CHARLES II’S SECRET QUEEN? Who was Lucy Walter? England’s secret queen | Who did Charles II marry?

who was Lucy Walter and was she Charles II's secret Queen if so that would mean that their son James Duke of Monmouth was the rightful heir to the throne after Charles's death and that it should never have gone to Charles's brother James II or to any of the other monarchs since then rumors have swirled since the 1650s that Charles and Lucy were married but is there any truth to them and was Monmouth robbed of his Birthright by his uncle stay tuned to this week's video from history calling to find out and to hear about the very sticky end that Monmouth ultimately came to [Music] Lucy Walter was born in Wales in around 1630 to William Walter of Rock Castle and Elizabeth prothero who was the niece of the first Earl of Carberry she was therefore a member of the nobility albeit an impoverished one her parents separated in 1640 and she went to London with her mother which is where she spent the remainder of her childhood she was apparently the Mistress of a military officer named Algernon Sydney when she was still just in her mid to late teens but by 1648 she had made her way to the Netherlands where the future Charles II then Prince of Wales and also just 18 years old was living in Exile Charles's father Charles the first had become embroiled in civil war against parliamentary forces in 1642 a conflict which he ultimately lost and by the time his eldest son met Lucy the king and two of his younger children were in the custody of the parliamentarians while the rest of the family had fled to France where the king's wife Henrietta Maria was from or to the Hague were the couple's eldest daughter Mary was the princess of Orange we know very little about the relationship between the Young Prince Charles and Lucy in later years his brother James Duke of York would apparently say that after being the Mistress of Algernon Sydney she took up with his brother Robert in Holland it was there that she apparently met Charles and very quickly became his mistress so quickly in fact that the Duke of York wrote that he dotted the paternity of the sun she would have by him saying that he instead thought the boy's father was Robert Sydney James had his own reasons to cast aspersions on the child's parentage though as he sought to ensure that he remained Charles's Heir and his Memoirs were written years later and subjected to considerable editing by himself and others so that they can hardly be looked upon as a watertight source of Lucy's person and character he said she was very handsome with little wit and some cunning the manner of their meeting was recorded slightly differently by the Earl of Clarendon as he said that Lucy who he called a private Welsh woman of no good theme but handsome had gone to the Hague with the intention of becoming Charles's mistress and it was one of the prince's Grooms of the bear chamber who made the introduction again these Memoirs were written years later and as Clarendon ultimately became the Duke of York's father-in-law he too had a vested interest in denigrating Lucy and protecting York's claim to the throne as York's oldest children the future Mary II and Queen Anne were clarendon's grandchildren whatever the truth was by the summer of 1648 Lucy was pregnant with a child which Charles and most historians have acknowledged as his on the 30th of January 1649 the parliamentarians executed Charles the first back in London making his eldest son the new king of England though it was in name only at this stage on the 9th of April at Rotterdam Lucy gave birth to their son named James after his uncle and also his great-grandfather James the first this child was later to use the name James Crofts after one of his tutors and ultimately became James Scott upon his marriage he was officially granted the title Duke of Monmouth in 1663 and in the interests of clarity I'm primarily going to refer to him as Monmouth in this video to differentiate him from his uncle I have just one further note on his paternity which is that whilst researching this video I find a story online that a 2012 DNA test on the 10th Duke of baklou who is a direct descendant of the Duke of Monmouth showed that he shared a y chromosome with a distant Stewart cousin if so this is further evidence that Monmouth was Charles's son though it's still not concrete as Stuart DNA could have entered the clue line at some other point I couldn't find any original source for this information however and eventually started to wonder if it was just an internet rumor The Source given on monmouth's Wikipedia page for instance is a dead link to the Scotsman newspaper website which is therefore useless and I found it odd that a story like this didn't generate more media interest the future Duke was raised initially by his mother but throughout the 1650s Charles II was virtually penniless much of the time and reliant on the kindness of others to support him so Lucy and her son had only intermittent financial help from him as for her own family her father died in 1650 and her mother in 1652. Charles went to Scotland and