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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Histories Worst F*ckboys: Charles II
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- [00:00]
A
Hello there, it's your host, Kate Lister. Now listen here, I have some very exciting news for you betwixters. After selling out our live recording of BetWixt on Thursday 4th September, we sold it out again and then we sold it out again and now we've had to be moved to the biggest theatre that they have and that means we have a few more tickets on sale. So I can tell you a little bit more about the show now. We have a very special guest and a very good friend of the show who you will be most likely to find talking about medieval things. Yes, it's the epic Dr. Eleanor Jarnegger. And what are we going to talk about? Well, we are going to be playing a historical game of Shaggoth, Marieth and Killeth Kings edition, where we will be deep diving into the sex lives, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms and the marriages of three kings. With some audience participation, of course, a lot of history and of course a lot of laughs. We hope that we will see you there. Book your tickets by following the link in the show notes or go to kingsplace.co.uk or just search for the London Podcast Festival and you'll find them. Snap up the last remaining tickets and I'll see you there. Right, on with the show.
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B
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A
Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Cade Lister, and you have arrived at Betwixt the Sheets. And thank God that you're here, because if you weren't here, I mean, what is the point of any of this? But before we can go, any do have to let you know, in case you've forgotten that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of suffixing. You should be an adult too. And we call that the fair dues warning because, well, fair dues, we did tell you it was going to get spicy. Right, on with the show. You can say a lot of things about Charles ii, but it's got to be said he very much brought the good time vibes back to Britain. After a long old stint of puritanism. And quite frankly, any alternative to puritanism is likely to be seen as quite radical. Those guys thought that church hymns were too much of a good time. So it's no surprise that Charlie Boy was nicknamed the Merry Monarch. But boy, oh boy, did he like to have a good time. One diarist described him as a prince of many virtues and good parts, but insatiable of women. They wouldn't have used the term fuck boy in the 17th century, but if they had, would Charles II have fitted the bill? I think he might. But let's find out.
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C
What do you look for in a man?
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A
Oh, money, of course.
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C
You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
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B
I make perfect copies of whatever my.
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A
Boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button now. Era Now. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful d. Goodness has nothing to do with it.
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C
Deari.
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A
Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, history of sex, scandal and society with me, Kate Lister as the eagle eyed of. You will have noticed our miniseries of history's worst boys is back with more. Hurrah. We're not exactly going to run out of content with this one, are we? But what better way to kick it off than with the merry Monarch himself, Charles ii, whose many, many mistresses include my absolute favorite, Nell Gwyn. How did this man measure up as a 17th century boy? What extravagant and decadent stories are there of his reign? And what did his poor old wife make of all of this? Well, joining Me today is Dr. David Taylor, Associate professor of English at Oxford University no less. And he's going to take us back to the wild world of. Of Restoration England where all of the action. Unfolded. Wigs at the ready everyone. Let's do it. Hello and welcome back to the Twigs, the Sheets. It's only David Taylor. How are you doing?
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C
I'm doing very well, thank you. And it's really, really lovely, really exciting to be back with you, Kate.
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A
Oh, it's a pleasure. I had so much fun talking to you about Nell Gwyn. She was a riot, wasn't she? I absolutely love her. But we are back for another installment of our little mini series of history's worst fuckboys. And of course, of course Charlie Boy. King Charles II had to make an appearance so we had to ask you back on, didn't we? Before we get into this, let's define our terms. David. This is from. This is from urbandictionary.com because the term fuckboy isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary. I checked. It's not in there. So if they're listening, might be time for an update. But this is according to Urban Dictionary, a fuckboy is a boy who plays with girls feelings and doesn't really like them and would say anything to a girl that they want to hear to have sex with them or to get something that they want. That's their definition. So we will consider if Charlie boy fits that particular description.
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C
Definitely.
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A
So the merry monarch, before we get onto his mistresses, let's just give him a little bit of a background because he had a very turbulent time getting to the throne, didn't he?
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C
Yeah, he really did. I think the thing to understand about Charles is that in lots of ways, he's a king unlike any other that have been before or since. Because he's a king who comes to the throne in 1660 when there's been a period of time in Britain when there's been no monarchy. Okay? There's been a republic since the execution of his father, Charles I, in 1649. So that's the other thing that makes him different. Okay? He's a king who comes to the throne when there's been no one immediately before him, no immediate predecessor. And he's a king whose own father has been executed for treason by his own people.
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A
He didn't see that, did he? Did he? Was he there when that happened?
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C
No, he was. He wasn't there. So by the time Charles I was executed in front of Whitefall palace In London in 1649, Charles II, his son, was on the continent, okay? So he learns about it. He's only 18 at the time. He's at the Hague, so in the Netherlands. And his chaplain comes to him and simply kneels before him and says, you, Majesty. And he understand immediately what that, understands what that means. And apparently, according to reports, Charles breaks down into this as he realizes his father is dead and he is effectively king, but also not king.
