Dan Snow's History Hit - Sex and Scandal at the Court of Charles II

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

According to John Evelyn, the great diarist, Charles II was ‘addicted to women’. Charles' court is infamous for tales of licentiousness and promiscuity, and I was thrilled to be joined by Linda Porter who introduced me to Charles' impressive list of mistresses. There was Frances Teresa Stuart, ‘the prettiest girl in the world’, Barbara Villiers, an ill-tempered courtier, ‘pretty, witty’ Nell Gwynn, Moll Davis, who bore the last of the king’s fifteen illegitimate children and Louise de Kéroualle, the French aristocrat – and spy for Louis XIV. Trapped in the middle of it all was Queen Catherine, the Portuguese princess, who was far from the childless, forlorn and humiliated figure we have come to imagine. Linda argues that she was likeable and resilient, and a leading cultural figure of the day. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got an excellent podcast for you here. It's Charles II and his mistresses, the wild restoration court of mid-late 17th century England. You've heard the myths? Well, what's the reality of Charles II and the women in his court? I've got the excellent Linda Porter on. She's written several prize-winning books, and she's going to tell me all about Charles II, Nell Gwynn, all those other ladies. Some pretty wild stories out there. For example, Christabella Wyndham was Charles II's wet nurse and a few years later also became his first lover.

Pretty wild. If you want to go and watch documentaries about the 17th century or any century, frankly, we've got hundreds of them on history hit TVs like Netflix for history. We are full of new content at the moment. We've been busy building it up during the lockdown. We've got more content than ever on there now. Still making fresh content, but we've licensed in a bunch of documentaries as well. So please go and check that out. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free and then you get one month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So please do go and

check that out. We're also doing History Hit Live. If you like this podcast, go to History Hit Live on YouTube's Timeline channel. We had Tom Holland discuss in the fall of the Roman Empire in the West last week. It's obviously available to be seen now on Timeline. So head over to YouTube. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the lockdown, 8am Pacific time, 11am Eastern and 4pm UK Time. Be good to have you watching those. But in the meantime, I hope everyone's staying well. And here is Linda Porter talking about Charles II and his licentious court. Linda, thank you very much for coming to the podcast.

Thank you for inviting me, Dan. Am I allowed to say what fun this subject is? Of course you are. It is a fun subject. And I think, ironically, in these difficult times, it's turned out to be even more of a fun subject for readers than I thought it might be. Is there any logic to this at all? There isn't any logic. But it's so strange.

Henry I, George IV, Charles II, wild, wild womanisers, and yet no legitimate heirs. It's just weird, isn't it? Well, it is. Of course, George IV did have a legitimate heir. He just unfortunately died in childbirth. But yes, it is quite extraordinary, I suppose, in a way. And I suppose of all of those three, Charles II is the one who's still most attached himself to the hearts of the British public, for reasons I find slightly difficult to understand. But I think that's true. I mean, the whole merry monarch thing dies quite hard, actually. It's still very much out there, I think. Okay, so let's get back to basics. Charles

II returns to the throne after the British experiment with republicanism. Was he merry? Was it just PR? Was the public grateful for their king returning and peace returning to the land? I mean, how do you begin to disentangle myth and PR from reality here? I think Charles was certainly marked by his years of exile. marked by his years of exile. And that may have a lot to do with explaining how he behaved as a restored monarch. I mean, I don't think it was just the country, though not all of the country heaved a sigh of relief when he came back. As you know, there was considerable opposition to him throughout his reign. But I think there was a general feeling that here was a new beginning. But I think there was a general feeling that here was a new beginning.

