Charles II's Illegitimate Children by Sarah-Beth Watkins

Author:Sarah-Beth Watkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Stuart Era (1603-1714)
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Anne separated from her husband in 1688. We know little of her life with her husband as he destroyed her papers and documents after she left him.

Anne had always been loyal to her father and her uncle, James. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, she received permission from Prince William of Orange (William III) to travel to France. Pepys wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth in December 1688:

The Prince this pleased this day to hold his hand from signing a warrant I had by his order prepared for the Mary yacht’s transporting the Lady Sussex to France, saying that he was likely very suddenly to have occasion of his own to make use of all his yachts & therefore should not let any of them goe abroad on other occasions.9

Although not having the Mary to take her, Anne travelled to the exiled court of King James II in France and became Lady of the Bedchamber to his second wife, Mary of Modena. Due to her husband’s massive debts, he had to sell the estate of Herstmonceaux in 1708 and died in 1715. One author posits that Sussex followed her to France and broke into her lodgings where he ‘put a pistol into his mouth and blew off the top of his head’,10 but this writer has confused Sussex with Lord Teynham, the husband of Anne’s daughter, also called Anne. Our Anne returned to England every now and then and after Sussex’s death she stayed at his residence in Chevening, then Pall Mall in London, and from then on lived with her daughter Anne throughout her marriages to Lord Teynham and, after his death, to Robert Moore.

Four months after Roger Palmer died in 1705, Anne’s mother, Barbara, married Robert ‘Beau’ Feilding, a notorious womaniser, although she did not know he was already married. When she found out she was rightly furious and had him arrested. At his trial for bigamy he was found guilty and it was ordered that he be branded on each palm and sent to a penal colony.

In the court case Feilding vs the Earl of Sussex, which came after the bigamy case, Anne tried to get control of her mother’s finances on behalf of her daughter Barbara but it was judged:

the said five hundred pound[s], the same haveing bin by her said Grandmother, the Dutchesse of Cleveland, [was] given to this [defendant] many yeers into without that that any other matter cause or thing in the [complainants] said bill of complaint conteyned for answore there unto and not of therein by these [defendants] well and sufficiently answered unto confessed avoided traversed or denyed is true all with things there defendants are ready to avow mainseyne and prove as this honourable court shall direct order award and humbly pray to be hence dismissed with their reasonable cost and charges in this behalf most wrongly susteyned.11

Anne had also tried to have the rents due to her mother transferred to her, but this was denied. It seems that whilst Anne

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