King Charles II (61 page)

As William told Buckingham and Arlington, on a joint mission to Holland in 1673 in search of a satisfactory peace – satisfactory to England, that is –‘he liked better the condition of Stadtholder they [the Dutch] had given him … he believed himself obliged in conscience and honour not to prefer his interest before his obligation.’
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For the next few years William, all unaware of the Secret Treaty of Dover, would see his obligation as the task of detaching England from France. First however he had to win his spurs in his own country, by saving it from extinction.

When war was declared on 17 March, the total forces of
French and English far outnumbered those of the Dutch, both by land and by sea. Only in naval guns – 4,500 to the allies’ 6,000 – did the Dutch approach any kind of equality. Charles
II
was confident that the spoils of war would include not only those Dutch territories specified in the Secret Treaty, but also some rich naval prizes calculated to swell his depleted Treasury. Since the conduct of the war at sea was left to the English, Charles construed it as his ‘obligation’, as William would have put it, to interfere himself whenever possible. He paid two visits to the Nore off Chatham, where the Duke of York was once more installed in charge of the fleet; at the end of June he was accompanied by Queen Catharine and Shaftesbury, as Lord Chancellor; at the start of September he took Prince Rupert, Shaftesbury and other members of the Council.

At the beginning of May Charles also wrote James a long letter in his own handwriting, beginning, ‘I was this day in our meeting for the business of the fleet, and amongst other things I thought it not amiss to give you this hint….’
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The hint was the inadvisability of fighting with the Dutch alone: the Duke ought to wait until he had joined up with the French squadron. But at the first proper battle of the war, neither French nor English – nor, by implication, the English commander the Duke of York – covered themselves with glory.

On 7 June, lying in Southwold Bay, off the East Anglian coast between Yarmouth and Lowestoft, the combined squadrons were surprised by the great Dutch Admiral De Ruyter. In the ensuing action both sides endured vast losses. On the English side, the Duke of York had to abandon two successive flagships, the
Prince
and
St Michael
. Lord Sandwich was killed; his body, drifting anonymously in the sea, was only recognized by the George it still wore, the insignia of the Garter. De Ruyter was now limited by lack of funds to using guerrilla tactics. Yet this he did brilliantly, using his superior knowledge of the shoals and islands off the Dutch coast to pounce and harass, then disappear.

It was on land that the Dutch situation seemed most desperate. How could the unfortunate Dutch hope to hold off the great swoop of the French forces through the southern and eastern
provinces? The answer was the dramatic and totally unexpected response of a small nation to the aggression of a great power. The Dutch opened their dykes, flooding the land in the face of the oncoming invader. Shortly afterwards William received supreme civilian as well as military command.

The French had been held off, but that was all: the crisis remained. There was no prophet to foresee that 8 July 1672, the date on which William
III
became Stadholder, had ushered in a new era in Europe.

In August Johann De Witt and his brother were murdered by ‘the people’ – as Charles
II
described the killers in one of his missives to William – for being ‘the authors and occasion of the war’. William kept himself coldly aloof from the crime. It is extremely unlikely that he participated, as his enemies suggested.
¹³
Nevertheless, the assassins went unpunished, and later he paid one of them a pension. Admittedly, it was granted for quite a different reason, but the implication that William was not sorry to see Johann De Witt out of the way was easily drawn.

In England, in contrast to fierce and fighting Holland, reactions to the war were desultory. By June, many of the English were talking openly of peace. Even her forces were not immune from this general malaise. In August Sir Charles Lyttelton wrote back from his ship, ‘I never saw people so intolerably weary as they are all of being at sea, not only land men and volunteers, but the seamen themselves.’
¹⁴
In general, the autumn of 1672 was not a golden time for good King Charles. William, as we have seen, did not acknowledge his uncle’s vulpine overtures for peace. Then Charles had a growing problem with the Catholicism of the Duke of York: much publicity was given to the fact that the Duke had not taken Anglican Communion at Easter. A smashing naval victory under the Duke’s command might have given him some further mileage in the popular esteem; instead, he was faced with the responsibility for Southwold Bay.

