Lucy Walter

Lucy Walter
Born	c. 1630 Roch Castle, Wales
Died	1658 (aged 27–28) Paris, France
Issue	James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth Mary Crofts
Father	William Walter, of Haverfordwest
Mother	Elizabeth Protheroe

Lucy Walter or Lucy Barlow (c. 1630 – 1658) was a mistress of King Charles II of England and mother of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. She is believed to have been born in 1630 or a little later at Roch Castle near Haverfordwest, Wales into a family of middling gentry. Rumours that she had married the king during his exile (and thus that she was Queen of England) appeared by the mid-1650s, but the question was later seized upon during the Exclusion Crisis, when a Protestant faction wished to make her son the heir to the throne, while the king denied any marriage, and supported the claim of his brother, the Duke of York.

Origins

Lucy Walter, a Welsh noblewoman, was the daughter William Walter, of Roch Castle and of Haverfordwest and wife Elizabeth Protheroe, daughter of John Protheroe, of Hawkesbrook and wife Elinor Vaughan, maternal granddaughter of Walter Vaughan, of Grove and wife Mary or Katherine ferch Gruffud FitzUryan, in turn daughter of Griffith ap Rice FitzUryan (d. 1592) and wife Eleanor Jones, daughter of Sir Thomas Jones, and paternal granddaughter of Rhys FitzUryan and wife Lady Katherine Howard (c. 1518 - 12 April 1554, interred 11 May 1554), daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk and Agnes Tilney. The Walters were a Welsh family of good standing, who declared for the king during the Civil War. The family home Roch Castle was captured and burned by the parliamentary forces in 1644, and Lucy Walter found shelter first in London and then Europe

Courtesan or queen?

The first paragraph of this article, apparently not subject to editing, primarily from Chisholm (Encyclopædia Britannica, 11 edition) has long since been discredited by numerous researchers. Unfortunately it is unfairly placed at the beginning of this article and never hidden, although the truth of those so-called facts have been doubtful since the 1830 discovery of the 1670 Secret Treaty of Dover. That pact was made because Charles II agreed that in exchange for Louis XIV's paid subsidies, Charles would publicly confess his Catholic Religion and return England to the Catholic church. That revelation and Charles request for a Catholic priest at the time of his death show strong motivation for Charles II to deny marriage to Lucy to allow the throne to be passed on to a publicly declared Catholic, his brother James II, rather than his acknowledged son, the Protestant James Duke of Monmouth. As a Catholic, Charles II's possible marriage to Lucy outside of the Catholic church, even if a legitimate Protestant marriage rite, would not be considered valid by his Faith although the law in the British kingdom at that time specified all marriages of whatever color during the Stuart exile were as valid as if performed by the Church of England.< references: 1. "The King's Apostasy... is not so late a date as the world is made to believe. For though it was many years concealed and the contrary pretended and dissembled, yet it is certain that he abjured the Protestant Religion, soon after the exilement of the Royal Family, and was reconciled to the Roman Church at St. Germain in France," White Kinnet, Bishop of the Church of England and Charles II's contemporary and supporter. Kennet's Register, p. 598. 2."Before King Charles left Paris he changed his religion, but by whose persuasion is not yet known." Bishop (of the Church of England) of Salisbury Gilbert Burnet and a contemporary of Charles wrote this in November 1655 from his "History of My Own Time" and/ or "Some Unpublished Letters of Gilbert Burnet, Camden Society, 1907. 3. "Appendix A" by G.D. Gilbert, p. 375. 4."Lucy Walter: Wife or Mistress", pp. 108, 122.

Lord George Scott has disputed in "Lucy Walter, Wife or Mistress" the biography of Lucy Walter drawn from a short memoir from the state papers of King James II, her son's successful rival for the throne. These so-called State Papers of James the Second state that Lucy Walter moved from Wales to London as a young girl, and nearly became the mistress of Algernon Sidney, a Roundhead officer and second son of the Earl of Leicester. When he was sent out of the capital on military duty, she moved to the Netherlands, and instead began an affair with his younger brother, Colonel Robert Sidney, who commanded a regiment of English soldiers in the Dutch army. Beginning on pages 207- 210, in the same book used as reference for these accusations, Scott discredits that James II’s so-called state papers were written by James II but rather by Innes or Dicconson in the narrative form. Further several contemporary biographies exists disputing the claims of James II and his supporters including: the referenced "Wife or mistress" by Lord George Scott, "Althorpe Memoirs" by George Steinman Steinman, "Appendix A" by G. D. Gilbert of "Memoirs of the Court of England in 1675" by Baronne D’Aulnoy, "The Abandoned Woman" by Frank Arthur, "The Defence of Lucy Walter: Putting to Right a Towering Injustice" by T. G. Lamford, and "Brown, Beautiful and Bold" by Brat Mac All among others.

