turn love,
And I prythee, love, turn to me,
For thou art the man that I long for,
And alack what remedy.
She performed this so charmingly before the King, wrote the prompter John Downes, ‘that not long after, it Rais’d her from her Bed on the Cold Ground, to a Bed Royal’. 11
In the autumn of 1667, Buckingham had been dangling both young actresses before Charles, having decided, said Burnet, that ‘a gayety of humour would take much with the king’. 12 Both girls were guided secretly up the Whitehall back-stairs, but Nell ruined her chances of becoming a royal mistress by asking for £500 a year. Instead Charles took Moll. One of the satirists’ favourite stories was that Nell tried to put Charles off Moll Davis by dosing her, when she was about to dine with the King, with a drastic purgative called jalap , made from the pounded root of a Surinam herb and given to her by her friend Aphra Behn. If so, it was not effective, or at least not in the way she planned. In early 1668 it was confidently asserted that Charles had taken a house for Moll in Suffolk Street and bought her a ring worth £600, more than Nell had asked as an annual fee.
Oblique comments were made about Charles’s affairs in the theatre itself. In February 1668 Robert Howard’s dark new play, The Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma , featured a disgraced favourite – an implied attack on Clarendon – who tried to prostitute his daughter to the King of Spain. (Nell played Maria, the daughter whose integrity foiled her father’s dastardly plans.) Pepys sat nervously in the pit. Seeing that the play ‘was designed to reproach our King with his mistresses’, he wrote, ‘I was troubled for it, and expected it should be interrupted; but it ended all well, which salved all.’ 13 In public at least, Charles took no notice.
Moll Davis
Shortly afterwards, perhaps hoping to compete with Moll, Barbara Castlemaine herself went on the stage, taking a starring role in a glittering court performance of Corneille’s Horace. The translation was by the Welsh prodigy Katharine Phillips, ‘the matchless Orinda’, another exceptional woman, a friend of the Ormonds and Boyles and the poet of friendship and devotion between women. Katharine had died of smallpox in 1664, aged thirty-two, and her translation of Corneille was published after her death. The play was a success, with magnificent costumes and superb dancing, but Barbara should have known that she could never match an actress on the stage. This spring she was parading with the actor Charles Hart, as if tossing her head at the king for taking an actress lover. But Charles could not really care. After the apprentice riots and The Poor Whore’s Petition , she had begun to seem coarse. ‘Paint Castlemaine in colours that are bold’, wrote Marvell, ‘Her, not her picture, for she now grows old.’ Even devoted admirers found she had lost some of her glamour. In early May 1668 Pepys watched her at the theatre, seated in the balcony with several great ladies. Not caring who was watching, she called to one of her women and borrowed a patch off her face ‘and put it into her mouth, and wetted it and so clapped it upon her own by the side of her mouth, I suppose she feeling a pimple rising there’. 14
Less than a week later, Pepys heard that Barbara was to leave Whitehall. Charles settled a pension on her of £4,700, paid out of Post Office profits through her uncles, Viscount Grandison and Colonel Villiers. Her new home was Berkshire House, for which Charles borrowed £4,000 from the ever-obliging Edward Backwell. Ironically this was the very house where Clarendon had taken refuge after the Fire, on the other side of the Park from Whitehall, but directly across the road from St James’s Palace, the home of the Yorks, who seemed to have forgiven her for her scheming against Clarendon and were becoming her closest friends. Her two eldest children, Anne and Charles, now aged seven and six, were
And I prythee, love, turn to me,
For thou art the man that I long for,
And alack what remedy.
She performed this so charmingly before the King, wrote the prompter John Downes, ‘that not long after, it Rais’d her from her Bed on the Cold Ground, to a Bed Royal’. 11
In the autumn of 1667, Buckingham had been dangling both young actresses before Charles, having decided, said Burnet, that ‘a gayety of humour would take much with the king’. 12 Both girls were guided secretly up the Whitehall back-stairs, but Nell ruined her chances of becoming a royal mistress by asking for £500 a year. Instead Charles took Moll. One of the satirists’ favourite stories was that Nell tried to put Charles off Moll Davis by dosing her, when she was about to dine with the King, with a drastic purgative called jalap , made from the pounded root of a Surinam herb and given to her by her friend Aphra Behn. If so, it was not effective, or at least not in the way she planned. In early 1668 it was confidently asserted that Charles had taken a house for Moll in Suffolk Street and bought her a ring worth £600, more than Nell had asked as an annual fee.
Oblique comments were made about Charles’s affairs in the theatre itself. In February 1668 Robert Howard’s dark new play, The Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma , featured a disgraced favourite – an implied attack on Clarendon – who tried to prostitute his daughter to the King of Spain. (Nell played Maria, the daughter whose integrity foiled her father’s dastardly plans.) Pepys sat nervously in the pit. Seeing that the play ‘was designed to reproach our King with his mistresses’, he wrote, ‘I was troubled for it, and expected it should be interrupted; but it ended all well, which salved all.’ 13 In public at least, Charles took no notice.
Moll Davis
Shortly afterwards, perhaps hoping to compete with Moll, Barbara Castlemaine herself went on the stage, taking a starring role in a glittering court performance of Corneille’s Horace. The translation was by the Welsh prodigy Katharine Phillips, ‘the matchless Orinda’, another exceptional woman, a friend of the Ormonds and Boyles and the poet of friendship and devotion between women. Katharine had died of smallpox in 1664, aged thirty-two, and her translation of Corneille was published after her death. The play was a success, with magnificent costumes and superb dancing, but Barbara should have known that she could never match an actress on the stage. This spring she was parading with the actor Charles Hart, as if tossing her head at the king for taking an actress lover. But Charles could not really care. After the apprentice riots and The Poor Whore’s Petition , she had begun to seem coarse. ‘Paint Castlemaine in colours that are bold’, wrote Marvell, ‘Her, not her picture, for she now grows old.’ Even devoted admirers found she had lost some of her glamour. In early May 1668 Pepys watched her at the theatre, seated in the balcony with several great ladies. Not caring who was watching, she called to one of her women and borrowed a patch off her face ‘and put it into her mouth, and wetted it and so clapped it upon her own by the side of her mouth, I suppose she feeling a pimple rising there’. 14
Less than a week later, Pepys heard that Barbara was to leave Whitehall. Charles settled a pension on her of £4,700, paid out of Post Office profits through her uncles, Viscount Grandison and Colonel Villiers. Her new home was Berkshire House, for which Charles borrowed £4,000 from the ever-obliging Edward Backwell. Ironically this was the very house where Clarendon had taken refuge after the Fire, on the other side of the Park from Whitehall, but directly across the road from St James’s Palace, the home of the Yorks, who seemed to have forgiven her for her scheming against Clarendon and were becoming her closest friends. Her two eldest children, Anne and Charles, now aged seven and six, were
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