England in 1650-51 to try to retake the throne and in order to support herself and her son Lucy who also went under the name Lucy Barlow became the Mistress of Theobald second Vicon tap she gave birth to his daughter Mary in about 1652. Charles had returned to Mainland Europe in 1651 having failed to get his crime but the relationship did not resume I'm just going to summarize Lucy's existence over the next six years as it's not of particular relevance to this video and in any case there are large gaps in what we know of her activities according to Clarendon she lived for some years in France in the king's site and at last lost his Majesty's favor she also lived at liege and The Hague her loss of favor from Charles was no doubt due to her lifestyle which included taking several lovers after him and wanting to murder hermit by sticking a Bodkin which is a large needle into her ear while she slept this was because she feared the woman was going to make public that Lucy Had apparently ended two pregnancies by physic to use the freya's find in a letter to Charles from a Mr Daniel O'Neill who the king was using as an intermediary to deal with Lucy Charles periodically tried to buy her off despite his own straightened Financial circumstances communicating to her in May 1655 for instance that he would send her money as soon as he was able and suggesting that she goes to some place more private than the Hig for her stay there is very prejudicial to us both she sealed to England with her children in 1656 ostensibly to secure an inheritance from her mother and possibly at Charles's insistence as a way to be rid of her but she was suspected of being a royal spy and imprisoned and interrogated in the Torah of London by the parliamentarians whilst there she pretended to be the Widow of a Dutchman claiming that her son by Charles was dead that the two children she had with her were her fictional husbands and that she hadn't seen the king for two years these statements were lies but they were intended to protect Charles and little James they didn't hold up under scrutiny though for Lucy's Mir and Hill had been arrested with her and admitted that the Dutch husband's story was untrue and that Lucy and Charles had seen each other quite recently there were other giveaways too a document was found in Lucy's possession which was an annuity granted to her by Charles dated January 1655 and Oliver Cromwell himself discussed her capture and release saying she passeth under the character of Charles Stewart's wife or mistress and hath a young son whom she openly declareth to be his and it is generally believed the boy being very like him and both mother and child provided for by him Cromwell saw to it that she was released on the 1st of July and returned to Flanders with her children if he believed for one second that Lucy was genuinely the Queen of England and her son its legitimate Heir there is no way he would have done so but releasing a wayward ex-mistress and an illegitimate boy was a useful way to embarrass Charles and Cromwell knew it he wrote that Charles's supporters could see now that the money they raised for his cause was squandered unquote the maintenance of his concubines and Royal issue and called Lucy Charles's Lily of pleasure and their son and this was written with sarcasm the young heir back in Mainland Europe she continued to be a pain in Charles's side even threatening at one point to publish his letters to her if he didn't give her more money and in December 1657 he made an attempt to have their son forcibly taken from her in Brussels where the family was then living this field when Lucy ran screaming into the street and got the assistance of neighbors and passersby but a few months later Little James whose education had been so poorly tended to by his mother that he was still completely illiterate and unable to count to the age of nine was successfully taken from her and placed into the care of a guardian chosen by his father her papers were seized at around the same time so that she could no longer hold them over Charles's head and by the end of the year at the age of just 28 she was dead and buried in Paris in agree of which is now lost the English diarist John Evelyn who met her while she was living in the city described her as a beautiful strumpet whom I had often seen at Paris she died miserably without anything to bury her his information was not necessarily correct though as he also said her surname was Barlow apparently not realizing her real name was Walter and that she was the daughter of some very mean creatures when in fact we have seen she was the child of very respectable even Noble parents if we are to believe James II she had succumbed to veneral disease less than two years later in 1660 Charles Regan the throne in 1662 he brought his son to England and married the Portuguese Princess Catherine of baganza but the couple had no children this left his brother James Duke of York as heir by nigh though he had openly converted to Catholicism and there was therefore great interest in some quarters in making the Protestant Duke of Monmouth air in his place this could