Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Scandalous Private Life of Charles II About this episode He had at least 14 known mistresses and a hoard of illegitimate children; Charles II's private life was as politically charged as it was scandalous. He presided over the Restoration court, a world of excess, intrigue, gambling, gossip and a lot of sex. Dan is joined by the host of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, Dr Kate Lister, to explore the salacious side of Restoration England and examine how power, pleasure, and reputation collided at court.
A warning that this episode isn't suitable for children!
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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2:39 Dan Snow? Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. The people of England, Scotland, and Wales, I'm sure collectively breathe a sigh of relief when Charles II returned to London and was restored to the monarchy in 1660. After 11 years of Puritan rule, people had grown pretty sick and weary of living under endless, strict rules. Intense religious observance, bans on, well, lots of things, the joys of life, celebrations, alcohol, the theatre, Christmas. When Charles returned, so did fun. Pubs reopened. Women were allowed to perform onstage for the first time. Literature and art and science flourished.
3:23 Dan Snow? It's no wonder Charles II, who presided over this restoration, earned himself the monarch, the Merry Monarch. He certainly practiced what he preached. His court was notorious for gambling, gossip, and sex. He himself had no less than 14 mistresses over his life, and they're the ones we know about. Many had illegitimate children. So to peek behind the curtain of Charles's salacious sex life, there's only one person I could call, and that is, of course, the wonderful Dr. Kate Lister, historian and host of our sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets. It's a pretty wild one, this one, folks, so maybe don't watch this one with the kids.
4:04 Speaker 04 T minus ten.
4:05 Speaker 05 Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black, white unity till there is first some black unity.
4:13 Speaker 04 Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
4:24 Dan Snow? Kate List, good to have you on the podcast.
4:25 Speaker 06 Hello.
4:26 Dan Snow? How's it going?
4:27 Speaker 06 It's going really good. How are you going?
4:29 Dan Snow? Well, I'm doing really well, partly because we're going to talk about one of the most colourful, is that the right word? Colourful monarchs of...
4:35 Speaker 06 It's a nice historian word for it. Complex?
4:38 Dan Snow? Complex.
4:39 Speaker 06 That's another good historian word. Challenging.
4:42 Dan Snow? All the seas. King of England, Scotland, Charles the Second. But actually, he's quite an interesting guy because he was born Prince the Blood, father Charles the First, remembered the civil war, witnessed the Battle of Edgehill, then became a sort of penniless exile. So quite an interesting story out compared to some of our monarchs.
4:58 Speaker 06 Yes, yes, definitely. I mean, his dad had his head cut off. That would stay with you.
5:04 Dan Snow? Yeah.
5:05 Speaker 06 That would have a few ripples, wouldn't it?
5:07 Dan Snow? He was smuggled out of custody and traipsed around Europe. And having to, it must be, as a young exile prince, it's such a, it's a bit of a trope in this world, isn't it? There are princes wandering around everywhere going, actually, I was kicked off the throne by my uncle or someone. Would you mind putting me back on it? And they must have bumped into quite a lot of them in the Low Countries and France, if you've thought about that in that period.
5:27 Speaker 06 There's just loads of deposed royals just wandering around. But he did spend a good few years wandering. And what can you do in that situation apart from go to other royal courts and go, hello, I'm a royal, could you put me up for a bit, please?
5:42 Dan Snow? And it's fascinating because you're just a pawn. Because when a country wants to sort of up the pressure on England, when it's perhaps even an outright war, you get invited to the court. They're like, yeah, you know, we reckon. Then if the peace treaty, you get thrown out again. You are a pawn.
5:56 Speaker 06 Yep. And that's exactly what he was. And he's just been, he'd been passed around. He doesn't know if he's coming or going. His dad, as his head cut off, can you go back to England? Can you not go back to England? It's just a mess.
