by Uglow, Jenny
By the spring of 1661 all was decided. Charles informed Parliament of his decision, and wrote charmingly to his proposed bride. He had already written to her mother the queen. ‘I send you here my Letter that is for the Queene of Portugal’, he scribbled in a note to Clarendon, ‘’tis the worse Spanish that euer was writt…looke it ouer and see if I have written it right, and send it me back againe.’3 In late July, when William Schellinks took a ferry down the Thames, he noted the convoys of merchant ships but also several warships, waiting to join the fleet that would go and collect Catherine.4
Fearing they would lose influence after this marriage, the Villiers and Howard families worked to ensure Barbara’s position as Charles’s mistress. In mid-October 1661, Charles requested his Secretary of State William Morice to make out a grant for Roger Palmer to be made an Irish earl. His title would be Earl of Castlemaine, and his estates in Limerick would descend to ‘his heirs of his body, gotten on Barbara Palmer, his now wife’. Leave the date blank, he asked, adding a P.S.: ‘Let me have it as soon as you can.’5 But there were obstacles. The humiliated Palmer initially refused to accept the offer, while Clarendon would not let the patent pass the Great Seal. (It was noted, too, that it was only Barbara’s children who would be heirs to the title, not those of any future wife, if she should die.) Palmer’s anger was partially assuaged by granting him the marshal-ship of the King’s Bench, and the patent was transferred to Dublin, out of Clarendon’s jurisdiction. Charles waited almost a month and then on 8 November peremptorily demanded a warrant making Palmer Baron of Limerick and Earl of Castlemaine, ‘and let me have it before dinner’.6 Roger Palmer was still far from pleased, refusing for some time to use his title. It was in reaction to his woes, some said, that he now converted to Catholicism.
In late January 1662, Pepys wrote, ‘There are factions (private ones at Court) about Madam Palmer. What it is about I know not, but it is something about the King’s favour to her, now that the Queen is coming.’7 Anticipating the arrival of the queen, and also of Henrietta Maria who was due to move back to England in the summer, Barbara had been angling for an official position at court and had won agreement from Charles that she would be appointed as a Lady of the Bedchamber to Catherine. Such a post would give her security, and enable her to offer patronage to her friends, so that she could build her own camp of supporters. She was nervous. Although Charles’s devotion was obvious, many courtiers who had curried favour with Barbara had now dropped her, including the Duchess of York and Buckingham. Mary Villiers, Buckingham’s sister and now Duchess of Richmond, notoriously said she hoped that Barbara met the same end as Jane Shore, Edward IV’s mistress, who had died in poverty and squalor, her body, according to story, flung on a dunghill.
Their change of tack was a miscalculation. Barbara was pregnant again, and in May she announced she would give birth at Hampton Court, the place where Charles was due to spend his royal honeymoon. Murmurs of disapproval volleyed around the court. In early April Dr Jasper Mayne preached what Pepys considered ‘a very honest’ sermon at Whitehall to the prospective royal bridegroom, in which he ‘did much insist upon the sin of adultery – which methought might touch the King and the more because he forced it into his sermon, methought beside his text’.8
Meanwhile Charles’s bride was on her way. Sandwich was despatched on the Royal Charles to lead his fleet to the Mediterranean, first to fight the Barbary pirates of Algiers, which he did with great success, then to take over Tangier. This proved less troublesome than expected but it was clear that Tangier was very vulnerable to attack, and a great project was started – which would continue all through Charles’s reign, swallowing time and money – to build a mole, a long breakwater that would create a defensible harbour. Having installed a garrison, Sandwich finally set out to fetch Catherine from Lisbon. At the last minute there were problems about the dowry. This had still not been collected, partly because the Portuguese had spent it on their continuing war with Spain, and to Charles’s distress it was largely paid in sugar and spices rather than cash. But at last, to the sound of cannon, Catherine boarded the Royal Charles, and settled down in her cabin, newly decorated and gilded, with velvet hangings and costly carpets.
