Blazing Star Read online

  As the round of killings and deaths went on, attitudes began to change. What was initially enacted as the righteous and just application of vengeance spread to encompass reprisal against anyone who was seen as a threat to the new regime. Those who were suspected of plotting against Charles and the monarchy were summarily executed, as was any dissident element. The most ghoulish moment of all came on the anniversary of Charles I’s death, 30 January 1661. The corpses of Oliver Cromwell and others who had been responsible for Charles’s execution were exhumed, taken to the Old Bailey, posthumously given the death sentence, and then hanged and decapitated, before their heads were stuck up on poles. Cromwell had already been hanged in effigy the previous year, but Charles had ordered the likeness to be taken down. The real thing would prove to be far more gorily compelling. For all his charm and social ease, Charles was implacable when it came to dealing with his enemies, and after the bloodbath that followed his accession to the throne, it was made clear that mercy would be tempered with a dedication to settling old scores that would put an Old Testament deity to shame. Rochester would still see the heads and other parts of the regicides’ bodies at the city gates seven years later.

  It was not all bloodshed. Charles was equally keen to ensure that those who had supported him in the years of exile were well rewarded. Monck was the most notable recipient of royal favour, being created Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Duke of Albemarle as well as having the Order of the Garter bestowed upon him, symbolizing his crucial place in Charles’s esteem. The king ran the risk of controversy by rewarding those who had accompanied him in exile over those who had remained in England; the dispossessed joked bleakly that ‘the king had passed an act of oblivion for his friends and of indemnity for his enemies’. Charles had no desire to reward those who had been passive in their loyalty to the crown, and most of those who were raised to office and given pensions were those who had been of vital use to him over the previous decade without any definite expectation of personal gain.

  Charles was both canny and just in those he chose to reward. The likes of Monck and Clarendon (who was given his earldom in 1661 after being created Baron Hyde in 1660) were obvious figures to whom he owed a debt of gratitude, but just as important were people such as Thomas Killigrew, a former playwright who had been at the king’s side during the years of exile. Regarded by Charles as a licensed fool of sorts, he was created Groom of the Bedchamber, as well as being given the unofficial role of court jester. Pepys later noted of him that ‘he may with privilege revile or jeer anybody, the greatest person, without offence, by the privilege of his place’.

  Others were not forgotten either. Rochester, as noted earlier, was awarded a substantial pension in belated gratitude for his father’s service, and many of those involved in the Worcester flight were also well recompensed. This generosity came about because Charles was, temporarily at least, in the best financial situation he had enjoyed since his childhood, thanks to the annual grant of £1.2 million that Parliament voted him to run the government. (In practice, he never received anything like this amount, so he had to introduce taxes to compensate.) He had his father’s estates and property restored to him, most conspicuously the royal residence of the Palace of Whitehall, and also his goods, jewels and pictures, which a House of Lords committee voted should be returned to him immediately, on pain of seizure from their new owners by the armed forces.

  In the official list of gifts and handouts, porters, barbers and pages were rewarded as often as great lords and ministers of state, and these payments were often associated with statements that they were made ‘in consideration of the faithful service he has done us during this time of our being in foreign parts’. Many of those who had been exiled with Charles were still young enough to take an active part in England’s government. Pepys reports, with some irritation, that the naval offices were overrun with Cavaliers such as James, Duke of York and Prince Rupert, whose associate Sir Robert Holmes’s presence was particularly unwelcome to Pepys ‘because of the old business he attempted upon my wife’.

  Charles’s attitude towards handing out titles and favours at the start of his reign mirrored the profligacy with which he scattered them in exile. There, they were little more than toys with which to buoy his followers’ spirits, but now they were concrete signs of royal favour. At times, his naïvety showed. Charles scattered Irish titles and gifts as if they were confetti, ignoring the delicate political balance that had existed ever since Cromwell’s violent incursions. He seemed to believe that Ireland was a more convenient alternative to America as a means of dispensing land. One trusty follower, a Henry Legge, was awarded the impressive but impractical gift of ‘3,000 acres of profitable land in Connaught’; the fact that one was hard pressed to find three acres of profitable land in 1660 Connaught had escaped his notice. However, the purpose behind Charles’s actions was clear, and welcome: being seen to recognize those who had backed him for the past decade was a sure way of maintaining loyalty at a time when the future of his throne was by no means secure.

  Another difficulty Charles had to face within days of becoming king was the foreign situation. His personal relations with the Dutch were very strong (when he left that country, he had been given gifts including gold plate and art), but the memory of the First Anglo- Dutch War of 1652–4 was still fresh, and the vexed question of trade routes lingered. It was clear that Charles’s diplomatic skills were to be tested if he was to maintain England’s sovereignty. His relationship with his cousin Louis XIV of France was close, but Spain remained a troublesome question. When Charles traipsed around Europe, he had hoped that Philip IV might come to his aid and potentially help him invade England, but now that he was king, the balance was more delicate. France and Spain were traditional enemies, and whichever one he chose to support would turn the other against him immediately. However, his family connection with Louis tipped the balance, and so, emboldened by his decision, Charles decided to act decisively by strengthening his country’s long-standing alliance with Spain’s long-standing nemesis, Portugal. He did this by contracting an extraordinary marriage.

