8 Painting a Life: The Case of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland

From the late years of the Commonwealth until today, Barbara Villiers Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland (1641–1709), has remained a figure of fascination for all types of historians of Britain: social, art historical, and amateur. Along with her two main rivals, Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, Barbara Villiers (Fig. 5) is the best known among Charles II’s numerous mistresses, and was so both to her contemporaries and to ours. In her day, she was called everything from ‘pretty’,¹ to ‘enormously vicious and ravenous: foolish but imperious’,² to a woman ‘whose Lust was insatiable … so infamous in her Amours, that she made no Scruple of owning her Lovers’.³ Political giants, such as Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, noted the ‘Power and Interest She had with the King’.⁴ Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers seem to have adopted a more condescending tone: even the most sympathetic emphasize her ‘shrewish’ temper and note, in a voyeuristic tone, what they deemed her uncommon sexual prowess. Modern scholars, as well, fall into this trap; one went so far as to dub her ‘a teeming mistress, a strong personality before bedtime and an omniscient witch afterwards, a woman [whose] only ecstasy was avarice’.⁵

This chapter presents a particular case study of two portraits of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, painted between 1660 and 1668 by Sir Peter Lely, who was made Principal Painter to King Charles in 1661. This examination aims to demonstrate that painted portraiture must be considered one of the central sites for early modern self-presentation (a case that I have made elsewhere).⁶ More particularly, the study of portraiture should be considered as one among the most critical tools we have for the recovery of the stories of early modern women’s lives. More so than the lives of their male counterparts, early modern women’s lives have been occluded by the conventions of traditional ‘biography’.⁷

Before turning to my specific subject, it is critical to define my goal within the context of this volume, and to locate it precisely in the larger project of early modern ‘life writing’. In discussing the paintings and visual objects at the core of my study, my own rhetoric intentionally avoids the terms ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ because, as an historian of the visual, I feel it is imperative that one must try to understand the mechanisms of visual images outside the boundaries that the rhetoric of ‘reading’ imposes upon them. When possible, the deciphering of an image’s visual rhetoric can reveal more than when images are thought of as visual texts. Indeed, disentangling the visual from the verbal is not only appropriate to this project, but also necessary, given that the culture which this chapter explores was one in which only part of the viewers, even among the elites, could have been considered highly ‘literate’. This is particularly appropriate when one considers the specific issue of early modern women’s lives; many women, even elites, were considerably less literate—or at the very least differently literate—than their male peers. Examining the ways these paintings function as images as opposed to texts, therefore, gives twenty-first-century scholars and viewers a better method of understanding the unique contributions of the rhetoric of the image to the creation and perception of self and society in the early modern world.

More numerous than suggested by the selection of images analysed here, Barbara Villiers’s portraits as a group present one of the more straightforward and enlightening cases for a study of a Restoration sitter.⁸ Two factors determine this assertion: (i) she was without question the woman most often represented in painted portraits during the first decade of the Restoration; and (ii) the greatest number of her portraits came out of the studio of one artist, Sir Peter Lely (1618–80). The face patterns and the poses in which they are found, as painted by Lely, are both numerous and various. Indeed, Lady Castlemaine’s various portraits by Lely expose a special painter–sitter relationship that reflects artistic, political, and personal ambition on the part of both portrayer and portrayed. Furthermore, as a group, her portraits document on the one hand, Lely’s campaign to establish himself as a painter through the patronage and depiction of the most beautiful and important woman at court and, on the other, Lady Castlemaine’s own role in the creation of a visual campaign to establish herself as the visual and virtual consort to the King.⁹ Consequently, a study of her portraits demonstrates the ways in which the portrait as a genre functioned as an integral component in the fashioning and performance of the lives of early modern elite women.

