Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox

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Peter Lely : Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, around 1662–1665

Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (also Frances Stuart ) (born July 8, 1647 in Paris , † October 15, 1702 in Lethington ) was a Scottish noblewoman and mistress of King Charles II of England . Because of her beauty, she was called La Belle Stuart .

Origin and youth

Frances was the eldest daughter of Walter Stewart († around 1657), personal physician to Queen Henrietta Maria and his wife Sophia (around 1610-1702), a daughter of Sir George Carew and widow of Richard Nevill from Newton St Loo in Somerset . Her father was the third son of Walter Stewart, 1st Lord Blantyre . So she came from a branch of the House of Stuart . Her mother, who was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henriette Maria, was known for her beauty. Her parents fled to France during the English Civil War , where Frances was born. She was raised a Catholic in France and remained a Catholic until her death.

Royal mistress

The young Frances Stewart became a favorite of Queen Henrietta Maria and also of her sister-in-law Henrietta Anne Stuart , Duchess of Orleans, who recommended Frances to her brother, King Charles II of England. After the Stuart Restoration , Frances went to England in 1662, where she quickly became lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Braganza . The king soon began to chase the young lady-in-waiting. Barbara Villiers , the king's official mistress, made friends with her in order to maintain her position, but in June 1663 Frances was considered the king's new mistress. However, Frances was considered too clever or too childish to become embroiled in the intrigues at court and did not become an official royal mistress. In the summer and autumn of 1663 Sir Henry Bennet , the Duke of Buckingham and Sir John Hervey Frances tried to influence the king for their ends, but these attempts failed and Frances played no further political role. In addition, Frances had other admirers such as Sir Francis Digby († 1672), whose unrequited love the poet John Dryden described in some of his essays . Although Frances remained uninterested in politics, rumors soon arose that the king would marry her in place of the seriously ill queen. After the queen recovered in late 1663, the king announced that he would stay married to Catherine, but still had a relationship with Frances. Her reputation as one of the most beautiful women at the English court continued to grow. In 1667 it served John Roettier as a model for the Britannia , which adorned a commemorative coin minted to mark the Peace of Breda , and Edmund Waller and Andrew Marvell mentioned it in poems. The motif of Roettier's Britannia was also struck on English copper coins after 1672 and later served as a template for other medals and busts.

John Roettier : Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox as Britannia , around 1667

Marriage to the Duke of Lennox and Richmond

In March 1667, however, Frances in turn ended her relationship with the king. Presumably fearful that the King would not allow her to marry her, she secretly left London and married her suitor Charles Stuart, 6th Duke of Lennox and 3rd Duke of Richmond , a distant cousin of the King, in Richmond on March 30th second woman had died in January. Shortly thereafter, the couple returned to London and moved into an apartment with Frances' mother in Somerset House , where they awaited the king's reaction. The king was deeply angry about the marriage, which took place without his knowledge or even consent. Even the fact that Frances returned the jewelry and jewels received from the king to appease him could not mitigate his anger, whereupon the Duke of Lennox withdrew with his wife to his country estate Cobham Hall in Kent . The secret marriage of the royal mistress is one of the reasons for the overthrow of Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon , who was believed to have encouraged Frances to marry. Allegedly, the Lord Chancellor wanted to prevent a divorce of the king, since the marriage of the king was childless and thus Maria and Anne , Hyde's granddaughters, had better chances to ascend the throne. During a stay in London in March 1668, Frances fell ill with smallpox in March 1668 , and in view of the serious illness the worried king forgave her. Frances was not said to have been disfigured by smallpox scars, but her eyesight was impaired by the disease. She returned to the royal court in full honor. In July 1668 she became the Queen's maid again and moved into an apartment at Whitehall Palace with her husband . To the dismay of the royal mistress Louise de Kérouaille at the time , she again enjoyed the king's favor, but it is alleged that Frances no longer had a sexual relationship with the king after her marriage.

In February 1672 her husband was appointed ambassador to Denmark. Frances stayed in England and received her husband's earnings. Unlike her prodigal husband, she also managed his lands carefully and with good judgment. On December 12, 1672, her husband drowned in Denmark. Since he had no male heirs, his estates reverted to the crown, but the king, with his typical generosity, allowed Frances to use the income from the Duke of Lennox's estates for life . In 1677 she ceded the rights to her husband's French estates to the king in exchange for an annual pension, and in the same year she left Cobham Hall to her sister-in-law, Catherine O'Brien .

Peter Lely: Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, around 1662–1665

Next life

For the next few years, Frances lived at the royal court as a respected widow and lady-in-waiting of the queen. In 1678 the daring young courtier John Grobham Howe had to formally apologize to her after claiming he had an affair with her. Before the Glorious Revolution began , she withdrew from court in 1688, either out of caution or because of her poor health. After 1690, the payments of her royal pension stalled, but she insisted on the payment of the allowances granted by King Charles II, which she successfully requested from parliament in 1692, 1693 and 1700 . In April 1702 she took part in Queen Anne's coronation . After her death, she was buried next to her husband in Westminster Abbey , and a wax figure commissioned by her commemorates her in the church.

heritage

Since Frances had remained childless, she bequeathed payments in her will to her mother, who also died at the end of the year, to her sister Sophia Bulkeley, who lived in exile as a Jacobite, and to her six children, including Nanette, the exiled wife of the Duke of Berwick . Her property was sold and the house where she was born was purchased, which was renamed Lennoxlove and passed to her great-nephew Walter Stewart, 6th Lord Blantyre .

See also

literature

  • Cyril Hughes Hartmann: La belle Stuart. Memoirs of court and society in the times of Frances Teresa Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox . Routledge & Sons, London 1924
  • Maeve Haran: The painted lady . Pan Macmillan, London 2011. ISBN 978-0-330-47212-8 (novel)

Web links

Commons : Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Westminter Abbey: Frances Teresa Stuart, Duchess of Richmond. Retrieved January 4, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Stewart, Frances, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stewart, Frances; Stuart, Frances; La Belle Stuart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish noblewoman and mistress of King Charles II of England
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1647
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1702
Place of death Lethington