sex life of charles II

There were many reasons, Charles II (1660-1685) of Britain was known as the ‘merry monarch’.

To begin with, he was the symbol of Restoration England, following 11 years of unrest and instability that ended with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland when Charles II ascended the throne. Without Charles’ royal patronage there would have been no St. Paul’s Cathedral, Kensington Palace, Chelsea Royal Hospital, or even No. 10 Downing Street.

And at a personal level, Charles was a people’s king; witty, generous, and immensely accessible. He never even once lost touch with the common people or his enormous popularity. Charles II was sporty, handsome, and smart and soon captured the public imagination he reinstated Christmas, makeup, sports, and even theatre.

But having said that, his biggest weakness in life were women, and more than his other achievements Charles is best known today for his prolific love life and the bevy of mistresses he had cultivated since the age of 16. From high-born ladies to lowly milkmaids, he was a compulsive womanizer who loved women, particularly women who are witty both in words and in the bed.

It was not known exactly the number of women Charles bedded in his lifetime but the man knew no sleep as he could call upon a mistress in the afternoon, visit the queen in the evening, bed another mistress in the evening, and finally end the night at a brothel after that. Indeed, his personal motto in life was quite simple. f

There was some substance to the accusations levelled at the king. His mistresses enjoyed cash, property, and honours from their royal lover. Barbara Palmer was made the Countess of Castlemaine (the title partly a poor sop to her cuckolded husband), collected properties and gifts, and spent vast amounts of money at gambling tables in the knowledge that the king would cover her debts. Her great rival, Louise de Kérouaille, was a conduit for dealings between Charles and Louis XIV, who negotiated a secret deal that saw millions of French livres pouring into Charles’s treasury in exchange for political and military cooperation, and the conversion to Catholicism which Charles, ever the pragmatist, only finally made as he lay on his deathbed.

During Charles’s reign, the public sphere was alive with rumour, lewd verses and scurrilous pamphlets. Jordan and Walsh draw heavily on the stories that others told about their king, but their willingness to incorporate the improbable and the apocryphal (even with caveats) alongside matters of fact weakens the reliability of the narrative. The text abounds with prurient speculations, with “it was said”, with gossip and suspicion. Just one example: narrating Barbara Palmer’s furious walkout in 1667, and her subsequent shacking up with Elizabeth, Lady Harvey, they note that “There has been speculation that Barbara and Elizabeth became lovers”, only to admit immediately that “there is no evidence one way or the other”. Rumour was a powerful force in Caroline political culture, but these narrators lean too heavily on dubious sources: too often, there’s more innuendo than insight here.

The King’s Bed paints its subjects in garish colours, leaving little room for the subtleties and nuances of the era. Rakes and bawds and salon hostesses are shown as dragging prudish England kicking and screaming into an age of sexual liberation. The book abounds in simplistic statements that ignore the richness and complexity of early modern thought and society. At one point, the authors state bluntly that “self-development was an alien concept in the 17th century”: this is nonsense, and it’s difficult to see how someone could believe it while writing a biographical study of the period. The authors do make some attempt to do right by the women in Charles’s orbit, but they fail to shift old caricatures – Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, is “the sad little Portuguese”, while Palmer is a “gold-digger”. These stereotypes have a long history, and employing them again dodges the much more interesting challenge of exploring how these women managed reputation, fortune and survival in the poisonous atmosphere of the Stuart court.