Court Beauties of Old Whitehall Part 2

(BARBARA VILLIERS, d.u.c.h.eSS OF CLEVELAND.)

_After Wissing._]

BARBARA VILLIERS, d.u.c.h.eSS OF CLEVELAND

A COURTEZAN OF THE RESTORATION

The difference between Hortense Mancini and Barbara Villiers is the difference between the refinement and the grossness of vice. If we had met them in fiction we should have said that the former might have been created by Balzac and the latter by Zola. The history of Barbara Villiers is like a study of the progress of vice.

At the first glance it would seem that such a statement was calculated to cause the respectable reader to skip the following biographical account of this British Imperia. But on considering that her name must possess some powerful interest for the imagination, from the quant.i.ty of ink that has been spilt over it, and the impa.s.sioned diatribes it has inspired, we are inclined to believe that what we have to relate of the famous beauty will fire rather than extinguish curiosity. For no emotion is so pleasant to most of us creatures of circ.u.mstance as that of righteous indignation, and that is what her Grace of Cleveland usually excites. Yet it has always seemed to us one of the strangest psychological phenomena that men should fly into a literary pa.s.sion over the iniquities of persons who have been dead for centuries. Personally, we have never been able, like most people, to look upon Nero as if he were a notorious criminal of our own day, whose trial at the Old Bailey filled a column or two in the morning papers. Nor can we work ourselves up to any heat over a profligate woman, who lived two hundred years ago when she enjoyed considerable public esteem, as if she were still living, when we should, no doubt, have her arrested, tried, and given the full penalty of the law. No people are more ridiculous than the literary policemen who nab historical offenders and prosecute them at the bar of a remote posterity, unless it be the literary whitewashers who defend the same criminals at the same bar. Such convictions and acquittals of the dead are like a burlesque of Justice which lacks the sense of humour. One should remember that Charles II., with all his vices so repugnant to us now, was perhaps from first to last the most popular king that ever sat upon the English throne. People talk of the whole period of the Restoration as if he personally were responsible for its shameless license, quite ignoring the well-known fact that the nation was heartily tired of the "weel-spread looves and lang, wry faces" of the Cromwellian _regime_. Instead of heaping a late ignominy upon him, it would be more sensible, if equally impractical, to arraign the British people who made him possible. He was but the crowned representative of their own unbridled vices. To us this man, who "never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," seems, at the distance we have got from him, to be as imaginary as if he had occurred in one of Oscar Wilde's comedies. After two hundred years to treat him _seriously_ is out of the question. His answer to an indignant generation he knows not might very well be his own cynical laugh.

From this it must not be supposed that we intend to flatter the memory of Barbara Villiers. On the contrary, we should prefer to forget her, but this the period in which she lived will not permit us. No mention of the Restoration would be possible without reference to her. So, as we are obliged to consider her, we shall imagine that the "trough of Zolaism" in which we have found her is frozen, and try to skate on it without breaking through.

If Hortense Mancini was _non_-moral, Barbara Villiers was _im_moral; she was consciously, unblus.h.i.+ngly, gratuitously vicious. There might have been some excuse on grounds of heredity and education for Hortense, but it is impossible to find any excuse whatever for Barbara. It was said of her, when created d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland, that "the King might add to her t.i.tles, but nothing to her birth." She was a Villiers. From her father who died at Oxford, when she was an infant, from wounds received at the battle of Edgehill in the Royalist cause, she should have inherited all the virtues. He must indeed have been a very n.o.ble character to judge from the panegyrics p.r.o.nounced at his death, even by those belonging to a party bitterly opposed to his. But so little did she resemble him, that when we first meet her we find her at sixteen in London--whither she had come to live with her stepfather on the death of her mother--engaged in an intrigue with the second Earl of Chesterfield, a young widower five years her senior, gifted with very agreeable manners and a fine head of hair. That she was allowed full control of her actions by her stepfather may be taken for granted from the following letter addressed to Chesterfield:--

"MY LORD,

"My friend" (Lady Anne Hamilton) "and I are now abed together contriving how to get your company this afternoon. If you deserve this favour, you will come and seek us at Ludgate Hill at about three o'clock at Butler's shop, where we will expect you, &c."

