Charles’s conduct was demoralizing enough to Catherine; imagine how painful it must have been to know that all of the foreign ambassadors were sharing the details with their employers. She had never appreciated being waited on by one of her husband’s lovers acting in her role as a lady of the bedchamber. In particular, the weepy Louise de Kéroualle, whom Charles had created Duchess of Portsmouth, and who had given him a bastard son, would stand behind Catherine’s chair during dinner and mock her.
And yet as the years passed, the queen’s tremendous character and fortitude had become much respected and admired by her subjects. These qualities were not lost on her husband, either.
In 1678, when Titus Oates, an anti-Catholic agitator, fomented the “Popish Plot,” a trumped-up conspiracy to assassinate the king that falsely fingered the most highly placed papists in the realm, including Catherine and members of her household, it was feared that charges would be leveled against the queen herself. But Charles was entirely convinced that his wife had nothing to do with the plot, despite Oates’s allegation that she both knew and approved of it as revenge for the king’s infidelities. Not only was Catherine modest and discreet in her piety, and never urged her faith on anyone (especially Charles), she was hardly the sort of person to exact revenge, especially through her religion.
By this time, the royal couple had been married for sixteen years. Although the Popish Plot had engendered mass hysteria throughout the realm, Charles knew that Oates’s allegations were bogus, particularly after he claimed that the plot was spearheaded by Catherine’s physician, Sir George Wakeman, and had been hatched right in the queen’s apartments. The king was so angry that he masterfully cross-examined Oates himself; the conspirator’s description of Catherine’s voice and her rooms clearly revealed that he had never seen or heard the queen, nor ever set foot inside her residence. He had invented everything.
Still, even as Oates’s charges were being investigated, Charles remained uncertain that his wife’s virtue and discretion would be enough to protect her. So he made a point of demonstrating that he supported and trusted Catherine entirely. Instead of dining with Louise de Kéroualle, the king took his meals with the queen, as well as enjoying his postprandial nap in her chamber. They appeared in public in coaches and on barges, presenting the picture of a loving, happy couple. Charles’s message to his subjects was clear: Catherine was remaining by his side.
Of all the events that had transpired during their marriage, including Catherine’s numerous miscarriages, the Popish Plot was the one that drew the royal couple most closely together.
The king’s support for his wife continued throughout the anti-Catholic madness. In 1679, the Countess of Sutherland, a close friend of Louise, wrote snarkily to a relative of her husband’s in Holland, “The King and Queen—who is now a mistress, the passion her spouse has for her is so great—go both to Newmarket, together with their whole court.”
Catherine wrote to her brother, the king of Portugal, to tell him “how completely the King releases me from all trouble by the care which he takes to defend my innocence and truth. Every day he shows more clearly his good will towards me, and thus baffles the hate of my enemies. I cannot cease telling you, dear Pedro, what I owe to his benevolence, of which each day he gives better proofs, either from generosity, or from compassion for the little happiness in which he sees I live.” That same year, the Earl of Shaftesbury had spearheaded the Exclusion Bill, intended to separate the royal spouses, thereby paving the way for Charles to marry a Protestant.
Charles had imprisoned Titus Oates, but after a brief period of incarceration, the House of Commons ordered his release under threat of a constitutional crisis. Oates, the ultimate con artist, went from being treated like a criminal to a hero, awarded a State apartment in Whitehall and a twelve-hundred-pound annuity.
As a result of the Popish Plot, fifteen innocent men, including some of Catherine’s servants, were executed; the last of them died in 1681. It took three years from the launching of the plot before a backlash against Oates began. That year, he was ejected from his apartment, but continued to denounce the royal family, leading to a second period of imprisonment, this time on the charge of sedition.
