Physically, Nell was tiny, with, it was said, the littlest foot in England as well as perfect legs. The King, who had a penchant for good legs, indulged his passion to the extent of paying for some of her theatrical costumes, including some ‘Rhinegraves’ – shirt, wide, divided skirts, guaranteed to fly up provocatively as the wearer danced. Nell certainly did not have the classical looks admired at the time: her nose turned up, unlike the aquiline noses of the conventional Stuart beauties. But everything about her was charmingly rounded, including her plump cheeks, where two dimples appeared when she smiled. As for her full lower lip, it aroused this tribute from a contemporary admirer: ‘An out-mouth that makes mine water at it.’15 It was no wonder that the King, at the height of his desire, paid frequent visits to Lely’s studio, where he was painting Nelly naked.
Like Charles himself, Nell had natural wit, although hers was the wit nurtured in Madam Gwynn’s bawdy-house rather than the courts of Europe. Her surviving letters, dictated to others as they may be, show a sparkle nonetheless. Evelyn describes her taking part in some jolly backchat over her garden wall with the King, out on one of his saunters. On another occasion she told Charles smartly how to deal with his finances: ‘Send the French into France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your codpiece.’16 Nell’s rivalry with Louise de Kéroüalle, who prided herself on coming of a good French family, was enlivened when Louise went into mourning for the death of some professedly grand relation; Nell proceeded to dress herself in mourning for the Great Cham of Tartary. And Nell is of course famous for her riposte, at the time of the Popish Plot, to the angry crowd who mistook her for the Catholic Louise. Poking her head out of her carriage, Nell cried, ‘Good people, this is the Protestant whore!’
But if she justified her reputation in one respect as ‘pretty witty Nell’ or ‘Mrs Nelly the impudent comedian’, as Pepys called her, Nell Gwynn was in other ways not quite the golden-hearted prostitute of popular imagination. Or rather, she may have had a heart of gold, but she also liked the stuff for its own sake. The records show that, like all Charles’ mistresses, she was extremely mercenary and demanding. By the end of 1674 she had acquired at least eight servants, a French coach needing six horses, satin window curtains, sky-blue shoes, other shoes of silver, green, gold and scarlet, all as befitted the grand lady she sought to be. Nell also coveted some kind of rank, to acknowledge her position. It seemed odious and unfair to her that she should not be rewarded on the same handsome scale as the other ladies, simply because she was an actress – considering she performed the same services. In 1675, for example, about the time that Madame de Sévigné at least believed that Charles was dividing his favours equally between the two, Nell received £1,000 from the Secret Service account, but Louise received £2,000 in the same period.17
Nell’s mockery of Louise, her insistence that she, Nell, was not ashamed of her profession, while Louise gave herself unjustified airs, begins to have a slightly sour note as the seventies wear on. ‘As for me, it’s my trade, I don’t set myself up as anything better!’ cried Nell. And she lifted up her petticoats to Courtin, the French Ambassador, to emphasize how magnificent – and how clean – they were, after boasting that the King slept with her constantly in preference to Louise.18 One feels that the lady – if one may so call her – protests her own frankness about her profession slightly too much.
And the sad truth was that for all her loud complaints Nell never did carry her democratic point of equality with the other favourites. It was Burnet who put it most cruelly: Nell was not treated with the decencies of a mistress, but rather with the lewdness of a prostitute.19 It is said that she secured the vacant Burford title for her surviving son Charles by calling him ‘You little bastard!’ in front of the King, and then blandly enquiring how else she should address him, since he had no other name.fn4 Just as Nell was about to be created Countess of Greenwich – the other ‘ladies’ were all made Duchesses – the King died. To commentators, up to the King’s last hours, she remained ‘Nelly’, where Louise was ‘Portsmouth’ and Barbara ‘Cleveland’. And thus she has gone down to history.