The Duke of York was not the only prominent Catholic who had newly swum into the public gaze. The King’s latest mistress,
that well-born French girl who had caught his eye in his sister’s train at Dover, Louise de Kéroüalle, was also a Catholic. Out of the Queen’s discreetly conducted but acknowledged Catholicism, the conversion of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland, the suspected Catholicism of Clifford and even Arlington, it was possible for the imaginative to weave a positive web of Popery around the King.

Under the circumstances, it cannot be denied that the choice of a new Catholic mistress was unfortunate – assuming that any political criterion at all was to be used in such matters. It was additionally unfortunate that Louise was French. Thus in her beguiling person she managed to combine the two attributes most likely to worry the English paranoiacs.

On the surface, there was some substance to these fears. There is evidence that Louis
XIV
did indeed view Louise as his secret French weapon. Madame cannot be accused of forwarding the plot, having frowned on her brother’s proposed abduction of Louise at Dover. But her death freed the girl to accept an invitation probably phrased in the first instance by Buckingham.
¹⁵
But, as ever, the wayward Duke showed a reluctance to carry through his own settled plans. He allowed Louise to wait in vain at a French port for his yacht to convey her across the Channel. It was an unwise piece of neglect. As a result of her suffering, Louise arrived in England the friend of Arlington, who treated her with greater courtesy; it was not until later that the firm alliance of Buckingham and Louise became a feature of the scene at Court.

Louise arrived at Court a virgin. Such was her mixture of romance, propriety and ambition, that she may actually have convinced herself that the King intended to marry her before she allowed him to seduce her. She certainly spoke of the Queen’s health to the Ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, as though it was likely to deteriorate violently at any moment; then she would marry the King. With similar wishful thinking, Louise later reckoned on making her son, the little Duke of Richmond, the King’s heir at a time when the prospect of a half-French, wholly Catholic bastard succeeding was remote indeed. Where marriage was concerned, Louise never even enjoyed the putative
chance of Frances Stewart. If Queen Catharine had died in the 1670s, the King would surely have headed for some rich princess, with a European alliance as an additional dowry. Louise, while retaining the pretensions of a lady, as Nelly angrily protested, suffered the vicissitudes of an older profession: she is reported to have caught the pox from the King, who gave her a pearl necklace to make her better.
¹⁶

In other ways Louise did not suffer quite so much. Her baby face, with the fat cheeks that led the King to nickname her Fubbs (for chubby), stares innocently out of her lovely portrait by Gascar, surrounded by a halo of dark curls. One small round breast is revealed: altogether, she resembles a fat little pigeon, or the soft white dove beneath her hand. Though she was described by a contemporary as ‘wondrous handsome’, we should probably term her merely pretty – and wondrous appealing.
¹⁷

There is no trace in the portraits of Louise’s slight cast, which caused Nelly to christen her ‘Squintabella’ at first sight; so perhaps jealous Nell exaggerated. But there is shrewdness in the expression of her almond-shaped eyes, dark and watchful in the childish face. Louise was nearly twenty-one when she caught the King’s eye in Madame’s train; it was surprising that such a beautiful girl remained unmarried: ‘la Belle Bretonne’ she was called at the French Court, where the manners were politer than Nell Gwynn’s. The explanation lay in her parents’ poverty: Louise had no dowry. As a result, she imported into her role as
maitresse en titre
a nice sense of the importance of money. It was respectable French Louise who saw to it that her pension was tied to the profitable wine excise, where reckless English Barbara settled for a much less stable source of income.
¹⁸
When the dukedoms were being handed out to the royal bastards, Louise saw to it that her son gained precedence over Barbara’s by the stratagem of getting Danby to sign the relevant document at midnight on the given date.

Tears and hysterics, as well as respectability, were part of Louise’s stock-in-trade; it was not for nothing that Nelly chose to nickname her the ‘weeping willow’ when bored by ‘Squintabella’. Louise had correctly summed up Charles as a man who would be made uncomfortable, then guilty, by such things. Later she
would swoon and threaten suicide in order to avoid losing his favour. In one sense she overplayed her hand. The Duchess of Monmouth relates the story of the King being told – not for the first time – that Louise was dying: ‘God’s fish!’ he answered. ‘I don’t believe a word of all this; she’s better than you or I are, and she wants something that makes her play her pranks over this. She has served me so often so, that I am as sure of what I say as if I was part of her.’
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Yet he never did quite get rid of her…. Louise would survive the determined broadsides of that magnificent fighting ship, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and come to safe harbour as the resident mistress at the time of Charles’ death.

