New light on Lucy Walter, 1649-1659

• Published in: The Seventeenth century Vol. 37; no. 3; pp. 391 - 415
• Main Author: Vander Motten, J. P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Durham Routledge 04.05.2022; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: 17th century; Archives & records; Biographies; Charles II; Essays; Exile; Home ownership; Howard, Thomas; Litigation; Living conditions; low countries; Lucy Walter (c. 1630-1658); royalists in exile; Walter, Lucy (c 1630-1658); Delft Netherlands; Netherlands
• DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2021.1916779
• ISSN: 0268-117X

In a recent article on “the tensions between royal authority and individual agency in exile”, Nicole Greenspan has demonstrated how Lucy Walter was able to “reinvent herself and to evolve from a Welsh gentlewoman of modest lineage to a royal mistress and mother of the king’s son …”. Her account of Walter’s skills in negotiating the social, political, and financial constraints imposed by the conditions of exile is justly punctuated with reminders of how “much of Lucy Walter’s short life remains a mystery”—the assumption being that “[f]or much of the decade 1648-58 the sources are largely silent with respect to Lucy Walter”. George Scott, Lucy’s most extensive biographer to date, has noted that “for more than a year … we do not know anything about her, or how she fared after she left England [in July 1656]”. With the exception of Marika Keblusek, all writers on the subject, including George Scott, Robin Clifton, and Greenspan, have remained ignorant of the existence in Dutch archives of an extensive collection of notarial acts, which are of immediate relevance to Lucy Walter’s life story and help to break the “silence” on events within the decade specified by Greenspan. Keblusek has drawn on some of these documents in a 2008 Dutch-language essay dealing with Walter’s ownership of a richly furnished manor house near Delft, and her troubled relationship with Thomas Howard, who became embroiled in legal disputes with Lucy about jewellery pawned by her and money lent to her. But apart from being acknowledged by Anna Keay in the latest biography of Monmouth, Keblusek’s work has not prompted any more thorough archival research.