Ashley’s Charles II throws much light on Charles II’s mistresses. In the following anecdote we hear about Barbara Villiers, the Countess of Castlemaine:

Lady Castlemaine was a termagant. Charles was little concerned over her infidelities but mocked them. When she took up with the handsome John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, and Charles found them together in Barbara’s apartments, he said to Churchill, “Go, you are a rascal, but I forgive you because you do it to get a living.”

Lady Castlemaine could not stand the King’s sarcasm. She told him once that it very ill became him to reproach the one woman in England who least deserved it; that he never ceased to pick quarrels with her since his low tastes had first declared themselves; that to gratify his base desires he needed only stupid geese like Stuart and Wells and that little slut of an actress [Nell Gwyn] he had recently taken up with.

Floods of angry tears accompanied these storms; after which, taking on the part of Medea, “she would close the scene by threatening to massacre her children and burn the palace over his head”. As for Frances Stuart, she constantly provoked the King by increasing his ardour “without diminishing her virtue by making the final sacrifice.” …

When King Charles II’s mistress, the Countess of Castlemaine, converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, Charles remarked with spirit that he never concerned himself with the souls of ladies, but with their bodies, in so far as they were gracious enough to allow him.

Adapted from Charles II by Antonia Fraser (1979).

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