Mistresses

by Linda Porter

  Now that she had justified herself, Barbara went on an all-out attack on Montagu. She was determined to ruin him. ‘Nor will you, I hope, follow the advice of this ill man, who in his heart I know hates you, and were it for his interest would ruin you too if he could. For he has neither conscience nor honour and has several times told me that in his heart he despised you and your brother; and that for his part, he wished with all his heart that the parliament would send you both to travel, for you were a dull governable fool, and the duke a willful fool.’8 Even worse than Ralph’s unguarded comments about the king was the duchess’s assertion that he had found an astrologer through whom he hoped to influence Charles II, a reminder that the king, despite his interest in science, was still believed to be susceptible to more primitive forces. Ralph cheerfully acknowledged that his underlying aim in all this was to become Lord Treasurer. Then he could control the purse strings, supply the king with all the money and women that he wanted, and lead him, in Ralph’s own words, by the nose.

  Aware that his career was on the line, though he seems to have felt that Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, was the main enemy, Ralph returned without permission to London, to plead his case personally with Charles. He did not get far into his explanation when the king interrupted him, demanding to know what could be so important that he had deserted his post. For Ralph, it was too late; he had been trumped by Barbara. He was removed from the ambassadorship in France, where he was replaced by the earl of Sunderland, and lost his place on the Privy Council. His political career, however, was far from over; he was elected as a member of Parliament and the French ambassador, Barrillon, soon recruited him as a source of information in return for a pension.

  The affair was Barbara’s last foray into court politics. She had brought Montagu low, but the problem with Anne, her daughter, was not so conveniently solved. Anne seems, not unnaturally, to have resented her mother, and though she did go on to have children with her husband, to whom she returned, the marriage was never a success and the earl of Sussex and his wife separated in 1688. Though the king had acknowledged her, Roger Palmer still regarded her as his daughter and her relationship with him was better than that with her mother.

  Roger’s life remained unpredictable. While abroad he had to deal not just with the difficulties of a self-imposed exile but also the constant importuning of his half-brother, Philip Palmer, and Philip’s equally desperate wife. To their frequent requests for monetary help, Roger responded with frigid politeness, saying, ‘I confess no letters can be more ungrateful to me than those that press me beyond my power; I thought your ladyship had known that I had disposed of my estate and consequently that it lay not now as much in my power to serve you as formerly, for though my brother is near to me yet I have those that are in blood nearer.’9 Barbara’s husband returned to England in 1677 and, as an active writer and Catholic apologist, found himself caught up in the Popish Plot. James II’s accession in 1685 saw him recognized for his loyalty to the Catholic religion and his diplomatic skills. He was despatched to Rome with considerable pomp as the new king’s ambassador extraordinary. James’s downfall meant that Roger was once again on the wrong side and he found himself in the Tower of London on suspicion of Jacobite sympathies, which he undoubtedly had. His quiet death in the Welsh Marches in 1705 finally released Barbara from her marriage of forty years. It was not quite the end of her story, as we shall see.

  Barbara was a remarkable woman. Self-possessed and confident, she saw clearly how to derive the maximum advantage for herself and her children. It was not in her nature to be embarrassed, indeed she gloried in her role as the king’s mistress, determined that the telling combination of her beauty, connections and business sense would triumph over anyone who stood in her path. Her unabashed sexuality was unusual, even at a court renowned for its lack of any conventional morality. She had a mind that was both daring and calculating. Several ladies of the court, including Montagu’s sister, Lady Harvey, who challenged her behaviour and criticized her openly, came off worse in their struggle with the woman who had risen from the fringes of the aristocracy and genteel poverty to become a duchess in her own right. But the woman she wronged most, and whose life was forever changed by Barbara’s very existence, was the Portuguese princess whom Charles II married with notable lack of enthusiasm in 1662.

