A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (28 page)

These parallel families were accepted with little comment. His brother James, Duke of York, had two sons and a daughter in the 1660s with his mistress Arabella Churchill, the sister of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. He had other long-standing affairs, including Lady Southesk, Frances Jennings – sister of the Duchess of Marlborough – and Catherine Sedley. Yet he was also devoted to his strong, stout wife Anne. When Pepys saw the Yorks together in 1663 he winced at their ‘impertinent and methought unnatural dalliances’. They were far too physical than was decent for man and wife, ‘before the whole world, such as kissing of hands and leaning upon one another’.
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Even if openly accepted, a royal mistress had to be resilient. Barbara Castlemaine was a woman of courage and will, bold enough to adopt the libertine manners of the male courtiers and match her lover’s infidelities. She had to endure constant stories about her sexual appetites and practices, being said to know all the variations in Aretino’s
Postures
, the leading pornographic textbook ever since its first appearance in Renaissance Venice, and (perhaps truthfully) to have tried out Jacob Hall, the famous acrobat and rope-dancer, as a lover, to see if his tumbling limbs were as satisfying in private as in public performances. But if some court women like Barbara were clearly predators, most were prey, ogled as soon as they arrived by the gallants, who virtually laid bets as to who would bed them first. If they did give in, they faced acid satires on their prowess or anatomy. Winifred Wells, one of the maids of honour, was described as a tall girl who walked like a goddess but had a face like a sheep. She was one of several who succumbed to Charles, prompting a punning verse from Buckingham, imagining Charles exclaiming to his valet Progers:

When one of the maids was said to ‘drop a child’ when dancing at a court ball, and it was picked up in a scarf, the mother was named as Winifred and the father as the king. This story sprang from one of Buckingham’s practical jokes, in which an unnamed court lady stuck a cushion up her dress and pretended to be pregnant, before dropping the cushion on the floor. But it was then embroidered more darkly. It was said that the child was stillborn and the king took it to his closet and dissected it, joking that he had lost a subject.

A stream of young women arrived, fresh-faced, excited at the prospect of intimate court life: Miss Price, Miss Temple, Miss Hobart, Miss Jennings, Miss Boynton. Some made good marriages. Very few, with odd exceptions like Evelyn’s platonic love Margaret Blagge, escaped with their reputation intact, and intense friendships were routinely suspected of being lesbian intrigues. The court was claustrophobically small – everyone seemed related to one another, by blood or marriage or old family connections. For example in September 1660 Ormond’s daughter Elizabeth Butler, a striking figure with blue eyes and dark hair, married Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, who was not only Barbara Castlemaine’s first lover but the current Lord Chamberlain to the queen.

The countess’s story illustrates the complexity of court relationships, and also the way that its members prized this hot-house life. When she was pursued both by her cousin, James Hamilton, and, more publicly, by the Duke of York, Chesterfield angrily whipped her off to his country seat in Derbyshire. Once there, she took vengeance on Hamilton, whom she blamed for this exile, by summoning him to rescue her and then leaving him to wait for hours outside, in an icy winter night.
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The nub of the joke, apart from the discomfiture of the freezing lover, was the hideousness of being exiled from the court and sent to live amid the ‘precipices’ of the Peak District. The jibes in Restoration drama about the different styles of life of the country, city and court were appreciated chiefly because they were so profoundly felt.

Lady Denham

Despite the libertine culture, many husbands, like Chesterfield, suffered agonies of jealousy. After his first wife died, Sir John Denham married the young and flirtatious Margaret Brooke, one of two stepdaughters of the Earl of Bedford. When the Duke of York fell for her and she reputedly became his mistress in 1666, Denham had a breakdown. John Aubrey, whose gossip in this case is substantiated, reported that Denham was on his way from London to inspect the Portland Stone quarries, when he turned round and ‘went to Hounslowe, and demanded rents of Lands he had sold many yeares before; went to the King, and told him he was the Holy Ghost’.
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Denham recovered, but lost his position. Margaret herself came to a sad end, as Aubrey declares with satisfaction but without evidence: ‘His 2nd lady had no child: was poysoned by the hands of the Countess of Rochester, with Chocolatte.’ Another version blamed Denham himself, saying that he had poisoned her, while a different vein of gossip blamed the Duchess of York. And the beautiful Countess of Chesterfield also died, in the deserts of Derbyshire in July 1665, again rumoured to have been poisoned by her husband. The court could, indeed, be a deadly place.