From the Tagus the fleet sailed north up the Atlantic coast and then across the Bay of Biscay. Catherine stayed below deck, afflicted by both shyness and seasickness. In the terrible gales, even the crew were sick, as some jolly doggerel describes:
Here laught a sailor, while another cry’d
He’d change this great Fish-market for Cheapside.
The deck with sick men covered; so that
It look’d like the valley of Jehosaphat.
Alive, or dead they knew not, like men shot
With dreadful Thunder, live, and know it not.9
The Duke of York was sent to meet the fleet as it sailed into Portsmouth on 13 May. By the time Catherine tottered on deck after the troubled voyage half of Whitehall had descended on the port. Teams of carpenters and upholsterers had worked for weeks turning the Governor of Portsmouth’s house into a makeshift palace, with suites for the king and the queen. In London Charles ordered a crimson velvet bed for the Queen’s Bedchamber in Whitehall, lined with cloth of gold, and commissioned a painting of St Catherine by John Michael Wright to set over her mantelpiece.10 And while James entertained Catherine in Portsmouth, Charles rushed through official business in Westminster. On 18 May the Privy Council sat until eleven at night while all the bills that were due to be passed in parliament were read aloud to them, including the key religious legislation, which would have such grave consequences.
It was characteristic of Charles to pack so many things into a day. His official work done, he walked over to dine with the new Lady Castlemaine, as he had done every night that week. On the eve of Catherine’s arrival, when guns were fired in salvo from the Tower and bonfires flared outside all doors, Barbara’s house alone was in darkness. Within, the scene was curiously domestic: Sandwich’s housekeeper, Sarah, prying from next door in King Street, reported that ‘the King and she did send for a pair of scales and weighed one another; and she, being with child was said to be heaviest’.11 The little charade proved, to Barbara’s eyes at least, that she outweighed the queen, not least in her ability to produce heirs.
Next day Charles stayed in town until all the parliamentary business was finished, leaving for Portsmouth around nine o’clock at night. A crowd waited for him at Westminster, as he jumped into his royal barge for the short trip to Whitehall stairs. Trumpeters blew their fanfares as he landed. Then ‘with all the company wishing him good luck’, he took his seat in his coach, ‘which was ornamented with very magnificent carvings, with six most beautiful stallions belonging to the Duke of Northumberland harnessed to it. He and many other noblemen accompanied his Majesty in carriages and on horseback, besides a brigade of horsemen and his runners.’12
Charles and Catherine looking happy on a Staffordshire slipware charger
The fine coach carried Charles to Guildford, where he had two hours’ sleep before taking to the road again, arriving exhausted in Portsmouth in the evening. Catherine was weak after her seasickness, cold and fever. She was twenty-three, and despite her slight buck teeth, Charles thought her charming, slim and small with a pale, oval face and large dark eyes. As he reported to Clarendon, in a tangle of defensive negatives, ‘her face was not so exact as to be called a beauty, though her eyes were excellent good, and there was nothing in her face that in the least degree can disgust one’.13 He was determinedly hopeful, and, as it turned out, strikingly accurate in his judgement, when he added that she looked like a good woman. But Catherine was not as malleable as he had hoped. Her first act on landing was to refuse English ale and ask for a cup of tea, an exotic drink that she would do much to popularise. She would not accept her English attendants and she soon changed back from the English dress in which she landed, into her more decorous national clothes.
