Ravenous: A Life of Barbara Villiers, Charles II's Most Infamous Mistress PDF Download
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Author: Andrea Zuvich
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526769131
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Barbara Villiers was a woman so beautiful, so magnetic and so sexually attractive that she captured the hearts of many in Stuart-era Britain. Her beauty is legendary: she became the muse of artists such as Peter Lely, the inspiration of writers such as John Dryden and the lover of John Churchill, the future great military leader whom we also know as the 1st Duke of Marlborough. Her greatest amorous conquest was King Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with whom she had a tempestuous and passionate relationship for the better part of a decade. But this loveliest of Stuart-era ladies had a dark side. She hurt and humiliated her husband, Roger Palmer, for decades with her unashamedly adulterous lifestyle, she plotted the ruin of her enemies, constantly gambled away vast sums of money, is remembered for the destruction of the Tudor-era Nonsuch Palace, and was known to unleash terrible rages when crossed. Crassly lampooned by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and subjected to verbal and written assaults, she was physically abused by a later, violent spouse. Barbara lived through some of the most turbulent times in British history: civil war, the Great Plague of London, which saw the deaths of around 100,000 people, the Great Fire of London, which destroyed much of the medieval city, and foreign conflicts such as the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Williamite wars, and the War of the Spanish Succession. An impoverished aristocrat who rose to become a wealthy countess and then a duchess, taking her lovers from all walks of life, Barbara laughed at the morals of her time and used her natural talents and her ruthless determination to the material benefit of herself and her numerous offspring. In great stately homes and castles such as Hampton Court Palace, her portraits are widely seen and appreciated even today. She had an insatiable appetite for life, love, riches, amusement, and power. She was simply ‘ravenous’…
Author: Andrea Zuvich
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526769131
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book Here
Book Description
Barbara Villiers was a woman so beautiful, so magnetic and so sexually attractive that she captured the hearts of many in Stuart-era Britain. Her beauty is legendary: she became the muse of artists such as Peter Lely, the inspiration of writers such as John Dryden and the lover of John Churchill, the future great military leader whom we also know as the 1st Duke of Marlborough. Her greatest amorous conquest was King Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with whom she had a tempestuous and passionate relationship for the better part of a decade. But this loveliest of Stuart-era ladies had a dark side. She hurt and humiliated her husband, Roger Palmer, for decades with her unashamedly adulterous lifestyle, she plotted the ruin of her enemies, constantly gambled away vast sums of money, is remembered for the destruction of the Tudor-era Nonsuch Palace, and was known to unleash terrible rages when crossed. Crassly lampooned by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and subjected to verbal and written assaults, she was physically abused by a later, violent spouse. Barbara lived through some of the most turbulent times in British history: civil war, the Great Plague of London, which saw the deaths of around 100,000 people, the Great Fire of London, which destroyed much of the medieval city, and foreign conflicts such as the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Williamite wars, and the War of the Spanish Succession. An impoverished aristocrat who rose to become a wealthy countess and then a duchess, taking her lovers from all walks of life, Barbara laughed at the morals of her time and used her natural talents and her ruthless determination to the material benefit of herself and her numerous offspring. In great stately homes and castles such as Hampton Court Palace, her portraits are widely seen and appreciated even today. She had an insatiable appetite for life, love, riches, amusement, and power. She was simply ‘ravenous’…
Author: Patricia Campbell Horton
Publisher: Avon Books
ISBN: 9780380017133
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
Author: Andrea Zuvich
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526753081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
An expert in Stuart England examines the sexual lives of Britons in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in this frank, informative, and revealing history. Acclaimed Stuart historian Andrea Zuvich explores the sexual mores of Stuart Britain, including surprising beliefs, bizarre practices, and ingenious solutions for infertility, impotence, sexually transmitted diseases, and more. Along the way, she reveals much about the prevailing attitudes towards male and female sexual behavior. Zuvich sheds light not only on the saucy love lives of the Royal Stuarts, but also on the dark underbelly of the Stuart era with histories of prostitution, sexual violence, infanticide, and sexual deviance. She looks at everything from what was considered sexually attractive to the penalties for adultery, incest, and fornication. Sex and Sexuality in Stuart Britain touches on the fashion, food, science, art, medicine, magic, literature, love, politics, faith and superstition of the day.