6:08 Dan Snow? And also, unfortunately, he's unlucky in his enemies. Oliver Cromwell is one of the most brutal, possibly nastiest, but probably most effective leaders that England's ever had. And he runs a pretty tight ship. It looks like, it does look like the Republic's head to state. And then Oliver Cromwell's son is completely useless and the whole thing collapsed like a deck of cards. So Charles goes from... Pennis exile, so he's back on the throne, 1660, the Stuarts are back, he's on the throne. How do you think that would shape his sort of mindset?
6:36 Speaker 06 I can't even begin to fathom that. I'd like to think of Charles as that it wouldn't have surprised him that he got to be king. I think that he, he would have had a sense about him that this is his, this is his destiny, this is, he should be king, he should be king. But there's no denying that that is a hell of a, a switch in fortunes from just traipsing around Europe to just suddenly, do you want to be king again? And then the weirdest thing happens is the whole parliament, everybody, they just sort of go, well, we'll just ignore the last 18 years. We're just going to pretend that didn't happen. They'll just pick up where we, where we left off.
7:09 Dan Snow? I always think as well that he was clever enough not to pursue vendettas because he must have, there were people around him whose family homes had been burnt, siblings killed, parents reduced to poverty, or will do that. He went out, he said, everyone who has signed my dad's death certificate is going to get it. But apart from that, let's just forgive and forget. And he rules, he's reasonably tolerant, isn't he? He doesn't, he doesn't come back and try and sort of wind the clock back to how it had been in the 60s.
7:36 Speaker 06 No, he does try for religious toleration. He does, I mean, it must have been very weird from his point of view to come back to the throne and know that there are people all around you that definitely, definitely had a hand in your dad being killed and you being chucked out of the country and having to just smile along and play nice. That's a masterclass in diplomacy. I'm not sure I would have been able to do that.
7:59 Dan Snow? Just a reminder in this period, so much of kingship and, and does just come down to, I think maybe it's true to say, personality. You know, his brother James is obviously an absolute idiot, but he clearly had that charm, that charisma, that ability to, well, that political touch.
8:12 Speaker 06 He was clever, he was bright, he was a big patron of the sciences. He was very into science and learning and pushing new horizons and the arts and the theatre. And he must have had something about him, some good banter.
8:28 Dan Snow? And particularly in contrast to what come before, because people talk about the puritanical, you know, the banning of Christmas, the closing of theatres. So we have this idea, don't we, that Charles comes back and there's an explosion of fun and naughtiness. Do we think, is that slightly overdone, the merry monarch? Or could you trace that in the record?
8:45 Speaker 06 I think that that, there is a hefty dollop of that, that's true. I mean, if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it.
8:50 Dan Snow? Yes, we do.
8:51 Speaker 06 Do we? Okay, all right, fine. But if you went and spoke to like a peasant out in the field in, I don't know, rural Sussex somewhere, and were like, the monarchy's been restored, would, would they have had a restoration? I'm not entirely sure. Or would they have just kind of nodded along and gone, right, oh, then you crack on with that. But if you were in court, if you were in the cities, you would have noticed something quite dramatic. For example, he reopened the theatre and he said, women can go on the stage.
9:17 Dan Snow? Right, okay.
9:18 Speaker 06 Which doesn't sound like a big thing today, like, you know, reopening the theatres. But so much of their culture was based in the theatre and the arts, and that was their big social life. And like taverns could open again. And the Puritans had brought in all kinds of rules around like adultery and fornication and lots of these quite oppressive, don't be having any fun kind of rules. And he did sweep all of that away. Now, it doesn't mean that everyone in the country went brilliant, yay, because there were a lot of people that really liked that and wanted more of it, in fact. So you didn't get rid of those beliefs, but you would certainly have noticed a big shift in attitude.
9:57 Dan Snow? Do you think it's true to say that he, was he just constituted like that? Or was it the fact he'd grown up in France, grown up in the Low Countries, there are different rules, different, you know, sexual politics there? Do you think is part of that, the travel that he'd undertaken?
10:09 Speaker 06 He brought a lot of French influences into the court, definitely.
