Love Quote by Antonia Fraser

Antonia Fraser slips a historian’s pin into a balloon of royal myth: Charles II wasn’t merely a libertine anecdote in a periwig, he was a man who actively preferred women as companions, not just conquests. The phrasing matters. “Liked women’s company” arrives first, a quiet corrective to the reduction of Restoration sexuality to sheer appetite. Then comes the deliberately plain “as well as making love to them,” a line that refuses euphemism while also refusing moral panic. Fraser’s tone is almost domestically matter-of-fact, which is precisely the point: she normalizes what court gossip sensationalizes.

The subtext is a critique of how male rulers get flattened into caricatures. Charles II’s mistresses are often treated as decorative proof of decadence; Fraser nudges the reader toward something more socially revealing: intimacy as politics. A king who seeks women’s conversation signals a court culture where influence travels through bedrooms and drawing rooms alike, and where women’s wit, access, and emotional labor become part of governance’s unofficial machinery.

Contextually, Fraser is writing with late-20th-century biographical instincts: interested in personality, private life, and the porous border between them. She’s also subtly rebuking the prudishness that makes historians either sanitize sex or make it the whole story. Her sentence keeps both truths in frame: desire, yes; companionship, also yes. That “and well as” (even with its clunky slip) reads like an insistence that human complexity survives even inside a crown.