II. FLASHPOINT...

'Mall' Villiers, A Character Profile

The intriguing climate of the Restoration court naturally favored 'Mall' Villiers's talents in subterfuge and caprice. A discreet operative in several famous scandals of the day, Lady Mary conspired, for example, with her childhood friend, Charles II, in more than one of his amorous cabals. Cyril Hughes Hartmann, the current biographer of Frances ("La Belle") Stuart, Mary's niece and "the Beauteous Marina" in Mary's book of 1679 (Appendix A), reconstructs Mary Villiers's role in a plot to "get Mrs Stuart for the King" (50ff). She also intrigued (unsuccessfully) with her third husband, 'Tom' Howard, to put the priggish Elizabeth Lawson (Howard's niece) into the royal bed. Mary's impulse in these escapades was political: she hoped to undermine the influence of two royal courtesans, whom she loathed: Louise (Keroualle), Duchess of Portsmouth, a dangerous French import; and her manipulative cousin, Barbara (Palmer née Villiers), Lady Castlemaine, later Duchess of Cleveland. 'Mall''s role in these plots soon became public, and inspired a few nasty lampoons.

In addition to court intrigue, Lady Mary enjoyed impersonation and masquerade. This evidently was a Villiers-family trait, as her talented younger brother, George Villiers, had established a colorful record in such amusements. And we know, furthermore, that cross-dressing was à la mode at this time. D'Aulnoy, Gramont, and Pepys tell us that 'Mall' Villiers, Frances Stuart, Mary Fairfax Villiers, and other courtwomen, sometimes visited country fairs incognito, dressed as rustics. This vogue in frisky urban peripatetics gave courtwomen access to a culture well outside their primary orbit. According to D'Aulnoy's Mémoires, Mary Villiers also enjoyed cross-dressing for formal portraits: "He [George Porter, a persistent suitor of Mary Villiers, and possibly the counseling "Celadon" in Mary's book of "female poems"] had just found the Miniature Portrait of the Duchess [Mary Villiers] in all her grandeur, dressed as a man -- as you see her in so many places at Whitehall -- & never was a figure more majestic nor a leg so fine as hers" (237, emphasis added; Hartmann 246, n.1). Porter's love of Mary Villiers is documented in contemporary sources, as is her "majestic" bearing, a description never used in accounts of her niece, Frances Stuart, the younger Duchess of Richmond, whose demeanor and presentation, though stunning, were never "majestic."

Consider two (potential) locations of 'Mall's delight in the Court vogue of transvestism. The first, a sight-gag of optical trickery, may be Simon Verelst's portrait of Mary's younger brother, a photograph of which is published in John O'Neill's interesting DLB profile of Buckingham (248). The sitter's feminine facial features and attitude do not resemble Buckingham, as against most other images of him; but they do suggest those of his pretty older sister, tricksy 'Mall' Villiers. And then there is the incident of Autumn, 1664, recorded by Pepys and the Comte de Cominges, who calls it one of many "mad freaks of women at Court." The reigning royal mistress, Lady Castlemaine, was menaced around midnight in St James's Park by three masked individuals, dressed as men, who insulted her as the Restoration Jane Shore, the disgraced mistress of Edward IV. So alarming was this episode that Castlemaine reportedly collapsed (Sergeant 114-5). Mary Villiers may well have been one of these masked three, in view of the fact that she had publicly confronted Castlemaine in open court only two years earlier, comparing her at that time to Mistress Shore (Pepys 21 April 1662; Sergeant 45). Readers are given a glimpse of this volatile relationship in Mary's searing rebuke to Castlemaine, "To A Proud Beauty" (Female Poems...by Ephelia, 54-55; Appendix A).

One of Mary's madcap frolics was legend: she commissioned the King's horoscope, a treasonable offense. According to Pepys and Burghclere, who date this escapade to early July, 1667, Lady Mary wrote an unsigned letter to "Dr" Robert Haydon, a popular astrologer, which implicated both Haydon and her younger brother, George Villiers, in a scheme to chart the royal nativity. By the time Charles II examined the letter and recognized the handwriting as Mary's, her brother, whose script resembled her own, had been arrested as the perpetrator and promptly sent to the Tower (BM Add. MS.27872,ff.134; Burghclere 168ff). Roger Lockyer, a major Villiers biographer, had this to say about the incident, in a letter to me of 29 February 1996: "Mary Villiers was one tricksy lady! Even if she hadn't forged the letter about her brother employing a man to cast the King's nativity, it seems to have been the sort of thing she might have got up to -- 'some frolic or other of hers,' as Pepys records in his diary of 12 July 1667." These words from Pepys are useful, as they convey the contemporary perception of Mary Villiers as a skilled practical joker, something her parents observed in her from childhood: "Our dear, sweet 'Mall,'" wrote Lady Katherine Manners to Buckingham, "is ever full of pretty tricks and play" (Thomson II: 233ff).