10:14 Dan Snow? Yeah, too many.
10:15 Speaker 06 Too many. He was well cultured, he was well travelled, he was, and he'd spent time in the French court. And so what he saw there, he kind of liked. So he was going to bring back quite a lot of that. He's like the ultimate gap year kid, like coming back with like beads in the hair and, you know, like, oh, when I was in India, speaking to the Maharishi, that's him, but he's on stage and he's on the throne and he can do everything he wants now.
10:39 Dan Snow? And unfortunately, his Maharishi was Louis XIV of France, who he gives Dunkirk back to for no reason. By the way, that's my niche, but extremely heartfelt complaint about Charles II.
10:49 Speaker 06 We've never forgiven him.
10:50 Dan Snow? Never forget, never forgive. The world wars against the Dutch, a lot of it around trade.
10:55 Speaker 06 Yep.
10:56 Dan Snow? Great Fire of London.
10:57 Speaker 06 Great fire of London. Yeah, he was there for that.
11:00 Dan Snow? And he did, he was amazing as well, the king. Yeah, he was there kind of involved in sort of trying to fight the fire and
11:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
11:06 Dan Snow? On the front line, bizarre. And also the year before, I suppose, but there was that terrible outbreak of plague as well, one of the most astonishing outbreaks of plague.
11:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, he wasn't quite so much there trying to fight that in the thick of it. No.
11:16 Dan Snow? He'd have been.
11:17 Speaker 06 That would have been a very, very silly idea. Yes, he did. And he self-isolated quite far away from where the plague was.
11:23 Dan Snow? So the court has this reputation, doesn't it, of being this place of sort of wife swapping and chaos and colour and drama? And that is, given what came before, that that must be true.
11:33 Speaker 06 It is pretty true. I mean, it was probably still going on underneath the Puritans. We know that Cromwell was suspected of having a few mistresses himself, but you just, yes. Ah, hypocrite. But you just kept it a bit quieter. But certainly in the court of Charles the Second, and I emphasise that to say that it didn't mean it was a free for all for absolutely everybody. But in that court, they developed a much more permissive attitude. I mean, you've got people like John Wilmore Earl of Rochester wandering around, who was prodigious for the amount that he could drink and the obscene poetry that he would write and just generally being sure. He wrote a poem about how big King Charles's will he was.
12:14 Dan Snow? Really?
12:14 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah.
12:17 Dan Snow? I guess, as you're saying, that that made me think of what's going on on King's Road in the 1960s. So the rest of the country, like, what do you mean, the 60s? I don't get this. But but in pockets and in part of a elite culture, the 60s, but as we saw in the 1920s and.
12:30 Speaker 06 If you're rich.
12:31 Dan Snow? Yeah.
12:31 Speaker 06 Then you can have a revolution.
12:33 Dan Snow? Yeah.
12:34 Speaker 06 The poor people, not so much. I mean, it would have kind of trickled down. They would have noticed things like not getting arrested for having adult.
12:41 Dan Snow? And there would have been pubs reopening, taverns reopening.
12:44 Speaker 06 Christmas was allowed back. They would have noticed things like that.
12:47 Dan Snow? So you've you've mentioned mistresses. We are going to talk a lot about his mistresses because he was prolific.
12:53 Speaker 06 Yes, he was.
12:54 Dan Snow? And he had lots and lots of children with those mistresses. Isn't it weird? You see Henry the First, it's almost like there's something in there, it's like karma. If you have lots of mistresses and have lots of children, you don't sometimes produce that many legitimate offspring. And Charles the Second and his wife didn't. Did they have a very unhappy marriage? Catherine of Braganza.
13:14 Speaker 06 Did they have an unhappy marriage? It's difficult to get a window into it. I don't know how this woman put up with the things that she did. But what can we say? She didn't have any children, which is bad news if you are a queen in the 17th century. It was a political marriage. It was there to cement relationships between Portugal and between England. But she was quite unpopular with the masses because she was foreign. And obviously being British, anyone who's foreign, we're not pleased with that, quite frankly.