THE COURT
was the supreme arena for showing off. The beauties set out to allure, the men to impress. It was a constant performance, with a feverish energy – too many young men, pent up, with too little to do. This was particularly true of the ‘wits’, like Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, who would later succeed his uncle as Earl of Middlesex, and his father as Earl of Dorset. One of the beardless boys in the new Cavalier Parliament, Buckhurst turned twenty in 1663. His constant side-kick was the twenty-four-year-old Sir Charles Sedley, ‘Little Sid’. Both took easily to the hard-drinking court, and both were known for their wit.

Wit could imply anything from a clever turn of phrase or a neatly applied epigram to venomous ridicule. It could also take the form of burlesque performance, using parody and bawdy as aggressive tools to ridicule authority and debunk deep-held beliefs. It was in this sense that it formed part of what Anthony Wood called ‘that notorious business in the balcony in the Strand’.
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In July 1663, Buckhurst and Sedley, with the Lincolnshire squire Sir Thomas Ogle, staggered into the Cock Inn in Bow Street, near Covent Garden. ‘Being all inflam’d with strong liquours’, they went out on to the balcony. Sedley then stripped naked, gave a jovial pantomime of lust and buggery, and preached a mock sermon which conflated priest, quack and pimp, ‘saying that there he hath to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’.
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That done ‘he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another and drank the king’s health’. As an encore he pissed on the crowd in the street. A minor riot began as angry townsfolk battered the locked doors and hurled stones and empty wine-bottles through the windows. In court next day, Sedley was bound over to good behaviour on a bond of £500, which he tried hard to get reduced, declaring ‘he thought he was the first man that paid for shitting’. In the end he borrowed the money for the fine from Charles himself – a gesture of royal amusement, instead of chastisement, which was quickly noted by hostile observers.

This impromptu farce attacked a host of targets at once, from the privacy of sex to respect for church and king. Shocked though the crowd were, there was little harm done except to the court’s reputation. But earlier that year, Buckhurst, his brother and three friends had been arrested ‘for killing and robbing a Tanner’, on the road from Waltham. They were charged with manslaughter but acquitted, said Pepys drily, after creating ‘a very good tale that they were in pursuit of thiefs, and that they took this man for one of them’.
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Buckhurst pleaded the King’s Pardon, which was granted. As his friend Rochester later remarked, ‘my Lord Dorset might do anything, yet was never to blame’.
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Yet this man of casual violence was also acclaimed for his culture and charm. Burnet, who knew him well, described him as a generous, good-natured man, charitable to a fault, quiet and solemn when sober but wild when drunk, in person a gentle soul but as a writer, ferocious: ‘Never was so much ill nature in a pen as in his, joined with so much good nature as was in himself, even to excess; for he was against all punishing, even of malefactors.’
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A poet and critic, Buckhurst was a generous patron of writers including Samuel Butler, Dryden, and Wycherley, and responded with awed admiration to Milton’s
Paradise Lost
.

Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later Earl of Dorset; an older, sober image. Horace Walpole thought him ‘the finest gentleman in the voluptuous court of Charles the second, and in the gloomy one of King William’.