The queen had incurred a reputation for goodness, and maintained a truly regal sense of serenity and poise, even during this frightening anti-Catholic period, and even as her husband continued to dangle his infidelities in her face. By now, he had added a former flame, the fabulously wealthy, and glamorously bisexual, Hortense Mancini, the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, to his stable of royal mistresses. Catherine’s remarkable tolerance of Charles’s affairs was the key to retaining his love, affection, and respect. He had more than political reasons for refusing to divorce the queen. Not only did Charles owe her a tremendous debt for suffering in silence while he committed countless infidelities, paraded his paramours around the court, and lavished more jewels and real estate upon them than he had ever given her, but he genuinely esteemed Catherine and enjoyed her company.
Unfortunately, the king would never feel the same kind of love for Catherine that she had for him. And by the spring of 1681, when the court was at Newmarket for Charles’s beloved horse races, it was being reported that Catherine “entertaines better thoughts in her solitude, being retired most part of the day at her devotions and reading.” The queen’s tolerance for Louise de Kéroualle had reached its limit. In 1683, in the course of an argument with Charles, Catherine complained to him that “now the mistresses governe all.”
In 1684, Charles fell ill. He and James kept the gravity of his ailment a secret so that neither their nephew, the statdholder William III of Orange, nor the Duke of Monmouth and his faction would get any ideas about instigating a rebellion. That year, James finally took his place in the Privy Council and was restored to his post as Lord High Admiral, a great boon for the navy. It was clear that with no child born to Catherine and Charles, the only legitimate successor was the Duke of York, despite his Catholic faith.
Following a night of cardplaying amid his mistresses, on the morning of February 2, 1685, after awakening feeling faint and nauseated, Charles had an apoplectic fit while his barber was shaving him. The sudden onset of his illness led to the suspicion of poisoning, although no plot was ever proven at the time. The results of Charles’s autopsy were consistent with granular kidney disease, a form of Bright’s disease, and modern medical theories have concluded that his symptoms were those of uremia, or kidney dysfunction. The king’s initial fit, however, would seem like a ministroke or TIA (transient ischemic attack), which can leave the victim suffering from neurological symptoms that pass within a day.
For the next four days, while his doctors tortured him with frequent bloodletting, blistering, emetics, purgatives, and a broth laced with cream of tartar, Charles languished between lucidity and unconsciousness. On the fifth of February, with the Duke of York by his side, it is believed that Charles II received last rites, welcomed into the Roman Catholic Church by Father John Huddleston, the priest who had helped him escape after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. It has never been fully proven whether the king’s deathbed conversion (if it indeed occurred) was his own idea, or if he had finally been persuaded by James, and/or Louise de Kéroualle (both of whom took credit for it). Louise, however, whose relationship to the king was considered no better than that of a prostitute, was not permitted anywhere near the dying monarch; nor were any other of Charles’s mistresses. However, their ennobled sons, because they were now peers of the realm, might be allowed to see their father if they wished. Nell Gwyn’s son, Charles, the little Earl of Burford (and later Duke of St. Albans), was the king’s favorite child, and was by his side during his final days.
Aware that her husband never wished his private views on Catholicism to be made public, Catherine stayed out of any preparations or discussion surrounding his conversion. She came to say good-bye to Charles on February 5. Already tearful,
she became convulsed with weeping when he greeted her tenderly. Prostrated with grief, she had to be carried back to her rooms. According to the poet-playwright John Dryden, “Which was nearest the Grave could scarce be seen / The dying Monarch, or the living Queen. . . .” She sent word to Charles, requesting his pardon if ever she had offended him. Nonplussed, the king exclaimed, “Alas, poor soul! She ask my pardon! I beg hers with all my heart.”
After apologizing to his physicians and courtiers for being “such an unconscionable time dying,” the fifty-five-year-old Charles II expired at noon on Friday, February 6. He was buried with no state funeral on February 14, St. Valentine’s Day, in a vault beneath the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey. His body, which was encased in a lead coffin, did not even lie in state prior to his interment. Atop the coffin, a solid silver plate bore a lengthy Latin inscription that ended with the words, “in the thirty-seventh year of his reign,” dating Charles II’s accession from the year of his father’s execution in 1649.
