CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The best of Queens, the most obedient wife …
His life the theme of her eternal prayer –
John Dryden on Catharine of Braganza
The Garter ceremony of April 1661 was a moving time for those who remembered the old order. The coronation of King Charles II, which took place immediately afterwards, on 23 April, was however more of a public demonstration of the strength of the new, as modern leaders parade their troops and armaments before the eyes of foreign ambassadors.
The Garter procession took place by ancient custom at Windsor on 15 April, but there was such a plethora of Knights to be installed that the ceremonies had to be staggered over three days.1 Princes like James Duke of York and Rupert of the Rhine, for instance, had received the Garter from Charles I at Oxford in 1645, but sixteen years later had never been installed. The ceremony itself had not been held since Charles I left London on the eve of the war.
The new Knights’ hatchments, and those of the Elector of Brandenburg and the late William of Orange, were now hung up for the first time. That loyal servant, the Duke of Ormonde, whose Garter was a fitting reward for all his efforts in exile, was there to swear his oath in person. It was however significant that the Knights’ costumes had been redesigned along more elaborate lines. Possibly they were influenced by the French King’s Knights of the Saint Esprit:2 if so, it was part of the general new admiration of the English for French Court ceremonial.
The coronation began as a piece of panoply in which much attention was paid to the presumed wishes of the populace.3 On the eve of his coronation, for example, the King took part in the traditional procession from the Tower of London to Whitehall, which was officially described as ‘a spectacle so grateful [pleasing] to the people’. He trod the same route as the mediaeval kings such as Richard II.fn1
Like modern coronations, this procession demanded an early start; everyone had to be mustered on Tower Hill by eight o’clock in the morning. What was more, they had to take care that their mounts were not ‘unruly or stinking’. As a result, John Evelyn felt able to comment favourably on the elegance of the prancing horses. Pepys, on the other hand, showed his particular interests by noting that the houses along the route had wealthy carpets and ladies (an interesting example of zeugma) hung out of their windows.4
Once again the conduits in the streets ran with wine, as on Restoration Day. But this time the streets were railed, and gravelled. As the foot guards of the King passed, their plumes of red and white feathers contrasting with the black and white of the Duke of York’s guard, they represented the established order – and monarchical strength. The coronation medal bore the royal oak bursting into leaf and the appropriate motto Iam Florescit – now it flourishes. This was the Crown triumphant, come out of its hiding-place.
The symbolic references of the triumphal arches under which the King passed made the same point.5 One arch supported a woman dressed as Rebellion, in a crimson robe crawling with snakes, a bloody sword in her hand. Her attendant, Confusion, was represented by a deformed shape, with the ruins of a castle on her head, a torn crown, and broken sceptres in each hand. At every turn it was heavily emphasized that the King himself stood, in contrast, for stability – for the whole social order. The dialogue between the figures of Rebellion and Monarchy, for example, went along simple lines, Rebellion beginning with ‘I am Hell’s daughter, Satan’s eldest child’, and Monarchy replying in valiant style, ‘To Hell foul Fiend, shrink from this glorious light….’ And so on and so on, for what to the King under his canopy must have surely seemed a very long time indeed, for all the impeccable nature of the sentiments.
The pleasantest arch to encounter was probably that supporting the woman Plenty, who addressed the King in the following glowing terms:
Great Sir, the Star which at your happy Birth
Joy’d with his Beams (at Noon) the wandering earth;
Did with auspicious lustre then presage
The glittering plenty of this Golden age….
Glittering plenty was exactly what the King needed.
A certain amount of it had already been expended on replacing the regalia essential to any decent coronation, most of which had disappeared or been melted down during the Interregnum. A committee had sat regularly to produce the requirements, retaining the ‘old names, and fashion’, and the total cost was over £30,000.6 The figure however was not really surprising, considering the determination to crown the King in style and the elaborate paraphernalia needed, including two crowns (one of which was known as St Edward’s crown, as before) and a quantity of ceremonial apparel for the King himself. The coronation ceremonial demanded, it seemed, an unceasing change of clothing for the monarch.7 Most of it was made of cloth of gold or some equally costly substance, from the King’s golden sandals with high heels (which must have made him tower over the assorted bishops and nobles around him) to his series of mantles of crimson velvet furred with ermine; even his under trousers, breeches and stockings were made of crimson satin. Rich golden tissue was also needed for the chairs of state. Then there was the horse of state, whose saddle was richly embroidered with pearls and gold, and although a large oriental ruby was donated by a jeweller named William Gomeldon, the further twelve thousand stones needed for the stirrups and bosses were only lent.
Scarlet cloth was used in abundance, including a false ceiling of red baize for St Edward’s Chapel and red cloth to cover the benches in both Westminster Hall and the Abbey. More mundanely, blue cloth was used to line the way from the Hall steps to the choir in the Abbey. Everything contributed to the overall impression of magnificence, but everything – down to the silk towel held by the Bishops before Communion – had to be paid for.
