CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Virtues and Imperfections

‘A Prince of many virtues, and many great imperfections’

John Evelyn on Charles II

The summer of 1670 – when Charles II reached his fortieth birthday – represented a turning-point. To a far greater extent than such anniversaries generally do, it marked his emergence not only as a fully fledged governor of his own kingdom but also as a mature man set in his ways. The years of youthful exile, while they had developed in him abnormal courage and resilience, had also artificially held him back as a ruler. Such development had to take place in his thirties, and was further retarded by the presence of Clarendon until 1667. After the great manager’s departure, King Charles was left to discover certain facts about himself, his views and intentions for the first time. By the summer of 1670 these facts were fully known to him.

On 29 May 1660 the crowds cheering the restored monarch had been greeted by an evidently wary, if affable, man. By 29 March 1670 the reserve had become so deep as to be impenetrable. The affability was virtually impenetrable too. A man of political strength, cunning and purpose, he was prepared to show himself at all times gracious to his people. The hope of Henrietta Maria that the son would not repeat the clumsy, shy discourtesies of the father had borne fruit. As a monarch, Charles II was renowned for his friendliness, the ease of access which he offered to his subjects, to include not only the poorest amongst them but also a traditionally less welcome category for kings – his critics.

There was however one aspect of his public face in which his subjects might feel that ease had gone altogether too far. It was after the fall of Clarendon that the Court of King Charles II began to enjoy that reputation for debauchery which has surrounded it in the popular imagination ever since. Gone was the attractive picture of a temperate king painted by Sir Richard Fanshawe in 1660 – or at any rate swallowed up in a series of vignettes of Court life depicted in far more lurid colours. Clarendon had been an imposing figurehead, who might not be revered but whose name was certainly never synonymous with debauchery. Buckingham offered a very different image.

A duel in which the husband of his mistress, Anna Maria Countess of Shrewsbury, was mortally wounded caused scandal, and a temporary fall from grace for Buckingham himself. The King, although he subsequently pardoned those involved, showed himself extremely stern on the subject of duelling, which he wished to stamp out. But, autre temps autre mœurs, the gesture which provoked the most genuine horror, even among the charitable, was Buckingham’s decision to have his illegitimate son by Lady Shrewsbury christened in Westminster Abbey. A duel was a duel, an unhappy feature of the times, but such a baptism offended against the established order of society.

Sir Charles Sedley and Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (later Earl of Dorset), two culpable rakes in Pepys’ view, were involved in an inglorious drunken orgy at a Fleet Street tavern which brought them before the magistrates. The mutilation of Sir John Coventry was another highly discreditable incident. When Sir John Berkenhead tried to avert the imposition of a tax on the playhouses on the grounds that they had been of much service to the King, Sir John Coventry enquired cheekily whether he meant the men or women players …? After which the troopers of the Duke of Monmouth waylaid Coventry and all but cut off the wretched man’s nose.

Of the Cabal, not only Buckingham gave offence. The Duke of Lauderdale was in private life a gross figure and his wife Bess a legendary amorist who even claimed to have dangled Cromwell’s scalp at her belt. The story was certainly not true – there are always ladies to claim the favours of great men – but Bess, holding her court at Ham House, made characteristically bold play with it. As against that, it should in fairness be pointed out that Clifford’s Devonshire-based life was a pattern of domesticity; Arlington’s private life was impeccable, as might be expected from such a ‘Castilian’ figure; Shaftesbury’s interests lay in political controversy rather than in private indulgence, and an open verdict has been returned by his biographer on the various theatrical references to his ‘lechery’.¹

Can it then be argued that this reputation for debauchery in ‘Good King Charles’ Golden Days’ has been much exaggerated? That a few vicious shooting stars have distracted attention from a host of lesser lights, who shone, in so far as they shone at all, with virtue? This view would of course discount not only the legends which have followed the reign – ever a necessary process – but the manifest criticisms and exclamations on the subject of the King’s contemporaries. The clue is to concentrate not so much on the question of debauchery but on the true keynote of the King’s Court after 1667: and that was laxity.

Much of the colourful aura which surrounds the Restoration Court in the popular imagination is derived from the behaviour of ‘the Wits’, rather than of the more powerful ministers. This little group, which flourished for about fifteen years after 1665, included John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, Henry Jermyn, Lord Buckhurst, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Henry Killigrew, Sir Charles Sedley, and the playwrights Wycherley and Etherege, as well as Buckingham (who straddled both circles). The first point to be made about the Wits, with regard to Charles II, was that they were in the main much younger than the King. Their characters had not been honed like his by fighting in the Civil War: they had grown up in the post-war years, when the atmosphere was very different. (Buckingham, as usual, was the exception.) Rochester, for example, was seventeen years younger than Charles, born only a few years before his father shared the King’s escape from Worcester; Mulgrave was younger still.

Rochester’s portrait shows a young man of almost insolent sensuality, wide lips curling with devilment, but with ‘something of the Angel yet undefac’d in him’, as was said of Etherege’s cynical rake based on Rochester, Dorimant, in The Man of Mode. To his own gaping generation Rochester was ‘so idle a rogue’– Pepys was in a tizzy at the idea of Charles making him his constant companion² – a virtual alcoholic as well as a brilliant and therefore hurtful satirist. To ours he has become the poet who, for all his obscenity, understands the sad side of passion.

The King enjoyed the outrageous side of his company and, where possible, shrugged off his excesses. There are many anecdotes of Rochester’s wildness. One of the most characteristic has Rochester wandering drunkenly in the Privy Garden at Whitehall; on spying the King’s favourite sun-dial, one of the rarest in Europe, he flung his arms around it and, quoting Shirley’s famous lines,

Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

he added, ‘And so must thou!’ Whereupon he hurled it to the ground.³ That kind of zany dash and style had always fascinated the more cautious house of Stuart: one is reminded of the madcap pranks of the elder Buckingham, catching the eye of James I. In Rochester’s case the style included a genuine love of literature in many different forms.

These high-spirited gentlemen – the ‘merry gang’, as Marvell called them – diverted themselves at times with poetry, plays and literature in general, at times with sardonic comment on everything about them, couched, very often, in scabrous language. Their tendency to the latter has become more famous than their patronage of the former: yet it was to the Wits that much of the abundance of Restoration drama was owed, a more important achievement than their unprintable rhymes about the King’s mistresses. It did not harm the theatre that play-writing became a fashionable occupation, practised by aristocrats, aspired to by gentlemen. At least one play, Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, was saved by the applause of the Wits, as theatre-goers hesitated, uncertain of their own taste.⁴Rochester was the friend of Aphra Behn and the model for Willmore, The Rover, in her play of that name. Buckingham himself wrote a play, The Rehearsal: an attack, full of humorous ingenuity, on Dryden and heroic drama in general. Its fame crossed the Channel: Louis XIV twitted his own prime minister on not being able to write a successful farce, as his cousin’s had done. It is still occasionally performed, if better known as the work from which Sheridan took his own play, The Critic.

