers, Anthony Hamilton. These are often inaccurate as to date or place, but perfectly represent the kind of stories that courtiers found amusing, and the scandals they enjoyed. One feels that Hamilton did not much like the opposite sex; he died a bachelor in 1720, ensconced in St Germain with the exiled Stuart court. But the picture he paints of their treatment often calls on our sympathy.

Well-bred women vied to serve Catherine and Anne, Duchess of York. Their households offered the only place where women could hold official positions, swearing loyalty to their mistresses and undertaking particular duties and responsibilities, parallel to those of the high-ranking men: Mistress of the Robes, Groomess of the Stool, Keeper of the Queen’s Privy Purse and so forth. The six or so Ladies of the Bedchamber (the ladies-in-waiting) were peeresses who provided company for the queen and duchess, positions that could give a woman access to power and benefit their families.
⁵
Beneath them were up to ten or eleven Women of the Bedchamber or dressers, drawn from the upper gentry. And in the third rank, like the flounce of a final petticoat, were six to ten maids of honour. These were unmarried girls from gentry families, who were often given positions as a reward for their families’ royalist loyalties. They were supposed to shine, and adorn the court. (Minette’s recommendation of Frances Stuart, ‘She is the most beautiful girl in the world, and the best fitted of any to adorn a court,’ was a job reference as much as a private tribute.
⁶
) The maids attended the queen. They walked out with her in the park or to chapel, stepped out at the balls, took roles in the plays and sang, talked and played cards in her rooms. Their favourite game was ombre, not a name deriving from modest shades, but a version of the Spanish game ‘L’hombre’, a three-handed game, where nine cards are dealt and the rest is in ‘stock’, where the player on the dealer’s right is ‘the man’, who decides trumps and starts the round. The games could last for hours. More practically, the maids were there to make good marriages, which Charles helped by granting a dowry of £2,000, although, as with most of his generous gestures, this did not always arrive as soon as expected, and sometimes not at all.

The maids were indispensable at Catherine’s evening circle, which grew in popularity as her confidence increased. In 1664 she would move this from the formal Presence Chamber to her private ‘withdrawing room’, thus combining a certain grandeur with the informality of music and cards.
⁷
The evening gathering slowly became a central feature of court life, a place where the King seemed at ease, where the latest hot gossip was exchanged, and where the barometer of royal favour could be tapped and watched.

All the court women scrutinised each other minutely, criticising their fellows’ style, their hair, their dress. It was lucky if one was witty and handsome, but misery if one was plain and quiet. And while the male courtiers fawned over their favourites, they sniped and cut them down at the same time. An early star and victim was Jane Needham, Lady Myddleton, a luscious beauty whom Anthony Hamilton described cruelly as ‘handsomely made, all white and golden’ but pretentious and affected: ‘The airs of indolent languor, which she had assumed, were not to everybody’s taste; the sentiments of delicacy and refinement, which she tried to express without understanding what they meant, put her hearers to sleep; she was most tiresome when she wished to be most brilliant.’
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Jane was pursued by both Charles and the Duke of York, but resisted becoming the mistress of either, falling instead for Ralph Montagu, the duke’s Master of Horse.

Jane Myddleton

The women were on display, in a literal as well as figurative sense. In the mid-1660s the Duke and Duchess of York put together a collection of portraits of women of the court, later known as the ‘Windsor Beauties’, a set that also commemorated friends and political alliances. It became fashionable to collect such series, especially when mezzotint prints became available in the next decade. The ideal of pictorial beauty was lightness and grace, which Lely conjured with folds of billowing silks and satins, a type of fashionable undress whose expensive materials conveyed the sitter’s status, while their looseness suggested the body beneath.
⁹
A century later Horace Walpole described these Lely costumes as ‘a sort of fantastic nightgowns, fastened with a single pin’. Lely was in truth, Walpole felt, ‘the ladies painter…He caught the reigning character, and

Lord Capel’s daughter Theodosia, who married Clarendon’s second son, Henry Hyde, was a typical sleepy-eyed star, with, Gramont’s memoirs recorded cattily, ‘skin of a dazzling whiteness, fine hands, and a foot surprisingly beautiful, even in England: long custom had given such a languishing tenderness to her looks that she never opened her eyes but like a Chinese’.
¹¹

But all of Lely’s portraits of court beauties were a version of his favourite, the almond-eyed Barbara Castlemaine. In December 1663, Barbara moved to the front of the court stage again when she announced, with no warning, that she had become a convert to Catholicism. The queen, devout Catholic that she was, remarked tartly that she did not think Barbara had done this ‘for conscience sake’. Her horrified family asked Charles to make her retract, to which he is said to have replied that ‘as for the souls of ladies, he never meddled with that’. There was much speculation as to her motive. Was it to appease her husband Roger Palmer, now serving in Venice? Or to situate herself even more snugly in the Catholic party at court? Or to be closer to the queen?

After her illness, Charles was still anxious about Catherine and full of good intentions, his concern running through his correspondence with Minette in late 1663. In these letters his writing ran straight, clear, untroubled across the page. The tone was open, straightforward about all physical matters like illness or sex, and childbirth, the mood occasionally marked by flashes of impatience, but usually buoyant and optimistic. Besides his evident affection ran an undercurrent of amusement and self-mockery, heard in ironic asides or deadpan juxtapositions:

My wife is now so well, as in a few dayes, she will thank you herself for the consernement you had for her, in her sicknesse. Yesterday we had a little ball in the privy chamber, where she lookd on, and, though we had many of our good faces absent, yet, I assure you, the assembly would not have been disliked for beauty, even at Paris it self, for we have a great many yong women come up, since you were here, who are very handsome. Pray send me some images, to put in prayer books. They are for my wife, who can get none here. I assure you it will be a greate present to her, and she will looke upon them often, for she is not only contente to say the great office in the breviere, every day, but likewise that of our Lady too, and this is besides going to chapel, where she makes use of none of these. I am just now going to see a new play, so I shall say no more, but that I am intierly yours. C.R.
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As she slowly recovered, Catherine often stayed in her own rooms, attending every office at chapel, while Charles cast his eye over the young beauties and went to the playhouse. Barbara tried hard to regain her place at his side. At a crowded performance of Dryden’s
The Indian Emperor
on 1 February 1664, she ostentatiously left her box to go and sit between Charles and the Duke of York, disconcerting them both. Later that spring, Charles told Minette that he had been playing the good husband, going out with Catherine all afternoon: soon he would banish Edward Montagu from court for spending too long with the queen and even daring to squeeze her hand. But he celebrated the fourth anniversary of his entry into London by dancing at Barbara’s lodgings, not with his wife. Barbara was pregnant yet again, and when the baby, Charlotte, was born in September 1664 Charles acknowledged her at once. The French ambassador, taking his beautiful wife to dine with Lady Castlemaine, reported that Charles ‘did the honours of the house in a way befitting more a host than a guest’.
¹³

Inevitably, Barbara had her enemies. Shortly after Charlotte’s birth she was attacked in the park by three masked noblemen, who hurled insults at her and compared her once again to Edward IV’s notorious mistress Jane Shore. When she reached the safety of Whitehall, she fainted. As soon as he heard, Charles left everything and rushed to her side, ordering the park gates closed and all inside arrested. And he loved their four small children. Although he had taken time to acknowledge the previous baby, Henry, as his own, he still went up to his room and tucked him in at night.