The earliest contemporary remarks about Barbara Villiers and her activities at the newly restored court come, not surprisingly, from Samuel Pepys, who saw Barbara, young wife of the royalist supporter Roger Palmer, for the first time on 13 July 1660: ‘[there were] great doings of Musique at the next house … the King and Dukes [of York and Gloucester were] there with Madam Palmer, a pretty woman that they have a fancy to … make her husband a cuckold.’¹⁰ He traced Barbara’s movements throughout the first year of the Restoration, remarking whenever he laid eyes on her. He spotted her at Whitehall Chapel in October 1660 and commented on what he considered her inappropriate attitude during the service: ‘Here I also observed how the Duke of Yorke and Mrs. Palmer did talke to one another very wantonly through the hangings that parts the King’s closet and the closet where the ladies sit.’¹¹ He again noted her presence with the royal brothers in April 1661, only three days before the coronation, observing that the king and Mrs Palmer ‘doth discover a good deal of familiarity’.¹² On 23 July 1661, Pepys reported that he ‘sat before Mrs. Palmer … [and] filled my eyes with her’,¹³ and it was that night that he designated her for the first time as ‘the King’s mistress’. Pepys’s report—which we must remember remained unpublished until the nineteenth century and was written as a personal record of his life ostensibly not meant for publication during his lifetime—indicates that she was openly acknowledged as the king’s lover by her contemporaries in the summer of 1661, and, indeed, confirms his observation of the previous year that the king had hoped to make a ‘cuckold’ of her husband.

Sir Peter Lely’s first portrait of Barbara Villiers (Fig. 5) attests to the complex relationship between Charles and his mistress, and represents the first in a series of paintings that document Lady Castlemaine’s attempts to construct a public persona. This portrait type lies at the heart of Lely’s iconography of this sitter, and I have called it elsewhere ‘her signature image’.¹⁴

This composition came to be particularly associated with the young Barbara, probably due to both the numerous studio versions and copies that were produced during her lifetime and to William Faithorne’s 1666 engraving after it (Fig. 6). The version of the painting that is now at Knole in Kent (Fig. 5) is almost certainly the prime version of the composition, but a number of good contemporary versions in varying formats still exist. Based on style, this work must be dated to c.1662.Given its date and its grandeur, Lely’s full-length portrait was probably made to commemorate Barbara’s new title, Countess of Castlemaine, her husband Roger Palmer having been made earl by Charles II in December 1661.¹⁵ Charles and Barbara had openly flaunted their flourishing relationship in the very early 1660s, and there is some evidence that the king may have owned the prime version of this image—possibly even commissioned it.

Although it is impossible to determine definitively whether this portrait was painted to honour Lady Castlemaine’s new status at court, it is certain that her new title was a hot topic of discussion at the time the work was in progress. Not surprisingly, we can gauge the court’s interest through Pepys’s report in which he, upon spying the patent for Palmer’s elevation in the Privy Seal Office, noted that the document held the stipulation that the Castlemaine titles could pass only to the male children who were, in his words, ‘got on the body of this wife, the Lady Barbary’. To this the diarist added wryly ‘the reason whereof everybody knows’.¹⁶ Apparently, Mr Palmer’s elevation to the peerage, in spite of his personal service to the crown before and after the Restoration, was generally perceived as being—and likely was—due solely to his wife’s relationship with the king.

Ostensibly a straightforward court portrait, this image of the king’s young mistress seated with her head on hand is, however, laden with artistic and allegorical allusions that are only slightly veiled. The most potent of these allusions depended on the pose of the sitter. As discussed elsewhere, this pose had its origins in the iconography associated with depictions of Melancholia, and in Jacobean and Caroline England, it had been especially popular in portraits of young, philosophically minded men.¹⁷ The pose was not, however, solely used for male portraits in the seventeenth century. In women’s portraits it appears to have carried more varied implications, ranging from prudence to piety. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was often used in representations of the reformed and penitent prostitute, St Mary Magdalen, and Lely based Barbara’s pose on these well-known images. Most especially, his painting recalls the Magdalens painted by the Italian Bolognese artist Guido Reni (Fig. 7).