Buckhurst loved drunken frolics, but his lyric on the eve of a naval battle against the Dutch in 1665, ‘To all you ladies now at land …’, represents courtly elegance; later in life he gave himself over to literary patronage. The notorious Sedley was also a great lover of the arts. Known to his contemporaries as ‘Apollo’s Viceroy’, he was the author of several plays as well as lyrics set exquisitely to music by Purcell. Baptist (‘Bab’) May, who became Keeper of the Privy Purse to the King, was a bon viveur whose appetite for life was matched by his appreciation of the arts. The brother of Hugh May, the architect who worked on the renovation of Windsor Castle, Bab May made a valuable collection of pictures in his own right.

In the eighteenth century the reputation of the Wits became further exaggerated, and Rochester in particular was the subject of gloating, frequently inaccurate, biographies.

While the King indulged himself with the company of these boon companions as a form of relaxation, he is definitely not to be identified with them. Far from being a ‘Wit’ himself, he could even be called their victim – along with anything else even remotely established which came within their sights. From time to time he issued reprimands: Grammont describes Rochester as having been sent away from Court at least once a year;⁵ the ‘profane’ Earl even had a spell in the Tower after eloping with an heiress, although he was subsequently forgiven. One suspects that the ‘merry gang’ had something in common with the lovely ladies of the Court: their irreverent company helped to dispel the unspoken melancholy lying within the King’s nature.

This was above all a liberal or, as we should now say, a permissive era. People of rank took their pleasures as they found them and made no secret of their practices because they saw no harm in them. ‘Is it not a frank age?’ asked the young blade Sparkish in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. ‘And I am a frank person.’ If it is accepted that the level of ‘sin’ remains roughly constant in human behaviour, then the difference between the age of Charles II and that preceding it – the so-called Puritan age of Cromwell – was this: after 1660 it was not considered necessary to hide these things. Naturally not everything which crept in under this permissive umbrella was equally desirable. Laxity towards moral behaviour at Court, in contrast to the rigidity of the Commonwealth period, meant that vice was able to take its chance with virtue and frequently – but not always – won.

In terms of the age itself, it was even more important that obvious laxity in high places – coupled with conspicuous extravagance at a time of national financial stress – antagonized, as it generally does, those in low places who were unable to share in it. Yet, pleasure-loving, easy-going as the Court of Charles II was, it was not a bad and certainly not an evil place.

It is hardly necessary to go as far as the classical comparison with ancient Rome. Let us take the Court of Louis XIV just across the water. It is not only that, mistress for mistress, Louis XIV matched his cousin. His Court was also marked by practices which would have been inconceivable at the Court of Charles II, including black magic and the celebration of the Black Mass for the King’s favour, degenerating into the widespread use of poison – horrific events which involved the King’s most flamboyant mistress, Madame de Montespan. Nevertheless, the grandiose formality so dear to the heart of Louis XIV has ensured that the Court of Versailles is not famous for such things. In the same way, the English Court takes its reputation from the easy-going nature of its own sovereign.

As a matter of fact, where Charles himself is concerned, his personal ‘debauchery’, as opposed to sheer love of women, does not appear to have been very great. In 1667 Pepys repeated a rumour that the King had expressed a wish to join with Barbara and Lord Jermyn in troilism; later Rochester spread rumours of his sovereign’s impotence, saying that only two ladies at a time could take care of this state – but impotence was a subject which obsessed Rochester, and the story probably tells us more about him than about the King.⁶ In an age beset by dirty rumours and innuendoes about the sex life of all and sundry, Charles emerged pre-eminently as a man of great physical energy who quite simply loved women.

He had after all ample opportunity to do so. Charles II had three great advantages where women were concerned. First, he was a king. And if he had little money himself, he was in a position to grant money, rank and other douceurs to his favourites: even Halifax admitted that ‘sauntering’ was a greater temptation to princes than to other people. Nor were such escapades held against them.

May not a man then trifle out an hour

With a kind woman and not wrong his calling?

exclaimed Jaffeir in Otway’s play, Venice Preserv’d. In the seventeenth century – and for many generations to follow – the answer was generally speaking ‘Yes’, when the man’s calling was that of King. It was a point of view expressed by the King himself in conversation with Burnet. God, he was convinced, would never damn a man ‘for allowing himself a little pleasure…’.⁷

Secondly, Charles II was extremely sexually attractive, or, as he put it more modestly to Sir John Reresby, ‘because that his Complexion was of an amorous sort’ women often offered themselves to his embraces. To the objection that the second advantage really sprang from the first – women were the aggressors, for mercenary reasons – it can be answered that there is plenty of evidence of this attraction. Barbara Castlemaine – who certainly knew what she was talking about – confided to a friend that the King was exceptionally well endowed physically to make love.^8fn1

Thirdly, Charles II actually liked women. He enjoyed their company, not only for the purposes of making love to them, but to talk to them, to have supper with them, to be entertained by and to entertain them. He did not snub them or bully them, unlike many of his companions. He allowed them to have brains and talk politics – as a result of which he was of course criticized for subjecting himself to petticoat influence; nevertheless, to our ears such an attitude makes a refreshing change from the English masculine tradition of boredom in female company.

There is indeed something very modern in this appreciation on the part of Charles, this capacity of the King to turn his mistresses into friends. Even if it is again objected that this process comes easier to kings than to other people – since the aforesaid mistresses have much to gain from remaining at Court – it is still much to Charles’ credit that he wanted to do so.

Above all, he knew himself and was not hypocritical where women and his desires were concerned. His witty – but courteous – refusal to interfere with Barbara’s ‘soul’ has already been cited. There is another characteristic tale of this tolerant and humorous attitude to his own reputation. Passing through the Palace of Whitehall, Charles overheard a young lady singing a satirical ballad in her room, based on his prowess as a ‘stallion’– ‘Old Rowley the King’. Instantly the King knocked on her door. When she asked who was there, he replied with a flourish, ‘Old Rowley himself, Madam.’⁹

If a great lover is one who shows certain essential qualities of tenderness and appreciation for the opposite sex, rather than a sheer sexual athlete, then Charles can lay claim to the title. One may cite Louis XIV once more, who showed nothing like the same emotional generosity to his former mistresses. The incident at the French Court, where the Princesse de Monaco more or less had to retire because the key to her room was not found outside her door by the King (it had been confiscated by another admirer), could not have happened in England: Charles’ very public pursuit of Frances and his equally public rejection, while they caused him anguish and even rage, ended with her installed as a grand and respected duchess.

