Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex & Scandal in Charles II's Court

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

There are many privileges that come with being a royal, but where do mistresses lay amongst these? If you'll excuse the pun.Charles II was notorious for the women in his life, from his wife Catherine to infamous mistresses like the formidable Nell Gwynn.What was in it for them? And how did they all get along? Joining Kate today is Linda Porter, author of Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at the Court of Charles II.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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but on with the show. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. It's no secret that royals through the ages have enjoyed certain privileges, and Charles II was absolutely no exception. In fact, he rather enjoyed his privileges, lots and lots of them. More often than not, there were privileges that headed straight to his boudoir, as we will learn. But who were the women,

both his wife and his mistresses? There's many, many mistresses. And what was in it for them? Was it really about jewelry and a crown? Did any of them really love the king? Of course not. You don't need to love a king when there's jewelry like that on offer?

Today we are revisiting an episode from our archives to go betwixt Charles II sheets and to find out about the many women in his life, we are joined by the fantastic Linda Porter. I am ready if you are. So hello, and thank you for joining me, Linda Porter. How are you? I'm okay, thank you, Kate.

I'm thrilled to have you here, because this is one of my favourite historical subjects that I keep going back to again and again, the sex life of Charles II. It's endlessly fascinating. There's so much material. There is a lot of material, and it does still seem to endlessly fascinate

a great many people. What is it that fascinates you about this? How did you get into this? What was it about Charlie Boy? Well, it seems to me having written about one of Henry the Eighth's wives, and we are constantly bombarded with stuff on Henry the Eighth's wives, that Charles II's mistresses, almost all of them are better looking than Henry the eight's wives. And also that many of them are actually more interesting women and, you know, accomplished, well educated. Not all of them. But I thought, well, you know, this is a topic that doesn't really get enough coverage. It's been approached, of course, in the past over many years and in different ways. It hasn't been much written about by women, actually, funnily enough. That's interesting.

See, that's the thing about the position of mistress is it's very easy to get, still seduced by the glitz and the glamour, you know, like you don't have to do the wife stuff, you just get to do the fun stuff and you get given a diamond necklace, hurrah. But actually, to be a proper royal mistress and to hold your position at court and defend your ground, that wasn't easy. And it took a lot of skill to do it. Because basically, your entire position at court is reliant on the royal penis. Oh, absolutely.

And even if perhaps that's starting to fade on the royal person actually being alive, of course, because as Luis de Carreau discovered in the moment that Charles was dead, she was already packing her bags. basically. That's, it's so precarious, the position, isn't it? It is, yes. Like the queen is, you know, you've got your ring, you've, I think that would be also really, be a really difficult job, but it's got some security, quite a lot of security, really. But the mistress doesn't have any security, which is why so many of them were desperately keen to build financial security as an integral part of the role, because without it, you are in the position, you're probably apocryphal of Charles the second saying to his brother James Duke of York, let not poor Nellie starve.

Well, she wouldn't have starved, but she was already in debt quite considerably by the time of Charles's death. And of course, Charles didn't always award the same amount of financial support to all of his mistresses. I don't know whether that was deliberate or partly just carelessness, but he didn't. And so, yes, you're right, it was a precarious existence. And not just in England, but throughout Europe and other parts of the world where these ladies held sway. But, their sway was, as you say, largely dependent on the royal penis. I've got such an admiration for these women. I really do. I think that, because Charles is pretty famous for his mistresses, isn't he? Do we have any idea about how many mistresses he had? Or is that

just kind of... I think we've got more idea of the number of illegitimate children he had, which is sort of variously described as 14 or 15, though it's probable that Barbara Villiers' last child, who was named Barbara like her mother, was probably fathered by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, but the child has often lumped in with the others of Charles's illegitimate children. I don't think we do. I mean, the ones, as far as the mistresses are concerned, because Charles may have had a number of casual liaisons,

as many kings did, which simply perhaps failed to attract attention or were very, very transitory. And certainly there were mistresses other than the ones that I mentioned in my book. There may have been a good other half dozen or so. It's particularly hard to be specific about his years of exile, of course, because women, they drifted in and out both of his life

and of the geographical surroundings of where he was at the time. But I would have thought, if you wanted a sort of ballpark figure, as they say, that there were at least a dozen, probably, I would think, and perhaps more than that. We should probably actually start with his wife, shouldn't we? We should probably start there before we start looking outside of it. So his wife, Catherine of Brganza, who was she? And were they happily married?