John Evelyn, a junior member of James II's government, also reported the story of a relationship with a member of the Sidney family, and Samuel Pepys, a supporter of James II, and Lord Clarendon, father-in-law of James II, also record similar tales about her background. Evelyn claimed to have met Lucy Walter briefly in 1649, and remembered her as a "brown, beautiful, bold but insipid creature", a "beautiful strumpet".<ref: Journal entries of 18 July 1649 and 15 July 1685, in Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S., ed. William Bray (4 vols., London 1819), vol. 1, pp. 239, 604; see also Memoirs of the Court of England in 1675, trans. Mrs. W.H. Arthur and ed. G.D. Gilbert (London 1913) pp. 383-4, for an argument that the first entry must have been revised after 1663>. Evelyn diary’s record of that August 18, 1649 event refers to the Duke of Monmouth, which was a non-existent title until February 14, 1663. Thus the accuracy of it has been seriously questioned by authors. If Evelyn indeed witnessed the event it was written down or altered at least fourteen years after the recorded date. Other quotes from Evelyn’s diary made much later add credence to these authors’ suspicions. For example September 6, 1676 in the same Evelyn diary he noted “the Duke of Monmouth, Duchess of Cleveland (both natural children of the King by the Duchess of Cleveland)…” That erroneous quote shows that even at that late date Evelyn didn’t know the paternity of Monmouth. <ref: Wife or Mistress, pp. 80–81 from Bray’s edition of the diary, p.108.>

Numerous authors and historians other than Scott support the claim that the marriage took place: Mrs. Everett Green in "The Lives of the Princesses", vol. v, p.20 speaking of Lucy's son the Duke of Monmouth, " an unproved though not improbable legitimacy." P.F. William Ryan in "Stuart Life and Manner",(1912) on pp. 271-272 wrote, "From the first it was said That Charles and Lucy were man and wife." Leopold von Ranke is quoted in the Nicholas Papers, vol. 1, p. 124, speaking of her (Lucy's) son being greeted in Paris as the Prince of Wales says a bit more, "Lucy Walters, the wife - or as some say the mistress - of Charles II and mother of the Duke of Monmouth." In "A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James II" on p. 106 Charles Fox calls the marriage ' a controverted fact'. Doubly descended from Monmouth, and thus perhaps biased, Smyth-Stuart in "Death and Fortitude", vol. iv, p. 20 said that at the time, the public considered Charles II repeated public denials as confirmation rather than denials... "and the priest who performed the service was promoted to a bishop to conceal it." A.I. Dasent on p.38 of "The Private Life of Charles II" (Cassel, London, 1927) says "The story of her intrigue with Sidney... coming as it does from a tainted source, must not be hastily accepted." Then Dasent adds, " I believe that the story of Lucy's relation with Robert Sidney and his brother is, if not a pure invention, a gross exaggeration of the actual facts."

What is certain is that Lucy was a distant cousin of the Sidneys, and that she left England around the age of eighteen, using the name "Mrs. Barlow" (or "Barlo"). Around the same time, The Hague became a base for exiled English Cavaliers after the king's defeat in the Civil War, and by the autumn of 1648, Lucy was with the exiled Prince[Charles II of England|Prince of Wales]].

In January 1649, the prince became Charles II, king-in-exile. Shortly after this, Lucy bore a son, James, who Charles acknowledged as his own, and whom he subsequently created Duke of Monmouth. James II and Evelyn, in contrast, reported that the boy's father was one of the Sidney brothers.