Nevertheless, the impact on observers, both native and foreign, was all the King could have wished. As far as the former were concerned, it was not a complete coincidence that the coronation took place shortly before the elections to the new Parliament. Visitors from abroad were duly impressed to discover that England was not at all the barbaric place that they had imagined it to be, cut off for twenty years behind its own iron curtain of republicanism. Henry Fagel, a ‘Foreigner at the Court of Charles II’, describing a sight-seeing tour of England at the time of the coronation, was astonished at the splendour of palaces such as Windsor and Hampton Court, as an Englishman today might be amazed at the richness of the palaces preserved in Poland or some other Iron Curtain country. And he was particularly impressed by the spectacle of the coronation itself, which excelled in splendour anything he had conceivably expected.8
The culmination of the ancient and solemn service in Westminster Abbey was the moment when the King’s crown was finally placed on his head by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘A great shout’ began.fn2 Immediately afterwards the whole nobility swore fealty. Thus they ‘firmly ascended the throne, and touched the King’s Crown, promising by that Ceremony to be ever ready to support it, with all their Power’. It was no empty oath. Within their lifetime, it could be that they would be called upon to implement it, as their fathers had. All this took place beneath the watchful eyes of the envoys who packed the gallery, from foreign powers as diverse as Spain and Sweden, Venice and Hamburg, as well as personal representatives of foreign dignitaries such as the Duc d’Orléans.
Even the weather (proverbially unkind to royal occasions in our own day) rallied to the King’s support. It had been extremely rainy throughout the previous month, but the day of the coronation itself dawned dry or, as a rising poet, John Dryden, subsequently described it:
Soft western winds waft o’er the gaudy spring
And open’d Scenes of flow’rs and blossoms bring
To grace this happy day,…
The weather continued dry throughout the ceremonies. If it was not quite balmy enough to justify Dryden’s ecstasy, a little over-enthusiasm can be forgiven on his part, in view of the fact that his last public work had been ‘Heroical Stanzas’ on Cromwell’s death. However, in the evening a violent thunderstorm broke out just as the King was leaving Westminster Hall. This satisfied everyone. The superstitious were able to prognosticate a gloomy future for the realm or its King or both from the thunder and lightning; optimists pointed to the auspiciously sunny day.10
And still the ceremonies were not done. They were rounded off by an ostentatious post-coronation feast held in Westminster Hall. Here the chivalric ritual extended to the service of the food, with the Earl Marshal, Lord High Steward and Lord High Constable appearing in their coronets, riding richly caparisoned horses, to present the first course. Even the humble Clerks of the Kitchen, who brought up the vast procession of servers, wore black figured satin gowns and velvet caps.
The King’s official champion, Sir Edward Dymoke, was there on his white charger, and made a grand entry preceded by trumpeters. Throwing down his gauntlet, he made the traditional challenge: ‘If any person of what degree soever, high or low, shall deny, or gainsay our Sovereign Lord King Charles the Second … here is his champion, who saith that he lieth, and is a False Traitor.’
This was the very Hall in which twelve years earlier the King’s father had been tried for his life. But the ghost of Cromwell did not answer.
At long last the King was able to wash his hands – in water ceremoniously brought to him by the Earl of Pembroke and a host of attendants – and, having done so, depart from Westminster as he had come, by barge along the river Thames.
But there was a fitting epilogue to all this parade of power and pomp ‘deemed … inferior in magnificence to none in Europe’.11 The King and the Duke of York subsequently presented their coronation robes not to a museum for posterity – but to the theatre. They were used in a play by Sir William Davenant. And in Henry V in 1664 (a version by Orrery), Owen Tudor wore the coronation suit of King Charles II. For all the sacred ceremony at its heart, there had after all been a strong element of the charade about the King’s gorgeous gold and scarlet crowning.
Henry Fagel had described the English ladies at the coronation with enthusiasm as ‘everyone dressed as a Queen’.12 But the position was in fact vacant; and Court and King alike stood in need of an incumbent. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, wrote Jane Austen in the nineteenth century, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ In the seventeenth century it was a universally acknowledged truth that a single King must be in want of a Queen – although he might expect to acquire the good fortune along with his bride. The concept of monarchy extended beyond the immediate person of the King, if only because the question of the succession could never be overlooked in this age of high and chancy mortality from every kind of disease.
This royal family had recently been depleted by two deaths, both by smallpox: Mary Princess of Orange at the age of twenty-nine, and Harry Duke of Gloucester at the age of twenty-one. The demise of this promising young man, described by Hyde as being ‘in truth the finest youth and of the most manly understanding that I have ever known’, ranks with the earlier death of his namesake Henry Prince of Wales as being one of the accidental tragedies of the house of Stuart. The death of the fabled Henry Prince of Wales left his younger brother to succeed as King Charles I, with dire results; the removal of the determinedly Protestant Duke of Gloucester from the royal succession (remember the steel with which he combated his mother’s Catholicism) was equally fatal. As it was, the Duke of York remained in effect the only heir to King Charles II throughout his reign who was both male and legitimate – and wholly English.fn3 But he was first a suspected, then an acknowledged Catholic. If the ‘sweet Duke of Gloucester’ had lived as an alternative Protestant heir, matters might have gone very differently.