There was a still relatively young, he was only 30, sort of vigorous, in a sort of dark, swarthy way, rather handsome man. Very urbane, very charming when he chose to be. And because of what he looked like and who he was, people, especially women, certainly fell at his feet. And he enjoyed the attention. he enjoyed the company of women I think it was for the year 1660 rather a good fit between his personality and a slight relieving of some of the uncertainties of the republic though as you know Dan the republic wasn't nearly as repressive as a lot of people think it was certainly not not in terms of the arts. But Charles was someone they didn't really know. And I think he liked that. I think he liked the fact that people didn't really

know much about him. It allowed him to develop this sort of aura of bonhomie and pleasant slack morality and everything, which became the byword of his court. It's this issue isn't it like with Catherine the Great she was just a normal human with sexual appetite and yet we've sort of created this bizarre myth around her. Was Charles, can we judge whether he was sort of particularly obsessed in this way more so than his peers or was this just the normal behaviour of a man with enormous wealth and power in that period? I'm not sure it was entirely the normal behaviour. And of course, the diarist John Evelyn said Charles II was addicted to women. And there certainly does seem to be some evidence of that in his

overall behaviour. I mean, he'd started young in exile. Lucy Walter was his first mistress that we know about, but there may have been other sexual liaisons. He was only 18 when he and Lucy met. They were both the same age. And I think in order to understand Charles, you have to think firstly about his long period of being the poor relation. It's an embarrassment to have people at your court, as Louis XIV made quite obvious to his cousins. It's embarrassing to have relations who've been chucked off their thrones. This is just not good for your own PR, much less theirs. And I think that helped shape Charles and his wish to enjoy himself later in life when he did have the money, when the women would come to him freely, when he had all the trappings and luxury of kingship. But I think you also have to remember that he was the grandson of the great Henri IV of France, who was an inveterate womaniser. And further back, of course,

Charles is a steward. And if you go back to James IV and James V of Scotland, you find that they're inveterate womanisers as well. And so there may be something of this in the blood, I think. People often say, well, but look at his parents. They had an exemplary marriage, Charles I and Henrietta Maria. It was rocky to start off with, but that wasn't because of infidelity. It was because of lack of sort of understanding of the situation in which they both found themselves. sort of understanding of the situation in which they both found themselves. But they did. So Charles II's behaviour was not in any respect, following the example of his parents, quite the

reverse. But again, you know, sometimes that happens with people. If you view your parents as being rather straight-laced, sometimes you decide not to be yourself. But I think the Bourbon background, because of course, Charles II looked very much like his French forebears. He wasn't a Stuart in appearance, really, at all. And not only do you have Charles behaving with absolutely careless and almost gleeful abandon, you know, I can do this. And by the way, I may not have any legitimate children, but look at the 13 or 14 illegitimate ones I've got. This proves I'm virile and I'm a monarch. But James, his brother, though never quite coming up to Charles in almost every respect, also had quite numerous mistresses and a fairly large progeny,

though not as big as Charles's. So I think it's a family trait, actually, as well as an opportunity which he took, as you've suggested. A family trait along with extra legal taxation those stewards. Let's talk about his wife because he was actually married everyone forgets poor child second ever marriage with whom he had no children or no surviving children. There were three pregnancies poor Catherine of Braganza but none was brought to term in what would seem almost rather extraordinary nowadays even when we talk about things quite so freely. At the time, the fact that Catherine of Braganza had this gynaecological problem, which caused her to

hemorrhage a lot and sort of menstruate almost constantly. Apparently, this condition does make you more likely to have miscarriages. And indeed she did. She had three. And by 1670, I think both she and Charles had given up any idea, firstly, that they could really live together in any meaningful way. And secondly, that they'd ever have any children. But Catherine's problems with this great unfortunate flow of blood were quite widely talked about at the time. You know, it's hard to imagine the current royal family being too thrilled by this aspect of their bodies being brought into public but it was in those days and she was a rather shy and carefully brought up

Portuguese girl from a relatively new dynasty in Portugal and she simply couldn't have been in any way prepared for what she would find in England and the sad thing is of course that of all the women that ever slept with Charles II she was probably the only one who genuinely loved him. She does seem to have fallen greatly in love with him with his appearance, he was handsome, when it suited him he was quite kind to her but often he wasn't. She had to deal not just with the inability to give him children, but the fact that he had, perhaps not deliberately, but certainly carelessly humiliated her for the first 10 years of their marriage. What formed that humiliation tape? How open was Charles with his mistresses and his illegitimate children? Because, of course, he ennobled them and had them at court, didn't he? He did, yes, though not so much during the first 10 years of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. But I think the humiliation was in absolutely flaunting women like Barbara Villiers, his maitresse en titre, if you like, at the time.