It can even be argued that in the first seven or eight years of his reign Charles was something of a ‘one-woman man’. Pepys, in conversation with Evelyn in that period, accepted that the King never kept two mistresses at the same time.¹⁰ Obviously this paradoxical fidelity, in which ‘a faith unfaithful kept him falsely true’, as Tennyson wrote of Lancelot, did not last for ever. The seventies were a different matter.

Louise Duchess of Portsmouth and Nell Gwynn unquestionably shared his official favours in the early years of the decade. There were shorter-lived parallel romances. Not only was there the affair with Moll Davis, but there was also a fling with one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, Winifred Wells, whose attractions included the ‘carriage of a goddess and the physiognomy of a dreamy sheep’ (but Barbara compared her to a goose), and Mrs Jane Roberts, daughter of a clergyman, who died young ‘with a great sense of her former ill life’. The singer Mrs Knight, whose angelic voice Evelyn and others so much admired, figures in the royal accounts; as does another Killigrew, Mary, the widowed Countess of Falmouth, who subsequently married Lord Buckhurst, and Elizabeth Countess of Kildare. Then there were the nocturnal visitors introduced up the Privy Stairs by William Chiffinch, the King’s confidential servant, and Page, Keeper of the Privy Closet. Their numbers, like their identities, remain unknown to history.^fn2

Nevertheless, Pepys’ conversation with Evelyn should not be totally dismissed. For one thing, Pepys was an acute observer of sexual matters in general, because he was so interested in them. Then Evelyn was a reliable source on the subject of the King in particular because he had close contact with him over so many years. Pepys’ Diary entry pointed to an important strand in the King’s character: Charles was not by conviction promiscuous, whatever the temptations offered to a king in a permissive age.

He did not share the attitude made fashionable by his friend Rochester:

If I, by miracle, can be

This live-long minute true to thee

’Tis all that Heaven allows.

He liked settled relationships. He believed in them.

Frances had declined the honourable post of King’s official mistress with what Barbara ungratefully described as ‘the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman Stewart’: as a result, Barbara’s own star remained artificially in the ascendant until the late 1660s. This was a remarkable achievement when women were said to be ‘at their prime at twenty, decayed at four and twenty, old and insupportable at thirty’, in the words of Etherege’s Dorimant. Barbara tended to agree with Rochester on the subject of fidelity (although violently denying it). When she was accused of intriguing with Harry Jermyn in July 1667 – that same Jermyn who had caused a flutter in the breast of Mary of Orange – the King was deeply upset. Jermyn was obliged to leave the Court for six months. As late as 1668 (when Barbara was nearly thirty), the Crown Jewels were said to have been taken from the Tower to adorn her for an amateur performance of Katherine Philips’ version of Horace at court. The public opinion of her reign, somewhat less glamorous, was expressed in the infamous fictional ‘Whores’ Petition’ of March 1668. Some London apprentices, in a fit of morality or malevolence, had pulled down certain brothels in the Moorfields area. Both the ‘Whores’ Petition’ and Barbara’s alleged reply to ‘the rest of the suffering sisterhood’ were highly scurrilous, not to say disgusting, in content.¹¹ The most interesting references are those to her Catholicism (she had recently been converted): these display another even stronger popular prejudice.

Then the appearance of a pert young professional actress named Nell Gwynn signalled that Barbara’s era was over. Barbara was asked to remove herself from her convenient Whitehall apartments. It was true that in August 1670 she was created Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Southampton and Baroness Nonsuch; all this was however in the nature of a golden handshake. About the same time, at least in Marvell’s version, the King had a ballad sung under her window beginning, ‘Alinda’s growing old …’. Marvell himself contributed his own drop of vinegar:

Paint Castlemaine in colours that will hold

Her, not her picture, for She now grows old…

Barbara’s own version of the King’s dismissal of her, quoted back to him afterwards without contradiction, was less crude if equally wounding. The King said, ‘Madam, all that I ask of you for your own sake is, live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.’¹²

Two years later Charles pointedly refused to acknowledge Barbara’s sixth child, a daughter. The baby began life as Barbara Fitzroy, the surname borne by her five quasi-royal brothers and sisters. Then she was consigned the simpler patronymic of Barbara Palmer, a name to which, like her mother, she brought some colour; for she entered a convent and then left it to bear an illegitimate child.

Duchess Barbara’s latest career was not so happy. Having lost her youthful bloom, she did not lose her rapacity: there was an ugly incident when the Viceroy of Ireland, the Earl of Essex, had to defend Phoenix Park, Dublin, against her covetousness. Nor indeed did Barbara lose her equally demanding sensuality. Quite possibly she owed her latest daughter to the attentions of her young lover John Churchill, the future warrior Duke of Marlborough. In 1676, after the Test Act had forced this Catholic Magdalen to renounce her position as Lady of the Bedchamber, she flounced off to Paris. She returned three years later, but at this point she passes out of the romantic history of Charles II.

The King’s new mistress was familiarly known as Nelly Gwynn. On the subject of her official nomenclature, the various royal accounts suffered from some confusion, calling her variously Mrs Hellen Gwynn, Mrs Ellen Gwynn and Mrs Elinor Gwyn, ‘spinster’. She was known as Madam Ellen on play bills after she received the King’s favour. Nell was virtually illiterate. Appointing an attorney for herself in 1680, Nell managed a very large and childish EG: so that obviously some version of Eleanor was correct; other receipts for payments for herself and her son were also signed with an ill-formed EG.¹³

Nell was introduced to the King by Buckingham some time before January 1668. She remained on fond terms with the Duke, visiting him in the Tower during one of the periods of his disgrace. Nell was not the only actress to entrance her sovereign. Moll Davis also succeeded in doing so by singing a particular song, ‘My lodging is on the Cauld ground …’, after which, as John Downes commented, her lodging was in the royal bed. Castigated by Mrs Pepys as ‘the most impertinent slut in the world’, Moll Davis was praised by other kindlier tongues for the especial grace of her dancing. Pepys thought her a better actress than Nell Gwynn. Richard Flecknoe was moved to address to her the following lines, which breathe sincerity if not poesy:

Dear Miss, delight of all the nobler sort,

Pride of the stage and darling of the court…

Moll Davis was a member of Sir William Davenant’s troupe at Lincoln’s Inn. In return for the King’s presents, said to include a ring worth £600, a house and even a pension, Moll presented him with a daughter, known as Mary Tudor.

But the relationship was not enduring. Whether or not the evil tale is true which has Nell Gwynn lacing Moll’s sweetmeats with julap (a purgative) when she was due to sup with the King, Moll fell from favour comparatively soon.¹⁴ She took refuge in another less lucrative passion – for cards and high play.