Sir John Reresby, a vigilant observer of such matters, described Louise as ‘the most absolute of all the King’s mistresses’. She was certainly the most disliked by the populace. None of the ballads of the time were particularly tasteful – Barbara was generally depicted as insatiable in her sexual appetites – but the language addressed to Louise was notably intemperate:

Portsmouth, the incestuous Punk,
^fn1

Made our most gracious Sovereign drunk,

And drunk she made him give that Buss

That all the Kingdom’s bound to curse…

So ran a fragrant piece, of 1673, entitled ‘The Royal Buss Rock’. The most playful piece of satire – if such an innocent adjective may be used – was that dialogue which, taking advantage of the King’s notorious weakness for his dogs, made Louise and Nelly into two pampered pets, named Snappy and Tutty. Even so, there was a social sneer: Snappy (Louise) was made to criticize Tutty (Nell) for her low breeding and suggest that she return to her ‘dunghill’.
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Louise’s rise was rapid. Her seduction by the King – if one may use the word for an event so obviously planned on both sides – seems to have taken place in October 1671 at Euston
Hall, Arlington’s splendid new county house near Newmarket. The scene, as reported, had dramatic overtones which must have pleased Louise’s histrionic nature, while its erotic ones pleased everyone else. For there was a ‘mock marriage’, at which ‘the Fair Lady Whore’ (Evelyn’s phrase for Louise) ‘was bedded one of these nights and the stocking flung, after the manner of a married bride’. By July 1672 her ascendancy was great enough for a large new coach for ‘Madame Carwell’, as her incomprehensible Breton name was anglicized, to feature in the royal expenses.
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In the same year, roughly nine months after the ‘marriage’ at Euston Hall, she gave birth to her only child; this boy was, incidentally, to be the last of the acknowledged royal bastards. In February 1673 Louise was created Duchess of Portsmouth, Countess of Fareham and Lady Petersfield – while Nelly still languished as Mrs Gwynn.

As befitted her position as she interpreted it, the new Duchess kept increasing state in the large area over which she held sway in Whitehall – she finally acquired a total of twenty-four rooms and sixteen garrets. Evelyn described her appartments as having ‘ten times the richness and the glory’ of the Queen’s.
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He also paints an inviting picture of Louise having her hair combed by her maids in bed, while the King and his gallants stood around. Three times her rooms were redecorated (amazing luxury). Her acquisitions included French tapestries specially woven at her command, such diversities as Japanese cabinets, clocks, silver, great vases of wrought plate and ornamental screens, as well as paintings originally belonging to the Queen.

‘What contentment can there be in the riches and splendour of this world, purchased with vice and dishonour?’ enquired Evelyn in elegant disgust. The answer was that Louise Duchess of Portsmouth found a great deal of contentment in such things; riches and splendour, after all, were visible to the naked eye, which was more than could be said for vice and dishonour.

For all this, Louis
XIV
did not really succeed in planting a Trojan horse in the person of the desirable Duchess. The reason for the failure lay in the character of Charles
II
. The varied intrigues which led to the establishment of Louise, the whole process of dangling this nubile beauty before a famously susceptible
King, all presupposed that Charles’ political sympathies followed his amorous inclinations. In the cool light of history, one cannot view the King in quite such a romantic light. As with Madame, so with Louise: it seems more likely that the reverse was true. Charles chose a confidante whose views or tastes accorded with his own, rather, than tailoring his to fit those of the lady.

Oddly enough, Louise’s strongest card with the King appears to have been the aura of charming domesticity which she cast around her. In the end, it was this traditional attribute of a French mistress down the ages which delighted Charles
II
: the ability to provide agreeable surroundings and good food (Louise was famous for her table) as much as her physical appeal. Mercenary as she may have been, haughty to her social inferiors, at times tiresomely hysterical, Louise possessed an excellent instinct where men were concerned. She was clever enough to spot that Charles
II
was reaching an age where a settled and comfortable salon possessed at least as much attraction as a voluptuous bedroom. It was in this manner that Louise’s French blood won Charles
II
, rather than in any more Machiavellian sense of political alignment.