The consequences of such a correspondence were such as might be expected. Barbara began to look about her for a husband, and as Chesterfield, who at the beginning of this intrigue proved the quality of his pa.s.sion for the beautiful wanton he was in the habit of meeting at "Butler's shop in Ludgate Hill" by marrying some one else, he was out of the question. In this extremely awkward position she had the luck to meet one of those impressionable, inexperienced youths who, under the glamour of a first and absorbing pa.s.sion, fancy that nothing is so likely to enn.o.ble, intensify, and immortalise it as the act of marriage.

The name of this dupe was Roger Palmer, and he was a young fellow of respectable means and family studying law at the Temple. Where, when, or how Barbara made his acquaintance is unknown; perhaps it is not doing her memory, already sufficiently lurid, an injustice to suggest that the first meeting might have been in the streets when she was on her way to "Butler's shop." For Roger Palmer, excellent young man though he was, by no means belonged to the same rank or moved in the same society as Barbara Villiers. In fact, her stepfather, the Earl of Anglesea, strongly opposed the match, but as he eventually yielded it is to be supposed that Barbara's arguments were irresistible.

Having got the necessary husband, she returned without compunction to her _liaison_ with Chesterfield, whom she was too much in love with to bear him any resentment. As for Palmer, poor creature, he was so blinded with love of his dazzlingly beautiful wife as to remain apparently long in ignorance of the real state of affairs of which he had been the dupe.

But the "Mounseer," as his wife spoke of him in her letters to Chesterfield, was not so great a fool as not to be jealous, if still unsuspicious, of the attention Mrs. Palmer received from her admirer. He suggested that they should go into the country to live, where he might have her all to himself.

An unexpected event, however, soon rid him of Chesterfield. This n.o.bleman--of whom Swift many years after declared "I have heard he was the greatest knave in England"--having killed his man in a duel, was obliged to flee the country, and the _liaison_ was interrupted. Shortly afterwards Palmer, who was employed by the Royalists to carry messages to Charles, went to Holland and took his wife with him. Although it is not known with any certainty what sort of reception the Palmers met with at the exiled Court at Breda, there can be little doubt that Barbara, whose character experience had already begun to develop, used Chesterfield, whom she found at Breda, to serve her ends in his turn as cunningly as she had previously used Palmer for the same purpose. It was to her, as all the world knows, that King Charles slunk off privately to spend the first night of the Restoration, treating the joyous acclaim of the people, such as no King of England has ever received before or since, quite as cynically as the pompous official welcome of Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Speaker of the House of Commons. Henceforth, the career of "the finest woman of her age," as she was described by one of her enemies, emerges from obscurity and pa.s.ses into the full light of history.

So far there was nothing in her life to mark it from that of hundreds of other loose women. She had given no sign of the _chef-d'oeuvre_ she was to execute; "like most great artists," says one of her biographers, "she had begun her career by copying conventional methods." But now she was to show a remarkably original talent in the design of vice. Her opportunity, that "tide in the affairs of men" which the great majority of mankind are incapable of using to their advantage, had come; she was not the one to let her chance slip. That she was fully alive to the fortune that dropped on those on whom Royalty smiled is evident from her attempt to capture the favour of the Duke of York while still uncertain of Charles's. We read of a flirtation carried on in church with the heir-presumptive; if she could not be the mistress of the King, she resolved to be that of his brother. Of the necessary qualifications for playing her game successfully, Mrs. Palmer possessed a perfect self-confidence and the power to fascinate. As we do not believe that it is possible to convey any real idea of physical beauty by enumerating its component parts, we will content ourselves with saying, on the authority of her friends and enemies, that Mrs. Palmer was dazzlingly, maddeningly, triumphantly beautiful.