The Duke of York’s prestige and importance were inevitably increased by his brother’s death. At the same time he had recently forfeited much of his previous popularity in Court circles, as well as his suitability to follow Charles II on the throne, if necessary, by what was generally regarded as a most unfortunate marriage. It was ironic that the lady in question was actually the daughter of Charles’ faithful servant Sir Edward Hyde (he had been raised to the rank of Earl of Clarendon at the coronation, by which name he will in future be known). James had seduced Anne Hyde while she was acting as a Maid of Honour to his sister Mary; as a result she became pregnant. James then made a secret contract with Anne and was married to her privately by his chaplain on 3 September 1660.
Once the marriage had taken place, James had second thoughts. Now he behaved in the most ungentlemanly fashion; he ignored the contract and tried to wriggle out of the situation by suggesting that others than himself could have been the father of the child. He wished the marriage to be declared invalid. James’ explanation in his Memoirs was that the contract had been made ‘in the first warmth of his youth’ (he was twenty-six).14 But he was unable to make the mud stick. On 22 October the child was born; it was a boy, who died. The marriage itself was generally known by the end of the year.
The irony lay in the fact that Clarendon himself was furious at the match. Marriage to his own daughter was no part of his elaborate web of marital plans, redolent of diplomatic alliances and wealthy dowries, for the two bachelor princes under his sway. At the same time, he incurred a great deal of odium for having apparently aimed to make his daughter Queen of England. It was unfair, but, given the relationship, natural. Really the only person who came out of the rather squalid incident of the York marriage at all well was King Charles. He refused to have the match declared invalid, which might have been politically wise, saying that it was unkind to Anne Hyde’s reputation, to say nothing of her condition. And he ostentatiously visited her during her confinement, showing a lead which the Court reluctantly followed. As for the idea of having Parliament annul the marriage, he refused to allow Parliament to interfere with the succession – a stand for which James would one day be grateful.
Once the coarse jibes against Anne Duchess of York, based on her pregnancy but inspired by the Clarendon connection, had died away, she was able to establish herself as a considerable character at the Restoration Court. She was certainly no beauty: Pepys called her downright plain. But Anne was nevertheless both witty and intelligent, and the French Ambassador went so far as to describe her as having courage, cleverness and energy almost worthy of a king’s blood.15
The untimely death of the Duke of Gloucester, the unsuitable marriage of the Duke of York: both of these increased the urgency to marry off the King. The eventual choice, the Infanta Catharine of Portugal, was no new candidate. Her father, King John IV, under whom Portugal had become liberated from Spain in 1640, had suggested it long ago when the bride and groom were respectively seven and fourteen. For sentimental reasons, it was pleasant to know that King Charles I had at the time favoured the match. But of course the point of the union to Portugal was very far from nostalgic. Put at its simplest, marriage into the Portuguese royal family brought England down firmly on the Portuguese side against Spain in the long-drawn-out struggle between the two Iberian countries. This contest was influenced by the fact that the young Portuguese King Alfonso was pretender to the Spanish throne through his grandmother the Duchess of Braganza; and his mother, the Queen-Regent of Portugal, was anxious to secure, by whatever means she could, the preservation of the relics of the Portuguese colonial empire (including of course Brazil).
Again, put simply, any support of Portugal was welcome to Spain’s other neighbour, aggressive France. By the Peace of the Pyrenees with Spain in 1659, France had bound herself specifically not to aid Portugal; but already her resolute young King Louis XIVwas casting ambitious eyes towards the Spanish Netherlands. If peace between Spain and France was not to be lasting, then it suited France to have Portugal, her natural ally against Spain, bolstered up by England. So that Charles’ projected match could not only count on French support, but also, by implication, drew England within the French network of European alliances.
Republican England had of course been the official ally of France; in consequence, King Charles had been forced to throw himself on the mercies of Spain. Despite this disagreeable memory and the perfidy of his French relations, the King was by temperament far more in sympathy with the French than with the Spaniards. After his Restoration, he was prepared to let bygones by bygones. Forgiveness was made easier by the fact that the young King Louis XIV, now grasping the reins of power for the first time at roughly the same moment as Charles II was restored, had not been responsible for the French betrayal. The moment the Restoration was effected, the English royal family tilted back contentedly to their French-oriented sympathies. It was a fact underlined by the betrothal of Charles’ surviving sister, the beguiling Henriette-Anne, to Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe Duc d’Orléans (generally known as Monsieur, as she will now be known as Madame). The marriage took place shortly before the coronation.
Negotiations with the King of Portugal were known to be under way some time in late 1660, probably helped on by the presence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who approved of the match, in England. By February 1661 the Spanish Ambassador was energetically advocating the rival claims of the Hapsburg Princesses of Parma, who would be endowed by his master with a suitably large dowry for the occasion. (However, the Earl of Bristol gave left and right of disapprobation in his report on these young ladies: the elder, he said, was very ugly, and the younger monstrously big.)16Undaunted, the Spaniards continued to propose the claim of almost every princess in Europe, it seemed: a Danish Princess, a Princess of Saxe – anyone except the Portuguese Infanta.