The immediate difficulty the couple faced conc
erned language, since Catherine spoke neither French nor English. Much bowing and gesturing went on. The next problem was religion. To satisfy Catherine’s devout faith, a priest performed a secret Catholic ceremony in the queen’s private chamber. Then Bishop Sheldon officiated at an Anglican ceremony in the improvised Presence Chamber in the Governor’s house. Catherine and Charles sat side by side on small thrones, railed off from the audience: she wore a veil of English lace and a rose-coloured robe, decorated with lovers’ knots in blue ribbons, which were later handed out to the guests as mementos. But the ceremony was a penance to Catherine. According to Burnet, writing after Sheldon had been made Archbishop of Canterbury, Catherine ‘was bigoted to such a degree, that she would not say the words of matrimony, nor bear the sight of the archbishop. The king said the words hastily: and the archbishop pronounced them married persons.’14 The wedding night was non-eventful, the marriage unconsummated. Charles told Clarendon that he was so tired after his ride from London ‘as I was afraid that matters would have gone very sleepily’. He told Minette, more baldly, that it was because Catherine had her period – as Minette too had on her wedding day, making the duc d’Orléans shudder with horror. ‘Monsieur le Cardinal m’a fermé la porte au nez’, Charles wrote, ‘but I am content to let those pass over before I go to bed to my wife, yet I hope I shall entertain her at least better the first night than he did you.’15
Perhaps he did. At any rate he wrote effusively to Clarendon, approving Catherine’s looks and her conversation, and even more warmly to the Portuguese queen, praising her daughter’s ‘simplicity, gentleness and prudence’.16 The next week was packed with balls and dinners and receptions. Everyone watched the royal couple. Sir John Reresby, in town with the Duke of Buckingham, thought it
very decernable that the King was not much enamoured of his bride. She was very little, not hansome (though her face was indifferent), and her education soe different from his, being most of the time brought up in a monastery, that she had nothing visible about her to make the King forget his inclinations to the Countess of Castlemaine.17
Anthony Wood put it more tersely, and prophetically: ‘a little woman, no breeder’.18
On 29 May, Charles’s birthday, they returned to London. It was a sweltering day, the kind of weather when Londoners and their wives took a boat over to Lambeth, to the gardens at Fox Hall (later Vauxhall), to eat cakes and drink ale and wander down the shady avenues. Charles and Catherine were denied such pleasures. They arrived at Hampton Court at nine in the evening, their coaches bowling past in a cloud of dust. It was so hot in the state dining room that the sweat dripped off the courtiers’ faces, the ladies’ make-up ran, and Charles had to whisk Catherine away before she collapsed.19
The old palace was in a poor state, with countless leaks from the roof dripping into buckets in the corridors. Charles had his own priorities – in the first couple of years he had the tennis court refitted and stables repaired – but nothing had been done to the building itself. There had therefore been a great rush to get it ready for the royal honeymoon, ‘a great deal of whitewashing and matting, putting up ledges for hangings, painting and gilding a balcony’.20 The suite of rooms prepared for Catherine was decorated, and furnished with a looking-glass sent by Henrietta Maria and with the fine bed given by the Dutch States General, which, by a twist of fate, had originally been ordered by William II of Orange for Princess Mary. Before Catherine’s arrival the park was planted with avenues of lime-trees and a new canal glittered serenely in the sun.
Faithorne’s engraving of the portrait of Catherine of Braganza, painted in Lisbon by Dirck Stoop a year before her marriage. Her wide farthingale was very old-fashioned in England, and her hairstyle, looped across her forehead in the Spanish and Portuguese fashion, was thought extremely odd.
Charles was patient and attentive, teaching Catherine English, taking her for rides, finding her presents, and asking Minette to hunt in Paris for the papier-maché saints she liked to have in her chapel and could not find in protestant London. The two gondolas that the Venetian senate had given Charles the year before were brought down on 6 June, and the king and queen floated blithely on the canal. Catherine had now adopted English dress and was wearing silk dresses in sweet-pea colours, but her retinue kept their black farthingales, with their tight bodices and skirts jutting out like shelves at each side. They looked strikingly old-fashioned and foreign, as Evelyn described them, ‘the traine of Portugueze Ladys in their monstrous fadingals or Guard-Infantas, their complexions oli-vaster and sufficiently unagreable’.21 Later, Catherine came to really like the light English dresses with their revealing bodices, and enjoyed dressing in breeches which showed off her legs. She turned out to be good at archery, and enjoyed fishing. But for now, rather lost and eager to please, she was a formal little figure at odds with the noisy court.