Nell Gwynn was made of sterner stuff, as was her connection with the King; one way and another, it would only end with his death some seventeen years later. Nell was of Welsh extraction. One story connects her birth with Hereford, a place with a great acting tradition. It is more certain that she spent her early years working in the London establishment of her mother, old Madam Gwynn; this, if not precisely a brothel or ‘bawdy-house’, was something pretty close to it: Nell served drinks – ‘strong waters to gentlemen’ – there, and later graduated to being an orange girl in the theatre, another profession which existed in the exciting, nebulous territory just outside acknowledged prostitution.

The first reference to her as an actress in the King’s Players occurs in 1664 (when she would have been fourteen). Her early lovers included the actor Charles Hart, Charles, Lord Buckhurst,^fn3 and the playwright Thomas Otway, who would remain a true friend through life; he was given power of attorney in her business affairs twenty years later. By 1670 Nell had achieved that guarantee of an establishment, pregnancy by the monarch; she gave birth to the first of her two sons and was set up in consequence in a little house at the east end of Pall Mall, later closer to Whitehall. Throughout 1670 and most of 1671 she reigned supreme.

Physically, Nell was tiny, with, it was said, the littlest foot in England as well as perfect legs. The King, who had a penchant for good legs, indulged his passion to the extent of paying for some of her theatrical costumes, including some ‘Rhinegraves’ – shirt, wide, divided skirts, guaranteed to fly up provocatively as the wearer danced. Nell certainly did not have the classical looks admired at the time: her nose turned up, unlike the aquiline noses of the conventional Stuart beauties. But everything about her was charmingly rounded, including her plump cheeks, where two dimples appeared when she smiled. As for her full lower lip, it aroused this tribute from a contemporary admirer: ‘An out-mouth that makes mine water at it.’¹⁵ It was no wonder that the King, at the height of his desire, paid frequent visits to Lely’s studio, where he was painting Nelly naked.

Like Charles himself, Nell had natural wit, although hers was the wit nurtured in Madam Gwynn’s bawdy-house rather than the courts of Europe. Her surviving letters, dictated to others as they may be, show a sparkle nonetheless. Evelyn describes her taking part in some jolly backchat over her garden wall with the King, out on one of his saunters. On another occasion she told Charles smartly how to deal with his finances: ‘Send the French into France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your codpiece.’¹⁶Nell’s rivalry with Louise de Kéroüalle, who prided herself on coming of a good French family, was enlivened when Louise went into mourning for the death of some professedly grand relation; Nell proceeded to dress herself in mourning for the Great Cham of Tartary. And Nell is of course famous for her riposte, at the time of the Popish Plot, to the angry crowd who mistook her for the Catholic Louise. Poking her head out of her carriage, Nell cried, ‘Good people, this is the Protestant whore!’

But if she justified her reputation in one respect as ‘pretty witty Nell’ or ‘Mrs Nelly the impudent comedian’, as Pepys called her, Nell Gwynn was in other ways not quite the golden-hearted prostitute of popular imagination. Or rather, she may have had a heart of gold, but she also liked the stuff for its own sake. The records show that, like all Charles’ mistresses, she was extremely mercenary and demanding. By the end of 1674 she had acquired at least eight servants, a French coach needing six horses, satin window curtains, sky-blue shoes, other shoes of silver, green, gold and scarlet, all as befitted the grand lady she sought to be. Nell also coveted some kind of rank, to acknowledge her position. It seemed odious and unfair to her that she should not be rewarded on the same handsome scale as the other ladies, simply because she was an actress – considering she performed the same services. In 1675, for example, about the time that Madame de Sévigné at least believed that Charles was dividing his favours equally between the two, Nell received £1,000 from the Secret Service account, but Louise received £2,000 in the same period.¹⁷

Nell’s mockery of Louise, her insistence that she, Nell, was not ashamed of her profession, while Louise gave herself unjustified airs, begins to have a slightly sour note as the seventies wear on. ‘As for me, it’s my trade, I don’t set myself up as anything better!’ cried Nell. And she lifted up her petticoats to Courtin, the French Ambassador, to emphasize how magnificent – and how clean – they were, after boasting that the King slept with her constantly in preference to Louise.¹⁸ One feels that the lady – if one may so call her – protests her own frankness about her profession slightly too much.

And the sad truth was that for all her loud complaints Nell never did carry her democratic point of equality with the other favourites. It was Burnet who put it most cruelly: Nell was not treated with the decencies of a mistress, but rather with the lewdness of a prostitute.¹⁹ It is said that she secured the vacant Burford title for her surviving son Charles by calling him ‘You little bastard!’ in front of the King, and then blandly enquiring how else she should address him, since he had no other name.^fn4 Just as Nell was about to be created Countess of Greenwich – the other ‘ladies’ were all made Duchesses – the King died. To commentators, up to the King’s last hours, she remained ‘Nelly’, where Louise was ‘Portsmouth’ and Barbara ‘Cleveland’. And thus she has gone down to history.

It is sometimes overlooked that the private tastes of Charles II ran as much to conventional as to unconventional sports. Viewing his obsession with physical exercise of all sorts, including tennis, swimming, walking and riding, it is tempting to suggest that his legendary ‘amorous complexion’ was merely an extension of this natural bent. He once referred to his daily tennis game, to Clarendon, as his ‘usual physic’; perhaps making love came into the same category. The Wardrobe accounts certainly provide as ample expression of his interest in tennis – real tennis as we should term it, played in an indoor court – as in women, ornamental beds and rich carriages for mistresses jostling there with the day-beds, linen, towels, curtains and so forth needed for the royal tennis-courts.

The tennis ‘sheets’ (that is, towels) were specially made by Dorothy Chiffinch (wife of the respectable Thomas, not the disreputable William), a lady so accustomed to looking after the King’s linen that she had done so as long ago as that disastrous expedition to Scotland in 1649. These ‘sheets’ cost ten shillings a pair. One day-bed on which the King could recline after a hard game cost £38.²⁰ The Hampton Court establishment in general cost about £200 a year to run, including not only the quilted nets, but also the hire of boatmen to take the King up-river to his sport. The renovation of the court there had been considered one of the prime needs at the Restoration. In 1662 a new court was built at Whitehall on the Hampton Court model, and a further one at Windsor, for which nets, cords and lines had to be provided.

Earlier royalties had enjoyed the game of tennis:²¹ Henry VIII had been an aficionado. It was also very much part of the Stuart family tradition: Charles I had played, and so did his nephew Rupert. In exile, Harry Duke of Gloucester had become so expert that he was rumoured to be contemplating earning a living at the game when times were hard.