By the 1660s, Reni’s were the most famous and admired images of the Magdalen in Europe, and through distribution in painted and engraved copies Reni’s works had become the archetypal depictions of the so-called penitent whore. Given his reputation, Guido Reni and his work were well known in England, and his signature full-length depiction of the Magdalen in the wilderness is a certain source for Lely’s portrait of Barbara Villiers. In fact, there were a number of paintings by Reni in Charles I’s own collection. Clearly, Lely was hoping to have comparisons made between his portrait of the king’s mistress and Reni’s images of the penitent Magdalen.

Given the highly erudite culture of viewing art so prevalent at the Restoration court, viewers of Lely’s portrait would have recognized Lady Castlemaine’s pose and long, loose tresses as an intended evocation of the Magdalen’s. Indeed, the Magdalen theme was and would have been regarded as particularly appropriate to Barbara Villiers at the time when this portrait was painted: in 1661, at the time of the portrait, she was patently the most reputed beauty of her day; she led the life of an openly sexual sinner; and she was openly revelling in her role as the king’s acknowledged favourite. Moreover, the role of repentant was one that suited her political purposes.

In 1662, just as Lady Castlemaine was preparing to give birth to her second child by the king, he took as his bride a shy, devoutly Catholic, Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. Given the extreme affection the king had publicly lavished on Lady Castlemaine for over two years, it is not surprising that on her arrival Charles II’s bride took an immediate dislike to the king’s mistress. An open rivalry between the two women began even before the young bride stepped ashore at Portsmouth in May 1662. The night of the queen’s landing in Portsmouth Pepys reported:

The King dined at my Lady Castemayne and supped [there] every day and night the last week … the night that the bonefires were made for joy of the Queenes arrival, the King was there; but there was no fire at her door … which was much observed. And that [night] the King and she did send for a pair of scales and weighed one another; and she, being with child, was said to be heavyest.¹⁸

After his marriage, the king felt it imperative that his mistress become a Lady of the Queen’s bedchamber, one of the most important positions for women at court and one made newly possible by the arrival at court of his bride.¹⁹ As a result of his desire to see his mistress ensconced in one of the most visible official posts at court, an open battle of king, queen, and mistress ensued. The king continually put his lover’s name on the list of ‘Ladies of the Bedchamber’ to be approved by the queen; she, in turn, consistently ‘pricked’ Lady Castlemaine’s name off the list and refused to meet her rival. Ultimately, it was through both the king’s authority (he was reported as threatening his bride with treason), and, according to contemporary ‘histories’, his downright trickery that Catherine was made to capitulate to her husband’s demand.

Among the most descriptive—and unquestionably biased—contemporary accounts of this Bedchamber incident is that of Lord Clarendon. In his memoirs, he described the final reconciliation of queen and mistress thus, ‘[the king] … brought [Lady Castlemaine] into the Queen’s Presence Chamber … ’ and

presented [his mistress] to the Queen, who received her with the same Grace as She had done the rest … But whether her Majesty in the Instant knew who She was, or upon Recollection found it afterwards, She was no sooner sate in her Chair, but her Colour changed, and Tears gushed out of her Eyes, and her Nose bled, and She fainted …²⁰

In the context of this battle and the ensuing forced public (should I say ‘sanguine’?) reconciliation between queen and mistress, Lely’s portrait represented Lady Castlemaine’s visible—if ironic—effort to ‘right’ her reputation as a rival to the queen. Her implied ‘penitence’ was not necessarily moral, but more importantly, political. In fact, the suitability and usefulness to Lady Castlemaine of marking similarities between the Magdalen and the mistress was not lost on court wits and critics, who closely monitored the mistress’s status within court circles, and particularly within the queen’s household.