What was their marriage like? Well, Catherine was a Portuguese princess. She was the daughter of a new dynasty in Portugal, actually, because Portuguese had a quite checkered history throughout the Middle Ages, which makes us look quite taming comparison. And unlike England, there were at least a couple, I think, of Portuguese monarchs who were illegitimate, but who were, you know, allowed to ascend the throne. And it was a family that had difficulty in producing healthy sons, which is why, you know, occasionally they expanded, for want of a better word, outside the legitimate line.

But also, of course, they had been under the rule of Spain for a considerable time. And in the sort of mid-17th century, there was so much ill feeling, particularly on behalf of the Portuguese nobility, who were always made to feel second-best. by their Spanish counterparts. And of course, Spain was not as powerful as it had been under the Second under his son and grandson. Some of the glory of it began to become a bit tarnished. Like a Portuguese Brexit? Yes, almost in a way.

The Portuguese nobility engineered a coup in the 1640s, which brought to power John, Duke of Brighanza, who was, he wasn't exactly elected from amongst them, but he was considered to be, you know, the most appropriate choice. And the Spanish did not fight back at that point. So Catherine is the daughter of Donjig Baganza and Louisa de Goucun, who was a Spanish noble woman. There'd been a lot of intermarriage and interchange between the leading families of Portugal and Spain.

And Catherine came from that marriage. Her mother was a very determined and able woman. Her father was almost, if you like, a country, gentleman who'd been catapulted into the position of monarch. He had spent most of the time on his estates outside Lisbon and didn't even know the capital that well. So Catherine and her brothers were brought up in this slightly unusual environment, but sort of trained and educated as royalty. I mean, I think a lot of nonsense has been written about Catherine in the past that she was brought up in a convent and had scarcely ever gone outside Lisbon. She might not have travelled very much

outside Lisbon there, she probably visited the family's estates. We don't know a great deal about her education. It doesn't actually have seemed to have been a convent education, but she would have been brought up in the way that any young princess of a noble house would have been at the time, you know, at least literate, but she probably didn't have a very great knowledge of the wider world. Her mother probably did, but Catherine didn't. So I would like to dispel the view of her as a sort of naive nobody who spent all her time praying and in tears. She wasn't like that at all. But I think it's fair to say she probably lacked the, well, certainly the worldly sophistication of some of Charles II's mistress, at any rate, because she hadn't been developed or grown

in that environment, but she had been trained as a princess and with the hope that she would make her a regal marriage. It was not an inappropriate background, but of course the thing about her, regardless of her personality and what attracted her to the English, and to Charles specifically, was that she was enormously wealthy. Well, that helps, doesn't it, you see? It does, yes. She brought with her the largest dowry of any British Queen consort. How much? How much? How much?

Well, it's hard to quantify in actual monetary terms, but I mean its main importance in the fact that it gave Charles II and Great Britain an entree into the hugely important markets of South America via Brazil, which was a Portuguese possession, of course. She bought enough money to buy Brazil. Well, not to buy it as a country. I mean, it still remained part of Portugal, but trading rights were hugely important and sought after in those days.

And it gave sort of specific favoured nation status. And also to parts of India, to Goa and Bombay and places like that, and to Tangier in North Africa. So she may have had a rather narrow upbringing, but in global terms, if you like, Catherine was very much a global princess in what she brought to the marriage, which I think is often overlooked. And she was a small woman with the kind of olive Mediterranean complexion, which we now regard as very attractive, but in those days we'd be sort of swarthy and not very feminine.

And she also, of course, came dressed in Portuguese fashions, which were also thought to be sort of ludicrously heavy and unattractive by the English. and we've always been very good at making fun of foreigners. But if the foreigner has enough money to buy Brazil, I think she can wear what the fuck she likes, quite frankly. Quite possibly, but Charles didn't agree. And I don't know if you've ever seen portraits of Catherine of Braganza. Or, I mean, I think even in the series years and years ago in the early 2000s with Rufus Sewell,

it showed her hairstyle, you know, with these great sort of sticking out bits at the side. And Charles is supposed to have said that he thought his diplomats had brought him a bat rather than a wife. Yes. He wasn't very kind to Catherine. Was there a marriage happy? The answer is no. It settled down to a kind of mutual affection.

One of the saving graces of Charles II is that he never really totally abandoned any of the women in his life. He was a sort of man that wanted to remain on reasonable terms. He had huge fights with Barbara Villiers' lady Couselmae because she was hugely into huge fights. But with the other women, he wanted a quiet love. but he wasn't going to allow Catherine of Bruganza to interfere in his relationship with Lady Castlemain. And she had to accept Barbara as one of her ladies of the bedchamber, which is hugely patronising, of course.

