Growing Old Gracefully (and Powerfully)

Commenting on a recent blog over at The Two Nerdy History Girls, reader JennyGirl asked if the ladies on my most recent book covers were related. They're not, not even remotely. But for anyone glancing at a group of 17th c. ladies by Sir Peter Lely, (1618-1680) THE portraitist of his time, there is, ahem, a striking similarity.

Much of this is because the ladies wanted to be shown in the fashionable "look" of the time (think of the interchangeable blond starlets of today), and Sir Peter happily obliged. He wasn't wildly successful for nothing. But Sir Peter could certainly paint more than one kind of face, and his two portraits of Elizabeth Maitland, Duchess of Lauderdale (1626-1698) prove it.

In an era of indolent brunette beauties, Elizabeth was unique. She was well-educated, assertive, outspoken, and ambitious, and a countess in her own right. You didn't mess with Bess. During her long life, she studied philosophy, married twice and bore eleven children, served as a Royalist spy during the Civil War, acted as a fierce behind-the-scenes politician on behalf of her husbands, and conducted a love affair considered especially shocking because she was in her forties! Here's an overview of her story.

Elizabeth wasn't conventionally beautiful by the languid standards of the day. Her first portrait by Sir Peter, painted when she was about 22 in 1648 (above left), shows her famously auburn hair (faulted for being "deep coullerd") and sandy brows and lashes. Unconventional or not, she was widely regarded as a great beauty, and praised as well for her wit.

When Sir Peter painted her the last time (above right), between 1675-80, she was in her fifties – absolutely ancient in the 17th c. – yet still confident enough in her appearance not to have herself idealized, but painted as she was.

Some historians simply can't accept this, however, and interpret this portrait as a memento mori, one of those cheerless warnings of mortality and impending death. I don't agree. To me the duchess seems quite content in her own skin and that swath of scarlet silk. She's proud of whom she has become, not who she wishes she still were.

Above: Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart, by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1648, Victoria & Albert Museum (Ham House)

Below: Lady Elizabeth Maitland, Countess of Dysart, Duchess of Lauderdale, by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1680, Victoria & Albert Museum (Ham House)

Louise & Amber: One Portrait, Two Covers

Any reader with a sharp eye has noticed how often the same paintings or portraits appear on the covers of historical fiction. Since many of the most popular pictures are also personal favorites of mine (the wide-eyed young Emma, Lady Hamilton, as painted by George Romney in the late 18th century, has appeared on as many covers as a modern-day supermodel), I don’t really object –– though with so much beautiful art in the world, duplicating does seem unnecessary, if not out-and-out lazy.

But sometimes these duplications seem almost fitting. The painting on the cover of my next historical novel, The French Mistress, features a portrait of the real-life heroine, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (1649-1734.) Painted around 1673 by King Charles II’s official court portraitist, Sir Peter Lely, the picture is captures Louise at her most lusciously seductive. Louise sat for her portrait many, many times during her long life, and for many different painters, but I like this one the best, and I’m grateful that the art director at NAL/Penguin Books chose it for my cover.

They, however, were not the first art directors to chose Louise’s portrait for a cover. When Kathleen Winsor’s scandalous 1944 novel of Restoration England Forever Amber was reissued in 2000 by the Chicago Review Press in a handsome new edition, this same portrait of Louise graced the cover as a stand-in for the fictional Amber St. Clare.

While the real Louise would most likely have been horrified to be connected in any way to the notorious Amber (for although Louise was a royal mistress, she was first a high-born lady of a noble French family), I wasn’t. My first introduction to Restoration England –– 1660-1682 –– came by way of Amber’s lusty adventures. One long-ago summer in my early teens, I discovered a well-thumbed copy of Forever Amber in my local library, and the rest, as they say, is history, albeit history filtered through Amber’s breathlessly thrilling adventures and amours. I was completely hooked. While I've since moved on to reading original sources like Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, I'll always be indebted to Kathleen Winsor for that first introduction to a fascinating era.

It’s been a long time since I devoured Forever Amber, but it remains one of those books I’ve always remembered, and one that still holds the original spell it cast on my adolescent imagination. I’m both delighted and honored now to share cover art with Ms. Winsor. I also invite all those readers who, over the years, have enjoyed Forever Amber to try my own interpretation of the bawdy royal court of King Charles II and his mistresses: Royal Harlot : A Novel of the Countess of Castlemaine & King Charles II; The King’s Favorite: A Novel of Nell Gwyn & King Charles II; and, to be released on July 7, The French Mistress: A Novel of the Duchess of Portsmouth & King Charles II.

