The strumpets who risked all to find favour with rich and powerful men A compelling exhibition has just opened at Hampton Court featuring what might be termed 17th-century strumpets - the beautiful women who sought to make their way in the world in the licentious court of Charles II. The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned reveals the way in which the court painters Peter Lely and (later) Godfrey Kneller turned them into goddesses and saints as they equated outer appearance and inner virtue. In fact, goodness had very little to do with what was going on: many of the women depicted owed their position to the way they parlayed their looks into currency, using them to become the mistresses of powerful men or to find an advantageous match. Such manoeuvring was a perilous business. Frances Stuart, portrayed by Lely as a glorious gold-swathed girl with a pearl earring, and described by Samuel Pepys as "the prettiest girl in the world," only just escaped the amorous advances of the King on her way into a good marriage. Her sister, Margaret Brooke, gambled and lost: she became the mistress of James, then Duke of York, just as she married the poet John Denham (he was 50, she 18). Within a year she was dead, poisoned - rumour has it - by her jealous husband. An introduction to The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned at Hampton Court For every Nell Gwynn, resplendently naked and keeping the King's favour, there is an abandoned Lucy Walter, dying of syphilis. For each carefree Carey Fraser, whose purchase of a ballgown costing £300 (£22,500 today) drove away a suitor who feared she would cost him his estate, there is a virtuous wife. At the heart of this handsomely mounted show, however, is the magnificent Barbara Villiers, Charles's mistress throughout the 1660s, who bore him five illegitimate children. Sexually voracious and tough as they come, she was also a master manipulator of her image, getting Lely - who said it was "beyond the compass of art" to capture "her sweetness and exquisite beauty" - to paint her as Minerva, Mary Magdalene and most outrageously of all, the Virgin with Child (her son Charles Fitzroy). Today, one wonders how Villiers would have fared. Her drooping eyes and heavy jowls don't conform to any modern notion of beauty - but that glint of intelligence in her eye, and the confidence of her presentation, make you feel she would have been running the country now as then. Just by different means.