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A
No, you can't go back, can you? They've just executed the other king. You're not gonna rock up and go, so where am I gonna go then?
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C
No. And he. And what then happens is ultimately he lands in Scotland, where he has. The Stuart family, of course, are a Scottish royal family ultimately. And there's considerable support in Scotland still for the. For the Stuart family. Charles lands in Scotland in 1650. He's crowned king in Scotland in January 1651. But then there's this big final battle really, of the English Civil wars, the Battle of Worcester in 1651, where Charles and his Scottish army are utterly routed by Cromwell's army and Charles has to flee the country. In what's a very dramatic sequence of events, he famously hides in an oak tree. It takes him six weeks after the Battle of Worcester to get out of England, back into the safety of mainland Europe. He disguises himself as a servant. He has many narrow escapes along the way. There's a big reward on his head for his capture. Lots of people looking for him because, of course, Cromwell's regime wants to capture Charles. They want Charles the first heir, but they don't. Ultimately, he escapes and then spends the next almost decade in considerable poverty. Really. He doesn't have much money on the Continent and certainly very bored. But already, as we get into the late 1640s and into the early 1650s, he's playing around. He becomes well known for his mistresses. He has a number of mistresses.
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A
I was going to say he's filling a hole, but that just doesn't sound.
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C
Exactly. I think he probably. He has many holes to fill.
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A
I think. I think he does, doesn't he? Yes. Okay, so what's going on with him? He's bored.
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C
Yeah, he's bored.
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A
That does sound quite fuckboy, doesn't it?
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C
I think he's very bored. And what we know later on, it's one of the things that Samuel Pepys, the Restoration diarist, tells us about Charles. Once Charles is king and he becomes king, as I say, Cromwell, I should say Oliver Cromwell, dies in 1658. His son, briefly, Richard, his son, succeeds him as Lord Protector, effectively kind of king in all but name. But Richard has no loyalty or power from the army, so he falls quite quickly. And in a series of actually, events that genuinely shock most people, the monarchy ends up returning in 1660.
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A
Charles, that's a hell of a plot twist.
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C
It is. It is a real plot twist that I think no one really sees coming two years before it happens, or even less than that. But Charles enters London triumphantly in May 1660. Monarchy is back. Charles II is king, and he's king in a very different way. As I say, as Pepys, Samuel Pepys says, Charles has no interest in business at all, really. He likes nothing but pleasure. That's what Pepys says of him. And certainly that seems to become increasingly true as his reign goes on. His reign lasts from 1660 until he dies in 1685. He's a man who wants pleasure, but he's also a king who. He's not very rich. Okay. He looks across the English Channel to his cousin, his first Cousin Louis XVI of France, who's an enormously wealthy king, an enormously powerful king, and Charles simply can't compete with that. And so one of the big problems he has throughout his reign is the question of whether his people are really loyal to him and his advisors and so forth are really loyal to him.
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A
Why doesn't he have any money? Did the Puritans spend it all?
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C
Exactly. The Puritans melted down the crown jewels. And it really is the case that Charles constantly struggles for money. He doesn't want to rule with Parliament. Okay, he wants to rule without Parliament. But Parliament is a necessary evil as far as Charles is concerned, because without Parliament, you can't raise taxes and therefore you can't gain funds. I mean, Charles ultimately signs a secret treaty with France in 1670 that guarantees him a staggering sum of money from France each year. So Charles is more or less being bankrolled by France. Now, what France really want is for Charles to openly convert to Catholicism. Now, in fact, Charles does that on his deathbed. Charles, he does. He converts to Catholicism on his deathbed and clearly is kind of more or less a covert Catholic for most of his life. I mean, his brother James, Duke of York, is openly a Catholic. So France see funding Charles ultimately as a way of controlling him and of controlling Britain. Had this become public knowledge, there would have been another civil war. Unquestionably, it would have been absolute political dynamite. So it's a secret treaty.
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A
Oh, wow.
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C
But anyway, so Charles is a king who can't behave like previous kings, who certainly can't behave as his father, Charles I had behaved because he simply doesn't have the money, he doesn't have the power effectively. And there's this constant worry that the country might once again descend into civil war because the relationship between king and Parliament throughout Charles's reign remains very, very tense and at times, unbelievably toxic.
