Barbara was an only child, born into an influential English noble family, the Villiers. Her father died in the first English Civil War, fighting for the royalists. After the defeat of Charles I and the royalist cause, the Villiers family was left impoverished. Barbara’s mother married a cousin of her late husband, but the Villiers family was ruined by the victory of the Parliamentarians and Commonwealth rule in England.

Marriage Mismatch

By all accounts Barbara was an outstanding beauty with long dark hair, deep blue eyes and sensuous features. But despite her renowned good looks and noble birth, the Villiers family’s lack of fortune meant that she was not considered a good match for marriage, and she was rejected by several potential husbands.

Eventually, in 1659, she was married off to Roger Palmer, who came from a lower-ranking family than the Villiers, but which was equally as royalist and devoted to the Stuart monarchy. However, Palmer’s family were not happy with the match. Barbara’s flirtatious behaviour, beauty and sexual promiscuity were well known - she had already had a scandalous affair with the Earl of Chesterfield at the age of fifteen – while  Palmer was quiet, studious and a devout Catholic. His father allegedly remarked that Barbara would make Palmer one of the most miserable men in the world! He may have been right…

Later in 1659, after the Protectorate had been dissolved and Charles had been proclaimed King of England, the Palmers set sail for the Netherlands as part of the entourage that were to collect Charles and take him back to England for his coronation. Although it is not clear exactly when the affair between Charles and Barbara began, this is certainly when they would have a first met, and within a few weeks of being back in England, rumour started to spread of the relationship between Charles II and Mrs Palmer.

By the summer of 1660, the Palmers had moved to a house on Kings Street, opposite Whitehall Palace. Samuel Pepys, walking past the house on the evening of 13th July, stopped to listen to the music he heard coming from the house, and wrote later that he knew who was being entertained inside: “the King and Dukes there with Madame Palmer”. Pepys information told him that Barbara was “a pretty woman that they [the king and his brothers] have a fancy to, to make her husband a cuckold.” What Pepys didn’t know was that Barbara was already mistress to the king… and that she was pregnant with their first child.

For Services Rendered

In February 1661, after Barbara had been Charles’ mistress for a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Anne. Although Palmer claimed paternity of the child, and many even said she resembled Chesterfield (Barbara’s former lover), Charles II recognised her as his natural daughter.

Later that year, the king granted Palmer the title of Baron of Limerick and Earl of Castlemaine for services to the crown. But everyone at court knew that the Palmers were being rewarded for Barbara’s services in the king’s bed. Moreover, the grant of the titles specified that the titles could only be passed down to children that Barbara bore, not any that Palmer may have had by subsequent wives. So it was clear to everyone that the titles, and the power, lay with Barbara.

Barbara immediately styled herself as Lady Castlemaine, while Palmer, shamed by his wife’s infidelity and the true motives for the granting of the peerage, held off using his new title and refused to take his seat at Irish Parliament. But there was another reason for the issuing of the Palmers’ titles, and for Palmer’s embarrassment. Barbara, now openly and unashamedly the king’s mistress, was pregnant for a second time.

The Queen be Damned

By now, the Queen-to-be, the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza, was on her way to England. Many people hoped that Charles’ dalliance with Barbara was simply the king sowing his final wild oats before his marriage. But Barbara, who was only just at the beginning of what would be years of influence and power over the king, had other ideas. Determined to make her position secure and public, she insisted on giving birth at Hampton Court Palace, where the king and his new queen were staying for their honeymoon! Charles agreed - not a great start to the royal marriage.

Barbara and Charles’ second child – a boy, Charles – was born in 1662. Although he was officially recorded as Palmer’s son, the king immediately and publicly recognised the baby as his. This was the last straw for Palmer.  Publicly humiliated and by now widely known as Europe’s most famous cuckold, he filed for a church separation from Barbara and left for the continent to travel and study.

Barbara, now feeling free and bolstered by her increasing sway over the king, wanted to secure her place at court even more official. She persuaded Charles to appoint her to Queen Catherine’s household as Lady of the Bedchamber, one of the most prestigious positions for a woman at court. The queen had been told about Barbara before she had arrived in England, and her mother warned Catherine to never have her in her presence – clearly Barbara’s reputation preceded her! The queen refused to take Barbara into her household, striking her name from the official documents, and crying and arguing with Charles for weeks about his decision. But the king, ever keen to make his mistress happy (and perhaps avoid her well-known, furious temper) eventually forced Catherine, through cruelty, isolation, and sending her Portuguese staff away, to accept Barbara into her chambers.