Author: Andrea Zuvich
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781490425566
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Set in the tumultuous late 17th Century, His Last Mistress tells the true story of the final years in the life of James Scott, the dashing but doomed Duke of Monmouth, and Lady Henrietta Wentworth. As the popular but illegitimate eldest son of King Charles II, the Duke is a spoiled, lecherous man. With both a wife and a mistress, this rakish libertine is nevertheless captivated by the innocence of young Lady Henrietta Wentworth, who has been raised to covet her virtue. Will she succumb? At the same time, the Duke begins to harbour risky political ambitions which may threaten not only his life but also that of those around him. Will the path he chooses lead him to bloody rebellion, or peace and happiness? His Last Mistress is a passionate, sometimes explicit, carefully researched and ultimately moving story of love and loss, set against a backdrop of dangerous political unrest, brutal religious tensions, and the looming question of who will be the next King.
Author: Charles II (King of England)
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN: 9780720609912
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Charles II was a renowned ladies' man but, arguably his greatest love--though not in the Biblical sense--was his sister Minette. Separated from her in their youth by a royal inter-marriage, his letters reveal a tender and humane side not often seen in biographies of this cunning and calculating monarch.
Author: Linda Porter
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781509877072
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
According to the great diarist, John Evelyn, Charles II was 'addicted to women', and throughout his long reign a great many succumbed to his charms. Clever, urbane and handsome, Charles presided over a hedonistic court, in which licence and licentiousness prevailed.Mistresses is the story of the women who shared Charles's bed, each of whom wielded influence on both the politics and cultural life of the country. From the young king-in-exile's first mistress and mother to his first child, Lucy Walter, to the promiscuous and ill-tempered courtier, Barbara Villiers. From Frances Teresa Stuart, 'the prettiest girl in the world' to history's most famous orange-seller, 'pretty, witty' Nell Gwynn and to her fellow-actress, Moll Davis, who bore the last of the king's fifteen illegitimate children. From Louise de Kéroualle, the French aristocrat - and spy for Louis XIV - to the sexually ambiguous Hortense Mancini. Here, too, is the forlorn and humiliated Queen Catherine, the Portuguese princess who was Charles's childless queen. Drawing on a wide variety of original sources, including material in private archives, Linda Porter paints a vivid picture of these women and of Restoration England, an era that was both glamorous and sordid.
Author: Catherine Curzon
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1473872650
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This royal biography of the 17th century princess and mother of King George II recounts an epic tale of privilege, passion, scandal, and disgrace. When Sophia Dorothea of Celle married her first cousin, the future King George I, she was an unhappy bride. Filled with dreams of romance and privilege, she hated the groom she called “pig snout” and wept at news of her engagement. When she arrived in the austere court of Hanover, the vibrant young princess found herself ignored and unwanted—while her husband openly gallivanted with his mistress. Then Sophia Dorothea plunged into a dangerous affair with the dashing soldier Count Phillip Christoph von Königsmarck, a man as celebrated for his looks as his bravery. When he and Sophia Dorothea fell in love, they were dicing with death. Watched by a scheming countess who had ambitions of her own, it was only a matter of time before scandal gripped the House of Hanover. In the end, Sophia Dorothea was divorced, disgraced, and locked away in a gilded cage for 30 years—whilst her lover faced an even darker fate.
Author: Sandra Lansky
Publisher: Weinstein Books
ISBN: 160286215X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
The daughter of one of the most powerful mobsters in America describes growing up amidst the glamour and tragedy of 1940s, 50s and 60s Las Vegas and recounts knowing Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and Frank Sinatra as a child.
Author: Kevin Sharpe
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191550892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather the biography's organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicize. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, only that is through a full return to history and an exact historicizing, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. In Writing Lives literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern conceptions of the life and our own conceptualizing of the biographical project, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.
Author: Leonida Caldesi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