King also protested to King. Philip IV of Spain expostulated that such a match cut across a previous Anglo-Spanish agreement. Charles II of England replied curtly that his marrying whomsoever he thought fit should not interrupt this friendship, much less cause ‘everlasting war’. It is in this context, incidentally, that the spiteful remark of the Spanish Ambassador that the Infanta Catharine was barren should be seen. As it happened, he turned out to be right; but the prophecy was a brilliant piece of ill-wishing, rather than the product of any intimate medical knowledge, and should not be cited as any kind of evidence.
The Portuguese Ambassador was at least on the right track in emphasizing the dowry of his own candidate. From the first, the English showed themselves mesmerized by the enormous fortune offered with the hand of the Infanta. Augustin Coronel Chacon, known as ‘the little Jew’, who acted as consular and financial agent to the King in London, had outlined its glittering dimensions to General Monck before the King returned to England.17 The actual implications of the match played a smaller part. It was as though the economic straits of the Crown had produced a kind of siege economy in which the first essential was to acquire money, any money; the diplomatic consequences could be sorted out later. So that although French support for the marriage was influential, it does not seem to have been crucial, as is sometimes suggested.
The Infanta’s portion, dangled before English eyes, was to be two million crowns, or about £360,000 (then), the possession of Tangier on the Mediterranean coast, Bombay on that of India. At the time, the King had to be shown where Tangier was on the map. It was more to the point that the dowry itself was to be paid in such diverse coins as sugar, Brazilian wood and cash itself; part on the day of the bride’s embarkation, the rest in staggered payments. Clarendon swore to the Portuguese Ambassador that the principal inducement to the marriage was the ‘piety, virtue and comeliness’ of the Infanta: but then gave the game away by asking for Tangier to be handed over ‘quickly’ to reassure the English….18
A proxy courtship was carried out on the King’s behalf in Portugal by the English Ambassador, Sir Richard Fanshawe. Charles himself was soon writing as flowery letters as could be managed, not only to the young lady herself but also to her powerful mother. He even made the effort to write in Spanish (the Portuguese Queen was Spanish-born), although he had to ask Clarendon to check his letters over for mistakes. To Catharine he referred to his sanguine feelings for the future; she responded in kind. By May 1661 the King and Clarendon were able to inform the English Parliament that negotiations were complete. Soon Charles in London was signing himself to Catharine in Lisbon: ‘The very faithful husband of Your Majesty, whose hand he kisses.’
The odd thing was that no proxy marriage between the pair of royal correspondents, of the kind familiar to European royalties down the ages, had in fact taken place, although the King’s language would seem to indicate that it had. Later congratulatory verses, part of a collection presented by Oxford University, made the same assumption, philosophizing thus on proxy marriage:
Kings have ubiquity, while vulgar minds,
Like bodies, Nature to one place confines….19
But since the Pope had refused to approve the independence of Portugal from Spain, his dispensation for such a ceremony was not asked, and this King at least was vulgarly confined to one place. Catharine was simply designated Queen of England, while remaining in Lisbon.
Nearly a year elapsed before she made the long and stormy sea journey to her new home, escorted by Lord Sandwich in the lucky ship which had restored her husband, the Royal Charles. Catharine arrived at Portsmouth on 13 May 1662. One of her first actions was to ask for a cup of tea. It was in its own way a milestone in our social history. It is true that tea-drinking had been known in England before this date but it was extremely rare. The national beverage was ale and that was what the Queen was offered. As no-one who wants a cup of tea has ever been satisfied with a glass of ale (and vice versa), it must have been a low moment. Subsequently Queen Catharine did a great deal to popularize the general drinking of tea; in 1680 Edmund Waller wrote a whimsical poem on the connection between the ‘best of herbs’ and the ‘best of queens’:
Venus her myrtle, Phoebus has his bays,
Tea both excels which she vouchsafes to praise….
In the meantime, still for the time being tealess, the English worried over the delivery of the dowry, the garrisoning of Tangier and other practical considerations. Once the Queen’s arrival was imminent, another practical arrangement preoccupied Clarendon and his master. Some sort of wedding had, finally, to take place. The Queen could not simply assume the married state. (Although it might have saved a lot of trouble in the long run if she had.) The question was, what sort of wedding?
Queen Catharine was of course a Catholic, like most of the royal princesses of Europe other than those cold northern ladies disdained by Charles. Her religion had already caused annoyance in those English quarters who disapproved of the Portuguese match in the first place. Yet a Catholic Queen, however irritating, could hardly be rated a cultural shock to seventeenth-century England. There were few alive in England who could remember a time when there had been a Protestant Queen, since James I’s consort, Anne of Denmark, became a Catholic convert. A Catholic Queen might therefore be said to be the norm rather than otherwise, while the appurtenances of such a creature, chapels, the Mass, friars, confessors and the like, however distasteful to honest Protestant Englishmen, were at least very familiar to them. In any case, the Portuguese Ambassador had assured King Charles of his bride’s docility on the subject: that it was ‘true she was a Catholic, and would never depart from her religion; but was totally without that meddling and activity in her nature, which many times made those of that religion troublesome and restless when they came to another country.’20 In short she was no Henrietta Maria.