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A
It's meant, when you think about it, though, just listening to you describe that there. So, like, we got rid. We actually cut the king's head off like that. For the British, that's like. That's the most extreme thing I think we've. Normally, we, like, we try and monitor our power by going, oh, well, really, that's about enough of that. Then we actually cut his head off, and then we got the Puritans in who went, right. No fun for anybody. I know it's more complex than that. We might have you back on to talk to us about the Puritans. But, like, that was a severe regime. And then we get Rid of them. And then we go, oh, let's have the King again. So Charles comes back and he must have been working with the same people that his dad.
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C
One of the preconditions of Charles's return in 1660 is effectively a kind of what we might call a general pardon. He publishes a couple of months before he returns, he. He makes a statement called the Declaration of Breda, which he basically says, I forgive everybody and I'll come. If I come back, there'll be religious tolerance. Now, there were exceptions to this. So when he came back, the bodies of some of the key people who'd signed Charles I's death warrant were exhumed and posthumously executed, posthumously hung, drawn and quartered. So not everyone was completely safe, but it was a strange. Everyone had to pretend like this hadn't happened. There was even an act of Parliament called the act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which more or less said the past 10 years, all of what happened with Cromwell, that never happened. Charles II became. Charles II became king the moment his father lost his head. But absolutely it did. It did mean that Charles had to get along with people who had very complex political histories and sympathies. And one report of someone who knew Charles says that Charles was deeply cynical. Charles didn't really trust anybody. He didn't really believe that anybody loved him or was loyal to him for anything other than the power and money that might come with that loyalty.
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A
Wow.
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C
So he was. Charles was understandably a deeply cynical man. And so he has his reputation as a merry monarch and he certainly is a man who loves his women. Absolutely. And who loves his. His high lifestyle, his food, his drink, his sports as well. He loved sport.
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A
He was a looker as well, wasn't he? He was good looking, yeah.
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C
He had no. He had style. He did. He absolutely had style. He had style. J.M. barrie, the author of Peter Pan, bases Captain Hook on Charles ii. I do know that slightly. Kind of. That slightly mischievous but also debonair kind of masculinity. That. That is absolutely Charles ii. And if you. If you see some of the portraits of Charles, he's often showing a good bit of leg. So you can see his nice legs. You can see his garters. So, yes, he was a bit of a looker. And, you know, he was. He was 30 when he came to the throne. He was a. He was in the prime of his life.
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A
So he's gonna indulge. I would. You would.
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C
And he did.
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A
Especially with what he's been through. It's so traumatic. But let's. Let's talk, ladies, because this, it is what Charles is known for, the merry monarch. He is like, how many mistresses do we know that this man had?
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C
I mean, that's an excellent question. How many women he slept with is impossible to. What we do know is that he had 14 illegitimate children in total by seven different women. Okay, so there were seven. We can think of seven.
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A
I mean, come on.
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C
Who ultimately had enough of a relationship with the king to actually become pregnant by him. But there would have been more women, and there may well have been more children.
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A
Yeah, exactly, because that's not even counting one night. Stands, flings, sex workers. Just a casual up against a wal. These are the women he got pregnant. And he had to acknowledge the children, isn't it? So, like, we've got no way of knowing.
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C
Well, I mean, he didn't have to acknowledge the children. That's an interesting thing. The fact that he chose to acknowledge them in many cases is itself important. And he not only acknowledged them, but in many cases, he ennobled them. So he ultimately gave them.
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A
So I'm gonna put that in a plus point in Charles's column, actually. I think, like, that many illegitimate children, not great. But the fact that he supports them.
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C
Yeah, that's because really, most of his mistresses. He's generous to his mistresses.
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A
Okay, well, before we get to them, we've got to talk about his wife. She often gets left out of this discussion. It's so easy to get carried away with Nell going in the theater and the wigs and Rochester and forget his poor bloody wife. All right, so who was she and when did they get married?
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C
So his wife was Catherine, known as Catherine of Braganza. She was a Portuguese princess, and she and Charles were married by arrangement in 1662. It was an important political alliance between England and Portugal. A treaty. A political treaty was part of that marriage called the marriage treaty, in which England gave about 10,000 men to the Portuguese army. And in return for that and also for the marriage, Charles got a huge sum of money going back to what you've already talked about. It's all he needs. The money. He gets over £300,000, which is a lot. And also, Portugal hands over the ports of the really important strategic ports of Bombay and Tangier to. So. So it's a hugely important political alliance that's forged in a marriage.
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A
You just think about, like, what. What I gave up to get, like, somebody bought me a drink down the pub. This is insane.
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C
Absolutely. But of course, it's A loveless marriage. It's an arranged marriage. Catherine arrives in England on the south coast in 1662. The king doesn't immediately come to meet her. In fact, he's in bed with his principal mistress at the time, Barbara Villiers, who is also Barbara Villiers, is also at that time, pregnant with their child. And despite Catherine's protests, Charles even makes his principal mistress, Barber Villiers, one of her ladies of the bedchamber.