At the Bartholomew Fair, to which she had the hardihood to go, the curses of a mob that threatened to wreck the carriage of the "King's Miss" were turned, at sight of her lovely face, to blessings. She was one of those women who appeal directly to the senses, a rare creature with the irresistible smile of a Circe and the temper of a Medea. Such women do not require intellect.

The siren played her part cunningly. Her husband had at the Restoration been returned to Parliament for Windsor, and lived in London in King Street, Westminster, in the house which had been the regicide Whalley's, now a fugitive in America. Next door, Pepys, as consummate a sn.o.b and gossip as he was diarist, used to hear "great doings of music; the King and Dukes at Madam Palmer's, a pretty woman they have a fancy to." It is strange to note how Pepys's admiration for her rose and fell with the King's favour. Exactly nine months after that Restoration night a daughter--afterwards Lady Suss.e.x, bosom friend of the d.u.c.h.esse de Mazarin--was born in "Whalley's house," about whose birth there was much scandal. The King, already the slave of Mrs. Palmer, acknowledged the child as his, but it was generally believed to be Lord Chesterfield's, "whom she resembled very much." But Palmer, who was either a fool or a very chivalrous man, claimed the baby as his!

Shortly after this scandal the negotiations for Charles's marriage with Catherine of Braganza were begun. At once Mrs. Palmer, who dreaded in the unknown queen a rival to supplant her, prepared to soften her fall and at the same time to prevent it if she could. Already political factions had formed around her, but it was by relying on herself more than on others that she managed to get Charles to send the following note to Morrice, the Secretary of State:--

"WHITEHALL, _16 Oct., 1661_.

"Prepare a warrant for Mr. Roger Palmer to be Baron of Limerick and Earl of Castlemaine in the same form as the last, and let me have it before dinner.--C."

Owing, however, to the hostility of Clarendon, the famous Chancellor, one of those men whose great abilities and integrity are characterised by a total absence of tact, Mr. Palmer did not become Earl of Castlemaine till the 11th of December, instead of "before dinner." In spite of this coveted honour Lady Castlemaine was very nervous as to the future. As she foresaw clearly that with the arrival of the Queen her position was at stake, she determined not to lose it without a struggle.

By her termagant temper, by which strangely she held Charles as much as by her beauty, she hectored and caressed the King into appointing her lady of the bedchamber to the Queen. Nevertheless, the interval before the battle-royal began was very trying to her. She quarrelled with Chesterfield and threw him aside like an old glove lest his former connection should damage her at such a juncture in the eyes of Charles.

Pepys and his wife saw her at this time at the play of "The French Dancing Mistress," where "with much pleasure we gazed upon my Lady Castlemaine; but it troubles us to see her look dejectedly and slighted by people already."

But nothing tried her temper more than her husband. The poor disillusioned man, thinking of her good name perhaps, if not of his own, had a child born to his wife in these days, of which Charles was undoubtedly the father, baptized as his own by a Roman Catholic priest, to which faith he was a convert. To Lady Castlemaine, hoping to hold the King by the children she had by him, nothing was more vexatious than this well-intentioned spoke in the wheel from a husband whose worth she knew in her heart and whom she had shamefully treated. She burst like a fury upon Castlemaine; had the child re-baptized by the rector of St.

Margaret's; and ten days later left her husband for ever, taking with her "the plate, jewels, and other best things, every dish and cloth, and servant, except the porter"--the first indication of the rapacity for which she was later to be famous. On this day, in such a temper as one may imagine, she went to Hampton Court to kiss the Queen's hand for the first time and fight out with her royal rival the battle for which it seems both had been preparing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF CLARENDON.