In the Privy Council however Clarendon had written some of his masterful notes to King Charles on the subject of the wedding: he must have a Bishop with him when he arrived in Portsmouth, and he must have a Protestant ceremony for the sake of the legitimacy of the children. Queen Catharine, Clarendon had been assured, was prepared to submit to this. The King scribbled back, ‘I hope she has consulted the Jesuits.’21
‘She will do that [which] is necessary for herself and her children,’ wrote Clarendon firmly.
And that proved to be the case. A brief and secret Catholic ceremony was held first in Catharine’s own room, as a concession to her piety. The legal marriage took place on 21 Mayfn4 in the Great Chamber of the house of the Governor of Portsmouth (his chapel was too small for the concourse). The King and Queen sat on two specially made thrones, behind a rail to keep off the press of spectators. Catharine wore rose colour, covered in lovers’ knots of blue ribbons. Afterwards they were cut off, according to Portuguese tradition, at her request; everyone was given a piece. The lace of her veil was however covered with patriotic emblems of her new country, including Tudor roses.22 The King presented the Governor’s chapel with an altar cloth embroidered with a view of Lisbon, with reciprocal flattery.
After that, things did not go quite so swimmingly. The Queen’s state of health did not permit the marriage to be consummated that night. The King jokingly reported to his sister Madame that he thought it was just as well that the long sea journey had upset her cycle, for he himself had had such a terrible journey down to Portsmouth that he was afraid that ‘matters would have gone stupidly’. It seemed to be a family misfortune – Charles recalled his sister’s own wedding night, where exactly the same state of affairs had occurred. Monsieur, to add to his other failings, or perhaps because of them – he was a homosexual who shortly after the wedding abandoned any pretence of being otherwise – had not been understanding about the situation. Added Charles of the eventual consummation, ‘Yet I hope I shall entertain her [Catharine] at least better than he did you.’23
The one thing which had troubled no-one throughout all these prolonged negotiations towards matrimony – least of all the King – was the character of the bride herself. After doubts about her piety had been set at rest by the Portuguese Ambassador, he considered it enough to describe her, rather casually, as having an exceptionally good and modest nature, and having been brought up in a ‘hugely retired’ manner.24
Convent-bred – and certainly reared in a most secluded fashion, having made very few appearances in the outside world – Catharine of Braganza was already twenty-three years old, which one sour commentator said was like a woman of forty in English terms.fn5When she was told of her impending marriage, she made one of her rate sorties from the royal palace, to make a religious pilgrimage to some Saints’ shrines in Lisbon: not perhaps the best preparation for marriage to King Charles II. The suite of over a hundred people that she brought to England sounded more like the cast of a grandiose opera than something suitable to the informal English way of life: it included numerous confessors, a deaf duena, a Jewish perfumer and a barber. Her ladies-in-waiting in particular – ‘six frights’, wrote the wicked Comte de Grammont – aroused English national prejudice, in their vast skirts, known as farthingales, or gardas Infantas, because no man could get near them.25
It was unkindly rumoured that the Queen herself clung obstinately to these Portuguese fashions, so unalluring to English eyes. In fact, she was on arrival pathetically anxious in all ways to do whatever might please the King, and first set foot on English soil wearing English clothes; it was the Duke of York, out of curiosity or a desire to put her at her ease, who desired her to change back into her own national dress. In cuisine Catharine was conservative: there are continual payments to ‘Portugall cooks’ in the royal accounts. But in costume at least she adapted quickly, showing a coquettish desire to wear man’s clothing, which set off her pretty, neat legs and ankles; it was incidentally something she had in common with Nell Gwynn, who chose parts which enabled her to wear breeches on the stage for the same reason. Quite a fashion for a type of seventeenth-century trouser suit followed the Queen’s lead – ‘women like men’ in velvet coats and caps with ribbons. Like many another grand lady, Catharine also enjoyed dressing up in general, as a village maiden, and so forth: the year after her marriage she was described by Pepys as looking ‘mighty pretty’ in a white-laced waistcoat and crimson short petticoat, her hair dressed à la negligence.26
Catharine of Braganza also came to enjoy such typically English preoccupations as fishing and picnics. For all her slight frame, she was not unathletic, particularly for one who had been nurtured in such a claustrophobic fashion. Catharine’s skill at archery was noted; she was sufficiently interested in the whole sport to become patroness of the Honourable Fraternity of Bowmen. In 1676 its marshal was awarded a heavy silver badge engraved ‘Reginae Catharinae Sagittarii’ (the Queen was born under the sign of Sagittarius the Archer).