One satire, entitled The Chimney’s Scuffle (sometimes attributed to Samuel Butler and published in or around June 1662) highlighted the rocky relationship between wife and lover. It proclaimed Barbara:

—a Convert and a Mirrour now

Both in her Carriage and Profession too;

Divorc’d from strange Embraces: as my pen

May justly style her Englands Magdalen.

Wherein She’s to be held of more esteem

In being fam’d a Convert of the Queen.

And from relapse that She secur’d might be,

She wisely daigns to keep her Companie.

Not only did this satire lampoon Lady Castlemaine’s penitence in her own sexual behaviour, but also that of her political and religious attitudes. Indeed, in looking from the poem to the painted image, one might speculate that the poem’s author was writing with Lely’s portrait in mind or vice versa. Like the satirist’s subject, Lely’s sitter appears as an ‘English’—that is, Protestant—version of the saint. Unlike her catholic model (Fig. 7), she bears no overt symbols to denote her role (there is neither cross, nor skull nor, most tellingly, ointment jar, the particular symbol of the Magdalen who anointed Christ’s feet). Whether or not the writer used the painting as his inspiration, that he dubbed Barbara Villiers ‘Englands Magdalen’ provides evidence that Restoration readers and viewers were eager to see and make links between the mistress and the Magdalen in a variety of contexts, and provides corroboration as to how this portrait’s pictorial ambiguities would have evoked multiple aesthetic and symbolic associations for its viewers.

Kevin Sharpe and others have postulated that the ambiguities of implied meaning in the arts of the Commonwealth and Restoration is precisely what differentiates the visual culture of the later periods from the earlier conflations of visual and political objectives at the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline courts.²¹ Although certainly pictorial meaning was portrayed and relayed in more complex (and, perhaps, more obtuse) ways following the Restoration, such relationships were directly linked to earlier Caroline strategies of visual culture. If such links became more and more obvious over the course of Charles II’s reign, at the beginning, they were necessarily veiled and ambiguous so as to allow for various interpretations by the factions tenuously brought together by the Restoration settlements.²²

While these English precedents for role-play and disguise in painted portraiture were clearly at the root of the Restoration visual culture, it must also be remembered that the majority of Restoration courtiers (most notably the king and his family) were steeped in the artistic conventions of continental Europe, as many of them had spent some time ‘travelling’ in Europe during the 1650s. There, and especially at the court of Louis XIV during the troubled 1650s, they would have seen the myriad portraits of men as modern adaptations of ancient heroes and of women as fashionable goddesses like Minerva and Diana.²³ These light allegories-cum-portraits are the visual analogues to the historiettes, portraits littéraires, and grand novels of Bussy-Rabutin, La Grande Mademoiselle, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry—the backdrops, if you will, to the verbal portraits and romans à clef that so amused mid-century French nobles.²⁴

Barbara’s 1661 portrait, then, with its allegorical allusions wrapped in a fashionable package, its multivalent potential political meanings, and its worthy aesthetic pretensions, stands squarely within the broad context of continental pictorial practices of the portrait historié and, most especially, within the specificity of the English courtly traditions that exploited images for political ends.²⁵ Lely’s full-length 1662 portrait of Barbara clearly was constructed from the outset as an elite image, one to be seen and recognized by an ‘educated’ courtly viewer with extensive knowledge of high-art traditions: it was primarily in the context of the inner circles (political and social) of Whitehall in 1662 that its whole range of potential meanings would have been most fully understood.

In effect, by creating a complex web of allusions—aesthetic, political, religious, and even satirical—both artist and sitter cleverly manipulated viewers by multiplying rather than circumscribing the potential meanings of the portrait. Indeed, by avoiding specificity, Lely and Barbara together fashioned an image of the king’s mistress which itself allowed for—even demanded—the viewer to map onto the image his or her understanding of the particularities of the sitter. In so doing, artist and sitter created a portrait that broke free of iconographic constrictions. For Lely the allusive nature of this portrait aligned him not only with the best artists of his own time but also with those of previous generations, foremost among them Anthony Van Dyck and Guido Reni; for Barbara, the painting (as well as the many versions of it produced by Lely and his studio in the early years of the Restoration) introduced her image and her body visually to a broad courtly audience as the embodiment of ideal beauty and—however ironic—exemplary conduct.