_After Sir Peter Lely._]

Catherine of Braganza, poor, little, lonely, inexperienced creature, had arrived in England with the fixed determination not to admit Lady Castlemaine into her presence. She came prepared to conquer the heart of her fascinating husband, and lost her own at sight of him. To receive Lady Castlemaine as her lady of the bedchamber was, as Clarendon told the King, "more than flesh and blood could stand." But Charles, who dreaded the ridicule of his courtiers if he yielded to his wife and under the spell of his pa.s.sionate mistress, remained firm. The Queen was equally obstinate. She declared that rather than submit she would go back to Lisbon "in any little vessel." The honourable Clarendon, to whom such a woman as Lady Castlemaine was personally no less abhorrent than her influence in State affairs was to be dreaded, sided with the Queen, and with his customary tactlessness tried to persuade the King he was in the wrong. The hatred of Lady Castlemaine for Clarendon dates from this period; she never forgave him for "meddling in her business," as she expressed it. As she never hid her dislikes, and in the war of interest fought squarely enough, the Chancellor had much to do to keep his own position secure.

It was she who made Charles write to Clarendon during his thankless _role_ of peacemaker--

"n.o.body shall presume to meddle in the affairs of the Countess of Castlemaine. Whoever dares to do so will have cause to repent it to the last moment of his life. Nothing will shake the resolution I have taken with regard to her; and I shall consent to be miserable in this world and the next, if I yield in my decision, which is that she shall continue a bedchamber lady to the Queen. I shall to the last hour of my life regard any one who opposes me in this as my enemy; and whosoever shows himself hostile to the Countess will, I swear by my honour, earn my undying displeasure."

The vituperative exaggeration of this letter betrays the real author.

Charles merely penned what the beautiful termagant dictated to him.

Such was the state of affairs when Lady Castlemaine left her husband, plundering his house of all it contained before she went, and on the same day got herself presented at the Queen's Drawing-Room by the King himself. Catherine, who till now had never seen her and did not catch her name, received her graciously; a moment later, discovering the trick that had been played upon her, and stung by the publicity with which she had been insulted, the wretched Queen fainted, bursting a blood-vessel. Far from feeling shame at being the cause of such an indecent scandal, not to speak of the misery of a fellow-creature, Lady Castlemaine gloried in her triumph. It is true the d.u.c.h.ess of Richmond, unable to control herself, before the whole Court called her a Jane Sh.o.r.e, and hoped she should live to see her come to the same end! But the Queen's powers of resistance were broken by exhaustion. Not long after Pepys saw the "King, Queen, and my Lady Castlemaine and young Crofts (the Duke of Monmouth) in one coach." Catherine shut her eyes, and Lady Castlemaine moved to Whitehall, into apartments close to the King's.

As for the husband she had degraded and deserted, his state of mind as well as his temperament may be imagined from the fact that he went to France to hide his shame and grief under a cowl in some monastery. This cure for his sick spirit did not, however, prove as efficacious as he had expected. He soon returned and tried a sort of political activity as a subst.i.tute, which from time to time drew him for a brief moment out of a respectable obscurity, from which but for his notorious wife he would never have emerged at all.

Great as was her victory and long as her sway lasted, we very much doubt if Lady Castlemaine's power over the King, marked as it was by plunder of the State, was ever so real as before the arrival of the Queen. For some ten years or more, it is true, she continued a sort of _maitresse en t.i.tre_, but never before or since was such a position a.s.sailed by so many storms, or filled by a woman whose actions were so calculated to cause her to forfeit it. No royal mistress has ever treated her lover so brutally, so indecently, so faithlessly as Lady Castlemaine treated Charles, and continued to be a power. He liked wit, and she had none; he liked peace in his establishment, and she scolded him like a Xantippe; he liked flattery, and she reviled him; he dreaded ridicule, and she made him the laughing-stock of his Court and the jest of his people.

Even affection was lacking between them; neither of them ever evinced the pretence of it for the other. It is true she had beauty, but others were more beautiful; and after the chain that bound him to her, many times snapped, was finally broken beyond repair, this strange couple continued on good terms. Perhaps psychologists may explain the secret of her hold over him, for never was connection between such a King and such a mistress so inexplicable.

Her first indiscretion, which, one would think, should have proved fatal to her position, occurred shortly after her triumph over the Queen.

