Lucy’s surname has been recorded as Walter or Walters, Waters, and, Barlow or Barlo (the alias she used occasionally) by contemporaries and scholars over the years, but here I have referred to her by the assumed correct name of Walter.

Lucy was born into a Welsh middling-gentry family around 1630 and lived in Roch Castle, Pembrokeshire. During the civil war, her family declared for Charles I and the royalist cause. In 1640 her parents separated, and Lucy and her mother moved to London, looking for opportunity and probably a wealthy match for Lucy. 

When she was about fourteen years old, at the end of the civil war, she was briefly engaged as the mistress of Algernon Sidney, a parliamentarian officer, who was said to have paid 40 gold pieces for her services. However, as quickly as the agreement was made, Sidney had to rush off to join his regiment, and Lucy, who had bigger fish to fry, set off on a ship to The Hague, in the Dutch Republic, where one of the exiled royalist camps were based. 

The First Mistress

It was here that she apparently met the younger brother of her former employer, Robert Sidney, and they began an affair. It didn’t last for too long though because, as luck would have it, in May 1648, a parliamentarian force mutinied and sailed for The Hague, which quickly brought Charles from his base in Paris to see who and what had joined the royalist cause. Within a week, Lucy had used her connections to meet and charm Charles, and the two began a relationship that would make her the first in a long line of his mistresses who gave him children. 

The following year, on 9th April 1649, Lucy gave birth to their son, James, the first of Charles’ children. In June, Charles, Lucy and their son moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris to join his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria. Lucy lived with Charles until September, when he left for Jersey to be ready to join the Scottish allies in his uprising. Charles left Lucy and their son at The Hague.

In 1650, while Charles was away, James was kidnapped. He was found ten days later, but Lucy was terrified and believed that agents of Cromwell’s commonwealth regime had attempted to remove Charles’ son as a potential future threat to the new republican rule. She moved with James to Breda, and then to Paris, and then turned to another source of income and protection: Viscount Theobald Taaffe. Taaffe was kind to Lucy and reports suggest that there was genuine affection between them; in 1651 they had a daughter, Mary. By now Lucy and Taaffe’s arrangement was stirring up salacious gossip at court – she had, after all, been in a relationship with the king-in-exile and given birth to his son.

When Charles returned to Paris in October 1651 after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester, exhausted, penniless, and down-trodden, he made it clear to Lucy that their relationship was over. However, he didn’t cut all ties: for three years Lucy remained at the Louvre Palace, living alongside Charles’ mother, Queen Henrietta-Maria, and his sister Minette. Despite Charles then going on to have further mistresses, and more children, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon reported that Lucy had lived “for some Years in France in the King’s Sight.”

Charles’ move to Cologne, Germany in 1654 changed all that, though, and her relationship with the Stuarts soured. By 1655, Lucy and Taaffe’s relationship had broken down, and at some point Lucy may have been evicted from Queen Henrietta Maria’s court, as a report from Clarendon asked for Charles’ permission to remove an unnamed “young lady” who had taken up lodgings there without permission and shown little respect to the Queen. Lucy returned to The Hague with her two children, and shortly afterwards, she and Thomas Howard, the Earl of Suffolk’s younger brother began an affair, though unbeknownst to Lucy, he was a spy for Oliver Cromwell’s intelligence service.

Sex, Scandal, and Stabbing

For several years, Lucy became tied up in all sorts of scandals, which caused alarm to everyone, especially Charles and his advisers, who saw Lucy as a liability, discrediting and embarrassing the exiled royalist party. Despite promises of pensions, threats and consistent efforts on the part of Charles’ ministers to appease her, Lucy seemed unable to live a quiet existence, and desperately clung  to her former position as the king’s mistress and, of course, the mother of his child. Several dramatic reports of Lucy’s life were recorded by Daniel O’Neill who was sent to keep an eye on her by Charles. 

Among other sordid reports of blackmail, prostitution and bribery, O’Neill overhead Lucy discussing the best way to murder her maid – Lucy reckoned by driving a knitting needle into her ear while she sleep so that there was no evidence of the crime – because the maid  had threatened to disclose tales of Lucy having abortions (more likely miscarriages) and working as a prostitute, as well as having an affair with Howard. O’Neill managed to dissuade Lucy and paid off the maid. Her urged the king to take a hard line with Lucy.

Eventually, Charles met with Lucy, and offered her a deal: she would be provided with funds, travel arrangements, and a token of his affection in the form of a pearl necklace, if she agreed to go and live in England. Lucy agreed and in June 1656 she set sail for London with her children, Thomas Howard, and her brother Justus. Though they had instructions to travel anonymously and live quietly, the party were recognised, and within weeks of settling in the capital – opposite Somerset House no less – Cromwell’s men had captured them and sent them to the Tower of London for interrogation. Though Lucy really didn’t have any useful political information, the republican regime used her as propaganda for their cause. Write ups about her immoral life, and how Charles chose to spend his money on whores, mistresses and illegitimate children, while good and honest citizens suffered, fuelled anti-monarchy propaganda. Eventually they decided they had gotten all they could out of Lucy and her story, and she was shipped back to the Dutch Republic at the order of Cromwell. Charles probably couldn’t believe it when in August 1657, Lucy had settled back in Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands. And it wasn’t long before she was stirring up more trouble.