That is, isn't it? And he made it very clear, even to some of his leading courtes like the Earl of Clarendon, Charles made it very clear, that anyone who stood against and tried to interfere in what he wanted for Barbara Villiers. would earn his permanent displeasure. That included Catherine. I mean, they were married at Portsmouth in two ceremonies. I mean, she was supposed to only be married in Protestant ceremony, but they were married in a secret Catholic one as well. Eventually, they came back to Hampton Court, because you've got to remember the marriage took place actually in the summer. It took place in 1662 well after the marriage treaty had been arranged and everything. And she had a long and particularly

unpleasant journey from Lisbon where she'd left, you know, to fireworks and guns salute and all that sort of thing to arrive half dead with her ladies from seasickness on the south coast of England. Oh. We don't think about these sort of things nowadays, do we? We assume that, you know, if you make a sea crossing, you take a few pills and you're in a stabilised ship. Well, in those days she weren't. You threw up through the entire voyage and felt more dead than alive when you arrived. And everyone's laughing at your hair. Yes. Well, you're probably wouldn't have very good looking hair after 10 days of seasickness.

Anyhow, shouldn't be the least of your worries. But James Duke of York, the King's brother, came out to meet her. She was conducted back into England to Portsmouth, where Charles met her and went through with the proper marriage ceremony. And then they moved to Hampton Court, where they spent most of the summer because there was plague in London. We tend to think of plague as being just in 1665, the year before the Great Fire,

I mean, they've been plagued in London for well over a century before that time and various other types of serious illness. So the royal household normally moved out to Hampton Court in the summer, anyhow, just because it was safer out there. The air was thought to be better, and there weren't so many people. So she began her time as Queen did Catherine rather artificially, if you like, you know, not in the capital, not in the centre of London. And eventually she did enter London.

There was a water pageant, a rather fine one on the Thames, But it was all rather, how should I put it, artificial, I suppose. You know, the couple were greeted and all that sort of thing. And various ghastly poems, which I found in the British Library there, and they're actually quite amusing. You know, these are the real doggerel verses were written about it because, you know, you were supposed to write polite and laudatory things about a foreign lady writing arriving to be queen.

But it wasn't the most promising of starts. And then, you know, it went downhill when, Charles was so unremittingly opposed to removing his mistress even from her presence. And she tried, I mean, she did have spirit, Catherine. She tried to oppose him. But although Queen's nominally had responsibility for who they could nominate to their bedchamber, in fact, if the king didn't like it, it just went out of the window because he held the purse. Of course, there was a Queen's household, and there hadn't been one for quite a long time, of course.

Larger because of the Civil War, the last Queen consort to have a household was Henry. her to Maria, Catherine of Borganza's mother-in-law. Eventually, Catherine, I think, counted by her husband's absolute refusal to give an inch on having a mistress on the premises and spending a lot of more time with her than he did with Catherine, submitted because she had no choice. Thereafter, she had several pregnancies, probably about three, but she was never able to carry a child to term. I mean, nowadays, we've only just started to talk about menstrual problems and girls' periods, but it was well known at the time that Catherine had a condition whereby she had extremely heavy and frequent periods

and apparently if you have this condition you are quite prone to miscarriage you know it sort of goes with it and this was well known you know it was talked about in various by various diarists that the Queen had these what they described as enormous fluxes oh bless is that endometriosis that she might have had it's connected to that but not it's I don't think it's actually quite the same It is a horrible thing, and to have this talked about quite openly by men who have no understanding or sympathy for your situation. I don't want to say that she was doomed from the start because she found a way to deal with Charles and her marriage, which is often overlooked.

But basically by the end of the decade of the 1660s, it was realised that Catherine couldn't bear children. Well, there were already some suggestions at the time that Charles might divorce her, but to his credit, Charles was not Henry the 8th. He didn't go around chopping off his wife's head or even trying to get rid of them through legal or other means. So she decided, I think, that if she couldn't be the mother of children, then she would need to forge a separate existence. And perhaps one that placed her quite separately as a queen consort. But, you know, a person in her own right,

she began to patronise various artists quite ostentatiously, ones who were either Italian or Flemish rather than the French ones favoured by. the King's Chief Mistress at the time. She was very interested in music, you know, supported a number of Catholic composers and brought a number of singers over from the continent to sing in her chapel and all that sort of thing.