Despite this space for interpretation left by the allusive nature of the image as constructed originally, the visual narrative of the painting necessarily became more circumscribed as time passed, which J. Enghels’s 1667 engraving of the portrait demonstrates (Fig. 8). In this print, of which there are only two still extant examples, Barbara holds a cross and is surrounded by the overt symbols of the Magdalen, books, skulls, and an ointment jar. In the space of five years, then, Barbara’s portrait had diminished from a richly veiled portrait historié, in which interpretation was demanded from the viewer, to a narrative allegory, in which interpretation was dictated: by 1667 England’s Magdalen had been returned to the strictures of the ‘Catholic’ and ‘continental’.

Were Lely’s 1662 portrait of Lady Castlemaine as the Magdalen exceptional in his portrayals of her made during the years of her ascendancy at court, it might have been possible to accept critics’ assertions that the artist’s use of allegory was more often than not trite and ‘primitive’ and that the choice of pose was largely driven by artist’s choice rather than sitter’s agency. But, this first portrait of Barbara by Lely was just the most important and pervasive of a series of canvases in which and through which Barbara’s personal and political status was created, portrayed, projected, and promoted. In other words, it is one in a series of markers that display her efforts to create a visual ‘life’.

Perhaps the most audacious of the images that Barbara and Lely collaborated on was his painting of her from 1663 (Fig. 9). Numerous copies of this painting exist, but the prime version was recently purchased by the National Portrait Gallery by a national subscription campaign. Stylistically, the portrait type belongs squarely within the earliest period of Lely’s production shortly after the Restoration, that is, c.1660–5. I and my colleagues have dated this work to 1663 based on the probability that the child represented is Charles Fitzroy, later Duke of Cleveland and Southampton, the first-born son of Barbara Villiers and Charles II. There are, unfortunately, no contemporary records that provide certain identification of the child. The earliest records in which the child is named date from the eighteenth century and describe its sitters alternatively as Barbara Villiers with her daughter Charlotte Fitzroy, later Countess of Lichfield (born 5 September 1664)²⁶ or with her second son, Henry, later Duke of Grafton (born 20 September 1663).²⁷ Because the stylistic reasons for identifying the child as Barbara Villiers’s first son, Charles Fitzroy, who was baptized on 16 June 1662, are discussed elsewhere, the following examination will focus on the conceptual reasons for this identification.²⁸

The most striking feature of this portrait is its clever—and quite obvious—reference to depictions of the Madonna and Child. The pose of the sitters relies on pictorial traditions that variously show Mary with the Christ Child in her lap, at her side, or held out to the viewers for adoration. Here, Barbara Villiers’s loose-fitting red and blue robes, which have little in common with any style of ordinary, contemporary dress, clearly allude to the Virgin’s traditional attire, the red robe and blue cloak symbolizing the Virgin’s passion as well as her role as Queen of Heaven. That the visually erudite Restoration court audiences, steeped in aesthetics of Christian traditions, would have immediately made the obvious pictorial connections between the sitters depicted here and the other holy pair is proven by a commentator who, in 1677, commented on a version of this picture as the ‘Dutches of Cleveland being as a Madonna & a babe’.²⁹

As does the earlier portrait of Barbara as ‘England’s Magdalen’, this portrait openly complicates the visual conventions of its subject matter: it subverts its subjects’ implied piety, flaunting the very preposterousness of mistress and bastard as Madonna and Child. The composition’s ironic, and arguably humorous, meanings are intensified by Barbara’s noticeable girth: under her robes she appears to be pregnant (a condition in which she found herself almost constantly from 1661 until 1665, during which time she gave birth to four of the king’s children).