  The 23-year-old Catherine of Braganza of Portugal was a highly sought-after royal bride for the monarchs of Europe, who knew that she offered a fantastic sum of money as her dowry (rumoured to be around £360,000), international influence and trading privileges, as well as a necessary military partner. Charles married her on 21 May 1662, in some haste; he had probably only met her for the first time the day before. She spoke neither French nor English, so they communicated awkwardly in what little Spanish Charles had gleaned on his travels.

  Catherine was an unlikely wife for the worldly king, having led a sequestered and cloistered life. Contemporary portraits, such as that by Jacob Huysmans, show a shy-looking, rather plain young woman, attired in expensive clothes and jewellery as befitted a queen, but without any sense of regality. Their marriage was not to result in children; she suffered three miscarriages, thereby depriving Charles of a legitimate heir. She was regarded with suspicion and distrust by many because of her Catholicism—​although Charles I had also been married to a Catholic—​and her lack of English. She was miserable, bored and homesick, all the more so because Charles, if a neglectful husband to her, was certainly a great lover of other female company.

  If Rochester’s famous description of Charles as ‘a merry monarch, scandalous and poor’ has often had the first part taken as praise and the second part discarded, then it is equally true that his preceding scornful comment—​how ‘restless, he rolls about from whore to whore’—​was less a libel on the king and more an accurate reflection of his torrid sex life (‘sex’ rather than ‘love’ is the fitting description). The roots of this clearly stem from his European exile. A period of boredom, depression and poverty coincided with a rich period of sexual dalliance.

  In addition to scores of casual liaisons with various anonymous women, Charles fathered at least four acknowledged bastard children before he became king. The first, Jame
s, by Lucy Walter, was eventually created Duke of Monmouth, while the others—​Charlotte FitzRoy, Charles FitzCharles and Charlotte FitzCharles—​became, respectively, a society lady, a leading figure at court and a nun. (Notably, Charlotte’s mother was Elizabeth Killigrew, sister of Charles’s jester Thomas; this bond brought the two men even closer.) While this was held up by contemporary Puritans as an instance of his moral turpitude, by the time Charles came to the throne, his open-minded and open-breeched attitude towards sex was approved of by most people, who felt relief that their own indiscretions would no longer be punished by whipping or imprisonment.

  When Charles returned to England in 1660, there were few women in London who would not have succumbed to his advances, and he was besieged by ladies at court. Most had an agenda. Some were put forward by their parents as potential marriage material, while other, more pragmatic families attempted to use their beautiful daughters to curry their own favour with the king. Some husbands were equally happy to pimp out their own wives if it advanced their careers. The rewards, after all, were almost limitless: patronage, gifts and money flowed towards those who were fortunate enough to share the king’s bed. Being in his esteem was rather like having the full glare of the sun directed towards you—​a blinding, brilliant experience that only ever lasted a short time, but was mesmerizing while it did. However, even the great seducer could meet his match, and that came in the beauteous, scheming form of Barbara Villiers.

  Although Nell Gwyn is traditionally the most famous of Charles’s mistresses, she was essentially an unsophisticated and pretty actress who happened to capture the king’s eye at an opportune moment. Barbara was an entirely different proposition. The daughter of Viscount Grandison, an ardent Royalist killed in the Civil War, she, like Charles, grew up penniless. She was also a first cousin of Rochester’s mother Anne, although the two women could scarcely have been more dissimilar. Her response to the days of Protectorate rule was to embrace a hedonistic and sexually eager outlook for which she would have been imprisoned and whipped, had it been made public: a fate that would have befallen any man or woman in a similar situation.

  Perhaps tired of pining for the exiled prince, Barbara married the staid and steady lawyer Roger Palmer, who soon found himself defeated. In the Restoration era women found themselves liberated in London society for the first time, but what Barbara epitomized was less liberation than full-blown sexual renegade status. She had set her cap at Charles while he was still at The Hague, when she and her husband joined the throng of those attempting to receive royal favour. Palmer was armed with a gift of £1,000 and his undying support; his wife’s charms were sufficient recompense in themselves. Charles was enraptured. The difference between her and many of the other would-be royal mistresses was that she was working entirely on her own terms, rather than being cajoled into pimping herself by a husband or family. Portraits of her, often painted by the adoring Peter Lely, show a remarkably attractive woman with a full, sensuous mouth, magnetically captivating eyes and luscious dark hair. She was an impressive match for anyone, and it was only fitting to many that she should become the king’s acknowledged mistress. Pepys acknowledged as much himself when he wrote in July 1660 that Charles intended ‘to make her husband a cuckold’. So it proved, and she was pregnant with her first child, Anne, almost immediately. Her reputation at court was assured.