Tennis, as practised by Charles II, satisfied the same kind of need in his life as squash might satisfy in the life of a busy, would-be fit man today. It was Charles’ custom to play early in the morning, six a.m. being a favourite time. And he played on into his fifties, challenging much younger men, like John Churchill. He also derived considerable satisfaction from the sauna-like qualities of a game played very fast on wood in an indoor court: he once weighed himself before and after playing and found that he had lost four-and-a-half-pounds.

Charles II also adored swimming. As Richard Penderel had discovered to his advantage after Worcester, Charles was an exceptionally strong and fearless swimmer. On occasion he was found plunging happily into the freezing waters of the Thames, while his courtiers shivered on the bank. His swimming too was apt to take place early in the morning. He would rise at five, go boating and swim, often with his brother James at Battersea, Putney or Five Elms.

The life of the Thames, river life in general, appealed to him: he was an enthusiastic fisherman. (One of Rochester’s more printable nicknames for his sovereign was Flatfoot the Gudgeon-taker – Flatfoot being a horse at Newmarket.) It was a taste Queen Catharine – tactfully – came to share. We hear of the King getting up at five a.m. to join her at Hampton Court to go fishing, ‘a recreation in which she takes much pleasure’. The King also spent much time on the Thames at Datchet when he was in residence at Windsor. There the royal cormorant-keeper received a special allowance in the household accounts. As a result, Henry Sidney complained in his diary of 1679 that the King at Windsor did nothing all day but fish. The following year the King’s serious illness was attributed to him going fishing in the kind of weather ‘when a dog would not be abroad’.²²

Fishing at least was a sedentary occupation, one of the few that the King practised. In general, his extreme physical restlessness was an attribute to which all contemporary observers drew attention. His famous walking, for example, went on at a horrendous pace. The courtiers panted to keep up with him. When Prince George of Denmark was brought before the King as the putative spouse of his niece Princess Anne of York, Charles advised him merrily on his future course of action at the English Court: ‘Walk with me, hunt with my brother and do justice to my niece.’ Leaving aside the second and third of these precepts it is doubtful that the stolid Prince was up to carrying out the first.

At least this love of walking dovetailed with the King’s passion for dogs. Wherever he went he moved with a little train of spaniels scampering and barking – or yapping as their detractors had it. He did not actually introduce his favourite breed of spaniel, whose particular appearance can best be gauged from the contemporary portraits, to England. Some form of these engaging dogs had in fact been known here, petted by royalty, for at least a hundred years. Mary Tudor, Queen Elizabeth, Charles I, and later Louis XIV, Prince Rupert and Madame are amongst those known to have enjoyed these ‘comforters’. But such was King Charles’ enthusiasm for them that they have become identified with his name.^fn5 As a result a tradition has arisen that a law was passed in his time giving these dogs free travel anywhere within the realm; it is, alas, unsubstantiated.²³

Trifling with his spaniels was Charles’ habitual way of whiling away the time during government business: hence that charming link-with-history anecdote which involves a very old man remembering as a very young boy seeing the King playing with his dogs in the Palace of Whitehall.^fn6 The royal pets, in the opinion of courtiers, were better outside than in. Obviously the King’s commitments would not allow him to cope with their exercise single-handed. Dog-walkers were essential, and well rewarded. In 1662 George Russell, serjeant of hawks, was paid twenty pence a day for taking out the King’s spaniels: he also obtained £7 a year for a suitable livery.²⁴

Pepys had waxed sentimental over the spectacle of the King’s dogs misbehaving themselves on the yacht bearing Charles to his Restoration. Evelyn was more caustic on the subject. Sumptuous cushions were ordered for them, according to the royal accounts. But the undisciplined spaniels would creep into the royal bed-chamber and even the royal bed; here the bitches whelped and suckled their young. A loyal gentleman, being bitten, exclaimed: ‘God bless your Majesty! but God damn your dogs!’²⁵ King Charles’ own affection for his pets remained sublimely above these annoyances: they could do no wrong.

Horses had of course been an early love which the presence of an equestrian expert as his tutor only encouraged. By the age of ten Charles had been riding ‘leaping horses’, often controlling those who had managed to throw more experienced horsemen. His subsequent prowess was of infinite satisfaction to Newcastle (created a Duke after the Restoration). He wrote: ‘No man makes a horse go better than I have seen some go under His Majesty the first time ever he came upon their backs, which is the quintessence of the art.’²⁶ The household bills include details of bits with silver and gilt bosses, hunting saddles of coloured velvet, crimson silk reins for the new travelling coach. At the royal mews at one time there were forty-three coursers, stallions and colts, sixty hunters, numerous grooms and a gentleman saddler. In 1668 horses, including not only these but also coach horses, chariot horses, rack horses and stool horses, were costing the King over £1,000 a year in hay, and over £700 in straw. In 1680 the King’s serjeant farrier, Andrew Snape (whose family had been farriers to the Crown for two hundred years), wrote a book on Anatomy of an Horse. It was appropriate that he should dedicate it to his royal master.²⁷

Charles II grew up with a taste for hunting, including deer, stag and otter (fox hunting in general belongs to a later period, when the shortage of deer could no longer be remedied). This was once again part of the Stuart family tradition. Even his otherwise unathletic grandfather, James I, had such a mania for the chase that his subjects complained of neglect on that score: similarly Charles II used the fact that he had got into ‘such a vein of hunting’ as an excuse for lagging behind in his correspondence with Madame.²⁸

At the Restoration the parks and forests had to be filled again with deer, poached unmercifully throughout the Commonwealth period. Thus the New Forest and Sherwood Forest were restocked. The King’s House at Lyndhurst in Hampshire, built by Charles I in 1635 (now offices for the Forestry Commission), was used as a hunting lodge for the New Forest. Charles II spent £4,000 enlarging it and building new stables. An edict of 1662 concerning Sherwood Forest forbade anyone there to kill a deer without a warrant from the King, unless Charles himself or the Master of the Buckhounds was actually present.²⁹ The Duke of Oldenburg sent over a freight of stags from the Continent to help with its replenishment. The King’s deer were kept in Windsor Forest, Waltham Forest, Enfield Chase and Hunsdon Park. Richmond Park, once royal property, had been confiscated during the Commonwealth. It was typical of the King’s tact that he consented to receive it back from the Corporation of London, who had acquired it ‘not of restoration but of a free gift’.³⁰

One Simon Smith petitioned at the Restoration to become Master of the Otter Hounds. He had actually hoped to become Master of the Tennis Play, and, with this in mind, he had not only taken the precaution of marrying the widow of the previous Master, but had also improved a court at his own expense.³¹ This new petition acknowledged the link which joined all the King’s pleasures: they provided useful remunerative posts for loyal subjects. The Master of the Privy Buckhounds, in charge of organizing one branch of venery for the King, had an average of thirty-four servants beneath him.