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A
Oh, no.
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C
Soon after the birth of Charles and Barbara's child. So the story goes that when Catherine Furz meets Barbara Villiers, who becomes the Countess of Castlemaine, poor Catherine has a nosebleed and she faints, about which the king is very upset with her. He feels that she's embarrassed herself. She's embarrassed him. She's failed with due protocol.
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A
You didn't meet my girlfriend properly.
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C
Exactly.
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A
Oh, that's right. I'm marking that down against him. That's not good behavior.
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C
Definitely.
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A
Did she know that he was. That you had all of these lovers? She knew. She knew, right, okay.
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C
She knew. One of the things that is interesting about Charles is that more or less, everybody knows that he's king at the center of gossip in a way that's utterly unprecedented in English history. Okay. No monarch really has had their sex life so subject to common gossip as Charles ii. And that's the case again, well before he becomes king. In fact, many of his advisors in the 1650s, when he's in exile on the continent, are worried. They're worried because these details of Charles's sex life are getting into the press back in England. And that's exactly what Cromwell's regime wants. You know, it's all of this mud raking suits them perfectly, because doesn't it? Charles is getting a bad reputation. I mean, it means that there's one report of a. Of a woman in Newcastle who's asked how she feels about the king returning in 1660, and she says, well, the only people who are happy about him returning are drunken whores and whoremongers. So already, for some, by 1660, by the time he becomes king, he already has this reputation. Okay? So absolutely, Catherine knows. And what's difficult for Catherine is that Barbara Villiers isn't the only one of Charles's mistresses whom Charles makes one of her Ladies of the Bedchamber. And to be clear, to be a lady of the bedchamber means you're one of the closest attendants on the queen.
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A
Okay?
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C
You're there with her. Charles makes others his mistresses. Ladies of the bedchamber, Frances Stuart, and also Louise de Kerouel, Duchess of Portsmouth, that they all become ladies in the bedchamber. So there's a kind of on running ongoing pattern, humiliating forces, his mistresses into his own wife's company.
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A
And Catherine doesn't do the thing that the Queen is supposed to do, like their number on page one of how to Be a Queen in the Olden Days. She doesn't have a baby, does she?
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C
She doesn't. It's, it's at a political level, it's kind of fascinating and kind of ironic that this king who is ultra fertile, I know.
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A
Can get the furniture pregnant just by sitting on it.
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C
Yeah, exactly, exactly right. Ultra promiscuous. You know, he just, he just can't stop fathering illegitimate children. But it's ironic that this king, who's fathering so many illegitimate children, never has a legitimate child and therefore his brother remains heir. Now that has huge consequences in terms of British political history, because ultimately what it means is that his brother James, Duke of York, remains his heir. And when Charles dies in 1685, James becomes king. What's the problem with James? Well, he's Catholic, openly Catholic, avowedly Catholic. And that ultimately leads to the so called glorious revolution of 1688, where effectively parliament says, we don't want a Catholic king, we want a Protestant king. It dispatches James and invites the Protestant William of Orange, along with his wife Mary, who's James's daughter, to come and take the throne instead. So it has this lack, this inability of Catherine to give Charles a legitimate son has this incredible political consequence going forward. But it also has a much more personal dimension, a one which is really tragic because we know that Catherine was pregnant three times between 1666 and 1669. In all cases, she miscarried. And there was indeed there was pressure on the King to get rid, to think about alternatives. So there was a point where Catherine was very ill and at that point some of his advisors were suggesting he remarry, possibly even marry one of his mistresses.
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A
Nice.
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C
And at the height of the biggest political crisis of Charles's reign, which is known as the exclusion crisis, between 1678 and 1681, when many people in Parliament were saying to the King, you must exclude your own brother for the line of succession because he is Catholic, we will not accept a Catholic king. Now, Charles wasn't having any of this, okay, but it was a real political crisis. It looked like again, there might be civil war. And what the so called exclusionists wanted was to replace James the brother as heir with the Duke of Monmouth, who was Charles's first illegitimate son, whom Charles had enabled. So the Duke of Monmouth, who was the son of Charles and his first known mistress, Lucy Walters, the Duke of Monmouth, became this key alternative heir for many people in what we might think of as a kind of political opposition that caused a lot of problems for Charles.
- [24:08]
B
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- [24:48]
A
I bet it did. I bet it. So he's got, he's got a politically favorable wife, but no baby, but he doesn't divorce her. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, really, but he, he doesn't. But when it comes to his mistresses, now, I might be very wide of the mark here, but it does seem like he likes the head cases. Like, he likes them. He likes, like he likes the lunatics, the really bonkers ones like Lucy Walters that you described just there, like, oh, hello. Tell me a bit about her.