It is sometimes overlooked that the private tastes of Charles II ran as much to conventional as to unconventional sports. Viewing his obsession with physical exercise of all sorts, including tennis, swimming, walking and riding, it is tempting to suggest that his legendary ‘amorous complexion’ was merely an extension of this natural bent. He once referred to his daily tennis game, to Clarendon, as his ‘usual physic’; perhaps making love came into the same category. The Wardrobe accounts certainly provide as ample expression of his interest in tennis – real tennis as we should term it, played in an indoor court – as in women, ornamental beds and rich carriages for mistresses jostling there with the day-beds, linen, towels, curtains and so forth needed for the royal tennis-courts.
The tennis ‘sheets’ (that is, towels) were specially made by Dorothy Chiffinch (wife of the respectable Thomas, not the disreputable William), a lady so accustomed to looking after the King’s linen that she had done so as long ago as that disastrous expedition to Scotland in 1649. These ‘sheets’ cost ten shillings a pair. One day-bed on which the King could recline after a hard game cost £38.20 The Hampton Court establishment in general cost about £200 a year to run, including not only the quilted nets, but also the hire of boatmen to take the King up-river to his sport. The renovation of the court there had been considered one of the prime needs at the Restoration. In 1662 a new court was built at Whitehall on the Hampton Court model, and a further one at Windsor, for which nets, cords and lines had to be provided.
Earlier royalties had enjoyed the game of tennis:21 Henry VIII had been an aficionado. It was also very much part of the Stuart family tradition: Charles I had played, and so did his nephew Rupert. In exile, Harry Duke of Gloucester had become so expert that he was rumoured to be contemplating earning a living at the game when times were hard.
Tennis, as practised by Charles II, satisfied the same kind of need in his life as squash might satisfy in the life of a busy, would-be fit man today. It was Charles’ custom to play early in the morning, six a.m. being a favourite time. And he played on into his fifties, challenging much younger men, like John Churchill. He also derived considerable satisfaction from the sauna-like qualities of a game played very fast on wood in an indoor court: he once weighed himself before and after playing and found that he had lost four-and-a-half-pounds.
Charles II also adored swimming. As Richard Penderel had discovered to his advantage after Worcester, Charles was an exceptionally strong and fearless swimmer. On occasion he was found plunging happily into the freezing waters of the Thames, while his courtiers shivered on the bank. His swimming too was apt to take place early in the morning. He would rise at five, go boating and swim, often with his brother James at Battersea, Putney or Five Elms.
The life of the Thames, river life in general, appealed to him: he was an enthusiastic fisherman. (One of Rochester’s more printable nicknames for his sovereign was Flatfoot the Gudgeon-taker – Flatfoot being a horse at Newmarket.) It was a taste Queen Catharine – tactfully – came to share. We hear of the King getting up at five a.m. to join her at Hampton Court to go fishing, ‘a recreation in which she takes much pleasure’. The King also spent much time on the Thames at Datchet when he was in residence at Windsor. There the royal cormorant-keeper received a special allowance in the household accounts. As a result, Henry Sidney complained in his diary of 1679 that the King at Windsor did nothing all day but fish. The following year the King’s serious illness was attributed to him going fishing in the kind of weather ‘when a dog would not be abroad’.22
Fishing at least was a sedentary occupation, one of the few that the King practised. In general, his extreme physical restlessness was an attribute to which all contemporary observers drew attention. His famous walking, for example, went on at a horrendous pace. The courtiers panted to keep up with him. When Prince George of Denmark was brought before the King as t
he putative spouse of his niece Princess Anne of York, Charles advised him merrily on his future course of action at the English Court: ‘Walk with me, hunt with my brother and do justice to my niece.’ Leaving aside the second and third of these precepts it is doubtful that the stolid Prince was up to carrying out the first.