You know, bringing her to be presented to the new queen at Hampton Court. And, you know, Catherine may have been innocent in some ways, but she wasn't completely stupid. And she had a fair idea of what was going on. You know, Charles said to her that if she didn't accept Barbara Villiers as one of her ladies-in-waiting, then he would essentially cast her off and have nothing more to do with her, which was cruel, I think. The children were not so apparent at court during that time, though it must be that Catherine knew about them. The other women that Catherine knew about were also round and about the court, not the least of whom was Frances Theresa Stuart, who never, as far as we know, actually went to bed with Charles II. She seems to have managed to resist him for five whole years

before she took a rather daring method out of this particular conundrum. But poor Catherine was said to be worried that she'd go to see the king in the morning or that, you know, she would go out among her ladies, because Frances Theresa was one of her maids of honour, and find this girl sitting on Charles's lap being poured, which was something that did happen from time to time. It is an extraordinarily grotesque, in many respects, way of treating your wife, I think. But curiously, though, he was very fond of, well, perhaps not curiously, he was very fond of his children. Famously, he brought the Duke of Monmouth into court, his illegitimate son, and many thought he might make him his heir. He seemed

so fond of him. But also there were the other stories of various sons fighting on opposing sides during the French and Dutch wars. They would sort of pick up each other's clothes at the inn after one side attacked or retreated. I mean, it's just incredibly confusing. It is confusing, yes. But you're right, Charles was very fond of his illegitimate children. And either at the behest of his various mistresses, or because he felt it was right to ennoble them. Nearly all of them had titles of one sort or another. Some of them a bit belatedly. The children from the earlier mistresses, like Catherine Pegg, were not ennobled for many years. They were all set up in life and

not treated disrespectfully. I think Monmouth is perhaps the most interesting of them because of what happened to him after Charles's death. But he was obviously held in genuine affection by his father. And he was also a very handsome young man, but difficult. And despite having been a fairly competent soldier, he was, of course, feted with an E, not an A, feted by the Protestants as a possible heir for Charles. But I think there's something interesting here, which is worth remembering about Charles II and all these women and the illegitimate children. And that is that Charles never wavered from the fact

that he would not pass the throne to an illegitimate child because he had that concern for the legitimacy of kingship, which goes way back to Henry VIII and well beyond that, even more into medieval times, that the throne must pass through the legitimate line. And although probably James Duke of York was his least favourite sibling, he never wavered in his deliberate concern and absolute commitment to make him his heir. So whatever the political shenanigans were at the time, and despite Monmouth's own rather vacillating nature, and eventually Monmouth was even caught up

in the Rye House plot, which would have assassinated his father if it had come to pass. So perhaps he was an indulgent father in some respects, but not in that one key respect when it came to what would happen after his death. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai

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Oh, it was very widely known, if for no other reason than that various of the courtiers from rochester and buckingham and others wrote quite freely about this and in ways which still seem quite shocking nowadays you know i had a conversation with someone else recently who said you know my god the sort of stuff that was written about barbara villiers later counties of castlemaine, would be fairly shocking even to a modern age when Twitter trolls are quite commonplace. And it is true, it still has the part of shock and it's sheer obscenity and viciousness, I think. And that was something that these women who all wanted to be well known and who all wanted to be celebrities, I think, in their different ways.