Yet as the King grew older, the enthusiasm for hunting gave way to a passionate involvement in racing: it was the Duke of York who was left as the chief upholder of hunting in the royal family, as Charles’ teasing remark to George of Denmark indicates. Charles II concentrated on what has become known appropriately enough as the Sport of Kings. The value of his patronage to British racing can hardly be over-estimated: at the beginning of his reign, race meetings were still suffering from the blight put upon them during the Protectorate, when they were banned as being opportunities for the seditious to meet (the first meeting of the monarchist Western Association had actually taken place at Salisbury races). By 1685 racing was thoroughly established as an integral part of British social and sporting life.

The King probably first went racing at Epsom Downs in 1661: but it was Newmarket in particular which owed so much to his prolonged personal patronage.³² The Duke of Tuscany, who paid the town a visit, drew attention to ‘the almost level territory which lies in every direction around it’ and commented, ‘It has, in the present day, been brought into repute by the king….’ This was true. The royal stables there were referred to as ‘ruinous’ in 1661. John Baypole, Surveyor of the Royal Stables, was granted £800 for immediate work, and though restoration proceeded slowly, since the money, in its usual fashion, trickled through slower than had been anticipated, enough was found to breed there twelve choice horses a year. The King also came to maintain four jockeys-in-ordinary.

There were races at Newmarket by March 1663. In 1666 Charles II paid his first visit to the spring meeting; thereafter he went two or three times a year for visits lasting several weeks. Although tents and pavilions formed part of the royal baggage, the King himself stayed at Audley End with the Earl of Suffolk, and used the Earl of Thomond’s town residence. Gradually the King found Audley End so convenient for his racing life that in 1669 he bought it for £50,000. His enthusiasm continued to grow: in March that year he left London before three a.m. in order to reach Newmarket in good time, only to be rewarded – or punished – for his early rise by having his coach overturn at King’s Gate, Holborn. ‘The King all dirty but no hurt,’ wrote Pepys philosophically.³³

There was an acute lack of money at the time (this was the period of so-called retrenchment) and the price of Audley End was never paid in full. In any case, £10,000 had to be spent on it straight away for essential improvements. Buildings inside Newmarket also began to be made more ‘commodious’, in the Duke of Tuscany’s phrase, as the visits of the noblesse proliferated. The King himself decided to build a palace in the town and commissioned Wren to draw up plans, the old palace having been knocked down under the Commonwealth.^fn7 Evelyn however found it a very odd sort of palace, which lay ‘in a dirty street … without any court or avenue’. And even Charles had some complaints about the low ceilings of Wren’s rooms. Wren, who was a short man, assured the King that they were quite high enough.

‘Aye, Sir Christopher,’ replied the King, squatting down from his great height, ‘I think they are….’³⁴

The King’s involvement in racing embraced every aspect of this rich and many-sided sport, including, on occasion, dining with the jockeys. He instituted four-mile heats at twelve stone for a Plate ‘for ever’– the precursor of all the subsequent royal Plate races at Newmarket. The idea of these heats over such a long distance – by modern standards – was to develop the breeding of ‘big stout horses’. What was more, the Plate race had something generally lacking in races at the time, a set of formal rules. Otherwise informality was so great that the King was sometimes used as an adjudicator. On one famous occasion, in April 1682, he was called in to decide the rights and wrongs of a race between Sir Robert Kerr’s horse and a gelding belonging to Sir Robert Geeres.

The King would get up early to watch the training gallops, either installed in his ‘Chair’, a small pavilion on top of the hill, or riding on his own hack. His overflowing energy prevented him from being a mere spectator whenever there was an alternative. The Duke of Tuscany described how the King would watch the races on horseback with his friends, riding parallel with the runners as they approached the finish, until the roll of drums and the blare of trumpets signalled the winner. Finally he rode in a number of races himself. In 1671 he rode the winner of the Plate – ‘a flagon of £32 price’ – beating, amongst others, the Duke of Monmouth. In 1675, when he was in his mid-forties, the King rode in three heats, a course and the Plate, all being ‘hard and near run races’; he won the Plate by what Sir Robert Kerr assured a correspondent was sheer ‘good horsemanship’.³⁵

Today the Rowley mile at Newmarket still commemorates Charles II in its own fashion: it was named after that famous stallion of the day, sire of a vast progeny – and, as has been mentioned, Charles himself was nicknamed Old Rowley in honour of his own similarly prolific powers. As for Newmarket itself, Alexander Pope wrote angrily in the next century,

In Days of Ease, when now the weary Sword

Was sheath’d, and Luxury with Charles restor’d …

The Peers grew proud in Horsemanship t’excel,

Newmarket’s Glory rose, as Britain’s fell …

Today, as British horse-racing and breeding flourish, following the lead of Charles II, many would think that, on the contrary, Newmarket’s glory had contributed to that of Britain.

There was a bucolic side to the life centred there. One is reminded of the lush pastoral backgrounds to some of Lely’s portraits. One incident, inspired by Queen Catharine’s wish to go to a fair incognito, has overtones of another country-minded Queen, Marie Antoinette. Catharine set off for the fair on the back of a cart-horse ridden by a courtier, in what she fondly imagined to be true country style. Unfortunately, both Queen and courtiers, including Frances, now Duchess of Richmond, and the Duchess of Buckingham, ‘had all over-done it in their disguise’. In their red petticoats and waistcoats, they looked more like ‘Antiques than Country folk’. Catharine continued for a while innocently to enjoy herself. At a booth she bought a pair of yellow stockings ‘for her sweetheart’. But of course, quite apart from her ‘antique’ clothes, her heavy foreign accent – what a witness unkindly called her ‘gibberish’ – could not help drawing attention. Soon a crowd gathered to gape at these strange birds in their even stranger plumage, and eventually mobbed the Queen.³⁶

There was another rather different natural extension to the King’s love of physical exercise – his addiction to garden and park planning. A work on gardening printed in 1670, Le Jardin de Plaisir, by André Mollet, which was dedicated to Charles, suggested with true nationalistic fervour that his good taste in gardens must derive from his French blood. Perhaps there was something in it; although those years of French environment probably played quite as much part as his French heredity in influencing the King. At all events, it was after consulting the French master Le Nôtre that he reafforested Greenwich. Avenues of Spanish chestnuts were planted and over six thousand elms, as well as small coppices of birch, hawthorn, ash and privet, Greenwich today still being remarkable for its luxuriant hawthorn. At Hampton Court the King planted what Evelyn approvingly described as ‘sweet rows of lime trees’. Botany also caught his scientific fancy: a famous picture shows King Charles II, before the façade of Ham House, being shown the first pineapple cultivated in England.