And yes, I mean, she did find solace in religion because that was the way that she'd been brought up. But I think to think of her as some people have in the past as a kind of weepy dope who found her only solace in kneeling in front of the altar is silly. That isn't the kind of woman that Catherine became. She doesn't sound like that, actually. I mean, to put up with that, you must have been quite a tough cookie.

Yes, indeed, because she knew she couldn't go home. Charles wasn't going to divorce her. They had some interests in common, like music. And she used to accompany him to Newmarket for horse racing and that sort of thing. And she did see him quite frequently, but the poor woman was always rather scared to go into his bedchamber sometimes in case there were signs that other women were there, like slippers and underwear left on the floor and things like that.

We part with Linda after his short break. I just think of this poor woman who's come over from another country. She doesn't know anyone from anybody. She's a million miles away from her. Doesn't speak much English. Isn't her culture. People are laughing at her hair. Her private medical information is blasted all around court.

And your husband has actually installed one of his mistresses as your maid effectively. And he's just flaunting these love affairs. I mean, wow. Yeah, see, it's not nice. And people often say to me, well, you know, surely Charles has said, was nice to his wife. He didn't divorce her. But I mean, there's a difference between not divorcing someone and being nice to them. That's pretty basic though, isn't it? I think a certain amount of affection did, you know, grow between them. I mean, the sad thing I suppose, really, Kate, is that

she fell in love with him. Oh, Catherine. Oh, no. You know, he was her handsome prince charming. And, you know, she had no experience of men. And Charles was able to play on that. However, she did have quite a loyal following. The members of her household admired and loved her. One of the things she did become was a major arbiter of taste in Restoration England because she brought with her all these beautiful things from Portugal's Eastern possessions, beautiful cloths and textiles, a lot of wicker work, things that were unusual in England and were much admired. And you know, many ladies of the court, particularly those who didn't like the King's mistresses, because for any given mistress,

there were always a huge number of women who couldn't stand them at all. And they sort of copied this style. And one of the great things that she did was to introduce the English to drinking tea. That was her. That was her, yes, it was. Tea had been drunk in England before,

but it was viewed entirely as a medicinal sort of, something nasty. Coffee had become popular much before tea. But Catherine introduced tea drinking as a polite, fashionable and enviable way of passing the time with friends and others. So she has left her mark on Great Britain. She really has. And I've always had a very soft spot for her.

And I did try in my book, as you probably saw, not to represent her as some sort of hapless foreign dope, basically. No, she does not come across like that. And I can feel your admiration for this woman and kind of what she had to put up with. and the kind of resignation of just like, right, well, this is happening, but, you know, she sort of throws herself into the arts and the patrons and tea drinking. Let's talk a little bit about Charles's mistresses, these women that he was kind of flaunting, because it was, I can't remember he said it, it was like a veritable harim of women clucking round.

Oh, yes, that was said. Well, of course, Charles' fondness for women began during his exile as an 18-year-old in the Netherlands where he met Lucy Walter, who I suppose is very different from the other mistresses. I mean, her background was somewhat better than Nell Gwyns, but not hugely more proper. Lucy Walter was quite typical of women of her background and age. She was in her teens, her parents' marriage had broken up,

she was born in Wales. She obviously had some level of education, at least a sort of basic literacy, and also had learnt somehow along the way how to use her good looks to please men. but she wasn't very bright, I'm afraid, you know, certainly not compared with quite a lot of the other mistresses. And so off she went with her mama to the Hague where the exile court of Charles II was. Well, in fact, he wasn't even Charles II at the time that she met him.

He was still the Prince of Wales. And they seem to have had what nowadays we would call a very brief fling during a warm summer. I mean, it may have been literally just a few nights of pattern. But the few nights of passion resulted in a pregnancy. and the difficult and ultimately tragic boy who became the Duke of Monmouth, who was the first of Charles' illegitimate children and his eldest illegitimate son. This is still controversial, but Lucy always claimed that Charles had gone through some form of marriage with her, but there's never been any evidence of this.

I mean, it may have been carefully concealed or even, you know, suppressed and destroyed. But Charles always denied that he had married her. And I think the feeling is that they hadn't known him. each other long enough to sort of go through a marriage ceremony, really. But anyhow, she proved a real thorn in Charles's side. I mean, at a time when he was desperate for money himself, she started to demand money for herself and her son. She got involved with various other dubious men. Charles tried to palm her off on one of his followers. She came back to England and was arrested for a while as a spy and put in the Tower of London. She did have a very chequered career. Well, the Crown William

regime loved her because she was such an embarrassment to Charles. Charles, that, you know, she fitted all of their attempts to discredit him. She played the hand that she had, which is that she's good looking and that men like her, and she's got access to very rich men. Yes, exactly. She played a very strong hand, I think. She did until, of course, eventually Charles removed her son from her. He was kidnapped, actually.

