A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game by Jenny Uglow Read Free Book Online Page A

galloped alongside to cheer the winner at the post. Sometimes he raced himself, and in 1671 won the Town Plate which he had established six years before, with a purse of £32.

    Francis Barlow’s engraving of the last horse race before the king below Windsor Castle, drawn on the spot in 1684 and engraved three years later. This is thought to be the first English drawing of a horse race.
    It was at Newmarket that he was given the name of ‘Old Rowley’ after a favourite stallion, a dig at his womanising. He was popular in the town, wandering through the streets in his old clothes. John Reresby, recording a later race-meeting, noted his informality, slightly disapprovingly:
     
    The King was soe much pleased in the countrey, and soe great a lover of the diversions which that place did afford, that he lett himselfe down from majesty to the very degree of a country gentleman. He mixed himself amongst the croud, allowed every man to speak to him that pleased, went a-hawking in the mornings, to cock matches in afternoons (if there were noe hors race), and to plays in the evenings, acted in a barn and by very ordinary Bartlemew-fair comedians. 4
     
    Outsiders were still astonished by the King’s accessibility and his habit of being charming to all. His courtiers explained this to Magalotti as being a hangover from his days in exile, and he concluded that Charles’s courtesy and affability were ‘not so entirely due to the effect of royal magnanimity that some little part of them may not be due to the habit formed in his youth of adopting the humble manners of a poor and private nobleman’. 5 In 1668 the young Italian, open-eyed at the intrigues of London, stayed mostly with scientific friends from the Royal Society, and gathered gossip from them and from members of the court. His portrait of Charles suggests the effects of the strain of the past years. He had a fine figure, he decided, ‘and is free and attractive in his person and in all his motions’. His complexion was swarthy, his hair black, his eyes ‘bright and shining, but set strangely in his face’, his nose large and bony:
     
    His mouth is wide, with thin lips, and he has a short chin. His cheeks are marked across under the eyes with two deep and prominent lines or wrinkles that begin near the middle of the nose and go towards the corners of the eyes, getting thinner and thinner and vanishing before they get there. He wears a wig, almost entirely black, and very thick and curly above the forehead, which makes him look sadder, but without giving him any trace of grimness; on the contrary his appearance is sad but not grim. Indeed a certain smiling look coming from the width of his mouth so greatly clears and softens the roughness of his features that he pleases rather than terrifies. 6
     
    The king was, he learned, lighthearted about religion, clever but lazy. In private life he was a good friend, with a dread of seriousness. As a lover, he was sensual but not ‘bestial’, and generous to his mistresses, especially in the first flush of infatuation.
    Like all observers, Magalotti was fascinated by anything he could learn of Charles’s sex life. The very public nature of Charles’s sexuality was both a bonus and a drawback. On the one hand it implied an almost supernatural virility and potency; on the other it certainly diminished his dignity. Both points would later be made by Rochester in his famous lines about Charles’s sceptre and his prick being ‘of a length’. This could mean nothing if he needed dextrous cajoling even to get it up, and, then, could never be satisfied:
    Restlesse he roalles about from Whore to Whore
    A merry Monarch, scandalous and poor. 7
    In terms of the body politic as opposed to the body private, the identification of his prick with his power was potentially dangerous. If one drooped, then by implication the other might also collapse. In 1667–8, said Magalotti, Charles was thought to prefer friendship to ‘bodily