  Part Three

  The Queen

  CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA

  1638–1705

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Wealthy Wife

  ‘I have often been put in mind by my friends that it was high time to marry’

  The king’s speech to Parliament, 8 May 1661

  CHARLES II’S RESTORATION had made him the most eligible bachelor in Europe. Yet he did not marry for another two years. There had been other, more pressing concerns: the shape of government, the settlement of the Church of England, suppression of discontent and pursuit of the regicides. His coronation at Westminster Abbey took place on 23 April 1661, nearly a year after his return, the hiatus caused not just by the demands of his new situation but the absence of the regalia needed for the ceremony, which had been melted down or sold by the republican regime. A new crown, based on the one supposedly worn by Edward the Confessor, was made. It was extremely heavy at over two kilograms and encrusted with jewels. Charles can be seen wearing it in his coronation portrait, in which the dandified glamour of his doublet and hose contrast uncomfortably with his almost threatening expression. He was thirty-one when the portrait was painted but looks older. He enjoyed being the centre of attention without the distraction of a consort but he was now under pressure to find a bride, though he would claim that he had ‘thought so myself ever since I came into England.’ The delay, he said, had been caused by the difficulty of finding a suitable wife but he had concluded that it would be impossible ‘to make such a choice, against which there could be no foresight of any inconvenience that may ensue’, without so much loss of time that the lords and gentlemen assembled ‘would live to see me an old bachelor.’ He went on to announce in his speech to Parliament in May 1661 that he had resolved to marry ‘the daughter of Portugal.’1 It may seem strange that this lady was not even referred to by name but such were the formalities of the time.

  The future queen consort was born Catarina Henriqueta de Bragança in the Palace of Vila Viçosa, in the Alentejo region of Portugal, east of Lisbon, in 1638. At the time of her birth, Catherine of Braganza, as she would be known in England, was a duke’s daughter. Her father, John of Braganza, came from a noble line, descended from an illegitimate son of John I of Portugal, who had reigned in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Luisa de Guzmán, Catherine’s mother, came from an equally venerable Spanish family, the Medina Sidonias. Catherine was high-born, but not yet a king’s daughter.

  Portugal had a long and often fractious relationship with its neighbouring kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula, centuries before the birth of a united Spain. It had survived Roman, Visigoth and Moorish occupation before breaking away from the kingdom of León Castile in the twelfth century. The height of its power and influence had come during the period from the mid-1490s to the 1540s, when its explorers discovered new lands as far apart as Brazil, Africa and the islands of south-east Asia. Trade brought the burgeoning Portuguese empire enormous wealth, a cultured society grew up and the daughters of Portuguese kings married into the Spanish Habsburgs. But a series of personal tragedies and premature deaths depleted the Portuguese royal family and the advent of the Inquisition sucked the lifeblood out of society. The crisis came in 1580, when Philip II of Spain, whose mother was a Portuguese princess, claimed the throne following the death of the childless King Henrique. To his vast domains in South America, Philip now added the entirety of Portugal’s empire, making him perhaps the first and only truly global monarch. England’s paltry gains on the world stage under Elizabeth I pale in comparison. In his person, Philip united the crowns of Portugal and Spain, rather as James I would, just two decades later, for England
and Scotland – though in his case, with much less immediate impact on the world. In one respect, however, there was a strong similarity. Portugal, though retaining its autonomy, was very much the junior partner in this new arrangement, as Scotland was to England in 1603. For a while, Philip considered moving his court to Lisbon, but it remained in Madrid. The Portuguese had lost their nation but not their sense of identity. In 1640, they would regain it again, with a new king, John IV – Catherine’s father.