Pregnancy had long been used in female portraits to emphasize the continued succession of a dynastic line, as had portraits showing children in the arms of their mothers. The use of these visual indicators in this image emphatically asserts the place of both mistress and child in the succession of the Stuart dynasty. In fact, although her second son, Henry, was eventually acknowledged by the king, his paternity was hotly discussed in the months shortly before and after his birth in September 1663. When considered within this context, the allusion to her pregnancy may well have been meant to create—and would likely have been considered as doing so—a link of clear and equal kinship between the first-born son and the unborn child.

Even without certain identification of the child, this painting holds up Barbara Villiers, acknowledged mistress of the English king, as ‘England’s Madonna’, in contrast to the full-length portrait of the previous year in which she posed as ‘England’s Magdalen’. As in that portrait, the role she dons here conveniently—if ironically—flatters Charles II: if she and her child are Mary and the infant Christ, the absent father/king is implicitly and necessarily conflated with God. While certainly verging on the blasphemous, Barbara Villiers’s assumption of the guise of the Madonna is strangely appropriate: hers was a child not begotten by her lawful husband but, rather, was the son of one more powerful; in Barbara’s case, the father was not only her religious leader (Charles, of course, was Head of the Church of England) but her secular leader as well.

Not surprisingly, subsequent generations did consider this composition as a conscious send-up of those very Catholic pictorial traditions it immediately invoked—and one engineered by Barbara Villiers herself. Most famously, in his Aedes Walpolianae of 1748 (p. xvi), Horace Walpole reported that:

Sir Peter Lely was employ’d by the Dutchess of Cleveland to draw Her and her Son … for a Madonna and a little Jesus, which she sent for an Altar-piece to a Convent of Nuns in France. It staid there for two years, when the Nuns discovering whose Portrait it was, return’d it.

When considered independently, each of the two portraits of Barbara Villiers as Magdalen and Madonna is rich in its own right. Yet, when considered in the context of their creation and reception, however, they become a kind of diptych that enriches and emboldens their meanings. In both the roles of Madonna and Magdalen the mistress is visually posited as physical and spiritual consort to the king, so that the two pictures might be thought of part of an implied triptych that places each notionally on either side of a missing image of Charles II. Just two of the numerous role portraits Lely painted of Lady Castlemaine when she was at the height of her power and influence at court during the 1660s, these works collectively suggest that both Barbara Villiers and the artist Lely devised her portraits as cunning visual tools in her bid to create a vision of herself as the consort of the king, who was her spiritual leader and bodily possessor.

As his practice developed in the late 1660s and 1670s, Lely’s portraits—of Barbara and other sitters alike—were no longer replete with multi-layered meanings pertinent to the sitter’s personal ‘history’ that could be deciphered variously depending on each viewer’s personal ‘access’ to the woman depicted. Instead, Lely’s portraits increasingly featured the women in numbered poses and guises that reflected neither the aspirations, the actual events of their lives, nor the desires of the sitters. These later paintings presented mere formulaic tropes of identity (i.e. women in pastoral settings were considered modern-day incarnations of Flora; riding costumes signalled warrior amazons; and Cleopatras were recognized by the pearls they held).³⁰