Charles, whose affection for his numerous progeny was one of the traits of his subtly complex character, had young Crofts, his eldest b.a.s.t.a.r.d, brought to Whitehall and publicly acknowledged. He was a singularly handsome and attractive youth, and Lady Castlemaine, under the pretence of "mothering" him, began at once to weave her spells around him. This intrigue did not escape the King; but, instead of overwhelming both with his royal wrath, he paid his mistress the compliment of being jealous, and cynically removed his son from her path by marrying him to the richest heiress in Scotland and creating him Duke of Monmouth. The termagant took her revenge by carrying on a double intrigue with James Hamilton, the brother of the famous Anthony, and Sir Charles Barkeley.

It was no secret. "Captain Ferrers and Mr. Howe," wrote gossip Pepys, "both often through my Lady Castlemaine's window have seen her go to bed and Sir Charles Barkeley in her chamber." But Charles merely shrugged his shoulders in his cynical fas.h.i.+on and declared himself "past jealousy." The report, the first of many similar ones, ran "that Lady Castlemaine had fallen from favour." Pepys, however, is able to state that the King still continued to visit her "four nights a week," and was told that "my Lady Castlemaine hath all the King's Christmas presents, made him by the peers, given to her; and that at the great ball she was much richer in jewels than the Queen and d.u.c.h.ess (of York) put together."

It is _de rigueur_, no doubt, that the reconciliations between a monarch and his mistress should be richly lacquered with gold; but in the annals of royal tiffs there is no gilding so heavy as that which calmed the termagant outbursts of my Lady Castlemaine. If it be true that lovers often quarrel for the pleasure of "making up," how great must that pleasure have been to Barbara Villiers, whose greed of gain was only equalled by her man-hunger!

For these two pa.s.sions, money and men, consumed her between them. After one of their quarrels Charles gave her 30,000 to pay her debts; after another he made her a present of Berks.h.i.+re House, a splendid property near St. James's Palace; after yet another her dukedom. But t.i.tles were of as little account to this woman with the blood of the Villiers in her veins as silver in the time of King Solomon. What she coveted was cash--cash to squander upon her pleasures, cash to pay her huge debts, cash to stimulate her lovers. As Burnet says of her, "she was enormously ravenous"; so the Customs were farmed for her benefit to the extent of ten thousand a year; likewise she mulcted the revenue derived from the tax on beer of a similar sum, and the Post Office of half this amount annually. But this great income was as nothing compared to the vast sums paid her from the Irish Treasury, instead of from the English, because the corruption was less easily to be detected. As for the Privy Purse, she never went shopping without it. "Make a note that this is to be paid for out of the Privy Purse," she used to say to her maid when anything in the London shops took her fancy. Further, during the period that my Lady Castlemaine played the Montespan to Charles's Louis, all offices that fell vacant, whether spiritual or temporal, were auctioned for her benefit. And, like the true courtezan she was, this literal shower of gold in which she lived ran off her like water through a sieve.

One night she lost 25,000 at play, and her usual stake on a cast was from 1,000 to 1,500. Money had neither meaning nor value for her, but she wanted it and was prepared to get it at all costs. Once too, like the harlot again, she stripped Charles of everything, so that he himself lacked linen and the very servants at Whitehall had not bread to eat!

This abnormal appet.i.te, which consumed even the money set aside for the purchase of the royal stationery, was the concomitant symptom of the nymphomania from which she suffered--a disease perfectly well known to medical science. Without some such explanation it seems impossible to us to account for the innumerable infidelities that Lady Castlemaine indulged in while _maitresse en t.i.tre_. As Charles had some knowledge of medicine and chemistry, and was very far from being a fool--as the beautiful shrew once called him to his face--one is almost tempted to hazard the suggestion, as an explanation of his long bondage to this woman, that he found a scientific excuse for her conduct which has been overlooked by historians. Be this as it may, it was not long before the lovely Lady Castlemaine found room again for others beside the King in her capacious heart.