As the years passed it became increasingly clear that the queen was unable to bear children. But most humiliatingly for Catherine, Barbara went onto have four more children whom Charles recognised as his own and doted on, while the queen, childless and rejected, was sidelined by a mistress.

A Beauty and a Beast

It was not by sheer force of will that Barbara held such a strong relationship with Charles. She wasn’t just a ravishing young beauty, but she was fun and feisty, and reported by many to be excellent company and a generous host. During the celebrations for the arrival of the king and queen into London on 23th August 1662, Pepys was watching the celebrations from Whitehall, where he felt lucky enough to be standing under Barbara who was on a terrace above, where he “glutted myself with looking on her.” But what impressed him most, he wrote, was that when scaffolding fell down amongst the crowd, “she of all the great ladies only run down among the common rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take care of a child that received some little hurt, which methought was so noble.”

While this side to her personality may well have existed – and there are conflicting accounts about her which suggest she had a somewhat dual nature, much like the king – there was is a reason why she was renowned for being greedy, arrogant, and using every trick available to manipulate Charles, including embarrassing him in front of courtiers and deploying her famously terrifying temper to get her own way. Often, after arguing with the king, she would storm out of Whitehall in a rage to stay with family or friends until Charles went to her to apologise on bended knee and take her back to court. Once she had been appointed Lady of the Bedchamber, she followed the queen around, tormenting her and flaunting her relationship with Charles. 

But despite all of this, her security came from the king’s obsession with her, and regardless of what anyone else thought of her, she was top dog at court, and made sure that everyone knew it.

She patronised Peter Lely, who became the official court painter and, through their mutually beneficial relationship, she further secured her reputation as the court beauty of the day. His style of painting his female subjects in relaxed poses with loose clothing and bedroom eyes was modern, titillating and sexy. His paintings  represented Charles’ court visually through oil and canvas – with Barbara, who outstripped even the Queen in number of portraits, as the central figure of splendour and power.

Pepys wrote about Barbara’s beauty regularly in his diary. She was the object of his lust and dreams, and he bought several copies of her portraits, impatiently waiting for their public release. He always referred her as “My Lady Castlemayne” and for the first few years of the diary would often write how he admired her, felt sympathy for personal issues she was having, and wished her well. But after the queen had arrived at court, he became torn between his appreciation of Barbara’s youth, looks, and finery, and his concern about the immorality of the king and court. 

For diarist John Evelyn there was no such dilemma of conscience. He hated Barbara and everything she represented, writing that she was a “Lady of Pleasure and curse of our nation.” Barbara was, after all, a major distraction for Charles and his duties, a drain on national finances, and was seen to overstep her ‘place’ when it came to court politics. Most importantly, for the pious Evelyn, she embodied the debauchery of the Restoration court which he so despised. 

Power Behind the Throne

Barbara’s relationship and influence with the king waxed and waned, usually dependant on whether he had set his sights on another woman, such as Frances Teresa Stuart (who did not succumb to his advances) Nell Gwyn or Louise de Kérouaille. But despite accounts of her falling in and out of favour with Charles, she remained a great power at court for over a decade. More often than not, it was Barbara’s enemies that suffered and fell from the king’s good graces.

Within a year or so of her taking on the role of mistress, court factions began to form,  often between those who supported Barbara, or rather sought appointments in high office that she would help place them into in exchange for favours, funding and cooperation and her enemies at court, such as the Lord Chancellor Earl of Clarendon and Lord Treasurer Earl of Southampton, who were loyal to the king but openly hated Barbara.

Barbara, in return, publicly denounced Clarendon, and did everything she could to remove him from power. Evelyn reported that Clarendon “had enemies at Court, especially the buffoons and ladies of pleasure, because he thwarted some of them, and stood in their way.” Clarendon and Southampton’s enemies began to form mutually beneficial relationships with Barbara, while she pushed her own favourites under the king’s nose to take their positions, and the eventual downfall of the earls was, according to Pepys, “certainly designed in my Lady Castlemaine's chamber.”

Wealth, and titles, and coat of arms… oh my!

“The prodigious amount of money dissipated by this woman,” wrote the Italian diplomat, Lorenzo Magalotti, “who has no moderation or limit in her desires, passes all bounds and exceeds all belief.”

From the start of her career as a royal mistress, Barbara had been showered with gifts, jewels, houses and was put up in lavish apartments at the palace which were far superior to the queen’s. Her greediness and obsessive desire for wealth was well known, and she spent much of her ‘personal rule’ securing estates, titles, assets, finery, pensions for herself and her illegitimate children. She was notorious for running up enormous gambling debts, which the crown paid off, and often used her connections through the treasury to take money from the privy purse for her own use. She also managed to secure several annual pensions for life which began at £1000 in 1667 and rose to around £12,000 by 1674. 

