A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (48 page)

Buckingham’s ambitions, many thought, verged on the dangerous. Soon he and Ashley were implicated in plans to oust the Duke of York from the succession by making Monmouth the legal heir. In the autumn of 1668, at Whitehall, Pepys’s friend Povey told him that people thought the duke ‘hath a mind rather to overthrow all the Kingdom and bring in a Commonwealth, wherein he may think to be General of the Army, or to make himself king; which he believes he may be led to by some advice he hath had with conjurers which he doth affect’.
⁴³
Charles’s bid to make use of him had brought unforeseen consequences. By the end of the year, Buckingham’s magic was once again suspect.

IN
1668
MAY DAY
was foul and cold. The ribbons on the maypoles flapped in the rain, and the dancers’ feet were muddy. Only a few bedraggled coaches took part in the annual procession round the ring at Hyde Park. People could not even shelter in the playhouse, at least not in the Theatre Royal, where the rain came spitting into the pit through the badly glazed cupola. The only place to take refuge was in the tavern or the coffee-house.

On 9 May Charles dissolved parliament for the summer, signing off, said Pepys, with a ‘short silly speech’.
¹
He seemed restless and distracted. At Whitehall he ordered a new range of rooms, which became known as the Volary Buildings since they were built on the site of the old aviary. His new apartments, with fine river views from their novel sash-windows, were near the queen’s, so that people could come and see him more informally when they visited her. They also had a private entrance which was handy for more private meetings, organised by the invaluable and slightly sinister William Chiffinch. William had taken over when his older brother, Thomas Chiffinch, Keeper of the King’s Closet, died suddenly in 1666, and his wife Barbara also became laundress to the queen. The couple arranged everything from meetings with ministers in the Bedchamber to a rota for walking the royal dogs. Their apartment was next to Charles’s rooms, opening onto the back stairs down to the river, a route taken by visitors who did not want to be seen, like French ambassadors – and young, ambitious actresses.

As if the pent-up energy which he controlled so carefully in his public life had to find release, Charles was more mobile and unsettled this summer than ever before. He hunted at Windsor, Bagshot and in the New Forest; he visited the ports and sailed his fast yachts; he stayed at Audley End (which he soon bought from the bankrupt Earl of Suffolk), to be near Newmarket. The excuses that he gave to Minette for not answering her letters were often of this kind: he has just come back from the sea, he has been hunting all day, he is off to the races next week.

Thousands flocked to Newmarket for the race-meetings and from now on Charles went regularly in summer and autumn. His father had a hunting lodge there, but this had been almost completely demolished by the regicide Colonel Okey, and Charles had not bothered with repairs, apart from rebuilding the stables. This year he bought an old timber-framed house, with bays overhanging the High Street, and commissioned the architect William Samwell to convert it. The small courtyard behind was surrounded by unpretentious but comfortable suites of rooms for Charles and Catherine, the Yorks and Monmouth.
²
The Lord Chamberlain’s office was next door, and many of the court had lodgings nearby, including the Chiffinches. When Evelyn visited the house on a trip to East Anglia in July 1670, he was disappointed. Not only was it full of awkward angles, low ceilings and poky rooms but it was ‘placed in a dirty Streete; without any Court or avenue, like a common Burger’s: whereas it might & ought to have been built at either end of the Towne, upon the very Carpet where the Sports are Celebrated’.
³

The stables, Evelyn thought, were far more impressive, with many fine horses kept ‘at vast expense, with all the art & tendernesse Imaginable’. Racing, like sailing, became one of Charles’s passions. He employed four jockeys, expanded his stables and set up a stud. He also improved the race-course (moving the site of the summer course, because the sun got in his eyes), introduced the idea of racing in silk colours, and gave purses and trophies. In the early mornings he could be seen watching the training, and when the races began he often galloped alongside to cheer the winner at the post. Sometimes he raced himself, and in 1671 won the Town Plate which he had established six years before, with a purse of £32.

