Other Women
Authors: Fiona McDonald
Part 1 The Place of a Mistress
Marriage, divorce and separation
Inheritance and property rights
The mistresses of King Charles II
Barbara Palmer
(née
Villiers), Countess of Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland
Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth
The mistresses of George Augustus, Prince of Wales
Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (néeDarby)
Maria Fitzherbert (née Smythe)
Edward David (Edward VIII, Prince of Wales)
Freda Dudley Ward (née Birkin)
Part 3 Mistresses of the Aristocracy
The mistresses of the Duke of Devonshire
Part 4 The Notion of Free Love
The Romantic poets and a tale of two sisters
Ellen ‘Nelly’ Lawless Ternan, the invisible mistress of Charles Dickens
The two women in the life of Wilkie Collins
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Part 6 Mistresses in the Twentieth Century
Florence Dugdale and Thomas Hardy
Part 7 Mistresses of Men of the Common Class
Thank you to my darling daughter Beatriz Alvarez who helped research and edit this book. Also, many thanks to lovely Isabel Atherton of Creative Authors, who gets me the best books. Thanks to Lindsey Smith and the team at The History Press for putting together such a wonderful publication.
There once was a man from Lyme
Who kept three wives at a time
When asked, ‘Why a third?’
He replied, ‘One’s absurd
And bigamy, sir, is a crime’.
Well, how does the lusty male avoid the sin of bigamy? He takes a mistress, or two, of course. The keeping of a mistress is a serious business and quite often one of considerable expense. Having a mistress is not like having a casual love affair, nor is it like visiting a prostitute who is paid only for her immediate sexual (and certainly not exclusive) services.
On the contrary, the woman who is taken to be a mistress must be housed, fed and clothed in a suitably comfortable, if not luxurious, manner. Offspring resulting from such a union must be acknowledged in some manner in order to compensate for their illegitimacy and they too must be provided for and educated. It is necessary for the man who wishes to keep a mistress to have the income to do so.
The relationship between a man and his mistress is an interesting one. It can simulate the married state almost exactly, lacking only the marriage vows and legitimacy for any offspring from the union. It can provide companionship with a partner of one’s own choosing who may well share interests and intellect that are lacking in a spouse who was chosen for her wealth or social standing.
Becoming the mistress of a wealthy man could mean a safe and secure life for a woman and the children she has with him. For some women, sometimes already married with wealth and status, becoming the mistress of a king meant access to power and influence at court.
Women have been kept as mistresses by men for as long as there has been the institution of marriage. Sometimes the women are kept in a comfortable state for their lifetime, even after they no longer have a romantic or sexual relationship with the man who provides their living. On the other hand, mistresses can be cast aside when a new, younger or more beautiful woman takes a man’s fancy – and then the rejected lover must either fend for herself as best she can, take up a profession (in some cases the man supplies the money for her to set herself up in business) or she is tossed away like a piece of refuse unless she finds another man to take her as his mistress.
This book does not attempt to delve into the morals of keeping women as mistresses nor does it judge whether it is a form of exploitation by either party. It will simply look at the stories of women who have been mistresses, and will occasionally sympathise with some of the sadder cases.
There are the tales of women who have been the lovers of kings, dukes and princes. There are women who supplied inspiration to artists and writers. And there are ordinary women who never expected more than a steady husband.
These are stories about individual women who chose or were chosen to follow a separate path from the socially respectable one of marriage, children and fidelity. Their lives were different from their married, faithful sisters and because of this they offer the reader a glimpse of another reality – with all its passion, intrigue and sadness.