But that of course was once the Queen had learned to relax. The first impression given to the English was of a hieratic, almost doll-like, figure:
See how unmov’d She views the Crowd and show
As Stars above behold men’s toils below,
wrote James Annesley, son of the Earl of Anglesey, in one of the Oxford University congratulatory verses. Catharine’s tiny figure also militated against her at first sight (although she was taller than Queen Henrietta Maria). It is unlikely that King Charles exclaimed that they had brought him a bat, not a woman, when he first saw her: such an unchivalrous remark would have been quite out of character. But the malicious tale does reveal how Catharine must have appeared to the English: small and dark and very, very foreign. ‘Swarthy,’ wrote Evelyn, adding that she had sticking-out teeth. ‘A long nose,’ wrote another unsympathetic critic. She even made up or ‘painted’ in what was considered to be an un-English manner.27
As against this, the King himself, the person most intimately concerned, was charitable; ‘her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty,’ he told Clarendon, ‘though her eyes are excellent good, and not anything in her face that in the least degree can shock one. On the contrary she has as much agreeableness in her looks altogether, as ever I saw.’ Moreover, Catharine’s character passed muster too (this type of analysis was after all the King’s speciality). He went on, ‘And if I have any skill in physiognomy, which I think I have, she must be as good a woman as ever was born.’28Finally, Charles described Catharine as having two other qualities pleasing in a woman, wit, and a most agreeable voice – a fact confirmed by the man appointed as her Chamberlain, Lord Chesterfield, who also called her voice very pleasing.
Yet the first crisis of Queen Catharine’s married life nearly undid her.
At the court of King Charles II there was already an uncrowned queen in the shape of Barbara Palmer. Indeed, the Duchess of Richmond had already nicknamed her Jane Shore after the mistress of Edward IV, and hoped she would come to the same bad end (Richard III forced Jane Shore to do public penance as a harlot after Edward’s death). Barbara, later Countess of Castlemaine and later still Duchess of Cleveland, has had a bad press from historians who have been only too well aware of her greed, extravagance and tempers and have been therefore inclined to agree with John Evelyn’s verdict – ‘the curse of the Nation’. They have not had the opportunity to admire at first hand her sheer physical appeal, like that of a magnificent animal. Grammont described her as having ‘the greatest reputation of the court beauties’; Sir John Reresby called her the finest woman of her age, while Bishop Burnet referred to her as ‘a woman of great beauty’ whose looks, even at the age of forty-two, were extraordinary.29 Pepys made her out of all the royal mistresses his firm favourite: she was his ‘lovely Lady Castlemaine’.
Pepys went as far as to buy a portrait of his pin-up, one of the many copies made by Sir Peter Lely for admirers of the great courtesan. Lely adored painting Barbara. With her heavy-lidded, slanting eyes and sensuous sulky mouth, it is Barbara of all the Restoration beauties who calls to mind those immortal lines of Pope:
Lely on animated Canvas stole
The sleepy Eye that spoke the melting soul …
The sight of her smocks and her pretty linen petticoats edged with lace drying in the Privy Garden affected Pepys so headily that even today his account of the sight retains the erotic thrill it gave the great diarist.30 For all Lely’s animated canvas, it is from this contemporary admiration, as from Homer’s description of the old men turning their heads to watch Helen as she walked along the walls of Troy, that one learns more than from any portrait.
Barbara had great buoyancy of spirit: the sort of gusto which prompted her in later years to take as a lover not only the playwright Wycherley, but also Jacob the Rope-dancer; his gymnastics inspired in her an adventurous desire to know how he might be ‘under his tumbling clothes’.31 Another recipient of her favours was the actor Cardonnell Goodman, who would shout out ‘Is my Duchess come?’ before allowing the curtains to rise in the theatre. The act of love on which her fortunes were founded was certainly no chore to Barbara – later the satirists would even use the word insatiable. In youth however the impression is of enjoyment rather than of excess, and the kind of magnetism such unabashed hedonism always gives its possessor.
Perhaps her famous temper came from the same uncontrolled spirit. Certainly Barbara could be a termagant when aroused; the King, like many another man, quailed before her furies and gave in to them. He did not however find them particularly lovable, and as she grew older there was a law of diminishing returns in such things. Nevertheless, Barbara when young was clearly great fun. She kept a good table, as reported by the French Ambassador (a connoisseur).32 She also showed heart as well as temper, being, for instance, the only Court lady to go to the assistance of a child hurt when a scaffold collapsed at the theatre.
Early reports coupled Barbara’s name with that of Lord Chesterfield, and at one point she was said to have ‘talked wantonly’ (like many others) to the Duke of York. Her husband, Roger Palmer, to whom she was married at the age of eighteen, appears as a sensitive and somewhat gloomy figure, his depression hardly surprising in view of the outrageous cuckolding by his young wife. In the autumn of 1661 he accepted the title of Earl of Castlemaine, with the further humiliation that its inheritance was limited to ‘heirs of his body gotten on Barbara Palmer his now wife’ – making the source of the honour quite clear. Shortly after the birth of Barbara’s second child by the King in June 1662, the new Earl separated from her, having first caused the boy to be baptized a Catholic. Barbara was to become a Catholic herself. But at the time she had the baby ostentatiously rechristened in the Anglican Church.
