Barbara Villiers was a woman so beautiful, so magnetic and so sexually attractive that she captured the hearts of many in Stuart-era Britain. Her beauty is legendary: she became the muse of artists such as Peter Lely, the inspiration of writers such as John Dryden and the lover of John Churchill, the future great military leader whom we also know as the 1st Duke of Marlborough. She had an insatiable appetite for life, love, riches, amusement, and power. She was simply ‘ravenous’…
Barbara Villiers’ Christmas Faux Pas by Andrea Zuvich
Christmas is a time when many people give gifts to family, friends, loves, and neighbours. After all, in the Bible, the Three Wise Men gave gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to baby Jesus. It is a time for generosity, and for thinking of others, particularly those less fortunate. And so it was so back in Stuart Britain (1603-1714), which was a deeply Christian country (this said, the country was divided into Roman Catholic, Anglican (Church of England, Protestant), Presbyterian, Arminian, Quaker, etc, so not everyone agreed with each other). One royal mistress, however, apparently didn’t agree with the traditional spirit of Christmas giving – at least on one Christmas in 1662…
Barbara Villiers was born in the Autumn of 1640 into the Villiers family (she was, in fact, the granddaughter of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham’s elder half-brother). Although she had a rather illustrious aristocratic pedigree, the British Civil Wars hit her family hard and her father was killed when she was nearly three. Her increasingly impoverished widowed mother and she lived for some years in difficult circumstances which only improved somewhat when her mother remarried when Barbara was eight. The years of poverty impacted Barbara greatly and appear to have instilled in her a deep-set avarice – a constant desire to want luxury, beautiful clothing, rich jewels, and a wealthy lifestyle.
Her beauty is legendary and when she was still in her teens, she caught the eye of the then-exiled King Charles II in the winter of 1660. She was, by that point, a married woman, having wed Roger Palmer the year before. Nonetheless, by the time of the Restoration, in May 1660, she was firmly placed in the king’s heart and bed. And in this privileged position she finally was able to have access to the fine clothes, fashionable accessories, and sumptuous lodgings she had craved for so long. She became a queen in all but name, with power and wealth.
In terms of her personality, Barbara was a fantastic hostess, great at enjoying herself, and being the life of the party. She was also consistently able to steal the show (even when she was merely an audience member at the playhouse). Many men were captivated by her great beauty and her magnetic allure. One of her admirers was a man named Samuel Pepys, who worked in an administrative role in the Royal Navy and is best known now for his incredible Diary which covers the better part of a decade (1660s).
But even Pepys’s ardour for the beguiling Barbara had its limits.
Despite King Charles II having married the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, only the previous year, the New Year of 1663 brought with it even more intimacy between him and Barbara. Their growing brood led to greater closeness and affection, and the amount of time the couple spent together was well known, with Pepys reporting that: ‘the King sups at least four or five times every week with my Lady Castlemaine, and most often stays till the morning with her, and goes home through the garden all alone privately, and that so as the very sentries take notice of it and speak of it’.
Charles didn’t seem to care who knew about his behaviour, but it was not considered very seemly (or regal). Pepys himself witnessed the king leaving Barbara’s home and opined that it was ‘a poor thing for a Prince to do’.
This was not the only aspect of the monarch’s relationship with the beautiful countess that irked the diarist. In February of 1663, Pepys discovered: ‘my Lady Castlemaine hath all the King’s Christmas presents [a few weeks before in 1662], made him by the peers, given to her, which is a most abominable thing and that at the great ball she was much richer in jewells than the Queen and Duchess put both together.’ In other words, she not only took the gifts that were specifically given to the King for herself, but she also upstaged the women who were of higher rank than she. Definitely a social no-no!
If someone as besotted as Pepys could be disappointed with Barbara’s behaviour, we can be sure that others at court had much worse to say. Barbara’s Christmas faux pas may make us cringe as her behaviour was in such poor taste, but perhaps we should remember her upbringing and how this likely led to her grasping, materialistic nature.
Andrea Zuvich
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