It was a great scene in Brussels when this happened. And she spent the rest of her short life trying to get Monmouth back, though she hadn't been a great. mother to him. I mean, he was about seven when he came indirectly into his father's care, and he couldn't read or write, didn't even know his numbers. You know, he was given to an English diplomat in Paris to be brought up, who did quite a good job with him, really. Lucy eventually found her way to Paris and died there. She became ill. We don't know what we're, I mean, James Duke of York claimed that she picked up her, what we would call a sexually transmitted disease, but we don't know that. And she confessed quite a lot of her regrets and all.

that sort of thing to a English priest who became the Bishop of Durham eventually. And I've often said that, you know, if there is any written evidence of a marriage between Charles and Lucy Walter, it may still be lurking somewhere in the Durham Cathedral Archives. Wouldn't that be interesting? Yes, no one has found such a thing. No. Very Games of Thronesy, that one. So she was the first one.

She did what a lot of royal mistresses do, which is that she had the baby, which well played. and then attempted to keep getting money from him. And basically she got a bit carried away. She made a nuisance of herself, which is what a lot of royal mistresses do, and then they become a cropper pretty quick. Who would you say, this is difficult, I know who my favourite is, but who would you say was the most successful of Charles's mistresses? Because Lucy's out, but who would you say played it really well?

Well, it's probably very nearly a tie between Barbara Villa's Lady Castlemain and Luis de Carrault, who became Duchess of Portsmouth. I mean, Barbara was given a title eventually in Statues of Cleveland, but it didn't pass on as such to any of her children, though most of her children were given royal titles, several of her sons became dukes. It is said, I think with some justification that most of the modern aristocracy of British Isles are descended from Charles II and Barbara Palmer. And I think there is a lot of truth to that. But Barbara's primary concern was money, I would say, always, always money. and recognition for her children. That might make her sound like a devoted mama,

except that at one stage when she thought that Charles was perhaps not going to recognise her youngest son, she threatened to dash his brains out against the mantelpiece. Oh, yes, she's just lost the mum of the year award, hasn't she? Yes, she has. On the other hand, she did make sure that they all had titles and or, in the case of the girls, were well-married. So to that degree, and she certainly succeeded. and she was showered with jewellery.

You know, she had bling far in excess of poor Catherine of Brighamza. And she was a very, very public figure and always, I think, a controversial and deeply unpopular one. She wasn't popular, wasn't she? The people didn't like her very much. Yeah, I mean, people didn't like her. She had a few friends amongst the women of her own family, but that was probably more family loyalty than anything else. She treated her poor husband, whom I've always thought was an interesting,

and judging by his portrait is rather a handsome man. actually, probably more so than Charles almost, but she treated him with absolute disdain. She'd been having an affair with the Earl of Chesterfield as a teenager and seemed very much in love, but I think also that was just sort of teenage puppy love almost. I mean, there obviously was a physical affair. And she was quite happy to move from Charles to other actors

that she met through her. They both had a love of the theatre. She wasn't so fond of Nell Gwyn now for obvious reasons. No, and no love lost there, though. No, no, there definitely wasn't. She called Nell a pathetic strolling player at one stage, which wasn't very... I'm not actually seen any... Nell was very witty.

Didn't she call her Squintabella, or was that somebody else? That was Luis de Quechal. Right, okay. The French woman that she called Squintibella. And, I mean, if we balance Barbara with Louise de Carrella, I think they were both successful. Louise obviously wanted money. and titles and she got them. She only had the one child by Charles because by that the time of the early 1670s when her son who became, she was born. I think Charles's potency was beginning

to flag a bit and certainly they didn't have any other children. There he did manage to give Port Louise a sexually transmitted disease for a while which made her very ill for several years but didn't stop her out living in by 50 years. So she must have been a robust old deer eventually. Yes. But she of course, had the title. She was viewed as perhaps being much more politically influential than she actually was. But of course, if you're looking at politics as it happens rather than looking back at it, someone who is perceived to have a lot of influence, it makes them important anyhow, whether the perception is wrong or not. And she became, as did Nell to some degree, I don't think Barbara ever did. Well, Barbara did act as a hostess from time to time. But Louise was kind of the

