Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

       My Lady Castlemaine

      Perhaps John Churchill and Barbara Castlemaine had already become lovers before he set off for Tangier, but more probably, as Winston S. Churchill suggests, it was his reappearance at Whitehall ‘bronzed by African sunshine, close-knit by active service and tempered by discipline and danger’ that did the trick. He certainly fought a duel with the future Lord Herbert of Cherbury at this time, getting run through the arm but pinking his opponent in the thigh. Whatever the reason for the fight, Churchill had the best of the propaganda. Sir Charles Lyttelton told a friend: ‘Churchill has so spoke of it, that the King and the Duke are angry with Herbert. I know not what he [Churchill] has done to justify himself.’⁴⁶

      Barbara Castlemaine had a hearty sexual appetite. Even in her sixties, by then Duchess of Cleveland in her own right, she conducted what turned out to be a bigamous marriage with Robert ‘Beau’ Fielding. She had not lost her taste for elegant men. For his part Fielding hoped to marry money, somehow forgetting that he had recently wed a Mary Wadsworth, imagining her to be a wealthy widow called Mrs Deleau. He certainly did not help matters by sleeping with Barbara’s granddaughter Charlotte Calvert, and the furious duchess duly sued him for adultery, ensuring that his explicit love letters were read out in court and subsequently published.

      By the time of John’s return to court Barbara Castlemaine had lost her place as the king’s acknowledged mistress. Charles had insisted on her appointment as lady of the bedchamber to Catherine of Braganza when she arrived from Portugal, warning: ‘Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.’⁴⁷ She played a leading role at court, formed an alliance of mutual self-promotion with Sir Peter Lely (some of whose impact upon English portraiture we have already seen), and bore the king several children: Anne (b.1661), Charles, 2nd Duke of Cleveland and 1st Duke of Southampton (b.1662), Henry, Duke of Grafton (b.1663, though the king seems to have harboured some reservations about his paternity), Charlotte (b.1664) and George, Duke of Northumberland (b.1665). Charles was fond of his children, and had Catherine of Braganza been able to give him any, this story might have been very different. ‘He loves not the queen at all,’ thought Pepys, ‘but is rather sullen to her, and she by all accounts incapable of any children.’ In contrast, ‘The king is mighty kind to these bastard children and at this day will go at midnight to my Lady Castlemaine’s nurses and take the child and dance it in his arms.’⁴⁸

      By 1667 Barbara Castlemaine’s name had been linked with that of Henry Jermyn, courtier, dandy and successful property developer, and what one royal biographer calls Charles’s ‘generous affection’ had been warmly engaged by a maid of honour, Frances Stuart.⁴⁹ That year Barbara was rumoured to be pregnant, and demanded that the king acknowledge the child, but he protested that he had not slept with her for the past six months. There was also a court rumour that he had nearly caught her with Henry Jermyn, who ‘was fain to creep under the bed into her closet’ to avoid royal detection. In January 1668 the king’s affair with the actress Mary Davis was widely known, but although Lady Castlemaine moved out of Whitehall into Berkshire House, opposite St James’s Palace, bought for her by the king, she remained on good terms with Charles, who paid her frequent visits. Her lovers during this period seem to have included the rope-dancer Jacob Hall, the actor Charles Hart, the playwright William Wycherley and, last but not least, Ensign John Churchill.

      She was definitively supplanted in the king’s affection by Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, in 1671–72, but succeeded, largely because of the king’s regard for his children, in retaining significant influence at court. She was created Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, and her boys were granted arms testifying to their royal connection. In 1676 she left for Paris, to oversee the education of her daughters, and on her return to England in 1682 she found that her former power had evaporated. An ill-starred affair with the actor Cardell Goodman, not long before the no less unlucky marriage to Beau Fielding, made her something of a figure of ridicule. She died of dropsy in October 1709.

      Some of John Churchill’s biographers see his affair with Barbara Castlemaine as simply a young man’s dalliance with an attractive and experienced older woman, but there is much more to it than that. Castlemaine was strong-willed and hot-tempered, capable of telling Charles that she would bring a child ‘into Whitehall gallery and dash the brains of it out before the King’s face’ unless he acknowledged paternity. She was a major political figure, deploying her formidable interest against all who crossed her. Castlemaine was an implacable enemy of Lord Clarendon, who as lord chancellor repeatedly opposed the king’s largesse towards her. When he left Whitehall in disgrace he saw her with Arlington and Bab May ‘looking out of her open window with great gaiety and triumph, which all people observed’.⁵⁰

      Her relationship with her kinsman George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was more changeable, and was enlivened by a public spat in 1668–69 when Buckingham engaged Lady Hervey to undermine Castlemaine, only to be decisively outmanoeuvred himself. She had declared her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1663, and favoured the French party at court, giving the French ambassador useful information on the attitude of the king and his ministers. Finally, she was a consummate accumulator of grants and pensions, and by 1674 she was worth, in theory, £12,000 a year. We should not concern ourselves with speculation about what Ensign Churchill might have learnt in the bedroom, though A.L. Rowse is doubtless right to call it ‘a very liberal education’, but he was certainly in a position to learn much about the manipulation of interest at court.⁵¹

      Despite the family’s first successes after the Restoration, the Churchills were not well off, and John had not been able to buy promotion in the army. His relationship with Barbara changed all that. She gave him a present of £5,000, which he immediately converted into an annuity of £500 a year. The 4th Earl of Chesterfield, whose grandfather had been one of Barbara’s first lovers, benevolently attributed the gift simply to Churchill’s delightful manners and appearance.

      Of all the men that I ever knew in my life (and I knew him extremely well) the late Duke of Marlborough possessed all the graces in the highest degree, not to say engrossed them; and indeed, he got the most by them, for I will venture (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes for great events) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough’s greatness and riches to those graces … while he was an Ensign of the Guard, the Duchess of Cleveland … struck by those very graces, gave him five thousand pounds, with which he immediately bought an annuity for his life, of five hundred pounds a year of my grandfather [the Marquess of] Halifax, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortune. His figure was beautiful, but his manner was irresistible, by either man or woman.⁵²

      Others ascribe the gift to an occasion when Churchill’s quick-wittedness prevented embarrassment. He was in bed with Barbara when the king arrived, and immediately jumped out of her window and made off across the courtyard: thus the payment was less for services rendered in bed than for alacrity in getting out of it. A similar version of the story has the Duke of Buckingham,