The contradictions in Buckhurst were those of the court and the King himself. Buckhurst and Sedley pushed the boundaries, with Buckingham as their wild older statesman, and Rochester, who arrived at court in 1664 aged seventeen, as their
enfant terrible
. They shared their beautiful boys as well as girls, and mocked every sexual act and condition from masturbation to the pox. They could never have got away with their transgressions if Charles had not shared the same sense of humour. On one trip to Newmarket, Buckingham invented a bawdy sermon just to amuse him. Sometimes Charles himself joined in the parodic performances. Many sermons, for example, had welcomed him as a returning King David, but one day in 1665, after a riotous evening at the Spanish ambassador’s, a passer-by reported that towards daybreak ‘the King and the ambassador and a handful of others, having thrown away their wigs, came along leaping and dancing in the moonlight, preceded by the whole band of violins, in imitation of King David before the ark’.
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In a politer mode, the wits’ attacks on authority found their way onto the Restoration stage, which Charles patronised with passion. In the new playhouses, the scrabble to find scripts led to many revivals and adaptations of plays from before the wars, like Jonson’s
The Alchemist
and
Bartholomew Fair
or Beaumont and Fletcher’s
The Humorous Lieutenant.
But writers also drew on the tragedies of Corneille, the early satires of Molière and the Spanish comedies of Calderón. In the drama, as in the contrast between Buckhurst’s drunken performances and intellectual seriousness, there were strange contrarieties. The comedies that mocked the follies of the age had plots that touched the heart, while the tragi-comedies and heroic dramas, echoing with the terms Honour, Duty, Love and Hate, could make the crowd guffaw. ‘I have observed’, remarks Dryden’s character Lisideius (based on the cynical Sedley) in the
Essay on Dramatic Poesie
, ‘that, in all our Tragedies, the Audience cannot forbear laughing when the Actors are to die; ‘’tis the most Comick part of the whole Play.’
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The conventions and contradictions were relished by a knowing audience. The playhouses were part of the new polite world of the Town, stretching between the City and Whitehall, but both theatres were also on the hinterland of slums and underworld haunts. Bridges Street, just off Covent Garden, where the King’s Company moved into their new Theatre Royal in May 1663, was cheek by jowl with the brothels of Drury Lane. The Duke’s Company had been established in Lincoln’s Inn Fields since 1662. It was surrounded by townhouses built in the last reign, inhabited by aristocrats, merchants and artists, but the Fields themselves and the alley of Whetstone Park behind were well-known haunts of prostitutes and thieves.

The only surviving plate from Hollar’s planned ‘Great Map’ of London, c. 1658, from the river to Holborn. The large riverside garden belongs to Somerset House, home of Henrietta Maria. The area north of the Strand is crowded, but there are still allotments and orchards, as well as the spaces of Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Although the public theatres were more exclusive than they had been in Shakespeare’s day, they were not a solely aristocratic purlieu. Merchants and professional men, artists and lawyers bought boxes and packed into the pit, ‘cits’ took the cheaper, second tier of boxes, and servants and shopkeepers crowded the gallery. The atmosphere of the Town, with its coffee-houses and shops, mingled with an older legacy from the court and the exile. Tom Killigrew, who ran the King’s Company, had been a courtier of Charles I, while Davenant, manager of the Duke’s Company, had been his court poet. Davenant had known the masques of Jonson and Inigo Jones, with their movable scenery, trap-doors allowing figures to rise from the abyss and ropes to fly in angels from above, and he brought these techniques into the theatre. The scenery had none of the symbolic reference of the masques, but was there simply to delight and ‘astonish’ (a favourite word), taking theatregoers from the ‘tragic’ scenery of Sicily or Madrid to the familiar comic territory of the Strand or Spring Gardens. The raked stage, behind the proscenium arch, allowed grand vistas ‘upstage’, but an apron still projected into the pit, with boxes on both sides, so that the actors could play intimately to the audience, swapping jokes and innuendoes.