Francis Barlow’s engraving of the last horse race before the king below Windsor Castle, drawn on the spot in 1684 and engraved three years later. This is thought to be the first English drawing of a horse race.

It was at Newmarket that he was given the name of ‘Old Rowley’ after a favourite stallion, a dig at his womanising. He was popular in the town, wandering through the streets in his old clothes. John Reresby, recording a later race-meeting, noted his informality, slightly disapprovingly:

The King was soe much pleased in the countrey, and soe great a lover of the diversions which that place did afford, that he lett himselfe down from majesty to the very degree of a country gentleman. He mixed himself amongst the croud, allowed every man to speak to him that pleased, went a-hawking in the mornings, to cock matches in afternoons (if there were noe hors race), and to plays in the evenings, acted in a barn and by very ordinary Bartlemew-fair comedians.
⁴

Outsiders were still astonished by the King’s accessibility and his habit of being charming to all. His courtiers explained this to Magalotti as being a hangover from his days in exile, and he concluded that Charles’s courtesy and affability were ‘not so entirely due to the effect of royal magnanimity that some little part of them may not be due to the habit formed in his youth of adopting the humble manners of a poor and private nobleman’.
⁵
In 1668 the young Italian, open-eyed at the intrigues of London, stayed mostly with scientific friends from the Royal Society, and gathered gossip from them and from members of the court. His portrait of Charles suggests the effects of the strain of the past years. He had a fine figure, he decided, ‘and is free and attractive in his person and in all his motions’. His complexion was swarthy, his hair black, his eyes ‘bright and shining, but set strangely in his face’, his nose large and bony:

His mouth is wide, with thin lips, and he has a short chin. His cheeks are marked across under the eyes with two deep and prominent lines or wrinkles that begin near the middle of the nose and go towards the corners of the eyes, getting thinner and thinner and vanishing before they get there. He wears a wig, almost entirely black, and very thick and curly above the forehead, which makes him look sadder, but without giving him any trace of grimness; on the contrary his appearance is sad but not grim. Indeed a certain smiling look coming from the width of his mouth so greatly clears and softens the roughness of his features that he pleases rather than terrifies.
⁶

The king was, he learned, lighthearted about religion, clever but lazy. In private life he was a good friend, with a dread of seriousness. As a lover, he was sensual but not ‘bestial’, and generous to his mistresses, especially in the first flush of infatuation.

Like all observers, Magalotti was fascinated by anything he could learn of Charles’s sex life. The very public nature of Charles’s sexuality was both a bonus and a drawback. On the one hand it implied an almost supernatural virility and potency; on the other it certainly diminished his dignity. Both points would later be made by Rochester in his famous lines about Charles’s sceptre and his prick being ‘of a length’. This could mean nothing if he needed dextrous cajoling even to get it up, and, then, could never be satisfied:

In terms of the body politic as opposed to the body private, the identification of his prick with his power was potentially dangerous. If one drooped, then by implication the other might also collapse. In 1667–8, said Magalotti, Charles was thought to prefer friendship to ‘bodily relations’. During the Dutch crisis, wrote Pepys, ‘the King’s greatest pleasure hath been with his fingers, being able to do no more’.
⁸

If conflict made him impotent or dulled his desire, when the war ended he found release in an unusual burst of promiscuity. So far Charles had been known as a one-woman man, or at least one at a time. In the next few months he was linked to a circle of names: to the maid of honour Winifred Wells, about whom Buckingham was so cruel; to Jane Roberts, a clergyman’s daughter down on her luck, who was imbued ever after with a deep sense of guilt, caught the pox and suffered in the same sweating-houses as Rochester. He was bracketed, too, with Maria Knight, the singer with the heavenly voice; with the beautiful Elizabeth, Countess of Kildare; and with Mary, Countess of Falmouth, the widow of his beloved Berkeley and the future wife of his friend from the circle of wits, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.