hostess par excellence, if you like. I mean, she didn't want a lot of property of her own, which both Nell Gwynne and Barbara Phillips had wanted. She had sumptuous apartments at Whitehall, but she didn't have anywhere separate, at least at that time. And she acted as a kind of hostess and comforting ear for Charles. I mean, I've always thought that if he'd given his queen the opportunity to do this, I'm sure she could have held a soire just as well as Louise did,

but, you know, Louise was French. She'd been brought up at the French court in its wider sense because she'd been made of honour to Charles's sister, Mnacht, who was the Duchess Valen. So she had grown up in that environment. Having come from a quite modest background in Brittany, I mean, her father had a title. But the Breton nobility were not viewed on quite the same level

as those who were in other parts of France, and they were poor as well. So I think Louise, of course, was seduced. by Charles, she lost her virginity to him. And thereafter, I think she did struggle with the concept of being a kept woman, but she persuaded herself that she wasn't a bad person, which I don't think she was, probably. No, you've got to, like, factor in this as well,

as the enormous power dynamics at work. I mean, you're quite young, you knew it caught, and the king is coming on to you. Like, can you say no to that? No, you can't, basically. As you may know, I wrote a biography some years of, of Catherine Parr and various people have always said to me, well, why did she agree to marry Henry the 8th? But I mean, it's a daft question. How can you say no to Henry the 8th? You can't.

It's the king. And there are rewards for you and your family, your wider family and all that. And Louise did also arrange a very advantageous marriage for her sister, Henrietta. So, you know, there were perks, undoubtedly. And I think she enjoyed the life of being a great lady at Charles's court and almost the first lady really. She didn't have an antagonistic relationship as such with Catherine Brigham so they just avoided one another altogether as far as one can tell. Probably the best that you could hope for in that situation. Now, in the French court there is an official position of royal mistress.

Like that's like the actual job. Maitre-saint-saint-Titre. Yes, like a job title. Was that an official position at the British court? No, it wasn't. No. So this is just whoever Charles is knobbing at the moment. And, I mean, as you know, he was often seeing various women at the same time that he was bedding Louise de Carouard. He was also seeing Nell Gwynne and Mold Davis. Didn't she poison her because, like, she put a laxative in her food?

Oh, yes. Nel Gwyn is supposed to have sent sweetmeats laced with laxatives to Mold Davis, which proved very embarrassing during an assignation with the king. As she doesn't bear thinking about, really. Yes. And anyhow, again, I'm not quite sure whether we know whether that story is true or not, but it was banged about at the time. But we still love Nellgwin, don't we? Oh, yes, we do. And people at the time love Nelgwin, which is very, very different from Barbara Palmer or from Louisa Caruale, who's name was Anglicised, and she was known as Mrs Carwell at the time.

Oh, but she hated that. I imagine she did. I don't know how much she knew about it, but she obviously knew that there were opponents of the king who hated her, because they tried to bring in Parliament, various acts to sort of limit, you know, what was perceived as her power and influence, was to make her an undesirable alien and all that. But, Nell, I think, perhaps because of her personality, her background, which we don't know very much about it, you know, there are all these stories about the fact her mother was a brothel keeper and her father was a royalist soldier and all that. We don't even know whether her parents were married. Her mother does seem to have had an alcohol problem and may well have kept a brothel in London. But of course, if you're

the kind of personnel was, it sort of adds to your colour and interest to play up those aspects of your, your mysterious past, which no one can really deny or confirm. Yeah. And also, of course, you know, having moved from being an orange girl selling oranges in the front of the theatre during intermissions and beforehand and all that, she became almost by accident, apparently a really very, very good comic actress. Tragedy was not her thing, but she was a very good comic actress. And I think if you're going to be accepted as an actress, you have to please people, don't you? So, you know, she had a good background in all that kind of thing,

as well as from what one can tell, the natural personality to go with it. It is somewhat mysterious how she became the successful actress that she did. I mean, she was part of a successful theatre company, and Charles and his brother James loved the theatre. But as far as we know, Nell was barely literate when she joined the theatre company under Charles Hart, who became her lover. She had nice legs, apparently. I've read that, she had nice legs.