At least this love of walking dovetailed with the King’s passion for dogs. Wherever he went he moved with a little train of spaniels scampering and barking – or yapping as their detractors had it. He did not actually introduce his favourite breed of spaniel, whose particular appearance can best be gauged from the contemporary portraits, to England. Some form of these engaging dogs had in fact been known here, petted by royalty, for at least a hundred years. Mary Tudor, Queen Elizabeth, Charles I, and later Louis XIV, Prince Rupert and Madame are amongst those known to have enjoyed these ‘comforters’. But such was King Charles’ enthusiasm for them that they have become identified with his name.fn5 As a result a tradition has arisen that a law was passed in his time giving these dogs free travel anywhere within the realm; it is, alas, unsubstantiated.23
Trifling with his spaniels was Charles’ habitual way of whiling away the time during government business: hence that charming link-with-history anecdote which involves a very old man remembering as a very young boy seeing the King playing with his dogs in the Palace of Whitehall.fn6 The royal pets, in the opinion of courtiers, were better outside than in. Obviously the King’s commitments would not allow him to cope with their exercise single-handed. Dog-walkers were essential, and well rewarded. In 1662 George Russell, serjeant of hawks, was paid twenty pence a day for taking out the King’s spaniels: he also obtained £7 a year for a suitable livery.24
Pepys had waxed sentimental over the spectacle of the King’s dogs misbehaving themselves on the yacht bearing Charles to his Restoration. Evelyn was more caustic on the subject. Sumptuous cushions were ordered for them, according to the royal accounts. But the undisciplined spaniels would creep into the royal bed-chamber and even the royal bed; here the bitches whelped and suckled their young. A loyal gentleman, being bitten, exclaimed: ‘God bless your Majesty! but God damn your dogs!’25 King Charles’ own affection for his pets remained sublimely above these annoyances: they could do no wrong.
Horses had of course been an early love which the presence of an equestrian expert as his tutor only encouraged. By the age of ten Charles had been riding ‘leaping horses’, often controlling those who had managed to throw more experienced horsemen. His subsequent prowess was of infinite satisfaction to Newcastle (created a Duke after the Restoration). He wrote: ‘No man makes a horse go better than I have seen some go under His Majesty the first time ever he came upon their backs, which is the quintessence of the art.’26 The household bills include details of bits with silver and gilt bosses, hunting saddles of coloured velvet, crimson silk reins for the new travelling coach. At the royal mews at one time there were forty-three coursers, stallions and colts, sixty hunters, numerous grooms and a gentleman saddler. In 1668 horses, including not only these but also coach horses, chariot horses, rack horses and stool horses, were costing the King over £1,000 a year in hay, and over £700 in straw. In 1680 the King’s serjeant farrier, Andrew Snape (whose family had been farriers to the Crown for two hundred years), wrote a book on Anatomy of an Horse. It was appropriate that he should dedicate it to his royal master.27
Charles II grew up with a taste for hunting, including deer, stag and otter (fox hunting in general belongs to a later period, when the shortage of deer could no longer be remedied). This was once again part of the Stuart family tradition. Even his otherwise unathletic grandfather, James I, had such a mania for the chase that his subjects complained of neglect on that score: similarly Charles II used the fact that he had got into ‘such a vein of hunting’ as an excuse for lagging behind in his correspondence with Madame.28
At the Restoration the parks and forests had to be filled again with deer, poached unmercifully throughout the Commonwealth period. Thus the New Forest and Sherwood Forest were restocked. The King’s House at Lyndhurst in Hampshire, built by Charles I in 1635 (now offices for the Forestry Commission), was used as a hunting lodge for the New Forest. Charles II spent £4,000 enlarging it and building new stables. An edict of 1662 concerning Sherwood Forest forbade anyone there to kill a deer without a warrant from the King, unless Charles himself or the Master of the Buckhounds was actually present.29 The Duke of Oldenburg sent over a freight of stags from the Continent to help with its replenishment. The King’s deer were kept in Windsor Forest, Waltham Forest, Enfield Chase and Hunsdon Park. Richmond Park, once royal property, had been confiscated during the Commonwealth. It was typical of the King’s tact that he consented to receive it back from the Corporation of London, who had acquired it ‘not of restoration but of a free gift’.30
One Simon Smith petitioned at the Restoration to become Master of the Otter Hounds. He had actually hoped to become Master of the Tennis Play, and, with this in mind, he had not only taken the precaution of marrying the widow of the previous Master, but had also improved a court at his own expense.31 This new petition acknowledged the link which joined all the King’s pleasures: they provided useful remunerative posts for loyal subjects. The Master of the Privy Buckhounds, in charge of organizing one branch of venery for the King, had an average of thirty-four servants beneath him.