Not every British sovereign has had a genuine love of London. Charles II felt this passion for the city of his birth. St James’s Park was his chef d’œuvre. Here he loved to walk on his fast daily round or ‘saunter’ from the adjacent Palace of Whitehall, accompanied by his dogs: one charming tradition associates this saunter, or morning ‘constitutional’, with the naming of Constitution Hill, which today runs up beside Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park Corner.^fn8 St James’s Park indeed benefited as much from the King’s patronage as Newmarket, although, as with Windsor Castle, the fact has been obscured by its later history (in both cases George IV swept away many of the improvements of Charles II in favour of further improvements of his own: today we see a park ‘anglicized’ by John Nash). The area had originally taken its name from a thirteenth-century hospital for female lepers, called St James in the Fields; in the seventeenth century it came to have more pleasurable connotations. The marshy area was drained. Then Charles completely transformed the layout into something very much in the French manner. Water was an integral part of the vision. Once again influenced by Le Nôtre, he had a formal pattern of ornamental water and avenues designed, which recalled the Versailles of Louis XIV. There was a further foreign influence: from Venice the Doge despatched two gondolas – ‘very rich and fine’ – to ride on the new canal.³⁸

The King’s gesture in throwing open the park to the public was however genuinely English. As were the games which he either introduced or extended in their range. Croquet and bowls, both of which the King enjoyed, were played in the park. For the game variously called pêle-mêle or pall-mall, a form of croquet using a wooden ring suspended above the ground, a fine new mall or alley, nearly fifteen hundred feet long, was laid out on the site of the present-day Mall. It was surfaced with fine cockleshells under the supervision of yet another official on royal pleasure bent – the King’s Cockle-strewer. The King was an expert at the sport: in Waller’s phrase (not too sycophantic, one hopes),

He does but touch the flying ball

And ’tis already more than half the Mall….^fn9

There was also wrestling in the park. Evelyn attended one match, held in the presence of ‘a vast assemblage of Lords and other spectators’; the prize was £1,000, and the ‘Western men’ wrested it from the ‘Northern men’.³⁹

The King’s new rectangular lake (or canal), for all its formality, was another new source of popular pleasure. Although only the King swam in it, winter was different. That of 1662 was one of the harsh seasons common at the time. The Dutch practice of ‘sliding’, as it was known (although we should now call it skating), was quickly introduced. Pepys, much taken with the spectacle of the ‘sliders’, with their skates, in the park, described it as being ‘a very pretty art’, the Duke of York being a particularly skilful slider. Evelyn was equally impressed by the dexterity of the practitioners, who would swoop to a graceful stop exactly in front of the King and Queen.

Summer brought its own delights. It was fashionable to drink warm milk, freshly drawn from the herd of cows placidly grazing in the parks, at a kind of early milk bar provided for the purpose. The women in attendance advertised their wares: ‘A can of milk, ladies, a can of red cow’s milk, sir!’ In adjacent Green Park the King had a ‘snow-house’ and an ‘ice-house’ constructed on the site of the former duelling-ground, in order to ‘cool wines and other drinks for the summer season’; it was another taste he had acquired in France.⁴⁰

Much as he enjoyed catering to his subjects’ tastes – and his own – King Charles’ real excitement within the confines of the park consisted in the various species of bird which he introduced, both in his specially built aviary and on the ‘Duck Island’ in the middle of the lake.⁴¹ It was true that exotic livestock had been seen in St James’s Park before: James I, another connoisseur of wild life, had introduced two young crocodiles as well as duck and pheasants. Charles II was able to make the more picturesque, less predatory addition of a pair of pelicans from Astrakhan, a present from the Russian Ambassador. Evelyn, who was fascinated by the pelican’s appearance, as well as the way it played with fish before devouring them, described it as ‘a fowl between a Stork and a Swan’ and otherwise, more imaginatively, as ‘a Melancholy Water Fowl’. Once again the King’s interest in rare birds is remembered in the name of Birdcage Walk, just beside Buckingham Palace, and Storey’s Gate, called after his aviary keeper.

Less exotic fowl also flourished. A duck decoy was created on the Dutch model – despite the King’s feelings about the Dutch, he was not above introducing those original aspects of their way of life which appealed to him, including yacht-racing and flower cultivation. A chain of pools, fed by a subterranean passage to the Thames at high tide, kept the duck happy, and they bred abundantly; while the household accounts also reveal expenditure on hemp-seed for their delectation. On the site of the present Marlborough House a pheasantry was established.

It is necessary to stress the outdoor character of many of the sports and amusements which marked the reign of Charles II since, in contrast to the so-called debauchery of the Court, they united him with, rather than divided him from, his humbler subjects. It is less necessary to stress his well advertised love of the theatre. It has been mentioned how many of his friends were patrons of playwrights. So, for that matter, were many of his mistresses, including Barbara, Nell Gwynn and Louise. Writers as a whole amused Charles II. He enjoyed the vicarious sport of suggesting subjects to them. We hear of the King walking with Dryden in the Mall and confiding to him the subject for a poem which he would write himself ‘if I was a poet and I think I am poor enough to be one …’. Dryden took the hint, wrote the poem along the lines suggested by the King, and became a little less poor himself as a result.⁴²

When John Crowne was suffering from that familiar complaint, playwright’s block, the King presented him with a ready-made plot to encourage him – in the shape of a Spanish play to adapt. Crowne subsequently scored great success with the result, Sir Courtly Nice or It Cannot Be.^43fn10 To Thomas Otway the King is said to have suggested the character of Antonio (based on that of Shaftesbury) in Venice Preserv’d.

As for attending performances, obviously a man who chose at least two of his best known mistresses from amongst the celebrated actresses of the day had a strong motive to do so. This was, after all, the period in which women first flourished on the public stage. But Charles’ enthusiasm extended beyond merely casing the joint for the latest pretty face. The King would almost as soon see a new play, wrote one wag, as have a new mistress (at times of course he was able to combine the two experiences). It was in keeping with his general desire to cry ‘Hence, loathéd Melancholy’ that he preferred comedy to tragedy. One can imagine that the King felt that he had had enough of tragedies in his own life not to want to see them re-enacted upon the stage as an evening’s entertainment. John Lacy, a comic actor, was a special favourite with the King. Lacy’s fortewas dialect: in 1663, for example, Pepys described his playing of an Irish footman in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee as ‘beyond imagination’. The King commissioned his portrait from Michael Wright and hung it at Windsor Castle in a passage on the way to his withdrawing room (it is still in the royal collection). ‘The greatest pleasure he had from the stage was in comedy,’ wrote Crowne, ‘and he often commanded me to write it.’⁴⁴ One way and another, the King visited the theatre regularly and with pleasure – almost daily, while the Court was in London, in his younger years.