Barbara, meanwhile, had sulked ever since Charles left for Portsmouth. When Pepys saw her at the theatre, it spoiled his evening, he wrote, ‘to see her look dejectedly and slighted by people already’.22 There was no doubt which camp he belonged to. Towards the end of May, walking across the Privy Garden, where nearby householders hung out their washing, he was stopped in his tracks by ‘the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine laced with rich lace at the bottomes, that mine eyes ever beheld; and did me good to look upon them’.23 With the king away Whitehall seemed a desert, as Barbara waited for the birth of her child in the June heat. When the baby arrived, it was a boy. Roger Palmer immediately reappeared and had him christened as a Catholic. Furious, within a week Charles was back in London, arranging for a Church of England priest to perform a counter christening. This took place in St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 18 June. Charles himself, and Barbara’s aunt, the Countess of Suffolk, now an attendant to the queen, stood as sponsors to the tiny Charles Palmer, Lord Limerick.
Charles, meanwhile, had been manoeuvring to have his mistress even closer, as a Lady of the Bedchamber. He had promised her this before Catherine arrived, and Barbara was skilled at making him feel guilty at her alleged ruin. Quiet though she was, Catherine knew what was going on. When she saw the name ‘Castlemaine’ on the proposed list of her attendants, she struck it off sharply. But when Barbara was presented, at first Catherine did not catch her name. She received the unknown woman calmly and let her kiss her hand: and then, on learning who she was, she collapsed to the floor, suffered a nose-bleed and wept furious tears. Charles apparently saw this as play-acting and defiance. In the aftermath, both husband and wife railed at the Portuguese ambassador, Charles complaining that Catherine should have been kept informed of his earlier life, Catherine attacking him for lying in the character he had given the king. She was distraught, lonely, confused by the new language and customs, hating the food and finding the London water ‘like poison’ compared to the clear streams of Lisbon.
Charles would not give up his battle on Barbara’s behalf and despite Clarendon’s obvious hostility to her, he now asked him to plead her cause with the queen. With profound reluctance, later commenting that it was ‘too delicate a province for so plain-dealing a man as he to undertake’, Clarendon agreed.24 His tactic was not to excuse, but to ask the queen to be realistic. Catherine, ‘with some blushing and confusion and some tears’, said that ‘she did not think that she should have found the king engaged in his affection to another lady’.25 Surely, he countered, she had not expected this active thirty-year-old to be ‘ignorant of the opposite sex’.
Far from accepting the situation with humour, as Clarendon suggested, Catherine stood firm. Meanwhile Clarendon lectured Charles, to equally little effect. He brushed off Clarendon’s reminders that he had himself censured Louis XIV for forcing his queen to receive his mistress at court as ‘such a piece of ill-nature, that he could never be guilty of’.26 His honour was involved, Charles declared, rather unconvincingly: ‘he had undone this lady and ruined her reputation, which had been fair and untainted till her friendship with him’.27 In July he wrote
to Clarendon, warning him not to try to divert him from his resolution.
You know how true a friend I have been to you. If you will oblige me eternally make this business as easy as you can, of what opinion soever you are of, for I am resolved to go through with this matter, let what will come on it; which again I solemnly swear before Almighty God. Therefore, if you desire to have the continuance of my friendship, meddle no more with this business, except it be to beat down all false and scandalous reports, and to facilitate what I am sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.28
Clarendon could show the letter to Ormond if he liked, but his mind was made up.
Struggling with parliament, fighting off petitioners, lectured by Clarendon over policy, Charles felt that his private life was one area where he must be able to exert his will. Egged on by his young courtiers, who reminded him that his grandfather Henri IV had openly kept a mistress at the French court, he remained stubborn. Fulfilling his earlier threat, he packed Catherine’s retinue off home to Portugal: only a few priests, maids and the ageing Countess of Pendalva remained. Barbara seized the moment. On 15 July she ordered everything in King Street to be packed – plate, clothes, jewels, furnishings – and decamped to her uncle’s house at Richmond, conveniently close to Hampton Court. She also took all the servants, leaving Roger with empty rooms and one decrepit porter. Her uncles George and Ned Villiers then signed a bond guaranteeing her debts up to £10,000. Her marriage, in all but name, was almost over.
The summer honeymoon was almost over too. There was a furious row, during which Catherine raged, wept, and declared she would go home, an empty threat as her mother, and her country, would view her return as a disgrace. The frustrated Chancellor’s account was vivid: