Lucy Walter

Lucy Walter (c. 1630 – 1658), also known as Lucy Barlow, was a Welsh noblewoman, the first mistress of King Charles II of England and mother of James, Duke of Monmouth. During the Exclusion Crisis, a Protestant faction wanted to make her son heir to the throne, fuelled by the rumour that the king might have married Lucy, a claim which he denied. Life Ancestry and early life Lucy Walter was born into Welsh gentry as the daughter of William Walter (died 1650) and his wife, born Elizabeth Prothero (died 1652), daughter of John Prothero and niece of John Vaughan, 1st Earl of Carbery. She was probably born in 1630 at her family's home, Roch Castle near Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and had two brothers, Richard and Justus. She received no formal education but learned etiquette. As her parents had a strained relationship, they separated in 1640 when Walter was 10 years old. She, her mother and her brothers went to live with her maternal grandmother in London. She may have first met the Sidney family, who held the earldom of Leicester, here through her maternal family members. In 1647, when Walter was 17, after a long legal battle between her parents, the House of Lords ordered her and her brothers to live with their father as their mother could no longer afford to keep them.