only be accomplished if the boy was legitimate though and for that Charles and Lucy would need to have been weared before his birth but was there any evidence that such a marriage had occurred during Lucy's lifetime she never made any public declaration that she was Charles's wife despite the fact that it would have made her the titular Queen of England her son the heir to the throne and perhaps allowed her to clear money from Charles or the French royal family in 1654 she even sought Lee from Charles to marry Sir Henry David she didn't do so but the fact that she was prepared to continence this indicates that she did not believe herself bound to Charles her comments whilst being interrogated by the cromwellians are a little hard to reconstruct as her Jailer said she presented herself as a widow while Cromwell said she claimed to be Charles's wife or mistress but it's enough to make me wonder if she flip-flopped from one idea to the other to see which would do her the most good whatever she may have said as we've already seen Oliver Cromwell gave no Credence to the idea that she was Charles's wife and it was no doubt lucky for her that he didn't instead her cromwellian captors consistently referred to her as Lucy Walter or Barlow never a Stewart or as a royal consort Charles II never claimed to have weared her she was openly his mistress for a time though and his family knew about her she was even presented to The Dowager Queen Henrietta Maria from the coach ride to meet this formidable woman on the 18th of August 1649 she was joined by among others the aforementioned John Evelyn who described her as the king's mistress and mother to the Duke of Monmouth a brown beautiful bold but insipid creature I would say that this diary entry was amended in later years though as the infant Monmouth hadn't actually been given that title yet when he was just four months old we have a few letters from 1655 in which Charles's Sister Mary princess of orange makes references to his wife there is no reason to think the woman in question was Lucy however or that the princess was speaking literally had she truly thought her brother was married she would have called his spouse the queen for to do otherwise would have been a sign of great disrespect instead she appears to be referencing a woman her brother was using as a wife meaning that he was sleeping with her and procreating with her by the mid-1650s though several women fell into that category next we have the fact that if Charles was married it would have been very hard to keep it quiet he and his immediate family were being constantly spied on by the parliamentarians and Lucy's relationship with him was such common knowledge that it led to her arrest in England in 1656 if Charles had actually married a Welsh nobody known for having slept with several other men the parliamentarians would have announced it and it would have been widely reported on as a way to embarrass him and demonstrate that he didn't possess the wisdom to be a good ruler Cromwell as we've seen took a certain pleasure in releasing Lucy back out into the world with her son to embarrass Charles as his lady of pleasure we'd also need to accept that Charles was incredibly stupid to believe that he'd marry Lucy a woman who he presumably knew had already had two lovers minimum before she got to him his hand in marriage was one of the few political assets he had and he would have been insane to squander it on a girl who could bring him new money or foreign alliances and whose reputation was already ruined although it wasn't unheard of for teenage monarchs to make stupid marriages see my video on Edward IV's possible bigamy with Elizabeth Woodville for a prime example it wasn't common and it makes no sense to suggest that they weared given Charles's precarious position yes she was the mother of one of his children but in Charles's world one did not marry the first girl one got pregnant in fact if she was prepared to be your mistress that was considered a sign that she shouldn't ever be your wife as it didn't reflect well on her morals double standards at their most flagrant there in later years the Duke of Monmouth got the idea that his parents were married from one of his tutors a man called Thomas Ross and this led the teenage Duke to declare In 1664 that he would be the death of any man that says the King was not married to his mother the man who reported this comment though the diarist Samuel peeps counted it by saying that it is well known that she was a common before the king lay with her Ross had tried to get John cousin Bishop of Durham who had been chaplained to the Protestant members of Queen Henrietta Maria's Court in France and Lucy's Confessor at the end of her life to say that he had conducted the ceremony but the bishop refused to do any such thing instead reporting the incident to Charles who had his son removed from Ross's charge how did the story become more mainstream though before we carry on if you're enjoying this content please remember to give it a thumbs up so that YouTube knows you like it and subscribe to the Channel with the notification Bell