page_title: English and British royal mistress
section_title: James II
hierarchical_section_title: English and British royal mistress / James II
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Lady Arabella Churchill (1648-1730), Mätresse des englischen Königs Jakob II.
context_page_description: In the English court, a royal mistress was a woman who was the lover of the King. She may have been taken either before or after his accession to the throne. Although it generally is only used of females, by extrapolation, the relation can cover any lover of the monarch whether male or female. To date no English reigning Queen is known to have had a lover.
  Monarchs had an incentive to take mistresses in that they generally made dynastic marriages of convenience, and there was often little love in them.
  Beyond the physical relationship, the royal mistress would often exercise a profound influence over the King, extending even to affairs of State. Her relationship with the Queen could be tense, although some wives appear to have felt little jealousy in the matter.
context_section_description: Charles was succeeded by his younger brother James II, who may have had as many as eleven mistresses. He did not follow the accepted standard of beauty of the time: while his contemporaries sought out heavy-set, voluptuous women on the Baroque model, James was attracted to skinny, boyish young girls in their teens. He was a Catholic, and his brother Charles II remarked in jest that his mistresses were "so ugly that they must have been provided as penance by his confessors". Anne Hyde was his mistress before she became his wife; he met her in 1657 at The Hague and by some reports promised marriage to her when he became her lover a year or so after. She became pregnant, but they were not officially married as was often the custom of the time until the year following, 24 November 1659. His brother Charles II sent lawyers to Breda when Anne Hyde insisted they had been secretly married where the legal marriage was registered in the public records as having taken place there on 24 November 1659. Further confirmation was the confession of James II's sister who on her deathbed confessed that she had set up the untrue slander against Anne. His longest-lasting mistress, Arabella Churchill, was described as nothing but skin and bone. He noticed her while out for a ride; she fell from her horse, exposing her legs. She would bear him four illegitimate children.
caption: Arabella Churchill
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