It could be argued that the more formulaic approach to Lely’s painted portrait in the late 1660s and 1670s was actually necessitated by Barbara Villiers’s augmented visibility. Indeed, by 1667 her increasing notoriety rendered nearly impossible any further pictorial ambiguity as the decade progressed. Her ‘stories’ enveloped her portraits even as she may have continued to try to manipulate their possible interpretations. By the late 1660s her body had become too available to a broad audience—literally, visually, and notionally—for her to maintain control over her appearance. An example of this is, no doubt, Andrew Marvell’s unpublished but widely circulated Last Instructions to a Painter, in which he lampooned both Lady Castlemaine’s status at court and her sexual appetites.³¹ Also, and even more widely circulated, was a group of satirical broadsheets that took as their subject the brothel riots of 1668; foremost among them, the so-called ‘Poor-Whores’ petition asked Lady Castlemaine, who was dubbed ‘the most Splendid, Illustrious, Serene and Eminent Lady of Pleasure’ for her help in restoring prostitutes’ ability to ply their trade. They claimed Barbara’s sponsorship on the basis that she had ‘great Experience [with the trade], and for your diligence therein, [you] have arrived to high and Eminent Advancement for these late years’.³² These satirical ‘pleas’ to the perceived ‘Pope’ of London’s church of prostitution,³³ ended with a fictional ‘response’, purportedly from Lady Castlemaine herself, in which she proclaimed her rightful status as a ‘Famous Lady … satisfied … with the Delights of Venus’,³⁴ and in which she pledged her aid in their misfortunes. Such satirical poems and broadsheets, which appeared with much more frequency as the decade progressed, demonstrate the extent to which Lady Castlemaine’s identity had become notorious even outside court circles and, therefore, how it necessarily was beginning to be perceived in ways she could no longer control.³⁵

Lady Castlemaine’s body by the late 1660s had, in fact, become itself a site of ill-repute, no longer one of beauty. Lorenzo Magalotti in his Relazione d’Inghilterra noted her declining beauty, remarking that ‘Presentemente questa dama non è molto bella, benchè se gli riconoscono i vestigi d’una bellezza maravigliosa’.³⁶ Her body, therefore, was seen as a deteriorating ‘sight’ and ‘site’ of beauty, one that was increasingly defined as visual proof of the licences and lasciviousness of all women at the Restoration court. Inevitably, the control she may have wished to maintain through her portraiture was becoming subsumed and even negated.

Ultimately, the use of enigmatic, non-symbol-driven allegory like that used in her Magdalen portrait necessarily failed as a satisfactory pictorial tool since it inherently created a temporally specific genre that inevitably led to a loss of control over interpretations of those meanings as time passed and as the schism between real woman and sitter became irreparable. In fact, the ambiguously emblematic role portrait, like her Magdalen portrait, which allowed for multiple levels of decipherability on the part of each viewer ultimately itself permitted and encouraged a total mapping of ‘notorious identity’ onto a painting at the expense of the original, self-fashioned one. For later generations, such allusive portraits, at best, prompted viewers to infer from the ‘guise’ that the portrait might have once made obvious references to the actualities of the sitter’s experience; but, at worst (and more often) it trapped the sitter in her role, leaving space only for the ‘stories’ imposed upon her by her audiences. In other words, it contained the seeds of its own subversion.³⁷

Whatever the ultimately negative effects of allegorical guise—or, in other words, whatever the inevitable ‘loss’ therein—for many there was distinct potential for empowerment inherent in symbolic role-play. Gill Perry has observed that ‘despite the negative or prurient possibilities in … readings … of the [various] myth[s], the connotations [of role-play] … could … carry more positive and (relevant) social meanings’.³⁸ Whatever those connotations would devolve into over the course of the 1660s, Barbara’s portraits clearly manifest an attempt (both on her part and on Lely’s) to manipulate from the outset these more positive aspects of the mythic and religious figures in whose guise she posed. Consequently, her portraits stand as the instruments of a conscious ‘fashioning’ or performance/presentation of her own image, one that prohibited the viewer’s complete access to her since it necessarily presented her as multifaceted and polyvalent.³⁹ Indeed, in posing ‘as’ many various women, Barbara effectively both promoted herself as all-powerful and denied viewers access to a single, exclusive, and final definition of her ‘self’.⁴⁰