That was something that they had to cope with. And it was known. And there were all these various pamphlets that circulated quite widely. One particularly scurrilous verse was even pinned to the door of the apartments of the Duchess of Portsmouth, the French woman Louise de Queralt. It was widely understood that the court was licentious and it gave ammunition to Charles's many opponents. So seen as a bad thing, I mean, was Charles's court out of keeping with the mores at the time? He wasn't out of keeping because, of course, the court followed where he went. And at that top level, his behaviour seems perfectly explicable, if not something one would necessarily condone from a moral point of view. But the fact that it did leave the monarchy open to criticism probably did weaken his position, particularly at a time when you're starting to see the beginnings of the two party system.

to see the beginnings of the two-party system. One of the things I found quite difficult to grapple with in writing this book is that on one level the women are fairly easy to comprehend and write about, they're entertaining and colourful, but the context in which they're functioning, the political context, is actually quite complicated. It says something for Charles's native intelligence and cunning, I think, that he managed to survive all of this. But there was growing religious problem, of course, both on nonconformist and Catholic side. And Charles's attempts to introduce some degree of toleration were not met with any success in Parliament. And he was also always very poor. He never had enough money.

He didn't manage Parliament very well at all. Shades of his father there, I suppose, so it wasn't quite so disastrous. And eventually he ended up selling the country quite cheerfully to Louis XIV for a substantial pension. He didn't do anything that he'd promised to do for Louis XIV, incidentally, but it was an enormous betrayal of his country. The English monarchy was so poor. And you look at Charles and you think both his father and his brother lost their thrones. So he must have done something.

He had learned from exile, quite obviously. And he was very good at playing people off against one another, particularly his politicians. He was naturally, I think, a fairly lazy man. He didn't bring a great deal to the day-to-day running of kingship in his three different kingdoms. But he had enough political savvy, if you like, to know how to manage the situation. And in the end, of course, when he dissolved the Oxford Parliament in 1681, he spent the last years of his reign ruling without a parliament. I suppose he was trying to some degree to emulate his cousin, Louis XIV. But he was making something of a success of it before ill health and death overtook him. But it is not a reign in which the populace as a whole are necessarily very happy, I don't think. There are these quite important and significant undercurrents

of religious unrest. There's the disaster of Charles's foreign policy for many years, of course, in which the country was humiliated by wars with the Dutch and a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and destroyed the... We don't talk about that on this podcast. It's still too painful. The wounds are still raw. But it's interesting, isn't it? Because people forget that. They think, oh, Charles II, Nell Gwynne, what a jolly time this was. But actually, it wasn't a jolly time. Not just was their humiliating foreign policy, it was also the Great Plague, the Great Fire, both of which in a way shaped popular responses over the centuries to Charles, I think. And there was also the mini ice age, you know, when the Thames froze over. So it is a time of fire and ice and pestilence.

Yeah. And you know what? Although I'll never forgive him for handing back Dunkirk, you're right. There's defeat, there's pestilence, there's fire. And I think your point is quite interesting. Maybe it's because he was lazy and didn't try and do much. There's trouble with his father and brother. They tried to do things. Fatal. Charles had enough sense, I think, to know when to let his ministers off the reign, as it were, and to watch them struggle with each other, people like Arlington and Danby. These are not household names anymore but they were important politicians in the 17th century he even managed to thread his way through the awful popish plot stuff to come out the other side of that through

the whole of the attempts to remove his brother James from the, the great exclusion crisis of 1679 to 81, he was not just a lover of women, I think, but a clever manipulator of men. And that's perhaps what makes him the most remembered of all of the Stuart monarchs. Let's come back to those women. You've named several of them. Most famous, what do you think, Nell Gwynne? Yes, I'm sure Nell Gwynne, you know, if you stopped someone in the street, Nell Gwynne would be the mistress that they would remember most. And she's a hugely entertaining person, but I don't think she was in many respects the most significant of Charles's mistresses. I would think that both Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, and later Louise de Queroal, the Duchess of Portsmouth, were considerably more

important in terms of influence, and in Louise's case, political influence as well. Not necessarily that Charles listened to what Louise said to him, but that politicians at the time perceived her as being influential, which is almost equally important. But it's the classic sort of story, isn't it? You know, selling oranges in the pit of the theatre at the age of 12, becoming apparently, by all accounts, a really very good comedy actress, though she wasn't so good at tragedy. Acquiring a lot of fame through that. I mean, the resurgence of the stage under Charles II is important for British cultural history, there's no doubt. And Nell was a cheerful, I suppose we'd say cockney sort, really.