13:43 Dan Snow? She's Catholic.
13:44 Speaker 06 Catholic. So those two big things. And then the third, she didn't have any children. So she wasn't very popular with the Brits, but she herself seemed to be, she was all right. She liked tea parties.
13:57 Dan Snow? The story goes that she introduced tea drinking.
13:59 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:00 Dan Snow? And she did bring definitely Bombay as part of her dowry.
14:04 Speaker 06 But that's a hell of a thing.
14:05 Dan Snow? It's a hell of a thing.
14:06 Speaker 06 Bombay.
14:06 Dan Snow? Bombay. There you go. So Charles the Second, that's a Bombay.
14:10 Speaker 06 I don't know if they had a happy marriage, but one thing that you can say is that Charles could have divorced her. There was a precedent for this. And certainly he was under pressure to divorce her to and find himself a nice fertile Protestant queen. And he would have had quite a lot of backing to do that, but he absolutely refused to do it.
14:28 Dan Snow? He said, I think in later life, she is a good woman and I am not a good man. I think he.
14:32 Speaker 06 That's a fair summation.
14:33 Dan Snow? Yeah, that's very true. And she did have lots of miscarriages, I think. So they were, they gave it a go.
14:39 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah. She had three miscarriages that we know about. And what that woman had to put up with in terms of this guy's other partners and mistresses is absolutely off the charts.
14:52 Dan Snow? Because it would have been, it would have been in your face at court because she was at court and it would have been obvious.
14:55 Speaker 06 It would have been beyond obvious. In fact, one of the things that he did is he made Barbara Villiers, her name was one of his most notorious and powerful mistresses. He made her his wife's lady in waiting. And when Catherine began to quite reasonably went sod off, he really dug his heels in and he sent home all of her retinue from Portugal and really put the pressure on her until she caved and let her husband's mistress be her lady in waiting. So that wasn't too cool, Charles. That was a bit of a dick move, to say the least. That's not nice, is it?
15:28 Dan Snow? You've mentioned one mistress. Let's talk about the rest of them. There's 14, I think, acknowledged. The historians can track down 14 mistresses.
15:33 Speaker 06 What they mean by that are those are the ones that we know we had children with.
15:36 Dan Snow? Oh, okay. Right.
15:38 Speaker 06 That's what we mean by confirmed, as in he acknowledged the children are his.
15:43 Dan Snow? Yes, because I'm often struck by the fact that you read about the king having mistress and always very, well, often quite aristocratic. Charles II, we do know about some others, don't we? But you think to yourself, is the king also forcing himself on members of staff when he goes off on hunting parties as well? I mean, that's so it's kind of, even the word mistress has a certain connotation, doesn't it?
16:01 Speaker 06 It does. We don't know that bit, but I would imagine that that is a low estimate of, I, I think it would be a lot more with, this is including just casual one night stands, flings, like I said, servants, people, any, we just don't know.
16:16 Dan Snow? So what does mistress mean when you hear that being talked about? Does that imply almost, is there, is there a monogam- do you have one mistress after another? Is, is that, is it?
16:25 Speaker 06 No, no. Well, I mean, you might have done.
16:27 Dan Snow? So mistress is a fancy word, or is it, is it something of an institution?
16:30 Speaker 06 It is an institution if you're French. The French did this properly. They had official court mistress, whose official job it was to be the mistress of the king. And that was known as the matrice en titre. The first official mistress was Agnes Sorrel in the 1400s. The English and everyone else attempted to emulate this, but they never made it an official position. So you get this weird no man's land of what we're doing. But the French were quite clear. You get, mistress is the mistress. But if you cheat on the person you're already cheating on your wife with, that was considered quite bad form.
17:03 Dan Snow? Really?
17:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, that was like a little bit.
17:05 Dan Snow? So it's one after the other?
17:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, like that's your official mistress. That's what you get.