To enumerate her lovers, the number of whom exceeded the King's, would not only be impossible but scarcely amusing. Of this legion devoted to the wors.h.i.+p of Priapus there are a few, however, that may be cited. As Lady Castlemaine consumed money irrespective of the source from which it was derived, so she never gave a thought to the rank from which her lovers were recruited. My Lady Castlemaine's taste in men was thoroughly catholic. From Barkeley and Hamilton her fancy flitted to her cousin, Buckingham, one of the most extraordinary men of an extraordinary age, of whom more later. From this great Duke what she termed her affections roamed through the various grades of society, and finally rested on a "compound of Hercules and Adonis," who supplemented his living on the tight-rope. With this man, Jacob Hall, she was, as Pepys would say, so "besotted" for a time that she gave him a salary, diverting the money for this purpose from a sum voted by Parliament for the National Defence. From the rope-dancer, who is said to have treated her after her own vituperative fas.h.i.+on, she probably suffered less than from the polished villainy of Buckingham.

Nor, when the ice of the trough on which we are skating is cracking under our feet, should we fail to mention the actor, Hart, a great-nephew of Shakespeare. Her _liaison_ with this handsome and justly celebrated tragic actor had apparently a less voluptuous motive than such amours usually had with her. Pepys, gossiping with Mrs. Knipp, the actress, in his customary prurient curiosity to glean news from any source, learns that "my Lady Castlemaine is mightily in love with Hart, of their house; and he is much with her in private, and she goes to him and do give him many presents; and that the thing is most certain, and by this means she is _even with_ the King's love to Mrs. Davis." (Moll Davis, an "impertinent s.l.u.t" of an actress, and as beautiful and brazen as my Lady Castlemaine herself.) As one of many instances of the bond, of which history does not afford a parallel, between a king and a _maitresse en t.i.tre_ this attempt of Lady Castlemaine to get "even with"

Charles is striking.

How the ice cracks under us!

It is not always on dukes and rope-dancers, actors and dandies that my Lady Castlemaine casts her hungry glance. No one, provided he be fair and shapely to the eye, escapes her attention. History does not relate the number of times Chiffinch let her through that little gate at Whitehall by which the crowd of d.u.c.h.esses, actresses, and meaner beauties pa.s.sed secretly to and from the private closet of Majesty. But on one of these masked a.s.signations, as my Lady Castlemaine scuttled down the back-stairs, she spied with her observant eyes a page loitering there. The page pa.s.sed after that meeting with the King's mistress from the back-stairs of Whitehall to the stage, a.s.sa.s.sination plots, and many a questionable adventure, but for nigh on twenty years my Lady Castlemaine was "interested" in him. His shallow, handsome head being turned, Goodman boasted openly of the patronage he enjoyed. Once at the theatre--it was in William and Mary's time--the audience being seated, the Queen in her box, and the curtain ready to rise, he shouted from behind the scenes to inquire "whether his d.u.c.h.ess had come," and forbade the raising of the curtain till she should appear. Fortunately at that moment her Grace of Cleveland arrived and Queen Mary was spared the insult of having to wait an actor's pleasure. Such was her pa.s.sion for this scoundrel that she was content to share his affections with his wife and another woman of the town. But this was at a later period when her money and rank rather than her charms attracted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.

_After Sir Peter Lely._]

Perhaps no better instance of the morals of the Restoration could be cited than the manner in which this female Don Juan commenced her notorious acquaintance with Wycherley. He was at the time a good-looking young man, in the bud of his dramatic career, and she was a middle-aged woman with such a past! He had, with design to secure her patronage, flattered her in his play, "Love in a Wood, or a Night in St. James's Park" (!), just then running to crowded houses, when she pa.s.sed him one morning in her carriage in Pall Mall. With the gross humour of Restoration manners she shouted at him a low epithet that might with perfect justice and much more fittingly have been applied to her own sons. He at once turned, and the following dialogue, according to Dennis, Pope, and others, took place:--

"Madam," said Wycherley, "you have been pleased to bestow on me a t.i.tle which generally belongs to the fortunate. Will your ladys.h.i.+p be at the play to-night?"

"Well," she replied, "what if I am there?"