We don't know much about her origins. She may have been born in a brothel. Certainly we don't even know whether her parents were married. She went very young to the stage, as did a lot of girls in those days. It was a disreputable profession for women unless you were married to one of the other actors, in which case you were not necessarily conceived to be a whore. But it did give you a public persona. Charles loved the theatre and that's how he met Nell Gwynn. But she was never really accepted at court because she was of a different social class. You can be the great whore like Barbara Villiers.

You can be ostensibly a little giggly girl who's much cleverer than people thought she was, like Frances Theresa Stewart. You can be a slightly prudish, on the surface, French woman like Louise de Queroal. But all of them came from less ordinary backgrounds than Nell Gwynne. And I think Nell loved winding people up and being rude about them.

But this didn't make her acceptable at court. She never really fitted in. I don't think she cared that much. And Charles viewed her as an interesting diversion, I think, at the same time that he was bedding, initially, Barbara Villiers, and then later on the woman that Nell so wonderfully called Squintabella, Louise de Carroale. So yes, Nell is the best known,

but she may not be the most significant politically. Speaking of significant politically, did any of them become like Madame de Pompadour under Louis XV, for example, really significant politicians? No, not in the same way as Madame de Pompadour, I don't think. Certainly every politician at the time courted Louise de Carroal because they thought that she did have Charles's ear. And a lot of the politicians, for a while, she worked very closely with Thomas Osborne, the Earl of Danby, although they were miles apart both sort of morally, religiously and anything else, because Danby

obviously thought that she was a conduit to the king. What is less obvious is whether Charles took much notice of her political views. And he may even have used her as a kind of stalking horse in the exclusion crisis when she sort of switched from opposing the possibility that James Duke of Monmouth could succeed to supporting it and then sort of back again. Louise was not as clever as she thought she was I think whereas someone like Frances Theresa Stewart was probably a lot cleverer than most people thought she was so they are quite a varied bunch but I like Frances Theresa Stewart's story very much, I think, because she was a very distant relative, as you can tell from the surname of the ruling Stuarts.

And her parents were royalist exiles in Paris. She'd been brought up as a Catholic in the French court and was sent across in 1662 by Charles's sister, the Duchess of Orléans, with the possibly rather unwise sort of starring role that she was the prettiest girl in the world. Not necessarily the best thing to tell your somewhat sexually licentious brother. And for five years, he tried to get this girl who was viewed as being pretty but silly into his bed until she eventually decided that this could not continue and she eloped with Charles's cousin also a Charles Stuart the Duke of Lennox in Richmond

much to Charles II's fury she became the Duchess of Richmond she was persona very non grata a court for a while and her husband was eventually sent off as ambassador to Denmark the marriage appears to have been a happy one, incidentally. There weren't any children. But poor Francis de Ries's husband, who was a bit too fond of the bottle, managed to fall between the deck of a ship that he'd been visiting, a British warship, in the sound of Elsinore, and the boat that had come to pick him up one very cold evening in December. He was fished out alive but died by the time he got back to his lodgings. This is the kind of thing you couldn't make up

actually. And Frances Teresa then fought a long battle with her sister-in-law for control of her estates. But this silly little teenager whom everyone had written off was actually a very competent businesswoman, an affectionate and loyal wife. And when she contracted smallpox, Charles's view of her changed. And while I'm not sure he ever entirely forgave her for what she'd done, she certainly was allowed back at court and became a very faithful lady in waiting to Catherine of Braganza. So there are some lovely stories in the midst of all of this, I think. What a soap opera. I mean mean we think we're living now my goodness thank you so much the book is called it's called mistresses sex and scandal at the

court of charles ii what a box office title that is can't go wrong good luck with it and thank you so much for coming on the podcast okay thank you very much. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart,

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