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C
Well, I mean, so she's the daughter of a Welsh gentleman. She's effectively a commoner. They actually have a very brief relationship. Charles is certainly not her first lover. Okay. She's fairly experienced, and her erratic behavior becomes increasingly embarrassing to Charles and to his advisors. As I say, they only have a brief relationship probably in about. So that this relationship was about 1648. So Charles is only about 18 years old. Okay. She starts selling some of letters to a previous lover, Thomas Howard. She threatens to make public the correspondence between herself and Charles and, and takes other lovers and is very overt in the way she behaves. Okay. And as a result, Charles and his advisors make several attempts to kidnap. That's the son they've had together, the future Duke of Monmouth. And eventually they succeed. Eventually they succeed and they get James, future Duke of Monmouth, away from her when he's nine years old. Okay. So Lucy Walters is definitely unpredictable, a volatile figure. And Charles and his advisors really want to distance themselves from her.
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A
And doesn't she? Like, she keeps trying to, like, obviously because he's stolen their child, but she keeps trying to follow him around and get him back. And, like, we're kind of moving Into. I don't know if it's stalker territory because I think she's got grounds, but it's the, the behavior is becoming more and more extreme.
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C
Absolutely. I think, I think there is almost a kind of stalking element to it. Absolutely. That, that she does. She doesn't let. As I say, Charles wants to distance himself from her, but she is not having any of that. Charles, in some ways, is her leverage, or she sees it that way. So that's, that's absolutely the case with Lucy Walters, I think, and others. All of them have their own quirks, to say the least.
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A
Barbara Villiers, head case, absolute stone cold.
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C
Maniac, but also canny. This is the thing.
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A
Oh, I didn't say I didn't like her. I just said maniac.
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C
Yeah, exactly, Absolutely. I mean, I suppose what way of putting it is that. Wouldn't you have to be to live this particular street, this strange life?
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A
But didn't she, when Catherine of Braganza was arriving to marry Charles, do this big stunt of putting her knickers on display for everybody to see? Didn't she turn up when they were having a honeymoon, fully pregnant and announced herself there?
- [27:50]
C
This, these are all. This is what, this is the stories that reported. And some of these must be true. Okay. Some of these must be true. Absolutely, absolutely. Another, Another story is that she. Yeah, that at their. I think, I can't remember, it's the wedding or the big ball announcing Catherine's arrival and marriage to Charles, that she turns up in an unbelievably extravagant dress, basically, that she, you know, it's the equivalent of a bridesmaid turning up in a beautiful. A far more beautiful white dress than the bride. Now that she's determined to upstage the bride, basically. And she does it. She does it.
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A
Yes, several times. But she wasn't popular.
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C
She wasn't popular. I mean, the two most, I suppose, important and certainly powerful of Charles's mistresses were first Barbara Villiers, who became Countess of Castlemaine, and then the Duchess of Cleveland. And she was really the main mistress in the 1660s. And in the 1670s, a woman who've already mentioned Louise de Keroua, who became Duchess of Portsmouth, she becomes the kind of principal mistresses, and in both cases they're not much light, particularly Louise, because she's French, which is at a point when there's a great deal of xenophobia. Big. No, no. But the thing that's amazing about Barbara Villiers is that she's pretty much the first acknowledged mistress of a king for centuries. And she's Openly acknowledged. Okay. She's given these titles, as I say, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland. She's given money, she's given power. We know that she helps many of the closest political advisors and statesmen to Charles into high office. She helps get them there. People like Henry Bennett, Earl of Arlington, who was more or less. There was no such thing at that point as a prime minister, but Arlington is Charles chief Secretary of State. There's a point, for instance, which I find so funny. There's a point when the office of the Keeper of the King's Privy Purse becomes open and Barbara decides there's a particular man who she wants to get that post, a man called rather brilliantly Baptist May. And the King wants to appoint someone else to that position. Barbara's having none of this. She does her usual thing. Right. She withdraws from court. She refuses to see Charles, and eventually she prevails. She gets her way.
- [30:12]
A
Wow.
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C
So it really is the case that these women are politically powerful.
- [30:17]
A
Yeah.
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C
They wield genuine political influence. Barbara is. Is constantly courted by the foreign ambassadors arriving at Charles's court because they know that she's a really key figure. If they want to find out what's going on or they want certain things to happen, they want to persuade Charles of certain things, then Barbara is in many ways a. Or even the key figure. And so she throws these very lavish parties, almost like state dinners, for these foreign ambassadors.
- [30:45]
A
Tell me about the Poor Whores Petition, because I think that's really funny. But, like, she is. She is very grand and very fancy, but also she is the target of public mockery and public scorn. There were these. They were called the Bawdy House Riots, where brothels were basically attacked in the city. And then somebody anonymously wrote this document called the Poor Whores Petition, which was allegedly written from the Pawhors of London to their sister, Barbara Castlemaine, imploring her as one of their own. Please come and rescue us.