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20:43 Dan Snow? It's 2015. Madame de Pompadour was his mistress. But then, in order that there wouldn't be a high-status mistress to replace her, she put sort of
20:51 Speaker 06 Yep.
20:51 Dan Snow? low-born
20:53 Speaker 06 Fling them in.
20:53 Dan Snow? common folk into his bed, so that he wouldn't get rid of her.
20:56 Speaker 06 Yeah, but they don't count because they're just flings. Like, she's got the official title. In this country, and certainly what Charles was doing, uh, no, that isn't what
21:07 Dan Snow? So it was a bit anarchic.
21:08 Speaker 06 It was, yeah, it was very anarchic. What you had was favorites, which is quite ill-defined. And if you think back, or if anyone thinks back about their colorful dating past, that you have people that you are completely infatuated with and people that you really fancy, and then it might wane. And then there are people that you look back on and you think, what was I thinking? I was, what on earth? How, how could I possibly have liked that person?
21:29 Dan Snow? Love will do that to you.
21:30 Speaker 06 But that's how precarious this all is. So these women who are his mistresses and that could gain enormous amounts of power and influence, it's all ride or die on the king's affections. It's not an official position at court.
21:43 Dan Snow? And you mentioned parent influence, let's dig into that. How does that work? If their, their brothers, their cousins have got a kind of property dispute or something, a petition they want to put in front of the king, they can just slide that to the top of his entry?
21:53 Speaker 06 They could do that. I mean, they've got what is often called soft power. So they wouldn't have been allowed on any councils, they wouldn't have been allowed on any war councils. But they spend time with the king, they're very intimate with the king, they can talk to him about the war councils. They might be influencing policy and events in the way that your partner can do. When you go home and talk about things with your partner, with your lover, you know, get some advice and some feedback. They can be very powerful like that.
22:21 Dan Snow? He really seems to acknowledge his children by these mistresses.
22:24 Speaker 06 Yeah, he does.
22:25 Dan Snow? He has a son, James, who he makes Duke of Monmouth with a woman he meets in the Low Countries, I think, who's not an aristocrat.
22:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's Walters.
22:34 Dan Snow? Yeah, Lucy Walters.
22:35 Speaker 06 Lucy Walters, yes.
22:36 Dan Snow? And when Monmouth comes into his life, he's like, I'm thrilled to see him, like, welcome to the family, I'm going to make you a duke, give you the night at the Garter.
22:42 Speaker 06 Yep.
22:43 Dan Snow? And just, I can't work out, does that show him in a good light?
22:46 Speaker 06 It's difficult to say, isn't it? He definitely acknowledged his children and he had so many illegitimate children. He called three of them Charles, four of them Charles and two of them James. That's how many illegitimate children you have. But he definitely recognised them, he gave them titles, he gave them land. Some of them had the last name Beauclerk, some of them had the last name Fitzroy. But he made a really big deal about it, which might have been great for him. But I always think, what was that like for Catherine?
23:13 Dan Snow? Well.
23:13 Speaker 06 Catherine of Beganza, who's there with no babies and he is like falling over himself, surrounded by children with other women.
23:20 Dan Snow? I think Lucy Walter, the mother of James, Duke of Monmouth, he does sort of abandon her. But some of his mistresses, he finds good marriages for, which in those days is what accounts for, you know, a big reward.
23:33 Speaker 06 I, well, it's a tricky one, being the mistress. I mean, what, how do you play this properly? It's all very, very precarious. It can end in a second if the king takes against you. So really the best course of action to you would probably be to get pregnant and get pregnant quite quick. Because then the king has got a tie to you and he should look after this baby. And that's what most of them did.
23:54 Dan Snow? So Barbara Villiers, who's probably one of the most famous mistresses, she ends up, he ends up looking after her.
23:59 Speaker 06 She was mental, by the way.
24:01 Dan Snow? Oh, was she?