switched on so that you never miss one of my videos you can also find me over on Instagram where I post at least once a week and on patreon where I provide bonus material including many podcasts and early access to ad-free videos to those of you who are already my patrons thank you as always for your generous support and the same goes to those who make one-off donations to the channel using the thanks button underneath videos Ross's story might be the Genesis for the most popular piece of evidence in inverted commas often spoken of in relation to this case this is the idea that Lucy confessed to John cousin shortly before her death that she had married the king and gave the bishop documentary evidence of this fact most likely a marriage certificate which was stored in a black box he was the only reputed witness however and he died in 1672. the box was meant to have been inherited by his son-in-law Sir Gilbert Gerrard with instructions not to open it until after Charles II's death Sir Gilbert couldn't wait though and supposedly find proof that Charles and Lucy had been married maybe even my cousin himself as Ross had said King Charles was aware of the rumors and in 1679 he took the extraordinary step of twice affirming to the High Court of Chancery that he had never married anyone but Catherine of Braganza still the stories persisted and the black box was the talk of taverns and coffee houses in the spring of 1680. in fact I'll be sharing one of the tavern stories with my patrons this week if they're in one of the top two tiers Charles and I intervened again as evidenced by this report in the London Gazette newspaper from the 26th of April that year his majesty having commanded the council to meet this Day Extraordinary acquainted them that he lately had notice of a false and dangerous rumor spread abroad of a black box pretend to be fined wherein was contained a writing importing a marriage or a contract of marriage between his majesty and the Duke of monmouth's mother which his majesty did positively declare to be altogether false and therefore said he thought himself obliged in honor and conscience to have the matter thoroughly examined and searched into and that in order thereon too he had sent for Sir Gilbert Gerrard who was reported to be the person that had seen some such writing or to have had the same in custody Sir Gilbert Julie trekked down to London from Yorkshire which is in the north if you're not familiar with English geography and despite being a vehement anti-catholic and no supporter of the Duke of York promptly denied all knowledge of a box or a marriage certificate in fact no actual proof of this tall tale was ever produced and as we've seen cousin had flatly refused to State there was a marriage When Ross asked him to do so furthermore it is suspiciously convenient that the details of Lucy's supposed confession and the Box only came to light when the bishop was dead and couldn't further refute them and Charles denied a marriage had ever happened nevertheless the story of the black box was enough to get the rumor mill spinning and tracked like the one you see here appeared in England which talked about it as if it was a real item even though it was never produced nor could any living person be found who said they'd seen it let alone its contents the issue of a verbal confession from Lucy must also be treated as highly suspect again we have no first-hand account of any such admission and even if she did say it she could have been delusional in her last illness trying to get in one last dig at Charles or attempting to secure a better future for her boy Monmouth and his supporters desperately clung to the king's good treatment of his son as evidence of his legitimacy and it is true that Charles dooded on him he showered his firstborn with love attention money and titles and got him an excellent wife in the form of the wealthy Scottish noblewoman lady Anne Scott I say woman she was actually only 12 at the time of the marriage with Monmouth being just 14. what people seem to overlook though is that Charles was a good father to pretty much all his acknowledged children of which he had many the boys were given titles most of them jukedoms and the girls were found good marriages In 1664 peeps noted that the king is mighty kind to these his illegitimate children and at this day will go at midnight to my lady castleman's nurses and take the child and dance it in his arms this is a reference to one of his children by Barbara kindness of Castleman who was his primary mistress in the 1660s in short Charles was a good dad by the standards of the day who had no legitimate children to distract him and his love for his eldest child was a product of this aspect of his personality it didn't mean that Monmouth was legitimate in fact the king had a degree of Honor not always appreciated and showed considerable loyalty to his family even when it wasn't in his best interests to do so it's true that Charles cheated on his wife prolifically and made her keep lady castlemaine as a lady of the bad chamber despite Catherine's protests yet at the same time he never repudiated her