- [31:19]
C
Exactly. Yeah. So the Brief House is quite funny. Exactly. We've got these hundreds, even not thousands of apprentices who in 1668, attack the brothels of London and start assaulting prostitutes. It's a kind of appalling.
- [31:33]
A
Yeah.
- [31:33]
C
Really nasty moment and act. And outbreak of civil violence, in part because of the prices. They're complaining about the prices. There's a large. There's a kind of economic element to it. But, yes, there's this satirical letter which is published very widely available. We don't know who wrote it, but it purports to be written by the prostitutes of London. And they're imploring Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, to come to their. To their a. Because she is one of their sisters. So the joke is absolutely that Bubba Villiers is nothing more than a common whore. Okay. That's what she is, ultimately.
- [32:10]
A
I love that. That's. You'd love to be. You'd love to be a fly on the wall when. When she heard about that. Like, how did she take that news? But I'm actually, I'm getting distracted now. I just want to talk to you about Barbara Villiers because she's so interested we should focus on how did the king treat her? Because we need to answer. Was he a fuckboy? Because he did look after her. And how many kids did they have together?
- [32:31]
C
How many kids they had? They had five children.
- [32:34]
A
Five? Yep. Okay. Wow.
- [32:36]
C
And her son with the King, Henry is married at the age of just nine to the daughter who's then five of the Earl of Arlington, who's then Charles II's chief politician. Okay.
- [32:49]
A
Wow.
- [32:50]
C
It's bizarre political dealings going on. But again, Charles is treating his illegitimate children well. Okay? He is treating them well. He's making sure they're looked after. Yes, he is. Barbara was made a Duchess in 1670. She's given. She's given non such palace in Surrey. Okay. She's given a palace to herself.
- [33:10]
A
See, that's. I've met many a boy and they've never given me a palace. Chlamydia maybe, but not a palace.
- [33:17]
C
And that definition of a boy, which is that they'll say anything to get what they want. Well, I mean, Charles didn't have to say anything. I mean, he is king. And you're right, he's not as rich or as powerful as other earlier kings of England or certainly not as rich and powerful as his cousin across the English Channel. But he still is. He's attractive, he is wealthy, and he lives a very lavish and good lifestyle. And he's able to give that to these women as well and to give them power.
- [33:51]
A
Sam. The thing that kind of makes you go, okay, so he is looking after them well. He's recognizing this horde of illegitimate children that he has. But there's a lot of them. And I always imagine, like, what would on earth would this atmosphere have been like? Because it's not just Barbara Castlemaine. You've got Louise de Carraway who turns up. We've got our favorite Nell Gwyn in the mix. There is Hortense Mancini who turns up at one point as well. Like, the castle is just stuffed full of these mistresses wandering around.
- [34:46]
C
Yeah, absolutely.
- [34:48]
A
Like, is that fuckboy behavior? Has any other king done that that you are aware of, that has that many at once?
- [34:55]
C
The important thing with Charles is that not that is recognized, not that's public knowledge, okay? So that on the one hand, he's got his acknowledged mistresses, people like Barbara Villiers, and they get huge recognition. Louise de Kerouel, Duchess of Portsmouth, she gets her own apartments in the palace of Whitepool at the time Charles's main residence in London. And her apartments, so the diarist John Evelyn tells us, are far larger and more lavish, more richly decorated than Catherine of Braganzas are. So certainly Louise de Keroua effectively becomes queen consort. So on the one hand, we've got these mistresses who are unbelievably visible, okay, and unbelievably acknowledged. And then we've got other mistresses who are probably being brought up the back staircase by servants into Charles's room initially. I mean, that's probably how the likes of Nell Gwyn was ushered into Charles's bedrooms. But no, Charles is unprecedented. I mean, he is. His promiscuity is at least public knowledge of his promiscuity is unprecedented. And his own willingness to recognize these women. There's so many amazing things we could say about that recognition. So, for instance, the renowned court painter, portrait painter of the time, Peter Lely, paints a series of portraits of Barbara Villiers, including a portrait of her as the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. And the Christ child is one of their illegitimate children, one of the royal illegitimate children, Frances Stewart, another one of Charles's mistresses. It sits as the model in 1667 for Britannia. Okay? So. And that meant that all the images of Britannia that appeared on English court queens all the way through to decimalization, okay, in the 1970s, were actually images of one of Charles II's mistresses.
- [36:45]
A
I love that it's one of his side pieces.