24:01 Speaker 06 She was like, the thing about Charles is not only did he like a lot of women and he seems to have liked slightly older women. He seems to have liked crazy women. Like properly, like she was mad. How mad was Barbara Villiers, right? So not only is she married, her husband eventually gives up on this because his wife is clearly having an affair with the king and not trying to hide it at all. And he's like the most famous cuckold in Christendom, so he gives up. But when Charles marries Catherine of Beganza, Barbara was so incensed that she hung her underwear outside of her house as a public display, as a public protest. And then, when the king and his new bride went to Hampton Court for their honeymoon,
24:39 Speaker 06 she went there to have his baby. She insisted on it. So she basically gatecrashed their honeymoon to have his baby. Nuts.
24:49 Dan Snow? You mentioned Charles liking older women. There is a story that Charles, as a teenager, was seduced by his former wet nurse.
24:56 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's not good, is it? That's all getting a bit Freudian. Yeah, that is something that he would say later in life.
25:02 Dan Snow? Tell me about other mistresses.
25:04 Speaker 06 Okay, so there's Barbara Villiers, completely bat crap crazy, notorious for being very greedy and spending money like it's going out of fashion. Uh, lots of erotic pamphlets and satirical things written about her. She was like this great big trollop.
25:17 Dan Snow? So it wasn't just known about in court. This is something people on the streets of London would have known about.
25:21 Speaker 06 Yeah, there was like satirical poems written about them having threesomes together and about Barbara Villiers being a lesbian with these other mistresses. And it just goes on and on and on. In sixteen sixty eight, there was something called the Bawdy House Riots in London, which was where a lot of brothels were attacked and people were dragged down the street and beaten up. It was a horrible thing. But out of that came this satirical work called The Poor Whores Petition, which was supposedly written by the poor whores of London to their sister Barbara Castleman, which she was at that point. Uh, and apparently she was absolutely furious. She was absolutely raging. This document is all like, oh, please take pity on your sisters. On your sister whores. And she was absolutely raging. Um, so she's like fireworks, crazy, mad.
26:04 Speaker 06 Then you've got an opposition to that. You've got, uh, the French aristocrat and Catholic Louise de Carrowell, who was very demure, very delicate, cried a lot. One of his other mistresses, Nalgwen, used to make fun of her, calling her a weeping willow and squintabella. Whenever like Charles would get his wandering eye and go off with someone else, she'd just take to her bed and just cry hysterically. She was also one of his most expensive mistresses. At one point, she was collecting like twenty thousand pounds a year off him, which is about fifty nine million pounds today. I know, it's like, it's so much money.
26:39 Dan Snow? That's extraordinary.
26:40 Speaker 06 Extraordinary.
26:41 Dan Snow? You mentioned Nell Gwynn there, who I'm a big fan of. She was another mistress, and she's not of an aristocratic background.
26:46 Speaker 06 No, she's not. She's my most famous mistress. So Nell does not come from an aristocratic background, not even remotely. She was born in poverty in London, we think, although there's some dispute about it. Her mother might have run a boardy house brothel, or that might have been a story that was spun about her later, we're not sure. Her father, whoever he was, disappeared. Some suggest he might have been in the army, some suggest he might have been in debtors' prison. We just don't know. But she was one of the first actresses on the stage. And she was a fantastic comedy actress as well. And this was the first time women had been on the stage. So she's a real trailblazer. People come from all round to watch her, and she's only about fourteen years old when she's doing this.
27:30 Dan Snow? And she appears in Samuel Pepys's Diaries, doesn't she?
27:33 Speaker 06 Oh, loads of them appear in Samuel Pepys's Diary, the horny old sod that he was. Just, he went and looked at Barbara Castlemine's knickers when she hung them up, and he's just, oh, no.
27:42 Dan Snow? How did Charles meet her?
