Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Venus her myrtle, Phoebus has his bays,

  Tea both excels which she vouchsafes to praise.

  But passively “converting” the English from their preferred brew to Portugal’s was the extent of the queen’s influence on her adopted subjects. Although Catherine of Braganza was a devout Catholic, she was no religious proselytizer. She made no effort to impose her deeply personal faith on others. Therefore, because “[s]he will do that [which] is necessary for herself and her children,” as Clarendon informed Charles, the queen had no problem agreeing to the Protestant wedding ceremony. But to assuage Catherine’s conscience, Charles consented to a second—secret and brief—Catholic ceremony, in the privacy of her own rooms. It was conducted by her chief almoner, Ludovic Stuart, Lord d’Aubigny.

  In the Great Chamber of the Governor of Portsmouth’s residence, on May 21, 1662, Catherine of Braganza and Charles II were united in wedlock in a simple Protestant ceremony conducted by Bishop Gilbert Sheldon. Charles was just eight days shy of his thirty-second birthday. The event was hardly lavish, although the bridal couple sat on a throne that had been constructed especially for the occasion and placed safely behind a rail intended to keep the spectators at bay. The twenty-three-year-old Catherine was considered ancient for a seventeenth-century bride—forty in English years, as one wag quipped. Tudor roses formed the pattern of her lace veil, and she wore a rose-colored gown trimmed with blue ribbons fashioned into lover’s knots. Unfortunately for Catherine, the dress, with its Iberian-style farthingales, was far too outmoded and unfashionable for English tastes, even though it was the Duke of York who had talked her into choosing it, instead of wearing an English gown. Catherine’s abundant dark hair had also been arranged in the Portuguese style—tightly curled on either side of her head into two unflattering wings that fell to her slender shoulders.

  Of the hideous hairdo, and perhaps also referring to her “swarthy” complexion and “sticking-out teeth,” as the Restoration-era diarist John Evelyn described her appearance, Charles is said to have remarked to a friend, “At first sight, I thought they had brought me a bat instead of a woman.” Yet historian Antonia Fraser, who has written copiously on the life and times of Charles II, does not believe he uttered that insult, because he was brought up to be chivalrous to women. In addition, the king is known to have told his chancellor on the day after the wedding that “Her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty, 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. And if I have any skill in physiognomy, which I think I have, she must be as good a woman as ever was born.” So either Charles was indeed being chivalrous about his wife’s appearance, or else Catherine’s detractors were then, and remain to this day, successful in discrediting her.

  After the vows were exchanged, Catherine was compelled to stand still while, in a postceremonial ritual, the lover’s knots were snipped from her dress and gleefully distributed to wedding guests as favors. Still recovering from a fever, the hapless bride allowed her dress to be despoiled by a bunch of screaming, rosy-cheeked foreigners, led by the Countess of Suffolk, her first lady of the bedchamber. There was a mad scramble to retrieve one of these precious tokens, which were scooped up so quickly that Catherine was unable to secure a single knot as a souvenir of her own nuptials.

  The wedding night got off to a rocky start as well. Some scholars have stated that Catherine had her period, preventing her groom from consummating their marriage. Others posit that she was still feeling unwell, or that Charles’s terribly uncomfortable coach ride down to Portsmouth had left him in no mood for sex (which is hard to believe, since he was incapable of keeping his hands off Barbara). Charles confided to his beloved sister Minette that it was probably for the best, as “matters would have gone stupidly.” It’s difficult to imagine that a king with the nickname Old Rowley (after one of his stud stallions) feared the inability to please his wife on their wedding night because of a jouncing carriage ride. Nonetheless, referring to her homosexual husband, Philippe d’Orléans, Charles remarked to Minette, “Yet I hope I shall entertain her at least better than he did you.”

  To his chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, the king wrote, “I cannot easily tell you how happy I think myself; and I must be the worst man living, which I hope I am not, if I am not a good husband. I am confident never two humours were better fitted together than ours are. . . .”