- [36:48]
C
Another one is that Charles's nickname for Louise de Carrawell was Fubs. That's what he always called her, Fubs. And he names one of his only royal yachts Fubs, again in her recognition. So these. These paintings of her, the way that these mistresses are celebrities are appearing and circulating. They are celebrities in some ways. I mean, this is often seen as a first age of celebrity. And these women became celebrities. And with that. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier about that letter written supposedly by the prostitutes of London to Robert Villiers with that idea of Celebrity comes, that double edged sword, the fact that people kind of love to hate these people as well as being utterly fascinated by them.
- [37:27]
A
He did have some limits though, Charlie boy, if I remember correctly. Maybe I've got this wrong, but didn't the poetry Rochester, everyone's favorite scallywag, didn't he write a play that was about the king that was too obscene and he got chucked out of court. Didn't he say he had a really big willie or something like that?
- [37:46]
C
So he, he wrote a poem for which he was exiled from court. So Rochester's an interesting example. So that in many ways the word that was used, and we use now to think about the kind of atmosphere and ethos of Charles II's court is libertinism, the idea of the libertine. And a libertine is a man who is utterly sexually uninhibited and promiscuous. Okay. There's also a kind of philosophical dimension to it about freedom, refusing to obey the seemingly artificial dictates of society and law and ethics. But Rochester was absolutely the quintessential libertine. And he was also in many ways a kind of Charles's foster son. His father died when he was very young. Rochester's father had been a very important figure in the army in the Civil Wars. And as a result, Charles II really rather favoured this young and rather naughty young man, Rochester, who became a poet and who constantly upset the king, constantly did things he shouldn't have done. He struck a man in front of the king, which was a big. No, no. He was briefly, briefly exiled from the court for that. He kidnapped a woman who he eventually married, but Charles sent him to the Tower of London for a period for that. But, yeah, Most famously in 1674, Rochester, who would, rather than publish his poems, he would circulate them in manuscripts to his friends and associates. Rochester wrote this very, very naughty poem about Charles and he accidentally gave a copy of it to the King, 1674. And for that he was again, he was sent away from court, he was exiled. But as always with Rochester, he kind of worms. The king just can't help but like him and he worms his way back into his affections. But some of the things that. Obviously the one key line in terms of what we're talking about in that poem that Rochester writes is this. I'll just read it. His sceptre, this is. He's talking about Charles. His scepter and his prick are of a length and she may sway the one who plays with the other in other words, these women, Charles thinks with his dick. And the people, the women who control that, they control the country, okay? And there's a joke there, but there's also deep anxiety there. That's exactly what people worry about. The fact that the likes of Barbara Villiers, the likes of Luis de Carol, have such influence over this man. He's never thinking with his head.
- [40:18]
A
I think that might be a fair accusation, though, you know, or. Yeah, there might be some truth to that.
- [40:24]
C
I. I think it is. He's again going back to what Peeps said, that he's somewhat. He's interested in pleasure. He can't really take to business. He's not a man of business. And I think that's absolutely the case. And I mean, someone like Freud would surely have a field day with Charles ii, wouldn't he? I mean, thinking about all the trauma he must have experienced in that kind of tumultuous period of his early life, and ultimately the death of his father in this most public and brutal manner when he was 18 years old. And then the kind of, will I. Won't I ever be King of England? Will I. Won't I ever be able to return to my own country? He comes back. And of course, this is a man who. I mean, who knows? But one easy way of understanding Charles is that he wants to forget in lots of ways.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah. He wants to lose himself.
- [41:13]
C
He wants to lose himself. Exactly.
- [41:15]
A
As a final piece of evidence that we might have to try and dissect to understand what we make of this man's behavior, I think he did seem to have a venereal disease. He did seem to spread that around, or at least, I don't know if that's ever been officially confirmed. But like a lot of his mistresses seem to have had something. So I think. Yeah, watch your thoughts on that one.
- [41:34]
C
We know that the king has a venereal disease. Syphilis, possibly, or something else. We know he's ill with this by the mid-1670s, if not earlier. We know for certain.
- [41:45]
A
Right, there we go.
- [41:46]
C
That he passes this to Louise de Carrawell. That actually supports Smith. But that. Not intentionally necessarily, but he infects her with disease. He must infect other of his mistresses.
- [41:59]
A
I mean, Nell Gwynne died very young, probably of complications from the venereal disease as well.
- [42:05]
C
Exactly. Nell dies just a few years after Charles. Really, really quite soon after Charles. Again, surely her health is also affected by diseases. I mean, lots of these people are riddled with disease. Rochester, we've just mentioned some dirty Dick, isn't it?
- [42:17]
A
That is some dirty dick right there.
- [42:19]
C
He's utterly riddled with disease by the end of his life. Yeah, I mean, he. I mean, he's utterly. And of course, all of this is made worse because the main way that things like syphilis was being treated at the time was through mercury therapy, which is going to do you absolutely no good at all, because, of course, statistics, it's utterly toxic, utterly poisonous to you. So what they thought was helping them get better was just killing them. So. Absolutely. Charles had sexually transmitted diseases and he himself infected others with those. There's no question about that.
- [42:49]
A
So then, David, with all of your expertise and your knowledge about this man and his gargantuan sexual appetite, do you think that we could classify him as a fuckboy in modern terms? He liked sex. He liked a lot of sex. But I'm not sure that's quite what we mean by fuckboy, is it?
- [43:09]
C
Yeah, I'm not sure we could call him a fuckboy. He's definitely what I said, what I would call a libertine. He lived that lifestyle, a lifestyle of very conscious kinds of freedom, of refusing to obey the dictates of society or morality. He definitely did that. We could think of him as a lothario, a word that was coined shortly after Charles died. But is he a. Is he a fuckboy? I don't think so, because I think the two things that probably prevent him from being a boy are, firstly, he doesn't have to work very hard. You know, he's. He's not simply saying anything else. He's in this unbelievably privileged position, as he knows well, of being able to get what he wants. And it goes back to what I said earlier about his cynicism that, you know, he realizes he can get anything he wants, but also that the flip side of that is that can you ever really trust the affection that people have for him, the loyalty that people have for him? So. And I think that's one element. The other element of the fact, I think, whether or not he's a fuck boy, is it. Arguably, the woman he treated worst was his wife, Catherine Braganza.
- [44:15]
A
I mean, she might have had a whole different perspective on this conversation.
- [44:19]
C
Absolutely. And poor Catherine. But otherwise, he treats his mistresses very well.
- [44:25]
A
Pretty well.
- [44:26]
C
They're getting thousands of pounds a year now. Gwyn is getting four or five thousand a year.
- [44:30]
A
Yeah.
- [44:31]
C
Someone like Louise de Carol is getting something like 20,000 a year. Okay. And. And this is from a king who, as I've already Said doesn't have that much money, so he's giving money to these mistresses, to these women, but he doesn't really have to give, which is another criticism that some of his advisors make of the lifestyle that the king is living. But he certainly treats these women pretty well.
- [44:48]
A
And he acknowledges. Not just the kids, but he acknowledges them. I mean, a fuck boy's defining thing is to go, oh, we don't need to put a label on it. We'll just, you know, we'll. Whereas he was quite happy to say, this is my mistress, to the point where going, please go and work for my wife.
- [45:02]
C
Right, exactly. No, he. He seems actively to want them to be recognized.
- [45:06]
A
Yeah. Okay. I think I'm going to agree with you. I think that there are elements of this behavior that we would have to. From a modern point of view, I don't think he'd survived the MeToo movement very well, but I don't think that Charles is a fuckboy.
- [45:19]
C
No, that's what I think. I think on the basis of the definition which you gave us at the start, I think.
- [45:24]
A
Yep.
- [45:25]
C
I don't think he is.
- [45:26]
A
So he's off the hook. Oh, well done, Charlie boy. Well done.
- [45:30]
C
Off that hook.
- [45:30]
A
He's off that hook.
- [45:31]
C
Yeah.
- [45:32]
A
There's plenty of other hooks for him.
- [45:34]
C
There's plenty of other hooks, including Captain Hook.
- [45:39]
A
Captain Hook. Oh, David, you've been so much fun to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find.
- [45:47]
C
Well, I just want to give a shout out to the group that I'm part of called the R18 Collective. What we're trying to do at the moment is get the plays of this period, especially plays by women, some amazing plays by women written this period in the restoration and beyond, better recognized and performed again. So people want to head to r18collective.org and check out the work we're doing. That'd be fabulous.
- [46:09]
A
Amazing. Thank you so much. Will you come back and talk to us about more Restoration scallywags?
- [46:14]
C
I would love to, and there are many.
- [46:17]
A
Thank you so much. You've been marvelous. Thank you for listening. And thanks so much to David 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 coming up, we've got episodes on everything from whether the Renaissance man Raphael was a fuckboy. Spoiler alert.
- [46:37]
C
Yeah, he was.
- [46:38]
A
And an exploration of Queer Jordans with none other than Anthony Delaney, co host of our son Sister Podcast After Dark and if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just fancied saying hello because you've had a few vinos, then you can email us @BetWixt History hit.com this podcast was edited by Amy Haddo and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Shakes History of Sex, Scandal and Society, A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound Close your eyes. Visualize your appliances and home systems. Protected covered Repairs and replacements taken care of Washers, dryers, AC units now say it with me American Home Shield Warranty American Home Shield don't worry, be warranty.
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