Apparently she did. And apparently, the feeling is that she must have either acquired a basic degree of literacy fairly quickly or had her lines read to her by the other actors and just learn them by heart. When you think about it, restoration actresses were not initially known for having got a very good grasp of their lines. You know, it was often commented on that they messed it up fairly often. But they did become much more professional. But of course, being an actress was viewed as being little more than a prostitute in those days anyhow. And many actresses took refuge against that in actually marrying other actors,

which at least gave them a veneer of respectability. But Nell never did that. And she went through, you know, first Charles Hart as her lover, then Charles Loughbuckhurst until she came, as she put it to her Charles III, who was the king. You've got to love this woman. She really did have, I mean, whether she actually said to this, the angry crowd in Oxford who stopped her carriage, thinking that she was Louise de Carraoul,

be silent, good people, I am the Protestant whore. You don't know. But you see, she also commented on to the fact quite quickly, given the huge religious tensions that were endemic in the restoration and which grudger in Charles's reign. She knew that playing on her Protestantism would make her popular with people, whereas Louise de Carrewell was Catholic, of course.

Charles converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, though he seems to have had a... Yen for it basically, because of the influence of his mother, probably for much of his adult wife. But he knew that he couldn't ever become a Catholic because he would lose the throne. And of course, it proved a huge problem with his brother when James announced in the early 1670s that he and his wife had converted to Catholicism. And that led to the whole exclusion crisis in which Louise actually backed the wrong horse. A lot of people thought that, you know, she would support James and she didn't for a while.

she supported the Duke of Monmouth. I mean, if Charles was beset by problems with his mistresses, he was also beset by problems with his illegitimate progeny, at least with the Duke of Monmouth, who was a constant trouble to him because he'd been brought up as a Protestant. And in the absence of a legitimate air, I mean, although what I said to you about Portugal at the beginning is interesting, really there is no serious sign of any English monarch at the time, because of course Scotland was still separate, if you go back to Henry VIII, of any English monarchs seriously considering putting an illegitimate child in the succession. And Charles held out against it all the time. His relationship with his brother, James Duke of York, was quite difficult. He didn't think much of him, which was

true judgment probably on his part. James may be somewhat maligned, but he wasn't terribly bright. It was very good looking, but he wasn't very bright. I'll take you a long way. Yes, well, it wouldn't take him quite long enough, at any rate. Louise as mistress and Nell, to a slightly different degree, were caught up in all of the politics of the time. But Nell wasn't as deliberately political in inverted commas as Louise tried to be. She was a favourite of the Duke of Buckingham, who was one of Charles' more difficult courtiers. I mean, he very much ploughed his own furrow and was considered to be untrustworthy. And he tried to use various of the king's mistresses to further his aims.

Nell seems to have liked me. He was a great wit himself and apparently a brilliant mimic. You know, he could have the courting stitches. But Nell for a time, you know, was not supported by him financially, but he tried to sort of put her up against Louise. But mostly she tried not to get involved in anything that was too politically difficult. Whereas some of the other mistresses courted this sort of thing quite happily, Louise certainly did. And Barbara Palmer had to some degree as well. And she was fun was Nell. She was funny.

Yes, she was fun, yes. She was never really accepted at court, though, because of her background. You know, there is a difference between being the King's Mistress if you've got a title and, you know, a semi-aristocratic background of your own. Whereas if you're thought to have been brought up in a brothel, you are ostracized at court. And Nell didn't make friends there. She seems to have been friendly with the female playwright Afro Ben. But apart from that, we don't know whether she had all that many close female friends. Was she friends with Rochester as well?

Did I, they hung out. She certainly knew him. They made jokes about Charlie Boy having a huge penis, I think. Yes, that kind of thing. They talked about this sort of thing quite free. I mean, I think I actually said I remember in the book that, you know, if you consider the kind of thing that was written about Barbara Billets, for example, it has the power to shock even nowadays.

It really does. It's grotesquely obscene. There really isn't any other way to describe it. But those were the times in which people lived then, except that, you know, I think people all assume that this must have been a huge amount of fun and very jolly. You know, it's the whole merry monarch thing, but actually it wasn't a jolly period at all.

It doesn't sound very jolly a lot of it. The court was heavily removed from everyone else. I mean, Charles was not a very visible king in the way that his Scottish Stuart ancestors had been. He wanted to be admired from a distance. He didn't want to go out and shake hands and have, you know, people patch you on horseback or anything like that. That wasn't his kind of thing at all. And I suppose he behaved this way because he could, you know.

