Barbara

BARBARA PALMER, MISTRESS OF KING CHARLES II

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Barbara was an only child, born into an influential English noble family, the Villiers.

Her father died in the first English Civil War, fighting for the royalists.

After the defeat of Charles I and the royalist cause, the Villiers family was left impoverished.

Barbara’s mother married a cousin of her late husband, but the Villiers family was ruined by the victory of the Parliamentarians and Commonwealth rule in England.

By all accounts, Barbara was an outstanding beauty, with long dark hair, deep blue eyes and sensuous features.

But despite her renowned good looks and noble birth, the Villiers family’s lack of fortune, meant that she was not considered a good match for marriage, and she was rejected by several potential husbands.

Eventually, in 1659, she was married off to Roger Palmer, who came from a lower-ranking family than the Villiers, but which was equally as royalist and devoted to the Stuart monarchy.

However, Palmer’s family were not happy with the match.

Barbara’s flirtatious behaviour, beauty, and sexual promiscuity were well known - she had already had a scandalous affair with the Earl of Chesterfield, at the age of fifteen!

Palmer was quiet, studious and a devout Catholic.

His father allegedly remarked, that Barbara would make Palmer one of the most miserable men in the world!

He may have been right…

Later in 1659, after the Protectorate had been dissolved, and Charles had been proclaimed King of England, the Palmers set sail for the Netherlands, as part of the entourage that were to collect Charles and take him back to England for his coronation.

Although it is not clear exactly when the affair between Charles and Barbara began, this is certainly when they would have first met.

Within a few weeks of being back in England, rumour started to spread of the relationship between Charles II, and Mrs Barbara Palmer.

By the summer of 1660, the Palmers had moved to a house on Kings Street, opposite Whitehall Palace.

Samuel Pepys, walking past the house on the evening of 13th July, stopped to listen to the music he heard coming from the house.

He later wrote, that he knew who was being entertained inside:

“the King and Dukes were there, with Madame Palmer”.

What Pepys didn’t know, was that Barbara was already mistress to the king… and that she was pregnant with their first child!

In February 1661, after Barbara had been Charles’ mistress for a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Anne.

Although Palmer claimed paternity of the child, Charles II recognised her, as his natural daughter.

Later that year, the king granted Palmer the title of Baron of Limerick and Earl of Castlemaine, for services to the crown.

But everyone at court, knew that the Palmers were being rewarded for Barbara’s services in the king’s bed.

Barbara immediately styled herself as Lady Castlemaine, while her husband, shamed by his wife’s infidelity and the true motives for the granting of the peerage, held off using his new title.

But there was another reason for the issuing of the Palmers’ titles, and for Palmer’s embarrassment.

Barbara, was now openly and unashamedly, the king’s mistress, and was pregnant for a second time.

By now, the Queen-to-be, the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza, was on her way to England.

Many people hoped that Charles’ dalliance with Barbara, was simply the king sowing his final wild oats before his marriage.

But Barbara, who was only just at the beginning of what would be years of influence and power over the king, had other ideas.

Determined to make her position secure and public, she insisted on giving birth at Hampton Court Palace, where the king and his new queen were staying for their honeymoon!

Charles agreed - not a great start to the royal marriage.

Barbara and Charles’ second child – a boy, Charles – was born in 1662.

Although he was officially recorded as Palmer’s son, the king immediately and publicly recognised the baby as his.

This was the last straw for Palmer.

Publicly humiliated, and by now widely known as Europe’s most famous cuckold, he filed for a church separation from Barbara, and left for the continent to travel and study.

Barbara, now feeling free and bolstered by her increasing sway over the king, wanted to secure her place at court even more official.

She persuaded Charles to appoint her to Queen Catherine’s household as Lady of the Bedchamber, one of the most prestigious positions for a woman at court.

The queen had been told about Barbara before she had arrived in England, and her mother warned Catherine to never have her in her presence – clearly Barbara's reputation preceded her!

The queen refused to take Barbara into her household, striking her name from the official documents, and crying and arguing with Charles for weeks about his decision.

But the king, ever keen to make his mistress happy, and perhaps avoid her well-known, furious temper, eventually forced Catherine, through cruelty, isolation, and sending her Portuguese staff away, to accept Barbara into her chambers.

As the years passed, it became increasingly clear that the queen was unable to bear children.

But most humiliatingly for Catherine, Barbara went onto have four more children with the King.

Charles recognised each one, as his own and doted on them all, while the queen, childless and rejected, was sidelined by a mistress.

Barbara held such a strong relationship with Charles, she wasn’t just a ravishing young beauty, but she was fun and feisty, and reported by many, to be excellent company and a generous host.

While this side to her personality may well have existed, she had a somewhat dual nature, much like the king – there was is a reason why she was renowned for being greedy, arrogant, and used every trick in the book to manipulate her royal lover.