Buckingham was well aware of Charles’s sensual enjoyment of women and as soon as he was back in favour he began trying to direct Charles’s sex life as well as his political fortunes. He could see that he was weary of Barbara. While the war was at its height she had been seen constantly again with the ugly, frog-faced yet oddly attractive Henry Jermyn. Charles had crushed their earlier flirtation, but it was now accepted that they were lovers. When she thought she was pregnant again, however, she asked Charles to acknowledge the child. He would not, he said, given that he had no memory of sleeping with her in the last six months. ‘God damn me! but you shall own it,’ was her reply. If the baby was not christened at Whitehall, she would dash its brains out before him on the Gallery wall, and parade his bastard children outside his door.
⁹
When Charles stood firm Barbara left to stay in Covent Garden with her friend Elizabeth, Lady Harvey, a member of the ubiquitous Montagu family and co-fighter against Clarendon. True to habit Charles begged forgiveness; true to custom, Barbara returned. Nothing more was heard of the controversial pregnancy.

In February 1668, while critics were poring over the state accounts, Barbara was gambling so deeply that she apparently won £15,000 in one night’s play, and lost £25,000 the next – betting £1,000 or more on one throw of the dice. She had also quarrelled with Buckingham, now that their alliance against Clarendon had ended. In Buckingham’s view, Charles needed a protestant mistress to counter Barbara’s Catholicism, a woman who would link him to the people, rather than the despised, licentious court. And where better to find one than the theatre.

Two actresses who had leapt to fame in recent seasons were Moll Davis at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Nell Gwyn at the Theatre Royal. Moll had been on stage since childhood and was famed for her singing and her light-as-air dancing. Her first great hit was
Sir Martin Mar-All
, a farcical collaboration between Dryden and Newcastle (Pepys went three days running, it made him laugh so much), and George Etherege then wrote a madcap role for her as Gatty in
She Would if She Could
, complete with song and jig. In this play, as she and her companion Ariana spy their gallants, the language of naval warfare that the court knew so well is turned into the jargon of dalliance:

Ariana
. Now if these should prove two men of War that are cruising here, to watch for Prizes.

Gatty
. Would they had courage enough to set upon us; I long to be engag’d.

Ariana
. Look, look yonder, I protest they chase us.

Gatty
. Let us bear away then; if they be truly valiant they’ll quickly make more sail, and board us.
¹⁰

A little later, as the mad Celania in a revival of Davenant’s
The Rivals
, Moll appeared in a more winsome vein, singing a plaintive song:

She performed this so charmingly before the King, wrote the prompter John Downes, ‘that not long after, it Rais’d her from her Bed on the Cold Ground, to a Bed Royal’.
¹¹

In the autumn of 1667, Buckingham had been dangling both young actresses before Charles, having decided, said Burnet, that ‘a gayety of humour would take much with the king’.
¹²
Both girls were guided secretly up the Whitehall back-stairs, but Nell ruined her chances of becoming a royal mistress by asking for £500 a year. Instead Charles took Moll. One of the satirists’ favourite stories was that Nell tried to put Charles off Moll Davis by dosing her, when she was about to dine with the King, with a drastic purgative called
jalap
, made from the pounded root of a Surinam herb and given to her by her friend Aphra Behn. If so, it was not effective, or at least not in the way she planned. In early 1668 it was confidently asserted that Charles had taken a house for Moll in Suffolk Street and bought her a ring worth £600, more than Nell had asked as an annual fee.

Oblique comments were made about Charles’s affairs in the theatre itself. In February 1668 Robert Howard’s dark new play,
The Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma
, featured a disgraced favourite – an implied attack on Clarendon – who tried to prostitute his daughter to the King of Spain. (Nell played Maria, the daughter whose integrity foiled her father’s dastardly plans.) Pepys sat nervously in the pit. Seeing that the play ‘was designed to reproach our King with his mistresses’, he wrote, ‘I was troubled for it, and expected it should be interrupted; but it ended all well, which salved all.’
¹³
In public at least, Charles took no notice.