27:44 Speaker 06 We're not entirely sure about that one, but it's likely they met in sixteen sixty-nine, and he probably came to see her in the theatre. Or at least that's the story that we get told about it. It was probably a little bit more political than that. The mistresses had a huge amount of power, people knew that. So there was some finagling behind the scenes to try and get Charles a new mistress. Because people were very, very upset with Barbara Villiers shrieking and stealing and just being mad. So people were trying to push other mistresses in front of him. Nell was one of those. And apparently, she originally said that she would meet with him and be his mistress for, I think it was like five hundred pounds a year. And they said, no, it's too expensive. So she initially turned it down. And then he took up with another actress called Mole Davis.
28:28 Speaker 06 But Nell has gone down in history because she was so funny, and she was such a firecracker. And she just seems like she was a really. Good laugh. And I think that was really important to Charles. I mean, you've got to think, he's got Louise de Carrowell balling over here. He's got Barbara Villiers waving her knickers around and having babies over here. His poor wife is somewhere having tea, who knows. So it's just absolute bedlam. And in the middle of it, you've got Nell cracking jokes. But I say that, she was also pretty vicious to some of the other mistresses. Mull Davis, the other actress one, she knew that she was going to have a night with Charles. And so she sent her a load of sweets that were laced with laxatives.
29:04 Dan Snow? No way.
29:05 Speaker 06 Nell, really?
29:06 Dan Snow? No.
29:07 Speaker 06 She did. But think about how cutthroat and how vicious this, because they're all stuffed in together. They're all hanging out together. They all sit around playing cards, all knowing that, oh, is it your turn next? No, it's my turn. And it's all so competitive. They have to try and get this man's attention. And she was really, really good at it. And she knew her reputation and she played on it. And she never let people put her down. And she was constantly berated for being this, like, jumped up, working class, like, some real nasty stuff was written about her. But she knew that she was also very popular with the people. There's this story about how she was in her carriage and they were going through London, and people started attacking the carriage. And they thought that it was Louise de Carrowell who was in
29:51 Speaker 06 there. And she leans out and she says, good people pray be quiet, I'm the Protestant whore. So she's like, that's a good line.
29:57 Dan Snow? Not the Catholic one.
29:58 Speaker 06 Not the Catholic one. That's a good line.
30:01 Dan Snow? To us, London is this giant global mega city. London would have been so intimate back then.
30:05 Speaker 06 Yeah. People knew, people, you know, they were the celebrities of their day.
30:10 Dan Snow? So she takes up with him about 1670. He's got 15 years left to run. Are they close through the rest of that? Or does she fall from favour as well?
30:17 Speaker 06 They are pretty close. He buys a house in Pall Mall. They have two children together. There's a story about how Nell, one of the little boys, was in the presence of the king and he was running away. And she went, come here, you little bastard. And the king was really shocked that she would call him that. And then she looks at me and said, well, your majesty has given me no other name by which to call him. And then he gave him a title. Boom. Well done, Nell. Come on.
30:42 Dan Snow? Yeah, that's the remark. So you talk about the Fitzroy's, those, the Dukes of Grafton to this day. So many of our aristocrats still today in Britain are descended from these illegitimate children of Charles II.
30:54 Speaker 06 Yes, an absolute litter of illegitimate children. Um. But once she's got the titles for her children, that's her pretty much secure. He never gave her a title, by the way. So he gave titles out to the other mistresses like they were going out a favour, but he never gave one to Nell, but her children got titles.
31:14 Dan Snow? My grandmother called her, so my Welsh nine, my grandmother called her little corgi Nell after Nell Gwynn. So I always had a soft spot for her.
31:21 Speaker 06 Samuel Peep said, pretty witty Nell.
31:24 Dan Snow? Pretty witty Nell.
31:24 Speaker 06 Pretty witty Nell.
31:25 Dan Snow? It's cool that she obviously fired him up, not just physically, but intellectually.
31:29 Speaker 06 She was really clever, but she never learnt to read. She was a literate throughout her whole life, which when you think that she was an actress on the stage, that she must have been memorising those lines, had them read to her, like, how, how did you do that, Nell? That's impressive. But that is the best rags to riches story. She only made it to thirty seven, though.