If the allure of the theatre remains constant, its hours have changed considerably. It is interesting to reflect that performances in the Restoration period were held in the early afternoon, taking advantage of the natural light, with the addition of chandeliers over the actors’ heads and footlights (double burners) in front of the stage. They were thus in effect matinées, bywords for respectability today, but the perfect occasion for saucy rendezvous then. The King would dine beforehand and take his place in the royal box – ‘the King’s box’ – at the Dorset Garden Theatre. Heavily adorned with gilt and decorated with the royal arms, a gilded figure of Apollo towered over it. Dryden, criticizing Settle’s play The Empress of Morocco, said that, if Settle convinced him of its absurd message, he would be ‘as great an Apollo as he over the Kinge’s Boxe …’.⁴⁵

Gallants were everywhere, including in the ‘tiring-rooms’ of the actresses. Gentry who preferred it went and sat downstairs amongst the ‘naughty women’, whom, in the words of Mr Pinchwife in The Country Wife, they ‘toused and moused’. Ladies of higher social strata, offering themselves for similar experiences, went masked. But that, as Mr Pinchwife observed, ‘like a covered dish’, gave a man ‘appetite’. Masks or no masks, ‘ogling’ went on without cease, despite the fact that the smell was horrific – a fact generally acknowledged at the time, when the exact recipe for a protective nosegay was discussed with as much seriousness as a cooking recipe today. The King however kept his tousing and mousing for supper after the play.

In contrast to the pit, magnificence was the keynote of what actually transpired on the stage. Indeed, at first sight those heavily bewigged figures, waddling about in their bepadded and bepuffed clothes, would hardly strike us as symbols of libertarianism. For it is important to realize that throughout the Restoration age there was a feeling that a politer – not a bawdier – form of art was being introduced and performed. It is also worth noting that, while the language used on stage was certainly extremely ‘frank’, in Sparkish’s phrase, and sex the theme of many of the plays, the action itself was not overtly sexual.

The first plays put on after the Restoration tended to be revivals, Beaumont and Fletcher being especially popular. Then there was a tiresome wave of plays whose subject-matter was intended as a kind of loyal rebuttal of the recent Protectoral regime: a typical title was The Usurper. After that the great orchard of Restoration drama was planted, and began to flower with all its multitudinous fruit-trees. But some of the old plays, notably a coarse piece called Hamlet, caused disgust to ‘this refined age’, whose elegant taste had been formed by the King’s long absence abroad. They were often performed in bastard or adapted versions.

Shakespeare’s language continued to be criticized for its (unnecessary) bawdiness throughout the Restoration period, while those very plays were being freely performed which we today consider almost synonymous with bawdiness, whatever their other merits. About 1680 Nicholas Clément, the French royal librarian, made a note in his catalogue on the subject, in which he expressed the opinion that, although the playwright’s thoughts were natural, his words ingeniously chosen, and he showed ‘a somewhat fine imagination’, nevertheless ‘these happy qualities’ were obscured by ‘the dirt’ Shakespeare persisted in introducing into his plays.⁴⁶

As the theatres proliferated, so did the theatrical companies. The King’s first troop had been formed a year after his own birth – ‘Prince Charles’ Players’. Only three months after the Restoration he issued patents to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant to form two licensed theatre companies – the King’s Players and the Duke’s Players respectively. It was a speedy return to normal after the long interval in which Puritan forces had waged war on the theatre as an immoral influence (although the new-fangled opera had crept in under their guard). The King’s Players eventually came to rest at the new Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in May 1663; the Duke’s Players’ best-known theatre was at Dorset Garden, designed by Wren, which opened in 1671. In 1682 the two licensed companies, under the sons of Killigrew and Davenant respectively, amalgamated and inhabited the Dorset Garden Theatre. As a sign of the way things were going, the Duke of Monmouth’s Servants were licensed in 1669, and the Duchess of Portsmouth’s (Louise de Kéroüalle) Servants licensed in about 1673. In 1671 King Charles was keeping eleven ‘Women Comedians’ and sixteen Men, who were allowed ‘several’ yards of scarlet cloth and crimson velvet every second year; Queen Catharine also had her Comedians.⁴⁷

This is not the place for a history of the Restoration theatre. Suffice it to note that King Charles II, in his genuine passion for the art, was once again united with rather than divided from his subjects. The gentry – and the orange-girls – who saw him at ease at the play did not love him the less for sharing in their own pleasures. As for the advancement of at least one former orange-girl – Nell Gwynn – that, like the story of Cinderella or the boss who marries the secretary, gave encouragement to all the rest.

Lord Halifax, summing up the character of King Charles II, presented him as not altogether a common type of man. The age over which Charles II presided was not altogether a common one either. Perhaps it was not quite the golden age of glittering plenty predicted in that eve-of-coronation address of 1661. Yet if the plenty is forgotten, that other phrase, ‘In Good King Charles’ Golden Days’, is still appropriate. John Evelyn, more simply than Halifax, wrote of Charles II as ‘a Prince of many virtues, and many great imperfections’, who brought in ‘a politer way of living’ – even if he turned later to luxury and expense.⁴⁸ A kind of freedom existed in the first decade of the King’s reign, not only for hedonism but also for enquiry and experiment. That freedom took its cue from the free, enquiring and of course hedonistic spirit of the King himself.

1 A fact expressed by Rochester in these lines:

Nor are his high desires above his strength,

His sceptre and his — are of a length.

2 The louche William Chiffinch succeeded his brother Thomas in 1666. But it should be noted that Chiffinch too was a lover of the arts of painting and music – as well as of the arts of love.

3 The repetition of the Christian name is supposed to have led Nell to refer to her lovers as Charles I, II and III.

4 An alternative story has Nell Gwynn threatening to drop the child out of the window of a house just as the King was passing, unless he granted the boy a title. The site of the house varies. The drama of the tale does not.

5 The King Charles breed of spaniel was registered at the formation of the Kennel Club in 1873 and the Cavalier King Charles breed in 1926.

6 There are several versions of it. One of the most plausible involves Oxford. Dr Martin Routh, President of Magdalen College, who died in 1854 in his hundredth year, used to say that, when young, he had known an old lady who as a little girl saw King Charles walking with his spaniels in Oxford. (The author, who lived in Oxford as a child in the 1930s, likes to think she might have known someone old enough to have met Dr Routh.)

7 Today the north part of the site is occupied by the International Stores, and the south-east block is part of a nineteenth-century building called Palace House Mansions; the latter name at least recalls its occupation by Charles II.

8 Although authorities are doubtful that this road was named Constitution Hill as early as the reign of Charles II, the true origin of the name remains mysterious;³⁷ so that one can still speculate happily on the connection with the King’s morning saunter.

9 The recent transformation of the Mall to a pedestrian precinct on Sundays gives it an air of popular recreation again.

10 But Charles himself never saw it, for he died on the first day of rehearsal.