FASHION HISTORY: THE STUART MISTRESSES

'Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond

Extravagant, hedonistic and utterly scandalous ‒ this was the Stuart court of Charles II (1660-85). The reign of the Merry Monarch, as he was known, saw England shake off the suffocating puritanical ideals of Oliver Cromwell, only to replace it with a royal court that was as renowned for its debauchery as its retinue of beautiful royal mistresses.

This was a time when a female courtier had few prospects apart from making an advantageous marriage or becoming the mistress of a wealthy nobleman. The adventurous risk-takers among them sometimes chose to do both. Beauty, then, was a powerful currency by which a woman could secure her fortune.

At the heart of the late Stuart court was Charles II, who married Catherine of Braganza (1638-1705) in 1662. While the marriage lasted until his death, the monarch himself was far from monogamous. Within the pleasure-seeking court of Charles, a woman could chance upon even greater fame and wealth if she caught the roving eye of the King.

So, how did the Stuart court define beauty in the late 1600s and how was a woman to live up to those ideals? In Beauty, Sex and Power: A Story of Debauchery and Decadent Art at the Late Stuart Court (1660‒1714), ‘men and women were expected to be immutably beautiful … and the Stuart courtier had an arsenal of powders, paints and cosmetic tricks to maintain the illusion’. It was a challenging undertaking, which required a courtier to be fashionably dressed and perform ‘on the daily stage of Court life, from dawn to dusk (and often well into the night)’.

Beauty was associated with virtue, with a beautiful appearance believed to reflect a virtuous soul. The English ideal of female beauty celebrated a pale, flawless complexion and rosy cheeks. Many female courtiers went to great lengths to achieve this artificially, applying a powder containing white lead to whiten their faces. Lips and cheeks were tinted with ‘Spanish leather or paper rouge (scarlet leather or paper that dyed the skin on application)’. These ideals were a challenge for Portuguese-born queen, Catherine, and her entourage of darker-skinned ladies, and their colouring was snidely described as ‘sufficiently unagreeable’.

A fine example of what the Stuarts believed to be the pinnacle of beauty in the 1660s can be admired at Hampton Court Palace. The ten ‘Windsor Beauties’, as painted by Peter Lely, provide a fascinating glimpse of some of the more prominent women of Charles’ court.

Although the paintings are not reflective of Stuart court attire, given that the women were dressed in ancient Greek or Roman style costumes, combined with the informal clothes women might have worn in the evening, they do offer insight into contemporary beauty ideals. Lely’s works feature the ‘languishing air, long eyes and drowsy sweetness’ that he found so alluring. His muse was the King’s principal mistress, Barbara Villiers, the daughter of a viscount, upon whom Lely modelled many of the paintings.

Charles II, who had no live heirs with his queen, sired a dozen illegitimate children with numerous mistresses. Five of those children were with Barbara, who was ‘handsomely rewarded with wealth, gifts, estates and titles, becoming Duchess of Cleveland in her own right in 1670’.

Nell Gywn, who traded up from her life as an actress (and former orange-seller) to bear Charles II two sons as his long-term mistress, enjoyed luxuries and privileges that came from her beauty. An indication of the wealth royal mistresses could attain is reflected in Nell’s purchase of a pearl necklace in 1682 for which she paid £4,520 (about £340,000 today).

The beauty remedies of women during the late Stuart period contain some ingredients recognisable today, such as ‘olive oil, pine kernels, honey, rosewater, orange-peel and jasmine powder’. However, there were more alarming items in the Stuart beauty kit as well, such as ‘dried bees, pigeon dung, snail ash, opium, hog’s grease and urine’. One especially horrifying face cleanser from Mary Evelyn’s The Ladies Dressing-Room Unlock’d lists a roasted nine-day-old puppy dog among other ingredients.

Make-up at this time was also not always reliable, as Queen Catherine, discovered to her dismay. At a banquet held at Hampton Court Palace in June 1662 following her marriage to Charles, the ‘hall was so full of people and it was so hot that the sweat ran off everybody’s face; the Queen’s make-up was about to run off with the sweat, so she hurriedly withdrew with the King, and with that, had hardly anything to eat’.

While the purpose of these beauty regimens may have been to improve on nature, ignorance about the properties of ingredients often led to unfortunate, and occasionally, deadly consequences. A toxic plant known as belladonna, or deadly nightshade, was thought to dilate pupils and add sparkle to the eyes. Meanwhile, poisonous mercury was used for a host of skin ailments, including pimples. An account by courtier Henry Savile in 1686 mentioned that a Lady Henrietta Wentworth ‘sacrificed her life to beauty, by painting so beyond measure that the mercury got into her nerves and killed her’.There were other dangers too. The smallpox was rife, and those it didn’t kill could be disfigured to a greater or lesser degree by the scars. Frances Stuart, a young Maid of Honour to Queen Catherine, was another of Lely’s Windsor Beauties. Diarist Samuel Pepys once described her ‘the prettiest girl in the world, and the best fitted of any to adorn a Court’. Frances was among those struck by the illness, which led to Pepys contemplating the ‘uncertainty of beauty’, as everyone concurred that she would be ‘wholly spoiled’ by the effects of it. There were, however, resourceful methods of disguising smallpox scars, with beauty patches made from ‘small pieces of velvet, leather or paper’ that were cut into various shapes and stuck on the face.

In the 300 years since the death of the Merry Monarch, beauty products may have come a long way from the days of roasted puppies and mercury. Perhaps what has not changed is how we still strive to attain the impossible ideals of beauty, resorting to a modern array of cosmetics with as much relish, and hope, as our ancestors.

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cosmetics and accessories

Both men and women of the 17th century would have worn wigs to create elaborate hairstyles and used powders and creams to whiten their skin or to hide blemishes or scars from disease.

Pale skin was a sign of status, for one thing it showed that you didn’t have to do manual labour outside and could afford to stay indoors. Elizabeth I (1558-1603) famously used lead-based creams to whiten her skin, and some elite women of the 17th century went to the extreme of wearing masks or ‘vizards’ when out in public to protect their complexions and, it is thought, to move about anonymously.

A particular fashion of the later 17th century was patches on the face. These were small pieces of black fabric, often velvet, that were stuck to the skin. They could either hide blemishes or spots, as Samuel Pepys noted for the Duchess of Newcastle, or they acted as a contrast against the fashionable pale skin. They came in a variety of shapes including stars, crescent moons and hearts. Not everyone was a fan of this trend though. John Bulwer wrote in 1653: ‘Our Ladies here have lately entertained a vaine Custome of spotting their Faces, out of an affectation of a Mole to set off their beauty, such as Venus had, and it is well if one black patch will serve to make their Faces remarkable; for some fil their Visages full of them, varied into all manner of shapes and figures.’