Though Louise’s unpopularity was due mostly to her being French and Catholic, she was also known to be wildly extravagant with the king’s money. Her apartments at Whitehall were rebuilt three times, and John Evelyn said they had “ten times the richness and glory beyond the Queen’s.”
Hortense Mancini, the Duchess Mazarin, was one of five Italian sisters all noted for their great beauty. Two of them became mistress to Louis XIV. Born in Rome in 1646, Hortense moved to France at an early age. Charles proposed to her while there, but her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, didn’t think the exiled king’s prospects were good. She later married and then left her husband, arrived at Charles’s court in 1675, and became his mistress shortly thereafter. Considered an “adventuress,” she was known for her compulsive gambling, her great skill with swords and guns, and her inclination to wear men’s clothing.
Christopher Wren was a real person, too. Best known for rebuilding London’s churches and St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire, he also designed the Royal Observatory and the Royal Hospital at Chelsea. In 1669, Charles II appointed him Surveyor General of the King’s Works, making him responsible for supervising all work on the royal palaces. Wren was knighted in 1673.
Besides churches, palaces, and other famous buildings, Wren also built a family home for himself beside the Thames in Windsor—the house we used as Kit’s house in this book. Built in 1676, the home is now known as Sir Christopher Wren’s House Hotel. If you’re lucky enough to visit, ask to view the original “Oak Room” (Kit’s dining room), and see if you find it as impressive as Rose did. Wren’s original paneled master bedroom can be booked for an overnight stay. To find the hotel from the castle, just walk down the hill to the river, as Kit and Rose did in the story.
Many other settings in The Gentleman’s Scandalous Bride are also real places you can visit, and although Kit is a fictional character, all the projects he worked on in the book were actually built for Charles II by different men.
Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England, began building Hampton Court Palace in 1514. The best surviving part of Wolsey’s palace is Base Court with its forty guest lodgings. By 1528, Wolsey had fallen from favor and was forced to relinquish Hampton Court to Henry VIII, who remodeled the palace to suit himself. Henry’s personal lodgings have since been demolished, but you can still see his kitchens, his great hall, and his astronomical clock in Clock Court.
The later Tudors changed very little of the palace, and neither did the early Stuarts or Oliver Cromwell. So the next king to make a major mark on Hampton Court was Charles II. Among other projects, Charles completely redesigned the gardens and also commissioned a set of apartments for his mistress Barbara, the Duchess of Cleveland. This new building, which I have Kit building in The Gentleman’s Scandalous Bride, is said to have looked completely different from the Tudor gothic architecture of Henry VIII’s day.
In 1689, soon after William and Mary took the throne, they followed Charles’s architectural lead and asked Christopher Wren to rebuild Hampton Court Palace in a more modern style, to compare with the likes of Versailles and the Louvre. The old Tudor buildings around Cloister Green Court were demolished and replaced by Wren’s elegant Fountain Court. The Duchess of Cleveland’s lodgings by the privy garden were destroyed at this time as well, and little is known of them now, as no building plans survived.
As for Hampton Court’s maze, the one you can visit there now was designed in 1690 for William III, but it possibly replaced an earlier maze, perhaps laid out for Henry VIII. In an inventory of Cromwell’s goods at Hampton Court dated 1659, there is mention of a cistern that serves “the fountaine and Maze.” Since Charles II was restored to his throne the following year, perhaps the maze still survived at the time of Kit and Rose’s story. In any case, we had fun imagining them exploring it!
Hampton Court Palace is open to the public seven days a week year-round. Just a thirty-minute train ride from Central London, it’s a perfect day trip back in time for anyone visiting the capital.
The remodeled east end of the Royal Chapel at Whitehall Palace in London was indeed designed by Christopher Wren—the sketch he made that Kit showed Rose still survives. The actual work was carried out by Thomas Kinward, Robert Streater, and Henry Phillips, for a total cost of a little more than £71. The fire in The Gentleman’s Scandalous Bride was entirely our invention, but would surely have raised the price of construction.
Sadly, Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire in 1698. Although a few walls and other original bits of the palace survive as parts of the current government buildings, the only intact part of Whitehall today is Inigo Jones’s exquisite Banqueting House. Completed in 1622 and renowned for its architecture and magnificent ceiling painted by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, the building is also famous for being the scene of Charles I’s execution.
In Charles II’s time, the Banqueting House was used as the ceremonial chamber of the court and the scene of grand receptions. Of the queen’s birthday celebration on the 15th of November in 1677, which Rose and Kit attend in the final chapter of their story, John Evelyn noted in his diary: “The Queene’s birth-day, a greate Ball at Court, where the Prince of Orange and his new Princesse daunced.”
The Banqueting House is open