Lucy and Howard’s relationship had been declining dramatically and, after an almighty argument, they fell out for the last time, and he broke off their affair. Lucy, fuelled with rage, sent a friend after Howard to kill him. Armed with a knife, a fight broke out between Howard and his assailant, and Howard was stabbed, though not fatally. Afterwards, Howard started legal proceedings against Lucy for theft, claiming that she had stolen important papers from him which she planned to use to blackmail him and others.

Exasperated by her volatile and dangerous behaviour, Charles and his advisers began making plans to separate Lucy and her son.

Custody Battles and Abduction

Charles decided that the best course of action was to somehow get Lucy into prison, where she would be forced to agree to Charles’ demands in order to regain her freedom. On 1 December 1657, Charles employed the services of the smooth-talking and handsome Colonel Arthur Slingsby, who befriended Lucy, persuading her to lodge with him as his guest. After a few weeks, he suddenly confronted, claiming that she had not paid her bill for her stay, and that he was taking her to the local jail. Lucy, not one to submit quietly, started screaming and ran out into the street with James, crying and hollering that she was being mistreated. Neighbours started peering out of their windows, and coming out onto the street, to see a woman and her infant son in distress. One of the neighbours was Don Alonso de Cardenas, a previous Spanish ambassador to England, who arranged for Lucy to stay at another house in safety.

Cardenas wrote the next day to the king, complaining of the “barbarous, abominable, and most unnatural” treatment of a lady. After several letters back and forth concerning his problems with Lucy, Charles managed to recruit the Spanish officials to help him remove James from her care. The Spanish endeavoured to convince Lucy to simply hand James over to Charles, but Lucy refused, saying that she would consent to bring up the child according to Charles’ wishes, but would not give up her son. By now Charles had had enough of negotiations and Lucy was put under house arrest by the Spanish on his request at the end of December 1657. Lucy threatened to publish private letters between her and Charles if her demands for a pension, which Charles had previously promised to pay, were not met. In the face of a looming scandal, Charles decided to make another attempt to abduct James.

One day in April 1658, Thomas Ross, a groom of the bedchamber for Charles, visited Lucy under the guise of having official business with her. While Lucy’s back was turned, looking for some paperwork, Ross hurried out of the house with James, hiding with him at a secret location. Lucy immediately began searching for the pair but this time was unable to find her son. For six months, while Lucy searched for James, Ross moved discreetly around, staying in locations undisclosed to anyone, and keeping the trail cold enough that Lucy was never to find him.

A Final Confession

While she was searching for her son, Lucy began to weaken, and her body became frail. She was suffering from a mysterious illness (which her enemies later claimed to be venereal disease); but, despite her sickness, she continued her desperate search. At some point in October 1658, she travelled to Paris, likely because she had heard that James may now have been moved there. But James was nowhere to be found.

During her search, Lucy became acquainted with John Cosin, a Protestant chaplain at Henrietta Maria’s court. Knowing that she was dying, she asked Cosin to take her last confession; a confession that would one day be used by supporters of James in an attempt to prove his legitimacy. Decades later, Cosin claimed that Lucy revealed she and Charles had in fact been married, and that James was therefore the rightful heir to the English throne. She allegedly handed him evidence of the fact, making him promise to keep it locked away, in what became the infamous ‘black box’, not to be opened in Charles’ lifetime. Aside from the fact that we do not know if Lucy even said this, it was highly unlikely that Lucy and Charles had been married, and the supposed evidence was never produced. However, James certainly spent his life believing, or at least claiming, that he was legitimate, and the apparent confession generated support for Monmouth’s claims and helped stir up the 1685 rebellion against James II.

With no sign of her son, no income, surrounded by her enemies, and a body riddled with disease, Lucy gave up her fight. She died in the first week of December 1658.

An Unfair Write Up?

Lucy is often given a bad write-up as a crazy, manipulative, nuisance of a woman, who caused nothing but trouble for Charles, and was a bad mother to her children. She certainly seemed to cause a lot of scandal wherever she was, but can we really blame her for all her reckless or misguided decisions when she was faced with so many obstacles?

Let’s break it down: Lucy had been abandoned while pregnant at the age of eighteen and left with little means of supporting herself or her child. Her son was temporarily kidnapped. In the meantime, she found support from another man, with whom she had a daughter. Then when the father of her firstborn son returned from his unsuccessful campaign, he had become completely disinterested in both Lucy and their child. She was promised money for her and her son which she never received and strung along with false kindness, trickery, and occasional affection. Seeking protection and financial support elsewhere, she has a string of relationships that led to her being dubbed a whore. She is snubbed by people who sided with the king on all matters, however poorly judged or cruel they were. Back in England, she is arrested, thrown in the Tower, and eventually deported back to the Netherlands. Attempts are made to throw her in prison and abduct her child. Finally, while penniless, alone, and with two children to care for, her son is taken by his own father, and she is never to see him again. All of this in the space of ten years. 

Another reading of Lucy could be that she was a young, ambitious woman, who was used and abused by the men in power and shamed in a way that reserved only for women. She was strong, capable and fierce, refusing to back down in situations where she was bullied or coerced by the men who wielded more power than she. Reports of her life almost always came from those who were irritated by her determined or hard-headed behaviour, especially when it prevented them from getting what they wanted. She was sure of herself and went to great lengths to get what she thought was rightfully hers and her son’s, ignoring conventions of the time, and proving herself a formidable opponent.