The late king’s official mistresses were permitted to wear black, but were not allowed to put their households into mourning; that was specifically a royal prerogative. Upon the accession of James II, after first withdrawing to a convent she had founded in Hammersmith, Catherine retreated to Somerset House.
Diarist John Evelyn described Charles as “a Prince of many virtues, and many great imperfections” who instituted “a politer way of living—even if he turned later to luxury and expense.” In his 1676 Memoirs, Sir John Reresby wrote that Charles was “not an active, busy or ambitious Prince . . . he seemed to be chiefly desirous of ‘Peace and Quiet for his own Time.’”
Yes, he desired peace. But in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, he was both busy and ambitious, tapping the great Sir Christopher Wren to help rebuild the capital. It was Wren whose design for a new St. Paul’s Cathedral began construction in 1675. In addition to granting royal charters to the British East India and Hudson’s Bay companies, in 1681 Charles also granted a vast tract in North America to William Penn, land that would eventually become Pennsylvania. Charles II also founded the Royal Naval Observatory and had plans to build a naval hospital for veterans modeled after Les Invalides in Paris; his dream was realized, but not during his lifetime.
At one point during Charles’s reign, the Duke of Buckingham wryly observed that a king is supposed to be the father of his people, and His Majesty was certainly the father of a good many of them. Because Catherine was unable to carry a child to term, the king shared her anguish at not bearing him a legitimate heir. Had she given him a child, which the queen accepted would be raised as a Protestant, the religious tensions surrounding James’s prospective ascension as a Catholic would have been mooted.
Instead, Charles fathered at least a dozen royal bastards with seven mothers, although there may have been more children as well. Barbara Castlemaine bore six children, but the king refused to admit paternity of her last child, a daughter. Nell Gwyn gave her royal lover two sons, one of whom died in France, where the little boy was sent for schooling. Louise de Kéroualle bore a son as well. Charles ennobled all of their children. Six of Charles’s illegitimate sons received nine dukedoms: the present-day dukedoms of Buccleuch (still under attainder), Grafton, St. Albans, and Richmond and Lennox (joined together) all derive from those granted to the sons of the merry monarch’s numerous mistresses. There were also children from his liaisons with Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon (a courtier and sister to the playwright and theater manager Thomas Killigrew), Catherine Pegge (who had two children by Charles while his court was in exile in Bruges), and the actress Moll Davis, who bore the king a daughter she named Lady Mary Tudor.
Things did not end well for Charles’s first illegitimate son, Lucy Walter’s boy, the Duke of Monmouth. After his uncle the Duke of York ascended the throne as James II, Monmouth staged a rebellion against the crown. Catherine, who had always nurtured a soft spot for her bastard stepson, unsuccessfully pleaded with the new king to spare his life.
During James’s reign, Catherine had more freedom of religion, but she was an isolated figure with no purpose for remaining in England, now that “the Almighty hath seen fitt to set me free.” Yet her brother, King Pedro II of Portugal, seemed reluctant to welcome her home, even though she offered to retire to a convent to avoid arousing the envy of his courtiers, who might fear her influence upon him.
So Catherine stayed at Somerset House. And she insisted that the treasury finally settle its financial obligations, paying her the allowance she had not received for so many years as queen consort. She had never complained of shortages and the necessity of economizing all those years, even when her husband continued to lavish untold wealth on his mistresses. Charles would have wanted her to receive her due. And so she fought for it.
In 1687, looking back on her royal marriage, Catherine ruefully wrote, “There were then Reasons for my coming to this Kingdom, solely for the advantage of Portugal, & for this cause & for the interests of our House I was Sacrific’d.”
After thirty years in England, Catherine finally sailed back to Portugal in March 1692. In the words of the diarist John Evelyn, “She deported herself so decently upon all occasions . . . which made her universally beloved.”
Catherine had no idea that in Portugal she was regarded as a living legend, the courageous infanta who married the king of a faraway land, a man whose navy had helped them defeat the invading Spanish several times. Stories of her patience, piety, and goodness over the decades had reached her homeland. Her countrymen did not revile her for never becoming a mother. And she would never again be made to feel unloved or unwanted.