  In the sixty years of Habsburg domination of Portugal, unrest had grown. Popular uprisings were put down and, while some of the senior Portuguese nobility were content to mingle with their counterparts in the Castilian court, other, younger men grew progressively discontented. In December 1640, a group of lesser nobility led what was, in effect, a coup d’état against Spanish rule, spurred on by the convenient distraction of a revolt in Catalonia, another disaffected Iberian region. They murdered the secretary of the Council of State in Lisbon and proclaimed the duke of Braganza king, as John IV, summoning him from Vila Viçosa to Lisbon to begin his reign. He acted swiftly in calling the Cortes, Portugal’s representative body, but he had not sought the throne and he accepted it with some reluctance. He knew the dangers that threatened the restored dynasty of Braganza, and his own limitations: ‘His background was that of a country gentleman who before his elevation to the throne had never left Portugal.’2 This of course made him more acceptable to the junior aristocrats who wanted him as their king. John had not bent the knee to the Habsburg kings in Madrid and could be represented as a true patriot. But the early years of his rule were uneasy, as he sought to promote himself and his country in Europe. Spain tried to frustrate him at every turn, using its greater power and diplomatic experience, and even France, Spain’s traditional enemy, was slow to recognize an independent Portugal, pointedly refusing the offer of Catherine as a bride for Louis XIV, despite the promise of a very generous dowry. The only country that was willing to negotiate with him and offer him protection was Oliver Cromwell’s republican England. A treaty was signed in 1654 but not ratified for another two years, and its commercial terms were highly favourable to England. When John IV died in 1656, the Portuguese empire was under threat in both Brazil and south-east Asia and Portugal’s survival as an independent country was once more menaced by Spain after the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees ended a century and a half of conflict between France and Spain. Philip IV’s daughter, Maria Teresa, married Louis XIV, while Catherine of Braganza remained unwed in Lisbon.

  She was – as her mother, the very capable Queen Regent Luisa, recognized – a natural choice of bride for the newly restored Charles II and, feeling let down by the French, Luisa pursued the idea with determination. She was ruling on behalf of her son, Afonso VI, who had been badly affected both mentally and physically as a child by meningitis. The years since her husband’s death had been a challenge but the marriage negotiations, led by the experienced Francisco de Mello, Portuguese ambassador to London, eventually bore fruit. Ratified in the Treaty of London of 1661, Portugal’s future seemed much more secure. But it had been bought at a very high price, not just for Portugal but for the twenty-three-year-old Catherine of Braganza herself.

  The bargaining had taken longer than Charles and Edward Hyde, who played a major part in the negotiations, let on in Charles’s speech to Parliament, though many of the king’s leading politicians had known something of what was going on, for the simple reason that Mello, armed with a very sizeable fund to back up the Portuguese case, had bought off most of them. Though Charles had begun his reign with a desire to restore good relations with Spain after Cromwell’s regime had sided with the French and vilified the Spanish as the fount of all evil, he swiftly discovered that Spain wanted concessions he could not give. Turning to Portugal, with its long history of alliance with England going back to the fourteenth century, seemed a natural alternative as well as a very attractive one financially. For Charles and his advisers, including his brother, the offer was too good to miss. The Spanish ambassador, though dangling the promise of impressive dowries for various minor princesses in different Habsburg lands, in a desperate attempt to match the Portuguese, was outmanoeuvred by Mello’s bribes and hamstrung by the not unreasonable scepticism of the English that Philip IV simply could not find the money he was promising. In addition, the French, despite their newly discovered friendship with Spain, were more than happy to support the Anglo-Portuguese match, hoping that it might prove an annoyance and preoccupation for the Spanish government.

  In return for supplying Portugal with 10,000 men to back up its still inadequate army, Charles received the most generous marriage settlement of any English monarch. He was given the ports of Bombay and Tangier, privileged access for English merchants throughout the Portuguese empire and a lump sum cash payment of about £330,000 (worth over £11 billion today), as well, of course, as a royal bride. This was an exceptional windfall and the king’s reference to his marriage in his speech to Parliament seems almost casual in comparison with the reality of what he was getting. The Portuguese, now much more secure in their place in Europe, had gained much as well, for, though Bombay and Tangier seemed powerful inducements, the Portuguese were, in reality, in danger of losing both of them as the Dutch challenged them in the east and the Spanish in North Africa. Catherine was to be guaranteed a personal income of £30,000 (nearly £4 million today) per year and she was permitted to practise her Catholic religion, as Charles II’s mother had been when she married his father in 1625. In retrospect, Catherine thought these concessions were a small price for England to pay. She would remark, years later, after Charles’s death: ‘There were reasons for my coming to this kingdom, solely for the advantage of Portugal, and for this cause and for the interests of our house, I was sacrificed.’3 It was a bitter comment, born of the long years of humiliation and unhappiness she endured, though this could not have been foreseen when she eventually set sail from Lisbon on 23 April 1662.

