Bullying on Twitter is nothing compared with what Charles II’s mistresses endured

Strolling through Whitehall Palace in the early years of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys was thrilled to spy a washing line displaying ‘the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine’s… and did me good to look upon them’. The owner of the glamorous undergarments was Barbara Villiers, the first of the many maîtresses-en-titre of King Charles II who form the subject of this incisive new study.

Linda Porter’s eye for detail is no less acute (though certainly less creepy) than Pepys’s. In her hands the lives and characters of the women who shaped the reputation of the Restoration court emerge as far more discrete and individual than the identikit line-up of Lely beauties whose portraits are one of the most recognisable identifiers of the period. Despite Charles’s reputation as a ‘sleazy playboy’, the list of his conquests is comparatively short. Porter concentrates on his five principal lovers: Lucy Walter, Barbara Villiers, Louise de Kérouaille, Hortense Mancini and, of course, dear old Nelly Gwynn — as well as his Portuguese queen, Catherine of Braganza, and Frances Stuart, best known for being one of the few women who resisted Old Rowley’s charms.

The commonplace that Charles’s accession ushered in an age of debauchery after the strict rule of Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate is disputed, as puritan London apparently provided ‘a heady mix of secret assignations and love affairs’ among the art-loving Cromwellian elite. Barbara Villiers took advantage of this, as seen in the delicious detail of her writing to the Earl of Chesterfield from the bed she is sharing with a girlfriend, suggesting an appointment above a shop in the city — possibly ‘the earliest recorded invitation to a threesome in English history’, Porter notes.

Nonetheless, the optimism surrounding Charles’s restoration was soon marred by a careless licentiousness which exceeded the clandestine debaucheries of the Commonwealth.