Barbara would often embarrass him in front of courtiers, and was a master at deploying her famously terrifying temper, to get her own way.

Often, after arguing with the king, she would storm out of Whitehall in a rage, to stay with family or friends, until Charles went to her to apologise on bended knee, and take her back to court. Once she had been appointed Lady of the Bedchamber, she followed the queen around, tormenting her and flaunting her relationship with Charles.

Despite all of this, her security came from the king’s obsession with her, and regardless of what anyone else thought of her, she was the top dog at court, and made sure that everyone knew it.

Pepys wrote about Barbara’s beauty regularly in his diary.

She was the object of his lust and dreams, and he bought several copies of her portraits, impatiently waiting for their public release.

He always referred her as “My Lady Castlemayne” and for the first few years of the diary, would often write how he admired her, felt sympathy for personal issues she was having, and wished her well.

But after the queen had arrived at court, he became torn between his appreciation of Barbara’s youth, looks, and finery, and his concern about the immorality of the king and court.

Barbara’s relationship and influence with the king, waxed and waned, usually dependant on whether he had set his sights on another woman, such as Nell Gwyn, or Louise de Kérouaille.

Despite accounts of her falling in and out of favour with Charles, she remained a great power at court for over a decade.

More often than not, it was Barbara’s enemies that suffered and fell, from the king’s good graces.

From the start of her career as a royal mistress, Barbara had been showered with gifts, jewels, houses, and was put up in lavish apartments at the palace which were far superior to the queen’s.

Her greediness and obsessive desire for wealth was well known, and she spent much of her ‘personal rule’ securing estates, titles, assets, finery, pensions for herself, and her illegitimate children.

She was notorious for running up enormous gambling debts, which the crown paid off, and often used her connections through the treasury to take money from the privy purse for her own use.

She also managed to secure several annual pensions for life, which began at £1000 in 1667, and rose to around £12,000 by 1674.

Although her relationship with the king began to cool from the 1670’s, when Louise de Kérouaille came on the scene, and replaced Barbara as the king’s favourite, Barbara’s long-term position as royal mistress, and the children that she had by the king, ensured that she still retained her influence with Charles.

She was granted the titles of Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Southampton, and Baroness Nonsuch in 1670 – though this could have been a golden handshake, to mark the end or her “reign”.

In 1672 she gave birth to a daughter, Barbara.

Although Barbara insisted that the child was his, the king and most others didn't believe her, because the king rarely visited Barbara, now.

Even so, later in 1672 all of Barbara's children, were given the surname, FitzRoy, meaning ‘son of king’ to publicly confirm their ‘official’ parentage.

Finally, to confirm their royal connection, they were also granted coats of Arms.

Eventually, recognising her favour with the king and her place at court was weakening, Barbara slowly began to pull away from her previous life as the star of Whitehall.

In 1673 she resigned her post as Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Catherine.

In 1675, the final blow came, when Barbara's replacement, Louise de Kérouaille’s son was granted a Dukedom, before Barbara’s older sons.

After this, she moved to France, with her three youngest children.

As she left, Charles told her, “Madam, all that I ask of you … is live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.”

But of course, living a quiet life still seemed impossible for the still glamourous Barbara.

Her notoriety, and luxurious lifestyle as a court concubine, were never far behind her, and she continued to have affairs with courtiers and young cads, showering them generously with gifts and money, for their attentions.

In 1682 Barbara returned to England.

With Nell and Louise taking up the king’s time, and their fiery affair behind them, Barbara and Charles’ relationship turned to one of friendship, more than anything else.

Though having been ousted as royal mistress, and no longer regarded with much interest, she certainly wasn’t living quietly.

She had several affairs with young noblemen, and an actor, whose child she may have given birth to at the age of 46.

In 1705 she was coerced into a bigamous marriage with Beau Fielding, who went on to have an affair with her granddaughter ~ who was living under Barbara’s care at the time!

As she aged, she began to sell off many of her properties for cash to pay her debts.

Her last few years were spent at her home in Chiswick Mall, where she passed away on 9th October 1709, aged 68.

In a world where women had little means to command their own lives, or create advancement and achievements for themselves, Barbara had done both.

Her opportunities may have been presented through her relationship with Charles II, but it was she who had carved out her own path, and masterminded her success.

By the time she was thirty, she had secured herself riches, independence, and title - as a Duchess no less - and had succeeded in safeguarding her children’s future.

Whether she was loved or hated, for good or bad, Barbara had impacted the social landscape of the Restoration, puppeteered court politics, and altered the aristocracy in both the seventeenth century, and today.

Her descendants through her illegitimate children, can be traced to today’s royal family.

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Source~WrongSideOfTheBed

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https://ko-fi.com/thetudorintruders

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Barbara Villiers - Sir Peter Lely