31:47 Dan Snow? So she died in the sixteen eighties?
31:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, because it does seem that Charles was riddled with syphilis, as you might expect. He seems to have passed that round like a bag of toffees. That goes round all of his mistresses. Yeah, yeah. Louise de Carrowell takes to her bed again when she gets infected with it and he gives her loads of jewels to say sorry. And there's like a joke going around at court about like, oh, maybe it'd be worth it to, you know,
32:11 Dan Snow? Oh, my goodness.
32:11 Speaker 06 Give me a dose for ten thousand pounds, Charles. But it's a horrible, horrible illness and it's probably what contributes to Nell's death, certainly, because at thirty seven, she has a series of strokes. We think that they're strokes. She suddenly becomes paralysed and that's probably a result of what syphilis has done to her body.
32:30 Dan Snow? Charles doesn't do badly as far as that period, fifty four ish, sixteen eighty five?
32:35 Speaker 06 Not a nice death, though.
32:36 Dan Snow? Is it not?
32:37 Speaker 06 No, no, it's not. I mean, we, there's a lot of debate actually about what happened to him. He suddenly started fitting one day and his doctors came to help. But what they did is they spent the next three or four days repeatedly bleeding him, blistering him, burning him with stuff, force-feeding him, emetics and things to make him shit himself. And just what they did to his body, whatever had happened to him, maybe he would have recovered, but the doctors coming in made that significantly worse.
33:06 Dan Snow? And then he left the throne to his little brother, James Second, and that was a catastrophe. Looking at the rounds, how should we think about these women and Charles Second? Like, did they have agency? Is this a story about how women can thrive and succeed in a patriarchy? Or is it just a depressing tale of misogynistic, unbalanced relationships where women get shafted and get given syphilis and just die miserable deaths?
33:29 Speaker 06 Both those things are true at the same time.
33:32 Dan Snow? Historian answer there from Dr. Kate Lister.
33:35 Speaker 06 It's a complex history. That's what we say. And then we walk away. What do I think about it? So the system was shit. The system was completely wank. There was, the king had all of the power and a great big wig and he could do whatever he wanted to because he was king. And some people had loads of power and some people hadn't. And it was a really difficult time to be a woman. And if you were a woman, there was only a few tiny accesses to power that you could get. And that was that you could marry it or you could shag it. And that's a really rubbish system, but that's what was there. And those women played an absolute blinder. They played the cards that they were dealt fantastically. They managed to carve out a legacy for themselves, titles, money.
34:15 Speaker 06 I mean, how else would Nell have ever, a woman like Nell with her background, have got to where she was? If not for shagging the king, it just wouldn't have happened. But an actress born in the slums of London, that was the only route for her. And it's incredible that she did that. So it's difficult because the system sucks, but they played it incredibly well. And I think that there was agency there, but the other thing we have to kind of balance it with was for a few people. For a few people, like for a few people, they managed to play the game really well. For millions of others, it was just unremittingly awful. But I can't help but admire them.
34:53 Speaker 06 Just the balls of them and the outrageousness of them and the fact that they, they knew what they wanted and they got it as well.
35:04 Dan Snow? Well, thank you very much, Kate Lister. What I wanted was to get you on the podcast, and I got that, so I'm very happy. You are the host of the Our Sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets.
35:14 Speaker 06 I am.
35:15 Dan Snow? You got any more content like this for people?
35:17 Speaker 06 Oh, we've got loads. We've got loads. We've got a really good episode on Nell, because we love her. There's so much royal sex. Honestly, you'll get sick to death of it. But we spend a lot of the time looking at the scandalous, the rude and the naughty things throughout history.
35:30 Dan Snow? There's plenty of that. You're not going to run out. Thanks for coming on.
35:33 Speaker 06 A pleasure.
35:35 Dan Snow? Well, thank you so much for listening today, folks, as ever. If you want more from Kate, and who doesn't, check out her podcast, Betwixt the Sheets. It's available wherever you get your pods. See you next time.
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