Providing a timeline will help to put these histories into perspective. Some stories will overlap and a timeline can help to give an overview at a glance.
| 1025 | Possible birth date of Edith the Fair |
| 1066 | Battle of Hastings and death of Harold Godwin |
| 1491 | Birth of Henry VIII |
| 1534 | Henry declares himself supreme head of the Church of England |
| 1547 | Death of Henry VIII |
| 1630 | Birth of Charles II; birth of Lucy Walter |
| 1640 | Birth of Barbara Villiers |
| 1648 | Birth of Moll Davis |
| 1649 | Birth of Louise de Kérouaille |
| 1650 | Birth of Nell Gwyn |
| 1658 | Death of Lucy Walter |
| 1661 | Charles II crowned King of England |
| 1685 | Death of Charles II |
| 1687 | Death of Nell Gwyn |
| 1708 | Death of Moll Davis |
| 1709 | Death of Barbara Palmer ( née Villiers) |
| 1734 | Death of Louise de Kérouaille |
| 1756 | Birth of Maria Smythe |
| 1757 | Birth of Georgiana Spencer, later Duchess of Devonshire |
| 1758 | Birth of Mary Darby |
| 1759 | Birth of Elizabeth Hervey Foster, later Duchess of Devonshire |
| 1762 | Birth of George IV |
| 1778 | Death of Charlotte Spencer, mistress of the Duke of Devonshire |
| 1800 | Death of Mary Robinson ( née Darby) |
| 1806 | Death of Georgiana Spencer, later Duchess of Devonshire |
| 1807 | Birth of Harriet Taylor |
| 1824 | Death of Elizabeth Hervey Foster, later Duchess of Devonshire |
| 1829 | Birth of Elizabeth Siddal |
| 1830 | Death of George IV; birth of Caroline Graves |
| 1837 | Death of Maria Fitzherbert ( née Smythe) |
| 1839 | Birth of Ellen ‘Nelly’ Lawless Ternan |
| 1845 | Birth of Martha Rudd |
| 1858 | Death of Harriet Taylor |
| 1862 | Death of Elizabeth Siddal |
| 1879 | Death of Claire Clairmont |
| 1891 | Birth of Freda Dudley Ward |
| 1894 | Birth of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor |
| 1895 | Death of Caroline Graves |
| 1905 | Birth of Thelma Morgan Furness |
| 1914 | Death of Ellen ‘Nelly’ Lawless Ternan |
| 1919 | Death of Martha Rudd |
| 1970 | Death of Thelma Morgan Furness |
| 1972 | Death of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor |
| 1983 | Death of Freda Dudley Ward |
The Place of a Mistress
EFINING THE TERM MISTRESS
Prostitutes, concubines, whores, courtesans, lovers, mistresses are all terms that have been used interchangeably over the centuries to mean a woman who is having a sexual liaison with a man she is not married to, often with some kind of exchange of money or goods for services rendered. However, this does not mean that the terms used do not have very precise meanings.
Prostitute and whore:
a person who has sexual intercourse for a fee. There is not necessarily any emotional bond between the couple although some prostitutes have regular clients. Some prostitutes work on the street, relying on casual passers-by for custom. Usually there is an unofficial specified area of a city or town where it is known that prostitutes ply their trade. A whore is another name for a prostitute but has a rather malicious connotation. To call someone a whore is usually an insult.
Courtesan:
the word courtesan comes from courtier, a person who resides in the court of a monarch. Courtiers were not servants carrying out menial tasks but people of some social standing who would attend in various ways to the monarch. During the Italian Renaissance the word
cortigiana
meant the mistress of the king. A court mistress needed to have accomplishments to entertain her lover, usually a musical ability, dancing, intelligence and wit. In Italy there were two different classes of
cortigiana.
One had the word
onesta
applied to it (meaning honest), which referred to women of intellect, often from the aristocracy. The other had
di lume
(of light)
after it and this was a lesser class of courtesan, although still considered higher than the street-walking prostitute.
The
cortigiane oneste
were not dissimilar to the ancient Greek
hetaerae
, who, although they did supply sex, were highly intelligent women who actively engaged in
symposia
(drinking parties) where philosophy and politics were discussed alongside art and poetry.