Mistresses by Linda Porter

Author:Linda Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Protestant Whore

‘Hard by Pall Mall lives a wench call’d Nell.

King Charles II he kept her.

She hath got a trick to handle his prick,

But never lays hands on his sceptre.’

From Poems on Affairs of State

IT WAS DISINGENUOUS to claim that Nell Gwyn had no interest in politics. The writer of this poem, one of many scurrilous if not downright pornographic verses inspired by the king’s cheerful promiscuity, went on to say that, ‘all matters of state from her soul she does hate’. Yet Nell’s association with Buckingham and the court wits, her rivalry with Louise de Kéroualle, Charles II’s French mistress and, indeed, her own inclinations, at least as far as protecting her children by the king were concerned, made her involvement inevitable.1 But she did not set out to be a political player, it was a by-product of her situation. Nell gave birth to her first son by Charles at the start of the 1670s, a decade that was to be every bit as turbulent as the first ten years of the Restoration.

As Charles contemplated the arrival of yet another illegitimate child, this time by a woman of a startlingly different social class and background from someone like Lady Castlemaine, who had contemptuously described Nell as ‘that pitiful strolling actress’,2 another man might have taken stock of what had been achieved in that first decade of his rule. But who was Charles II in 1670? Even the court wits, whose company Nell Gwyn frequented, did not know. Their attitude towards the king was ambivalent. They were his companions, in drinking, in whoring, yet they could – and did – undermine him in their public utterances and behaviour, just as much as they enjoyed his transitory favour. They, at least, knew his inscrutability. Topical and personal lampoons were widespread in the 1670s, a form of media that predated the vicious artistic caricatures of the eighteenth century. An anonymous writer in 1669 managed to impugn the king’s political grasp and his sexual prowess by using the metaphor of sailing, one of Charles II’s favourite pastimes:

Our ruler hath got the vertigo of state,

The world turns round in his politic pate,

He steers in a sea where his course cannot last,

And bears too much sail for the strength of his mast.3

Charles II shared his thoughts with almost no one except his sister, Minette, who had herself been powerfully affected by the condescension and sense of displacement they experienced as a result of the Civil Wars. The king disliked mulling over things in ministerial meetings, nor did he wish to revisit his past. It was only later in the reign that he carefully crafted his version of the escape from Worcester and then he put a spin on the experience of defeat which modern communicators would admire. Though much of his attitude – his instinctive dissimulation, his mistrust of political advisers, his liking for display at a safe distance from his subjects – could be ascribed to his experiences as a prince and king in exile, as a monarch he did not like to acknowledge failure.

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