Although her relationship with the king began to cool from the 1670’s, when Louise de Kérouaille came on the scene and replaced Barbara as the king’s favourite, Barbara’s long-term position as royal mistress and the children that she had by the king ensured that she still retained her influence with Charles and was still very much active in court politics for several years. In fact, she was granted the titles of Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Southampton, and Baroness Nonsuch in 1670 – though this could have been a golden handshake to mark the end or her “reign”. These titles were all the more unusual and important because they were awarded directly to Barbara rather than through a husband. 

In 1672 she gave birth to a daughter, Barbara. Although the Duchess of Cleveland insisted that the child was his, the king and most others believed her not to be his daughter, partly because he now rarely visited Cleveland, but also because it was well known that she had been conducting an affair with John Churchill for a year. Though the king remained discreet, he privately disavowed Barbara and said she was not his child. Cleveland, though maintaining that Barbara was of royal paternity, did not persist in seeking titles and honours for her daughter, as she had with her other children.

Even so, later in 1672 all of the Duchess of Cleveland’s children given the surname FitzRoy (including the youngest child, Barbara), meaning ‘son of king’ to publicly confirm their ‘official’ parentage, regardless of any doubt that there may have been over any of their paternal lines. And finally, to confirm their royal connection, they were granted coats of arms: the sons Charles, Henry and George received these in December 1672, and her first two daughters, Anne and Charlotte, received theirs in April 1673.

A Fading Star

Eventually, recognising her favour with the king and her place at court was weakening, Barbara slowly began to pull away from her previous life as the star of Whitehall. In 1673 she resigned her post as Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Catherine; in 1674 she was fined for refusing to take part in Anglican services (she had converted to Catholicism several years earlier); and, in 1675, the final blow came when Louise de Kérouaille’s son was granted a Dukedom before Barbara’s older sons.

After this, she moved to France with her three youngest children. As she left, Charles told her, “Madam, all that I ask of you … is live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.” But of course, living a quiet life still seemed impossible for the Duchess. Her notoriety and glamorous life as a court concubine were never far behind her and she continued to have affairs with courtiers and young cads, showering them generously with gifts and money for their attentions.

Though she had only planned to be on the continent for a couple of years, her money problems and her Catholicism prevented her from moving back to England permanently. She made some brief visits to England throughout this time - usually for the marriage negotiations of her children, each time managing to get some money for her offspring out of the king. 

The next generation that were causing a stir too. Over the years her daughters, Anne and Barbara, were involved in their own sexual scandals. Anne had affairs with lovers of both her mother and father, and Barbara gave birth to a child out of wedlock and spent the rest of her days as a nun. Back in England, her spoiled sons continued to gain wealth and appointments from the crown and lucrative marriages (that Barbara had orchestrated). Only her daughter, Charlotte, seemed to live a respectable life without scandal.

In 1682 Barbara returned to England for good. With Nell and Louise taking up the king’s time, and their fiery affair behind them, Barbara and Charles’ relationship turned to one of friendship more than anything else. Though she was no longer regarded with much interest from the public (having been ousted as a royal mistress) she certainly wasn’t living quietly. She had several affairs with young noblemen, and an actor, Cardell Goodman, whose child she may have given birth to at the age of 46. In 1705 she was coerced into a bigamous marriage with Beau Fielding who went on to have an affair with her granddaughter who was living under Barbara’s care at the time!

As she aged, she began to sell off many of her properties for cash to pay debts, many of which she had accumulated by giving money to her various lovers, something Charles had always found amusing. Her last few years were spent at her home in Chiswick Mall, England. The Duchess of Cleveland died there on 9th October 1709 at the ripe age of 68. Her grandson, Charles, 2nd Duke of Grafton, was her principal heir and sole executor.

Legacy

In a world where women had little means to command their own lives or create advancement and achievements for themselves, Barbara had done both. Her opportunities may have been presented through her relationship with Charles II, but it was she who had carved out her own path and masterminded her success. By the time she was thirty, she had secured herself riches, independence, and title - as a Duchess no less - and had succeeded in safeguarding her children’s future. Whether she was loved or hated, for good or bad, Barbara had impacted the social landscape of the Restoration, puppeteered court politics, and altered the aristocracy in both the seventeenth century and today. 

Her descendants through her illegitimate children can be traced to today’s royal family; one of them is now second in line to the British throne…