There is no conclusive evidence to support the story that Lucy Walter was secretly married to the king, but the intimacy between them lasted with intervals until at least the autumn of 1651, and perhaps for rather longer. Lucy's maid claimed to Oliver Cromwell's interrogators that the couple had spent "a night and a day together" as late as May 1656, long after the memoir claims their relationship was over.

The next month, Lucy Walter moved back to London. The reason is not clear; The French historian de Larrey in 1713 wrote, "before her imprisonment her servants served her on the knee: which they would not do unless they regarded her as the wife, and not the mistress of Charles II." <ref: quoted in Scott's "Wife or Mistress", p. 137.> This is in support of claims that she was received as Queen by the royalists, but she was quickly arrested by the Republican regime, who publicly announced the capture of "Lucy Barlow, who... passeth under the character of Charles Stuart's wife or mistress", and sent her back to Holland perhaps in a bid to embarrass the king. However, according to the head of the Tower of London, in Barksdale's surviving record of her testimony, Lucy denied she was the wife (to protect her children who were with her at the time). So the Commonwealth's part of the report that she passeth as Charles Stuart's wife was from another source other than Lucy and her party. <ref: "Thurloe State Papers", edited by Thomas Birch, 1742. G.D Gilbert's "Appendix A", p.405-406 and as signed by John Barkstead Tower of Lond., June 28th, 1656.>

After her return from London, there were claims of an affair with her cousin Colonel Thomas Howard. The exact words claiming such are based on a Cromwell spy's report to Thurloe: August 25, 1657, "'a little young gentleman, cousin of Mrs. Barlow, who by former challenge demanded satisfaction from Tom (Howard) for WORDS dishonoring his cousin'. Howard declined to accept the challenge and so the young man stabbed Howard with a stiletto and left him for dead." < ref: Quoted Arthur, Frank, "Abandoned Woman", p. 167 from Macphersonson's "James II", vol. 1, p. 76.> At the end of 1657 and the start of 1658, concerted attempts were made by the King, encouraged by Sir Edward Hyde, to separate her son from her; the King's clumsy attempt at kidnapping was obstructed by the Earl of Castlehaven, the Spanish rulers [(of the Spanish Netherlands]] and the burghers of Brussels, but eventually, her son was transferred into the care of a Cambridge-educated tutor named Thomas Ross.

By this time, however, Charles's exiled court had moved to Brussels, where Lucy already was; in August, a Commonwealth spy reported that she had engaged in a "combat" against his chaplains, and emerged victorious. But by December, she was reported to be dead, apparently in Paris, where she was living in the care of the Earl of Mar's brother - his sister's granddaughter would later marry Lucy's son Monmouth. It is generally assumed that she had been separated from her son, but he seems to have also been brought to that city; the memoir says she died of syphilis, but is certainly wrong about the date, which it places after 1660. Actually the discredited memoir, attempting to disparage James II rival Monmouth by attacking his deceased mother, did not name the disease as syphilis either. <ref: G.D. Gilbert, "Appendix A", p.423>

A daughter, Mary Crofts (The Hague, 1651 - 1693), was later repudiated by the king <need source>. James II's papers identified the father as "E. Carlingson" (according to the copy made by Thomas Carte around 1740) or "the Earl of Carlington" (in the copy by James Macpherson in the 1770s, the independence of which is unclear). Later historians have identified this man with the Earl of Carlingford, who was sometimes called "Earl of Carlington" by James II and who acted as go-between for Lucy and the King, or else with the Earl of Arlington. However, Arlington was only named after it was discovered Carlingford, like Algernon Sidney was in Ireland at the requisite time (1650-51).<ref. Lord George Scott's "Lucy Walter: Wife or Mistress", p.190>

Mary Crofts married firstly William Sarsfield and had female issue, and married secondly William Fanshawe (b. The Hague, May 1651), and had issue.

In books and literature

• The novelist Elizabeth Goudge published a novel about Lucy, The Child from the Sea, in 1970
• Her descendent, Lord George Scott, published a biography called "Lucy Walter Wife or Mistress". London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1947.

In film and television

• In the 2003 television documentary, The Boy Who Would Be King, Sandra Darnell portrays Lucy Walter.

See also

• English royal mistress

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lucy Walter". [[Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition|Encyclopædia Britannica]] (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)