  Barbara Villiers was a woman of such unremitting personal vileness and greed that she became immediately notorious. Burnet described her as ‘most enormously vicious and ravenous’, and her supposed friend and companion Mary Manley said of her that she was ‘querulous, fierce, loquacious, excessively fond or infamously rude’. The author of the poem ‘Signior Dildo’ later referred to her sardonically as ‘that pattern of virtue’, and as soon as she was allowed to dominate court society, she wasted little time in trying to ingratiate herself with anyone perceived as her inferior. Pepys was torn when describing her, simultaneously saying ‘I can never enough admire her beauty’ and undercutting this with ‘I know well enough she is a whore’. Her dreadful temper, spurious sense of entitlement and extravagance were legendary. Charles lavished her with an annual pension of £5,000 (around £400,000 today), and considerably more in gifts and jewellery. She spent equally enormous sums in an evening’s unsuccessful gambling. Palmer was created Earl of Castlemaine in 1661, possibly as a reward for accepting the situation with good grace, and Barbara was referred to as ‘Lady Castlemaine’ thereafter.

  The quiet, rather timid Catherine did not stand a chance against this highly sexed Delilah and proceeded to undergo a series of humiliations, watching as bastard after bastard was born to Barbara in the first half of the 1660s. The cruellest touch came in 1662, when, against Catherine and Clarendon’s wishes, Barbara was created Lady of the Bedchamber, thereby allowing Charles constant access to his maîtresse-en-titre and allowing her to flaunt her position as the king’s consort. Catherine attempted to veto this appointment, was overruled by Charles, and had to suffer her presence at court. The first time the two women were introduced by Charles led to a near-hysterical meltdown on the part of Catherine, but thereafter he compelled her to acknowledge Barbara both socially and privately. Barbara celebrated her victory by having her portrait painted by Lely in several guises, including Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and, most notoriously, as the Virgin Mary flaunting one of her bastard sons by the king, Charles FitzRoy.

  Charles’s treatment of his wife, while appalling on a personal level, should be viewed in the context of the time. Flaunting one’s mistress in public was something done by gentlemen of quality, and Charles was the exemplum of quality. We can only speculate on which particular sexual charms of Barbara proved the most compelling—​Pepys alludes to her possessing ‘the skills of Aretino’, a notorious Italian sixteenth-century erotic poet. Yet the far greater consequence that this relationship had was to alienate Charles from Clarendon, long his most consistent counsellor and guide. While Clarendon accepted that it would be absurd for Charles to be ‘ignorant of the opposite sex’, he saw that the unrestrained Barbara was an embarrassment to the court and begged Charles to give her up. He thereby drew an uncharacteristically stinging letter from the normally amicable monarch: ‘if you desire to have the continuance of my friendship, meddle no more with this business... whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.’

  While Charles was accessible and charming, there was a determined, even bloody-minded side to him too. Like his father, he believed that kingship allowed him to do as he pleased, and consequences and the feelings of others could be damned. He had other affairs, as did the ever-lascivious Barbara, but he found himself in an ideal position. He had his wealthy and tame ‘little queen’, his sexually voracious mistress, a mixture of wise heads to counsel him and younger ones to entertain him, and drink, lavish banquets and entertainments by the score. Although some thought his unfettered dedication to pleasure was distasteful and ostentatious, many more considered the new, unrestrained age to be an exciting and fruitful one, and Charles the suave and all-welcoming figurehead of the time.

  During the Commonwealth, to be fashionable and elegant was considered anathema to the Puritan regime. The diarist Sir John Reresby noted that ‘the common salutation to a man well dressed was “French dog” or the like’. However, Charles’s own French family connections, to say nothing of the time that he had spent in exile there, ensured that he would soon bring about what Evelyn described as a ‘politer way of living’. For men, this could be a tricky balancing act. Go too far in ostentation and one ran the risk of being seen as an effeminate and ridiculous fop, but dress in too drab a manner and the result was to be called puritanical and behind the times.

  To appear successful at court, lavish clothing for men was a necessary expense. ‘I must go handsomely whatever it costs me,’ wrote Pepys, ‘and the charge will be made up in the fruits it brings.’ His diary records how his long black
cloak was discarded in favour of a short one, ‘long cloaks being now quite out’, but then this was superseded by a coat and sword ‘as the manner now among gentlemen is’. Eventually, this fashion developed even further into more elaborate outfits that might encompass a knee-length waistcoat, gorgeously decorated with gold and silver threads and tassels, a lace cravat, breeches, a fine linen shirt and a dress sword. The latter item was more a fashion accessory than an expected accoutrement to gallantry. All of this was worn under an elaborate and expensive wig. It is little wonder that Charles needed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, a Master of Robes and a barber to attend to his everyday attire. He was no wilting violet when it came to spending serious money on his clothes. When he first came to England, he ordered five suits and cloaks from his Parisian tailor Claude Sorceau at a staggering cost of £2,000, or about £160,000 in today’s money. He was somewhat inconsistent in his views, complaining to a no doubt astonished Parliament in 1662 that ‘the whole nation seemed… a little corrupted in their excess of living… all men spend much more in their clothes… than they had used to do’.