He was determined to stay on the throne after the years of exile marked him permanently, I think, and explain why on one level he seems a sort of jovial, jolly good type, and on another, not someone you would want to spend a great deal of time with, to be truthful. And during his reign, religious dissension grew, you know, from the Catholics on the one hand to the Puritans and the dissenters on the other. And, of course, because he was always short of money, in 1670, he made largely through the offices of his sister, though she was to die soon afterwards, Minet, the secret treaty of Dover in which he sold his country to Louis XIV. He got a lot of money in return and didn't incidentally do any of the things that he said he would do. but he had agreed to support Louis the 14th against Charles's own nephew, the William of Orange. He promised to return the country to Catholicism. He didn't do any of these things.

And there was a public treaty and a private treaty which only became known within the last sort of century and a half or so when the papers about it were found down in Devon somewhere, I think, in a private home. Also, of course, you've got the plague, you've got the Great Fire of London, and you've got these ignominious defeats at the hands of the Dutch when they swept their navy up the medway and destroyed the fleet. And people who say, oh, well, you know, good old Charlie, do tend to overlook these negative aspects of his reign. And it wasn't actually a great time for Britain.

I mean, we tend to still confuse England and Scotland at the time. Scotland was still separate. Charles had spent some time there while in exile. You know, he used it as a springboarder, what eventually became the Battle of Worcester, which was a disaster. and he hated Scotland with the passion over after and never set foot in it again. And it was run by his fixer there, the Duke of Lauderdale, who helped himself do quite a lot of money

and didn't really do anything for Scotland at all. So it was, they are two separate countries. And what happened in Scotland wasn't good for the Scots either at the time. I think it goes a long way to explaining the permanent feeling of alienation that many Scots had. You know, even though Charles was Stuart and the Jacobite calls, lasted way after the abdication of James II. Still, I think the seeds of a lot of this tension and ill feeling between the two countries and the aristocracies and that goes well back into this difficult time. So Charles and his mistresses are interesting and they're fun,

but he left a difficult legacy which his brother was quite unable to cope with properly. I mean, there was goodwill towards James II when he came to the throne, and it took a lot several years with people like Marlborough to desert him in fact. But there was too much tension which had a long background, I think, for James to be able to rule successfully. What we've got here then is a rain where the leader has, can't seem to keep it in his pants, cheats on his wife, has numerous, we don't know how many children it really has, reigning over a country with a lot of illness, plague, in fact, where everybody is really sick. There are tensions with Scotland and the country has been sold to France big issues with Europe. Yeah, exactly. I think that maybe we can

appreciate that there was some serious issues. Thank God our leaders don't do that. Yes. Well, there were some, you know, there were some competent politicians. Charles didn't deal with politicians that opposed him in the way that Henry VIII did, for example. I mean, a number of them did from time to time end up in the tower, but they were released and returned into the political world. He had his own kind of loyalty, I think, and that is something for which he should be admired. I think there are things to admire,

just to be known as the Mary Monarch, the person that bought back fun and partying after Cromwell, that's still quite an important legacy. And I'd love to talk to you forever and ever, but my last question that I want to ask you is, would you rather be the wife or the mistress? Oh, I'd much rather have been the mistress, knowing what I know now. I mean, if you'd ask me before he married, then you'd probably have said the wife,

because being a queen, you know, does give you a certain amount of clout. And no one in those days expected you really to be hugely enamoured. You know, kings and queens were marriages throughout Europe, not just here, were for political and diplomatic reasons rather than, I think it was unfortunate for Catherine of Aragon that she became so enamoured so quickly of her husband. Her life might have been a bit easier if she had given herself some time to really observe what was going on and reflect on it, which she did eventually, but not before I think she'd suffered quite badly.

The mistress because the Queen suffers greatly, the mistress because she has more fun? Yes, I guess so, though you are. There is a certain precariousness attached to the position, and you can be thrown aside with little to show for it very quickly. I think you'd have been a spectacular mistress, Linda. I think you would have been dripping with diamonds, and you would have just played that hand fantastically well. Well, I'd certainly have tried. If people want to know more about you and more about your book, where can they find you?

Well, they can find me on Twitter. I'm at Dr Linda Porter 1. I also have a website which is www. lindaporter. org, all one word, dot net. Could you imagine if Nell Gwynne was on Twitter, that'd be amazing.

Actually, I think she'd have been great on Twitter. She'd have been fabulous, wouldn't she? Probably much better than Barbara or Louise, actually. That's a very good thought. Oh, Linda, thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been absolutely amazing. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for listening.

a thank you to Linda for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really does help us out. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hello,

then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from medieval torture implements to a full mini-series on the real Bridgeton ahead of the hotly anticipated third season. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie, the producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.

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