despite her inability to give him children the fact that her Catholicism made her unpopular with some and the many attempts by his ministers to persuade him to leave her when she was desperately ill in 1663 and hallucinating that she and the King had a nursery full of children he sat with her all night soothing her and begging her not to die and when she was falsely accused in the late 1670s of having a role in the so-called publish plot to kill him he publicly supported her and shielded her from harm he was also kind to her in their one-to-one dealings and expressed regret at his treatment of her when he Lay Dying it would have been far simpler to find a reason to annul their Union or even divorce her an option which was just starting to become available in England and his Reign then marry again but he didn't why because I think he would have considered it dishonorable and flat out wrong she was his wife and he knew it even if he didn't want to be married to her he accepted that he was and he refused to pull a Henry VIII by finding some flimsy excuse to get out of it that CM honor can be applied to his dealings with his brother the Duke of York York's open Catholicism calls Charles any number of headaches and led to a full-blown political disaster known as the exclusion crisis as pressure was put on him to exclude York from the succession but Charles knew that his sibling was the rightful claimant to the throne and wouldn't falsely deny him his Birthright by declaring Monmouth was legitimate when he wasn't it's this surprising streak of Honor in a man who is otherwise a complete card combined with the fact that it would have made his life so much easier to declare Monmouth to be trueborn which makes me believe Charles's assertions that the boy simply wasn't all the king's statements and the total lack of evidence for any marriage to Lucy weren't enough for Monmouth or his supporters however and when his father died in February 1685 the Duke openly rebelled against his uncle the new James II and made a serious attempt to seize the throne the Rebellion field and James showed him no mercy Monmouth suffered a horrendous beheading on Tower Hill on the 15th of July 1685 during which the Executioner took five Strokes to take the man's head off despite mommy's entities to him beforehand to do a good job and much to the anger of the assembled cried he was then buried in the chapel of Saint Peter at vincula in the Tower of London next Queen's Anne Berlin and Catherine Howard among others on the morning of his death he was finally brought to acknowledge his illegitimacy by signing a paper which read for the satisfaction of the world I do declare that the late King told me he was never married to my mother having declared this I hope that the king who is now will not let my children suffer on this account and to this I put my hand this 15th day of July 1685. this declaration that Charles had told him he was illegitimate was probably true though in his stubbornness and desire for the crime Monmouth may not have believed it admitting to the fact that Charles had confirmed his illegitimacy though was clearly an effort to protect his own children and it succeeded monmouth's line still exists today with his most notable descendant being the current jug of the clue a title which had been grounded to Monmouth upon his marriage and which was not forfeited upon his death because it actually came via his Scottish wife who had been conscious of buklu in her own right before they were upgraded to Jurgen duchess in researching this video I came across a few unsourced stories on the internet that one of the later jokes find a marriage certificate for Charles and Lucy at the family seat in dal Keith in the 19th century and in a fit of patriotism destroyed it but there is no evidence that I'm aware of that this anecdote is true to sum up despite the decades and then centuries of speculation over the marital status of Lucy Walter I don't believe she was ever wed to Charles II or in fact to anyone her son was indeed Charles's but just like his many siblings Monmouth was illegitimate and had no claim on the throne rumors to the contrary are nothing more than a house of cards they look good at first but it takes very little effort to unmask how flimsy they are and Destroy them have I convinced you though let me know in the comments below if you think Charles married Lucy and why you've reached that conclusion to find out what happened next to the house of Stuart and harmonious cousins William of Orange and Princess Mary managed to do what he could not and rest the Quran from James II see my video on how James lost the throne I'll be back next week and until then keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 36,829

Keywords: charles ii's secret queen, england's secret queen, who did charles ii marry, the woman who should have been queen, charles ii's son, secret queen of England, charles ii's secret wife, who was lucy walter, the life of charles ii, james duke of Monmouth, History Calling, Lucy Walter, Lucy Barlow

Id: dXqYeb0umRQ

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023