  The royal newlyweds arrived for their honeymoon at Hampton Court on May 29, and the following day they were greeted by crowds of curious Londoners who had come down the Thames to catch a glimpse of the rakish king and their new queen dining in public. But Catherine was so overwhelmed by the crush of onlookers that she rushed from the hall, her makeup “about to run off with sweat,” according to an eyewitness, William Schellinks.

  Apart from this little incident, their first several days of marriage seemed quite happy. The king was charmed by Catherine’s soft and musical speaking voice, which was equally praised by Lord Chesterfield, although she had yet to become fluent in English. As the spouses came to know each other, Charles began to admire his little wife for her wit, a virtue prized as greatly as beauty at the Restoration court. According to a contemporary, during those halcyon days the king was “extremely fond, and spends all his time with her,” finding the queen “of extraordinary piety, full of sweetness and goodnese.” However, Catherine did appear concerned with the extreme frivolity of the ladies of the court, who seemed to “spend soe much time in dressing themselves, she feares they bestow but little on God Almighty, and in housewivry.”

  The queen took the terms of her marriage contract seriously, particularly the clause that permitted her the free exercise of her Catholic religion. The entourage she brought to England from Portugal was comprised of more than a hundred musty, black-robed priests, and a half dozen ladies-in-waiting that the Stuart court nicknamed the “six frights.” These dueñas incurred both the mockery and the enmity of their adopted country for their outdated, square-silhouetted farthingales that made the wearers appear as though they had been stuck waist-deep inside a shoe box. These skirts were so wide that they kept the women a safe distance from others, especially men, hence their nickname, gardas Infantas. The queen had also hired “Portugall cooks,” so that she did not have to subsist on the English staples of capon, roasted beef, and mutton joints.

  Catherine had religious, linguistic, and cultural barriers to overcome before she could comfortably assimilate at the Stuart court. Surrounding herself with other Portuguese didn’t ease the transition. Yet Charles was not doing his wife any favors when he presented her with a list of female courtiers to be appointed to positions within her household.

  Everyone at court knew that the sloe-eyed seductress Barbara Villiers Palmer, now Countess of Castlemaine, was the merry monarch’s official mistress, that she was carrying her second child by him, and that her husband, Roger Palmer, had finally grown tired of being publicly cuckolded by the king and had abandoned her. Many also knew that only Barbara arrogantly refused to light a fire in front of her residence to welcome the queen to England, although the rest of London had done so with good cheer. Barbara, who had been Charles’s lover and the de facto hostess of his glamorous court for the first two years of his reign, was damned if she was supposed to share him with his homely little foreign wife—a woman described by the poet Andrew Marvell (who, it should be said, liked none of the royal family) as an “[i]ll natured little goblin . . . designed / For nothing but to dance and vex mankind.”

  Two months after the royal wedding, Barbara gave birth. She had wanted to do so at Hampton Court Palace, right under everyone’s nose, which would have truly humiliated the queen. It was the one time Charles put his foot down and refused her whim. At his denial of her absurd request, the temperamental Barbara became hysterical. To calm her, Charles offered her an ill-thought-out carro
t: He would appoint her a lady of the bedchamber to the queen, the highest rank a female could have at court. He placed Lady Castlemaine’s name on the list of prospective attendants and gave it to Catherine, but the queen, whose mother had told her about the infamous countess and her illicit relationship with the king, struck Barbara’s name from the list. Sheltered as Catherine had been, she wasn’t born yesterday, and she was aware of the huge insult being perpetrated upon her by the very notion of insinuating the king’s mistress—the mother of his bastard children—into her retinue. How dared her husband daily rub her nose in his adulterous affair and in his paramour’s fecundity!

  Peeved at Catherine’s reaction, Charles simply readded Barbara’s name to the list. Catherine crossed it off again. This little game of tit-for-tat was repeated a few more times. But the queen had yet to meet her nemesis in person. At Hampton Court, during a presentation of a number of ladies to the queen, Charles approached Catherine with a stunning brunette on his arm. The queen was entranced by the woman’s beauty and hoped they might become friends. Then Charles dropped the bomb, introducing the gorgeous creature as Lady Castlemaine. The mention of her name sent Catherine into shock. Numerous eyewitnesses, including the chancellor, saw Her Majesty reel and grow pale; her nose began to spontaneously bleed, her eyes filled with tears, and she fell backward into a dead faint.