  Princesses had always been diplomatic fodder but Catherine, unlike the more spirited Dutch princess, Henrietta, who might have been Charles’s wife, had no say in the matter. In truth, little was known about her because there was little to know. The English consul in Lisbon reported that she had been ‘bred hugely retired. She hath hardly been ten times out of the palace in her life.’4 There is no evidence, however, as earlier writers claimed, that Catherine was brought up in a convent. Her early life seems to reflect that of her father, no traveller himself. As the only surviving daughter of King John and Queen Luisa, the royal couple knew that her marriageability was an important asset but they do not seem to have given much thought to preparing her for a future that would inevitably be outside Portugal itself. She was brought up to be devout, ladylike and respectful. Catherine could speak Spanish (or at least understand it well enough to communicate with Charles II until she learned sufficient English) and her subsequent interests as queen indicate that she had an appreciation of music and art. In dress and hairstyle, she favoured the stiff and, by other European standards, conservative fashions of her country. These looked heavy on Catherine, who was short and slim. Her eyes were acknowledged to be very attractive, though her portraits suggest that she might have been short-sighted. In days when few people had good teeth into their adult years, Catherine’s were her worst feature. They protruded badly (none of her portraits show this, as smiling with your mouth wide open, such a feature of celebrity in our time, would have been considered unseemly), but observers did not fail to remark on it when she came to England. Queen Luisa praised her daughter as gentle, virtuous and prudent. Charles II pronounced himself eager for her arrival, telling Catherine in July 1661, ‘I am going to make a short progress into some of my provinces . . . seeking in vain tranquillity in my restlessness, hoping to see the beloved person of Your Majesty in these kingdoms, already your own, and that with the same anxiety with which, after my long banishment, I desired to see myself in them.’5 He had a good way with words. However, there was little pu
blic comment in England and certainly no great rejoicing when the match was announced. In September 1661, Sir Richard Fanshawe was despatched as ambassador to Lisbon to hasten the signing of the treaty by the Portuguese. Charles sent a diamond-framed miniature of himself and a wardrobe of silk dresses for Catherine. It seems, in retrospect, rather a cheap gesture for what he was getting. Catherine’s reaction to this limited largesse is unknown.

  The Portuguese, however, were determined that their princess’s marriage would be an occasion of great display, a public demonstration of the clout of the Braganza dynasty. Nor were they in any hurry to send Catherine to England until they had fully milked this opportunity. Their willingness to spend money on public celebrations to mark Catherine’s betrothal and the signing of the treaty was remarkable for a small country still struggling to establish itself. The Portuguese empire may have been extensive but wars with the Spanish and the Dutch had weakened the exchequer. Visitors to Lisbon were not impressed: ‘it is a very poor dirty place – I mean the City and the Court of Lisbone’, wrote Pepys in his diary. He had dined with an English sea-captain, recently returned from Portugal, who reported that the young king was ‘a very rude and simple fellow’. He went on to add that fine dining was a rarity at the Portuguese court. The king, he had been told, ‘hath his meat sent up by a dozen of lazy guards . . . and sometimes nothing but fruits and now and then half a hen.’ Catherine’s enhanced status meant that she got the pick of the rather meagre diet of the royal family: ‘she is come to have a whole hen or goose to her table – which is not ordinary.’ It certainly was not and, in an apparent effort to broaden their future queen’s culinary experiences, English diplomats in Lisbon had requested ‘neats (beef) tongues, bacon, oil anchovies, pickled oysters, Cheshire cheese and butter’ be sent over.6