Some time in 1662 Barbara was accorded her own apartments within Whitehall. The accommodation included nurseries which proved most necessary since she bore a total of six children, all but the last acknowledged by the King. After her conversion to Catholicism in 1663 an oratory was provided. When quizzed on this volte-face, King Charles remarked with spirit that he never concerned himself with the souls of ladies, but with their bodies, in so far as they were gracious enough to allow him. The popular reaction – if the Catholic Church gained no more from her than the Church of England lost, ‘the Matter is not Much’ – displayed less charm.33
It was the coincidence of the Queen’s arrival, Barbara’s second pregnancy, and the resignation of Roger Castlemaine from his role as official husband, which brought about the unhappy ‘Bedchamber Crisis’ of the summer of 1662. After her marriage in Portsmouth, Catharine was welcomed to the capital with all the pomp due to a royal consort. John Evelyn called the floating procession which carried her from Hampton Court to Whitehall at the end of August the most magnificent ever seen on the Thames (although an eye-witness told Ormonde that the Queen, in the middle of it all, looked like a prisoner being carried in a Roman triumph).34 But already at Hampton Court ‘my lady Barbary’ had exercised those powers she knew well that she possessed over the King.
On a petty level, she refused to light a fire outside her bedroom door to welcome the Queen – the only person not to do so. More flagrantly, Barbara insisted that her latest accouchement should take place at Hampton Court during what was in fact the royal honeymoon. Worse was to follow. The trouble was that Barbara at this stage understood perfectly how to manage Charles – she appealed on this occasion not so much to his lust, but to that other potent emotion he felt towards the female sex, a sense of guilt. Perhaps the feeling was rooted in a suppressed dislike and resentment of his own mother; perhaps, more simply, in the strength of his physical desires, which he knew to be unaccompanied by love. We shall certainly meet this sense of guilt later, in his treatment of his wife. Now it worked towards Barbara’s, not Catharine’s, advantage.
All his life, King Charles’ method of dealing with a woman’s complaints or tears was to attempt to cozen her with something to cheer her up, as a parent gives a lollipop to a child. Where Catharine was concerned, her piety gave him plenty of opportunities. Although normally a lazy correspondent, he was for ever sending off to his sister in France for little objects of devotion to please her. Catharine had such a passion for relics that she had brought them with her in a series of great coffers which had to be cloaked in red velvet cloths embroidered with the royal arms of England and Portugal. Barbara was made of sterner stuff. In a series of hideous scenes Barbara demanded, besought, and implored Charles to make her Lady of the Bedchamber to the new Queen. Eventually, out of pity for her abandoned, husbandless, pregnant condition (and worn out by the scenes), King Charles succumbed sufficiently to agree. He explained rather lamely that ‘he had undone this lady and ruined her reputation, which had been fair and untainted till her friendship with him’.35
In doing so he risked an extraordinary insult to his wife. Catharine might have been brought up ‘hugely retired’, but she was not a fool, while the Portuguese Ambassador in London was an exceptionally well informed and worldly man, to whose machinations some critics ascribed the King’s marriage. Catharine certainly recognized Barbara’s name, having been doubtless warned of her existence in advance, and, on seeing it in the list of Ladies of the Bedchamber presented for her agreement, crossed it angrily out. However, when she was first presented with Barbara in person, she received her rival cordially, her poor understanding of English preventing her from realizing who Barbara was. The moment she discovered, Catharine’s eyes filled with tears of rage; her nose began to bleed and she collapsed to the floor in hysterics.
King Charles shrugged his shoulders and sent Clarendon to reason with her. One dreads to think of the task of this elderly Anglican, left to explain to a devout Catholic princess exactly what she was going to have to tolerate in the name of marriage and concord. At first, Clarendon failed totally. He merely elicited further torrents of tears and threats to return to Portugal. The scandal reverberated. Madame in France was outspokenly shocked by her brother’s behaviour to his wife. ‘It is said here that she is grieved beyond measure,’ she wrote, ‘and to speak frankly I think it is with reason.’36
It took Queen Catharine a little time to discover that hysteria and threats were no way to play her cards where Charles was concerned – those were best left to Barbara, the mistress. In repose, Catharine discovered the strength of her own hand: not only was sheer goodness of character her strongest suit, but it was also as effective in its own way, where Charles was concerned, as sensuality and tantrums.
A year after the marriage, relations between the royal couple had settled down most amicably, thanks to Catharine’s tact and restraint. Once she had actually supped in Barbara’s apartments, the crisis was over – although to the end of her days as Queen of England, Catharine remained extremely touchy on the subject of royal protocol in so far as it concerned her own position. As late as 1684 tears stood in her eyes when she found the King’s mistress, Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, waiting at dinner as Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘contrary to custom’, although in other ways she favoured Louise. More immediately, she formed a tactful friendship with Charles’ bastard son James; but when he was created Duke of Monmouth, and had the baton sinister, which proclaimed his illegitimate birth, omitted from his coat of arms, Catharine felt it necessary to protest. (A second grant of arms included it.)37
It was of course far pleasanter for the Queen to join in the fun of the Court than to mope disapprovingly with her Portuguese ladies. Soon Charles was praising her ‘simplicity, gentleness and prudence’ to Catharine’s mother – it was the third quality which had been lacking on her arrival. To Madame he spoke with a slightly stunned respect of her piety, how she would say the great office of the Breviary every day, as well as that of Our Lady, and go to chapel.38 In the autumn of 1663 Catharine became violently ill, possibly with peritonitis: the King became quite frenzied with anxiety over her condition (although he still managed to sup nightly with Barbara).