  Barbara was incensed that she should be treated so poorly! Charles was mortified on his lover’s behalf and left the servants to carry the prostrate queen into an adjoining chamber, where they tried to revive her. So much for chivalry. It was Barbara who claimed the king’s attention—and received it—while his wife was given all the consideration of a sack of dirty linen.

  After escorting Lady Castlemaine to her coach, Charles rebuked Catherine. How could she behave so uncivilly to Barbara—an old and dear friend whose father had fought beside his father and laid down his life for the royalist cause in the civil war? For that alone, he owed much to Lady Castlemaine. “I have undone this lady, and ruined her reputation, which was fair and untainted till her friendship with me, and I am obliged in conscience and honor to repair her to the utmost of my power,” he insisted disingenuously. Charles’s sense of honor seems misplaced, as he claims to have been discharging a debt to one lady by insulting another who was his wife and queen.

  The king felt ill at ease with appearing “ridiculous to the world” if he did not triumph over Catherine in what had come to be known as the Bedchamber Crisis. His authority was not to be questioned, even by his wife. Exasperated with her, Charles dispatched Clarendon to explain the rules of the game: A queen-consort was expected to put up and shut up and bear the heir. The earl was placed in an uncomfortable position. Clarendon reminded Charles how strongly he’d once condemned Louis XIV for insisting that Minette retain his new mistress Louise de La Vallière in her retinue, and for parading about with Louise in the presence of his queen. At the time, Charles had even said, “. . . if ever he could be guilty of keeping a mistress after he had a wife, she should never come where his wife was.”

  Her temper finally up, Catherine hotly defended herself. Wasn’t Charles making her appear ridiculous, degraded, a mere cipher or doormat to accept this one request? The queen told the chancellor, “The King’s insistence upon that particular can proceed from no other ground but his hatred of my person. He wishes to expose me to the contempt of the world. And the world will think me deserving of such an affront if I submitted to it. Before I do that I will put myself on board any little vessel and so be transported to Lisbon.” To accept Barbara in her bedchamber was not only to accept the humiliation, it was to condone the countess’s sin with her husband, something that Catherine, as a devout Catholic, was unwilling to do.

  Throughout the summer of 1662, the stalemate between the royal spouses continued. Barbara’s name was added to, and vigorously crossed off, the list of prospective ladies of the queen’s bedchamber, and Catherine continued to threaten to board the next ship weighing anchor for Lisbon. Clarendon warned her that unless she complied, Charles would recall his fleet from the Mediterranean, where it protected Portugal from the Spanish aggressors.

  Finally, the only woman Charles ever truly heeded and respected, his sister, Minette, wrote to him from France on July 22 to inform him that the Bedchamber Crisis had become the subject of much gossip at the French court. “[I]t is said here that she [Catherine] is grieved beyond measure, and to speak frankly I think it is with reason.”

  Nevertheless, as the weeks dragged on, Charles made his preference extremely clear, and the court followed suit. He moved Lady Castlemaine to a suite of rooms directly above his own at Hampton Court and openly dined with her, laughing and joking and flirting, while Catherine was shunned. People didn’t want to be seen talking to Her Majesty because it would give the impression that they had taken her side in the Bedchamber Crisis. When she left the hall to go to bed, courtiers showed so little respect for their own queen that they made insulting jokes about her.

  By the end of the summer, Catherine had been worn down, relenting in August just before she traveled by barge to Whitehall, amid a spectacular flotilla on the Thames, entering London on the twenty-third of the month for a massive celebration in her honor. Among the crowd eager to catch a glimpse of England’s new queen was Samuel Pepys, who saw Catherine again at Somerset House, the queen mother’s residence, on September 7. Afterward, he wrote in his diary, “[T]hough she be not very charming, yet she hath a good modest and innocent look.”