Now over fifty, the former queen of England lived quietly and modestly with a small retinue at a series of Portuguese palaces. She emerged from her retirement in 1704, when she was appointed queen regent for the ailing Pedro. Like her mother, Luiza Maria, Catherine was an exceptionally capable regent. Although she had never taken an active role in the politics or administration of England, she had absorbed much by listening so attentively to Charles.
In fact, since her husband’s death in 1685, Catherine governed her decisions by asking herself, “What would Charles do?” As one example, on his deathbed, he had implored James to look after the welfare of his mistresses, particularly Nell Gwyn, famously urging his brother to “not let poor Nelly starve.” James did so, transferring the allowance to Nell’s son, Charles, after she died in 1687. But after the Glorious Revolution made James an exile, William III saw no reason to continue to pay a pension out of the royal treasury to one of his uncle’s bastards, even if the boy was Duke of St. Albans. So before Catherine left England, she made provisions for two thousand pounds a year to be disbursed out of the funds she brought back to Portugal, part of her own marriage settlement. Not only had Catherine been fond of the child, but Nell Gwyn had been the one royal mistress who was not avaricious and who truly loved Charles II as much as the queen did. Nell never wed and never cheated on him with another man, as the king’s other significant paramours had done. With her inimitable wit, she always insisted that she would not “lay a dog where the deer had laid.”
In 1704, during Catherine’s regency, Portugal was forced to make war on Spain, which was then ruled by the French-born Philip of Anjou. Under Catherine’s instructions, the Duke of Cadaval executed a brilliant strategic campaign and the Portuguese were triumphant. In the throne room at Lisbon, Catherine received the envoy from Madrid and signed the peace treaty on behalf of her native land.
She remained regent until her death on December 31, 1705, at the palace at Bemposta. The sixty-seven-year-old Catherine of Braganza was buried in the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, near Lisbon. In the twentieth century, her remains were reinterred in the capital’s Monastery of São Vicente de Fora, where the royal family of Bragança reposes.
The great Restoration-era playwright John Dryden praised the goodness and marital loyalty of Catherine of Braga
nza in an unrhymed couplet that wasn’t, but might as well have been, her epitaph:
The best of Queens, the most obedient wife . . .
His life the theme of her eternal prayer—
How ironic that Catherine’s own countrymen viewed her royal marriage as a glorious alliance for their kingdom, while her husband’s subjects—poetic panegyrics aside—regarded the union as an inglorious one from the moment they’d discovered that her mother had played bait-and-switch with her dowry. From her mousy physical appearance to her Romish religion to her unfortunate inability to bear an heir, Catherine was considered an utter mismatch for their charismatic king, and their marriage a political misstep for England.
MARIA CAROLINA OF AUSTRIA
AND
FERDINAND IV OF NAPLES
MARRIED: 1768–1814
“Others wage wars; you, happy Austria, marry,” was the motto of the Hapsburg dynasty, the family into which Maria Carolina, archduchess of Austria, was born. Sadly, the motto would prove to be no more than wishful thinking: Maria Carolina’s inglorious royal marriage to a philandering idiot was never a happy one.
Her mother was the formidable Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, Bohemia, and the Netherlands. Her father was French: the indulgent François of Lorraine, a grandson of Liselotte, the outspoken second wife of Philippe d’Orléans. In 1745, Francis, as he became known, was elected Holy Roman Emperor. However, it was Maria Theresa, whose father had held the title before him, who really wielded the scepter.
Maria Carolina was the third daughter born to the empress to be given that name, her first two namesakes having died in infancy. Our Maria Carolina was the thirteenth of Maria Theresa’s surviving children, and would always be known within her large family as Charlotte. When she became queen of Naples, it was also the name she would sign beneath the letters written in French or German, although she called herself Maria Carolina in her Italian correspondence. Despite being a polyglot, she was never able to write in any language with academic perfection.
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