On a winter’s day in 1668, Samuel Pepys stopped off at his bookseller, where his eye was caught by a French book called L’Ecole des Filles. This unlikely bestseller explained in graphic detail how “a young Man and a Maid can without any cost or trouble give one another the greatest pleasure imaginable”. It argued that sex was a pleasure enjoyed across the social spectrum: “People of all ranks and degrees participate therein, even from the King to the Cobler, from the Queen to the Scullion Wench, in short, one half of the World Fuckes the other.” The incorrigibly randy Pepys bought a copy and brought it home, noting in his diary that it was “the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw”. He read it once, recording his response – a mixture of shame and arousal – before burning it.
In The King’s Bed: Sex, Power and the Court of Charles II, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh argue that Pepys’s time saw a sexual revolution with the king on top. In their telling, the nation emerged from a period of strait-laced puritan rule into a bodice-ripping Restoration, in which new ideas about sex and sexuality were put into practice in and around a court presided over by the famously priapic “merry monarch”.
The authors see Charles’s many liaisons as the key not only to his character, but to his rule. A scurrilous verse by the Earl of Rochester said of Charles that “His sceptre and his prick are of a length / And she may sway the one who plays with th’other”. The king was roundly criticised throughout his reign for the favours he lavished on his sexual partners, and for their supposed influence over him in political matters: in Rochester’s lampoon, the king’s lust overruled all other questions of government: “Though safety, law, religion, life lay on’t, / ’Twould break through all to make its way to cunt”.
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.
By contrast, Charles deserves less indulgent treatment. He could be charming – particularly when compared to the century’s other British monarchs – but also petty, jealous and (more importantly) unconcerned with whether or not his sexual targets were as interested in him as he was in them. He was accused of attempted rape in Scotland in 1650, and much later he was likely behind a savage attack on an MP who had the temerity to mention his relationship with the actor Nell Gwyn in parliament: the man was set upon in the street and had his nose slit. While they mention these incidents (and there were many more), the authors’ final judgment of Charles is forgiving: “It is the measure of the man that his last recorded statements are one of regret to his wife for not having treated her better, and another to his brother, imploring him to ensure that one of his mistresses should not starve.” These may have been decent sentiments (or too little, too late?), but they shouldn’t overshadow the controlling and even coercive nature that underlay many of this merry monarch’s relations with women, and the sexual violence that was part of the rakery and libertinism of his court.
Jordan and Walsh claim that their book offers a novel perspective on a much-discussed monarch – but what’s new about this account? John Evelyn, a more prudish observer of Restoration politics than Pepys, judged Charles II an “excellent prince doubtless had he been less addicted to women”. That Charles was unusually lustful, and that that lust risked opening him up to bankruptcy, corruption and political attack, would not have been news to Charles’s contemporaries, and none of it is news to us. Charles’s relationships have come in for over three centuries of scrutiny: The King’s Bed has little to add to our understanding of the man or of his time.
And lastly: did sexual intercourse really begin in (or around) 1663? The idea that England before 1660 was somehow a land of prudes, or a place where sex wasn’t publicly discussed, doesn’t hold up. Jordan and Walsh argue that Charles “facilitated an experiment in social change in which sexuality was no longer hidden away but put out in the public glare”, yet a quick look into anything from popular songs to high literature, from the rulings of church courts to the chronicles of court politics, shows that an intense interest in sex was no 17th-century development. The idea that the roots of this great historical change can be traced to the upper classes’ nether regions is dubious in the extreme. When Pepys picked up a smutty paperback, it wasn’t because he was an avatar of modernity, and he certainly wasn’t doing it because his king had told him he could.
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