  Her Majesty might not have given off a very charming vibe because she was still smarting from the recent resolution of the Bedchamber Crisis. The last straw for Catherine had been when her husband threatened to send her Portuguese entourage home.

  Yet by the early autumn of 1662, she began to acknowledge that unless you were gorgeous and highly sexed, throwing a tantrum was not the way to get what you wanted out of Charles II. So she began to play to her own strengths: patience, goodness, understanding, and compassion. And while Charles never gave up his mistresses—in fact, he kept acquiring more of them—Catherine ultimately earned his love, trust, respect, and affection. And there were certain aspects of the king’s life that he shared with no other woman but her.

  Passionate about science and naval technology, Charles permitted only Catherine to visit his laboratory, where he and his cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, would conduct various experiments in whatever scientific subjects had captured the king’s interest. And when he purchased a new type of coach that was all the rage and Barbara insisted that she be the first one to have the glory of riding beside him, Charles awarded that honor to the queen instead. Although Catherine was also the queen of patience and forbearance, she quietly exulted, enjoying this, and her other infrequent triumphs over her husband’s inamoratas. Yet she would never conquer her jealousy of them, and no matter how long she and Charles were married, she would not become inured to his infidelities, compelled to accept the unpleasant fact that he was incapable of being true to her.

  Catherine has earned a reputation for remaining in the background, eclipsed by her husband’s glamorous mistresses, a wren among macaws. In some measure this is true, but she and Charles also shared a number of common interests. At Hampton Court the queen would cheerfully awaken at five a.m. to go fishing with the king, “a recreation in which” she took “much pleasure.” The royal spouses enjoyed picnics together, and Catherine was also quite an archery expert, becoming patroness of the Honourable Fraternity of Bowmen. A fan of Italian opera, Catherine, like Charles, was also the patron of a theater company. The queen had her comedians and her husband had the King’s Players at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

  Drinking tea was not the only trend she began at court. Catherine set the fashion for cross-dressing in men’s breeches, coats, and hose—velvet trouser suits and caps with ribbons—displaying her short, slight figure, shapely legs, and dainty ankles. The more zaftig ladies of the court were none too t
hrilled by it, as the style hardly flattered them. Catherine also loved to play dress-up, especially in the guise of a village maiden, a look that Samuel Pepys saw fit to chronicle. A year after her marriage, Pepys wrote that the queen looked “mighty pretty in her white-laced waistcoat and crimson short petticoat,” with her hair dressed in studied disarray “à la negligence.” Catherine also loved to dance, and excelled at it, and in an era where grace and elegance were prized, although she was not the most beautiful woman at court, she might give that illusion on the dance floor.

  Nevertheless, even as Catherine endured malicious charges of extravagance from her detractors, her apartments at Whitehall were practically Spartan, furnished with only the meager belongings she had been permitted to bring from Portugal. By comparison, Lady Castlemaine’s rooms were lavishly appointed with wall hangings, jewel-framed miniatures, and expensive tchotchkes.

  By 1663, Catherine’s tact and restraint were serving her well. Madly in love with Charles, she made every effort to stifle her wounded feelings when he paraded his paramours about the court with a blithe lack of sensitivity. As her husband’s chancellor had reminded her, her business was to not mind his, and to bear children. So far, she hadn’t done her job, although the royal spouses enjoyed regular conjugal visits. Rumors had spread around court the previous December that she was barren.

  In July 1663, Catherine began taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells and Bath, the first of several annual summer visits, in the hope that it would increase her fertility. She always suffered from dysfunctional uterine bleeding; an Italian visitor to the Stuart court in 1668 heard that “the extraordinary frequency and abundance of her menses” would make it unlikely for her to have children, and the English diarist Sir John Reresby recorded that the queen had “a constant flux upon her.” In September 1662, Charles had joked to his mother that Catherine was pregnant; the queen’s reply, “[Y]ou lye,” was chronicled by Pepys.