Lady Castlemaine’s project of allusive portrayal confirms pictorially what some have documented through studies of the verbal displays of women in Restoration London. They have characterized the period of Charles II’s reign as a moment in which society—in other words men—saw an increasing need to categorize and to control women’s appearances (real and notional), and this was prompted by the perception that women were ably evading and frustrating any such controls.⁴¹ They assert that after the Restoration the increased efforts to create a codification of ways of describing and viewing women (evidenced in literary texts, conduct manuals, and the like) was actually fuelled by a growing discomfort with the physical autonomy and visual availability of women in Restoration London. This observation is directly corroborated by Barbara’s willing and complex self-display in her portraiture by Lely.⁴²

As objects that literally show and direct her gaze, her portraits demonstrate the extent to which women attempted to control their own appearances through the return of their gaze. To characterize the Restoration actress—of which Barbara was one who lived her life on the court stage—as primarily scenic ‘simplifies their effect on the spectator’.⁴³ Like actresses who looked out from the stage, Barbara’s images at once promote her as an object to be viewed but at the same time they attempt to control her viewer’s reactions and interpretations through her own gaze and the ambiguity of the various roles she assumes.

Self-display is always effectively a conscious masking of the self, at once inviting and frustrating the viewer’s knowledge of the subject; as was the case of an actress donning a role on stage, Lady Castlemaine ‘could be seen, and perhaps had, but not known’.⁴⁴ Lady Castlemaine’s portraits achieve the simultaneous revelation and masking inherent in any portrait, but when considered together they are at best a conglomerate portrait of the personae she and Lely devised for us to see. In fact, they are never a representation of an unmediated ‘self’.⁴⁵ As such, they require to be approached and understood well outside not only the now-dated physiognomic theory of portraiture but also the confines of teleological, biographical interpretation.

As Marcia Pointon has pointed out, ‘the portrait [is] … one component in a wider and encompassing practice of delineation through which women are constructed in that world but within which women also construct a position, a voice, and an identity through their own acts of portrayal and delineation’.⁴⁶ Restoration female portraits, especially those of elite women in highly visible and politically charged roles, should be considered precisely as such ‘constructions of position, a voice, and an identity’ and not the mere visual clichés they have so often been assumed to be.⁴⁷

An examination of this particular, focused group of portraits demonstrates, at best, how looking to these works as visual evidence (which itself must be considered within a tapestry of other sources) can help us elucidate the various ways a woman’s portrait played and depended upon the circumstances pertinent to her situation at the time of an image’s execution. This model should provide a useful method by which we, modern scholars, might better comprehend the meanings and possible impetuses behind modes of display in all Restoration female portraits, and, further, in the genre of early modern female portraits as a whole.⁴⁸ These efforts are not made in the service of ‘writing’ lives, but rather in order to help us recover the various non-verbal—but, nonetheless permanent—ways in which early modern women might have constructed their public personae.

Like Pointon’s work on female portraiture and representation in eighteenth-century England, my study of Lady Castlemaine’s early role-portraits attempts ‘not to discover the “real” people behind the paintings or to tell a life-story, but rather to understand the processes whereby these subjects—through a relatively mundane act of sitting for a portrait—are woven into a complex web of discourses’.⁴⁹ My work does not aim to recover either a ‘real’ Barbara or one who came to be seen through later interpretations of her portraits. Rather, my method tries to expose the ways in which the sitter/subject herself could be considered as an active agent in the construction and manipulation of the creation of her persona, one that would be seen by her contemporaries as multifaceted and polyvalent. It is precisely in its fragmentary nature that the tandem performances of Lady Castlemaine and Lely in painting her ‘life’ become so potent. To try to localize her power within the bounds of any narrative trajectory would betray the very tools of her power, which depended upon the slippery nature of her existence outside sexual, social, or political convention. Any biographical enterprise undertaken by twenty-first-century scholars must engage with the fact that this woman’s power rested precisely on her vital liminality. It is precisely that elusiveness which she and Lely capture so eloquently in these paintings.