The season lasted from September to June, the months when the law courts were active and parliament was in session. The playhouses were open six days a week, with actors rehearsing in the mornings, acting in the afternoons and sometimes trooping off in the evenings to play for the court. Over a season the companies might stage fifty plays, three different ones each week, old and new, ranging from broad farce to heroic verse drama. A new play rarely ran for more than six days at a time, with the playwright awarded the takings of the third night. The theatre was addictive – Pepys’s diary is full of resolutions to give up going to plays, and equally full of his breaking them. Charles went to the theatre constantly, both for love of the plays, like Pepys, and because here he could play out his strategy of openness, sharing the entertainment, rubbing shoulders with the crowd, letting himself be seen. His presence there was part of the draw. The whole audience stood up as he entered, and waited until he took his seat in the royal box, in the centre of the first row of boxes. Everyone watched him, turning and gazing up from the pit, or leaning over the balconies of the boxes and galleries overhead. If he laughed, the play was a hit; if he stayed silent, yawned, or examined his nails, a chill fell on the production.

The auditorium could squeeze in seven hundred at a pinch. In the pit, where the green-baize-covered benches sloped gently back from the stage, the court gallants sat, shouting comments, ogling actresses and ribbing the orange sellers who stood in a row between the pit and the stage before the performance began. These were young girls carefully selected for their looks, their friendliness, their willingness to run messages for the rakes to women in the audience, and their sparky ability to talk back. In the Theatre Royal they were run by Mary Meggs, ‘Orange Moll’, who paid for ‘full, free, & sole liberty, licence, power, & authority to vend, utter, & sell oranges, Lemons, fruit, sweetmeats, & all manner of fruiterers & Confectioners wares & Commodities’.
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Tickets – little round brass discs – were bought in a room next to the theatre, but seats were not reserved, allowing for much pushing and moving around. If you didn’t like the play at one theatre you could go to the other, as described in George Etherege’s
She Would if She Could
, where the fops run ‘from one Play-house to the other Play-house, and if they like neither the Play or the Women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their Perriwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend; and then they cock their Caps, and out they strut again’.
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If the crowd was too great, people pushed in without paying, provoking Charles to issue a stern proclamation against the ‘diverse persons who doe rudely presse and with evill Language and Blows force their wayes into the two Theatres’.
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Brawls and fights broke out, swords were drawn and on at least one occasion a man was killed. Sometimes soldiers were stationed outside the theatres until the play was over.

The packed theatres, suffocating on hot days, were ripe with the smell of sweat, powder and heady perfume. They buzzed with the chatter of fops, the heckling of the wits, the flutter of fans and the rustling of silk. In the crush, there was always a scent of sex, with assignations in the pit and the boxes, glances from audience to stage and back. The audience started flowing through the doors up to an hour before the play was due to start, which was usually around half-past three. The mood was like that of a club, where the latest gossip was exchanged. Cliques formed, rivalries brewed, political deals were made and information exchanged. The news heard here spread outwards, to dinner tables and coffee-houses, and through letters to friends and relations in the country.

The reopening of the theatres was followed by the arrival of two distinct groups of writers. One was composed of the courtiers themselves, including Charles’s old tutor William Cavendish, the Marquess of Newcastle. Cavendish had a taste for broad comedy, but the mood of the Restoration, so full of uncertainty, also lent itself to the mixed genre of tragi-comedy. This was usually a tragedy with a happy ending, or one where the tragic lead was a victim rather than a flawed hero. (The genre was popular with royalist audiences, it has been suggested, because there had been so much real tragedy in the recent past and the return of the monarchy demanded celebration, the triumphant overcoming of trials and obstacles.)
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Like the romances of Mlle de Scudéry that Restoration readers so admired, tragi-comedies featured princes and princesses with exotic histories, and over-complicated love affairs. Dryden, as usual, pinpointed its peculiar character. ‘There is no Theatre in the World’, he wrote, in the mocking voice of Lisideius, ‘has any thing so absurd as the
English
Tragi-comedie, ‘’tis a
Drama
of our own invention…here a course of mirth, there another of Sadness and Passion, and a third of Honour, and a Duel: Thus in two hours and a half we run through all the fits of Bedlam.’
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