Yet as the King grew older, the enthusiasm for hunting gave way to a passionate involvement in racing: it was the Duke of York who was left as the chief upholder of hunting in the royal family, as Charles’ teasing remark to George of Denmark indicates. Charles II concentrated on what has become known appropriately enough as the Sport of Kings. The value of his patronage to British racing can hardly be over-estimated: at the beginning of his reign, race meetings were still suffering from the blight put upon them during the Protectorate, when they were banned as being opportunities for the seditious to meet (the first meeting of the monarchist Western Association had actually taken place at Salisbury races). By 1685 racing was thoroughly established as an integral part of British social and sporting life.
The King probably first went racing at Epsom Downs in 1661: but it was Newmarket in particular which owed so much to his prolonged personal patronage.32 The Duke of Tuscany, who paid the town a visit, drew attention to ‘the almost level territory which lies in every direction around it’ and commented, ‘It has, in the present day, been brought into repute by the king….’ This was true. The royal stables there were referred to as ‘ruinous’ in 1661. John Baypole, Surveyor of the Royal Stables, was granted £800 for immediate work, and though restoration proceeded slowly, since the money, in its usual fashion, trickled through slower than had been anticipated, enough was found to breed there twelve choice horses a year. The King also came to maintain four jockeys-in-ordinary.
There were races at Newmarket by March 1663. In 1666 Charles II paid his first visit to the spring meeting; thereafter he went two or three times a year for visits lasting several weeks. Although tents and pavilions formed part of the royal baggage, the King himself stayed at Audley End with the Earl of Suffolk, and used the Earl of Thomond’s town residence. Gradually the King found Audley End so convenient for his racing life that in 1669 he bought it for £50,000. His enthusiasm continued to grow: in March that year he left London before three a.m. in order to reach Newmarket in good time, only to be rewarded – or punished – for his early rise by having his coach overturn at King’s Gate, Holborn. ‘The King all dirty but no hurt,’ wrote Pepys philosophically.33
There was an acute lack of money at the time (this was the period of so-called retrenchment) and the price of Audley End was never paid in full. In any case, £10,000 had to be spent on it straight away for essential improvements. Buildings inside Newmarket also began to be made more ‘commodious’, in the Duke of Tuscany’s phrase, as the visits of the noblesse proliferated. The King himself decided to build a palace in the town and commissioned Wren to draw up plans, the old pal
ace having been knocked down under the Commonwealth.fn7 Evelyn however found it a very odd sort of palace, which lay ‘in a dirty street … without any court or avenue’. And even Charles had some complaints about the low ceilings of Wren’s rooms. Wren, who was a short man, assured the King that they were quite high enough.
‘Aye, Sir Christopher,’ replied the King, squatting down from his great height, ‘I think they are….’34
The King’s involvement in racing embraced every aspect of this rich and many-sided sport, including, on occasion, dining with the jockeys. He instituted four-mile heats at twelve stone for a Plate ‘for ever’– the precursor of all the subsequent royal Plate races at Newmarket. The idea of these heats over such a long distance – by modern standards – was to develop the breeding of ‘big stout horses’. What was more, the Plate race had something generally lacking in races at the time, a set of formal rules. Otherwise informality was so great that the King was sometimes used as an adjudicator. On one famous occasion, in April 1682, he was called in to decide the rights and wrongs of a race between Sir Robert Kerr’s horse and a gelding belonging to Sir Robert Geeres.
The King would get up early to watch the training gallops, either installed in his ‘Chair’, a small pavilion on top of the hill, or riding on his own hack. His overflowing energy prevented him from being a mere spectator whenever there was an alternative. The Duke of Tuscany described how the King would watch the races on horseback with his friends, riding parallel with the runners as they approached the finish, until the roll of drums and the blare of trumpets signalled the winner. Finally he rode in a number of races himself. In 1671 he rode the winner of the Plate – ‘a flagon of £32 price’ – beating, amongst others, the Duke of Monmouth. In 1675, when he was in his mid-forties, the King rode in three heats, a course and the Plate, all being ‘hard and near run races’; he won the Plate by what Sir Robert Kerr assured a correspondent was sheer ‘good horsemanship’.35