She learnt to speak pretty, broken English, rather like that practised by another foreign princess, also a Katharine, prattling of her ‘bilbo’ to Henry V. It amused Charles to tease his Catharine by teaching her English swearwords without telling her what they meant, and then listening to her innocently repeating them. He also, like many unfaithful husbands, managed to work up a fit of illogical jealousy against Edward Montagu, the Queen’s Master of the Horse, because he was thought to have squeezed her hand; Montagu was sacked. In time, Catharine was notably more spontaneous with Charles in public – grown quite ‘debonair’, as it was described; she even hugged him in public, something unthinkable to that grave Portuguese Infanta who had arrived at Portsmouth. There is also a pleasantly tart air about her exchange with Barbara, as reported by Pepys, in the summer of 1663. Barbara commented on the length of time the Queen had been under her dresser’s hands: ‘I wonder your Majesty can have the patience to sit so long a-dressing.’ To which Catharine replied, ‘I have so much reason to use patience that I can very well bear with it. …’39 It was, in the contemporary slang, a considerable ‘wipe’ or put-down; in more ways than one the Queen was learning how to survive at her husband’s Court.
Only one thing was lacking: an heir. It was not for lack of effort on the King’s part. It was reported that he slept regularly with the Queen. (All contemporary evidence indicates that, while Charles kept many mistresses, he also made love to his own wife a great deal – no doubt this contributed to the marital status quo.) But royal brides were watched for signs of pregnancy virtually from their wedding night. Any failure to conceive immediately was converted into total barrenness by the unkind rumour-mongers within and without the Court. It was suggested that the Queen was barren as early as December 1662, surely a premature conclusion. Catharine had only been married a year when she was to be found taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, as her mother-in-law had done a generation earlier. Catharine took the waters repeatedly that summer without success. Later she turned to the spa at Bath.
It was hardly surprising that, during her severe illness of the autumn of 1663, the delirious Queen raved of pregnancy and childbirth. To the King at her bedside, Catharine confided that she had been delivered of a ‘very ugly’ boy.
‘No, it’s a pretty boy,’ Charles answered gently.
‘If it be like you, it is a fine boy indeed,’ whispered the Queen. There followed further rambling remarks on the same subject: at one time the Queen thought she had three children, including a girl who did look like the King.
‘How do the children?’ she enquired anxiously.40
The King might equip her chapel, redecorate her apartments, employing Catharine’s favourite greens and yellows, start to build her a new palace at Greenwich – none of this could bring the Queen true security or happiness without the longed-for heir. Yet for all the impatience of the Court gossips, there was a precedent. The example of Henrietta Maria was in itself encouraging – four years of marriage without conception, followed by a quiverful of healthy children. For the present, Catharine continued to justify Dryden’s high praise of her and of her devotion to Charles:
The best of Queens, the most obedient wife …
His life the theme of her eternal prayer.
The Marvell who called her an ‘Ill natured little goblin … designed/For nothing but to dance and vex mankind’ reflected his own dislike of the royal family, rather than the prevailing opinion of Catharine’s character.
The day would come when Catharine’s unarguable goodness would stand her in good stead. By the time of the Popish Plot, even the prickly, suspicious English had been so won to the side of their little foreign Catholic Queen that she was preserved from serious harm throughout this whole inflamed period. No-one could seriously believe ill of her. This was a major achievement in such an age, and can be compared with the very different treatment earned by the equally Catholic and foreign Henrietta Maria.
King Charles, in view of his preoccupation with the study of physiognomy, must have been delighted that his first impression of her character proved so accurate.
1 Charles II was however the last English monarch to take part in this eve-of-ceremony procession.
2 Although Pepys, who had had to get up at four a.m. and had been for hours in the Abbey in his sumptuous velvet suit, needed to piss (as doubtless did some others).9
3 There was of course the King’s first cousin, Prince Rupert; if not wholly English, he had served the English Crown faithfully on land and at sea during the recent war and was a Protestant. But Rupert was by now over forty and hopes of his marriage – his own and other people’s – died away after the Restoration.13
4 The date is wrongly given in the entry in the registry of St Thomas’s Parish Church (made to comply with the Commonwealth Act of 1654), preserved today in Portsmouth Cathedral.
5 She was born on 25 November, the Feast of St Catharine; it was an unfortunate coincidence that by English dating – ten days different – this was close to the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth, an anniversary which later in the reign became an occasion for Pope-burnings and other manifestations of Protestant extremism.