Twelfth Night in the Manner of Samuel Pepys

Twelfth Night slips by virtually unnoticed here in modern-day America, but it was an important holiday in the past. No one in Restoration London enjoyed a good holiday quite as much as Samuel Pepys, so it seems most fitting to discuss Twelfth Night as he experienced it. He’s over there to the right, wearing the stylish Indian gown he hired especially for this portrait by John Hayls (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London), and trying very hard to look as haughtily genteel and handsome as he wished he truly could have been.

For those of you firmly ensconced in other eras, Samuel Pepys was a minor administrator in the Naval Office under Lord Sandwich in the 1660s, following Charles II’s return to the throne after Cromwell’s death. Pepys would be completely forgotten today if not for the fact that he kept a relentlessly detailed daily diary that has miraculously survived. Intended for his own eyes and no others (he wrote in a personal shorthand code), he describes not only momentous events in London like the Plague and the Great Fire, but also what he ate, what he wore, where he shopped, how he scolded his servants and loved his wife, and also how he celebrated Twelfth Night.

For example, in 1661, Samuel noted that Twelfth Night was celebrated on the seventh of January, not the traditional sixth. The sixth that year fell on a Sunday, an inconvenient Sabbath for drinking and carousing, and so the celebration was shifted a day, much like Americans today casually move the Fourth of July to the fifth to make a three-day weekend.

In the 17th century, Twelfth Night was the day for taking down the evergreen boughs that had been put up as decorations on Christmas Eve. Before this was done, silly songs were sung, dances danced, and games like Blind Man’s Bluff played by children, and by adults who’d drunk a sufficient amount of wine to make this entertaining. Samuel liked to make this a special night for his friends by hiring a fiddler for singing and dancing, and making sure there were “good fires and candles” in his house.

In 1663, he celebrated by taking his wife to the theatre: “after dinner went to the Duke’s house, and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day.” Perhaps he can be forgiven for this; Cromwell’s Puritans had shuttered the theatres for twenty years, and even Shakespeare was still a novelty to be rediscovered by Samuel’s generation.

His celebration was more subdued in 1662, when he was a guest at the house of Admiral Sir William Penn (the father of the founder of Pennsylvania): “a merry fellow and pretty good natured, and sings loose songs.” Alas, there were no “loose songs” that night, “it being a solemn feast day with [Sir William], his wedding day, and we had a good chine of beef and other good cheer, besides eighteen mince pies. . . the number of the years he hath been married.”

Eighteen mince pies sounds formidable, but even that appears to have paled besides the traditional Twelfth Night cake. In 1668, Samuel spent twenty shillings for the ingredients alone for this cake (which in a time when common servants and laborers had annual incomes of four to six pounds, made for a costly cake indeed.) Twelfth Night cakes were large, dense fruitcakes, with a pea and a bean baked inside. Whichever guests found these in their pieces were named the King and Queen of the evening, and had the right to order everyone else around, apparently to high hilarity, until the party finally broke up at nearly dawn.

(For anyone who’d like to try to replicate such a grand cake, here’s the link to the recipe offered by 18th century cook Hannah Glasse on the Colonial Williamsburg website. If you're fortunate, your finished cake should look something like the one at left.)

But in addition to the usual heavy drinking of all Restoration celebrations, it was Twelfth Night, rather than New Year’s Day, that was the time for reflection and resolutions. Though Samuel made his nearly 350 years ago, they sound suspiciously similar to the resolutions I'll make for myself today (except, of course, no one in the Restoration worried too much about eating less and exercising more): “This night making an end wholly of Christmas, with a mind fully satisfied with the great pleasures we have had by being abroad from home. . . that it is high time to betake myself to my late vows, which I will tomorrow, God willing, perfect and bind myself to. . . that I may. . . increase my good name and esteem in the world, and get money, which sweetens all things, and whereof I have much need. So home to supper and to bed, blessing God for his mercy to bring me home after much pleasure, to my wife and house and business with health and resolution to fall hard to work again.”