A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (15 page)

The inevitable conflict between the ambassadors was sparked, to no one’s surprise – although the scale did genuinely shock – by competition over their position in a procession. The French insisted on preceding the Spanish, and vice versa. Guessing that there would be trouble, when the Venetian ambassadors arrived Charles persuaded both the French and Spanish to stay away. Louis, however, was mortally offended and insisted that d’Estrades be present when the Swedish delegation made their entrée in October. While his ambassador was making preparations, Louis heard from a spy in Albemarle’s household that the General (as Albemarle was known) had offered to send Scottish and Irish soldiers to guard the Spanish coach. They would be waiting in the streets near Tower Hill. D’Estrades, he said, must make sure his coach took prime position and must keep his guards close ‘for fear that at the crossing of some street these Scotch and Irish rush in with might and main and stop you and let Watteville go’.

Londoners looked forward to a good brawl. Early on the morning of 10 October 1662, the streets were full of soldiers and echoed with the noise of people running. When the procession gathered, the French shouted and jeered. The Spanish stayed silent. Seeing this, Pepys was sure they would lose. Quickly he had breakfast and ran from the Tower to Cheapside, only to find he had already missed the fight. Contrary to his expectations, the Spanish had won. De Watteville had taken the precaution of putting iron chains beneath the horses’ harness, so that the French could not cut their carriage loose; the French had not. Having marooned their coach, the Spanish fell on the French with their swords, and then charged on in their coach, all the way to the Royal Mews at Charing Cross. ‘I ran after them’, wrote Pepys, ‘through all the dirt and the streets full of people, till at last, at the Mewes, I saw the Spanish coach go, with fifty drawn swords at least to guard it, and our soldiers shouting for joy.’
²⁷
When he had seen it turn in ‘with great state’ at York House, where the Spanish Ambassador had his rooms, he ran to the French headquarters, full of glee ‘for they all look like dead men, and not a word among them but shake their heads’. The Spanish victory was all the greater, people said, because the French had outnumbered them four to one and were armed with a hundred pistols as well as swords. ‘We had a great battle here upon the
intrado
made by the Swedish ambassador,’ wrote the Bishop of Elphin, adding more details of the ungodly fray with considerable relish.
²⁸
‘The King’s guard of horse and foot were spectators, but let them fight on without parting them.’

This was no trivial affray. D’Estrades told his boss, the French Foreign Minister Lionne, that five of his fifty guards had been killed and thirty-three wounded. In addition he had been attacked personally twice, a musket ball had whizzed through his hat, and a mob had surrounded his house.
²⁹
Charles was aghast, particularly at rumours that his own courtiers and soldiers had aided the Spaniards.
³⁰
Quickly, he sent John Evelyn on a fact-finding mission, with detailed instructions as to whom he should interrogate. Evelyn scurried around town, questioning officers at the Tower and others, and wrote ‘a narrative in vindication of his Majestie & carriage of his officers and standersby &c’.
³¹
As soon as the ink was dry, Charles wanted to send the papers to his ambassador in Paris. Next day he had second thoughts, spotting Evelyn at Whitehall and asking him to soften a passage or two in his report. It was late before Evelyn gave it in, ‘and slip’d home, being my self much indispos’d & harrass’d, with going about, & sitting up to write, &c.’

Although men had died, no one could be arrested or tried for murder because all involved claimed diplomatic immunity. His pride hurt, d’Estrades refused to attend the English court. Louis supported him and protested furiously, both to Charles and to the King of Spain. He won this round outright, as Philip IV of Spain – nervous that this might even be a pretext for war – recalled de Watteville and conceded French precedence on all state occasions. In London, Charles issued a decree forbidding ambassadors to send their coaches to follow any entrée at all. Yet this in itself provoked more upsets and the word ‘decree’ had to be changed to ‘resolution’. No one could decree anything to the King of France.

The life of the envoys and ambassadors could be wearing on the soul. Like a man waving frantically from a quagmire, in June 1662 the diligent Venetian envoy Francesco Giavarini burst out in one of his despatches. ‘Hard necessity forces me to break silence,’ he wrote. ‘This is my seventh year at this Court after six in Zurich and in France. I hoped I should be removed from a country always agitated by strange events, always subject to serious peril, never free from expense and unbearable discomfort.’
³²
He longed to go home.

BARBARA PALMER
, by then obviously pregnant, had stayed quiet through the sombre autumn and winter of 1660, when Whitehall was mourning the deaths of the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess of Orange. Her baby, Anne, was born in February 1661. Roger Palmer accepted her as his child, but she was also later publicly acknowledged by Charles. By April Barbara herself was back in the public eye. Three days before the coronation, where her Villiers relations were conspicuous in the ceremony, Pepys spotted her at a play in the Cockpit. He eyed all the beauties there, but ‘above all Mrs Palmer with whom the King doth discover a good deal of familiarity’. Pepys fell for her badly. He lusted after her – she appeared in his dreams – partly because she was the king’s. His desire made him one with the king, and at the same time it made the king like other men, just as the sight of the little dog shitting in the boat had done. Pepys ‘filled his eyes’ with Barbara, he said, watching her again in July and August and September, when, he sighed, ‘I can never enough admire her beauty.’
¹

Charles clearly felt the same. But he was also realistic. Since the autumn of the previous year, he and Clarendon had been hunting for a suitable wife, who would bring a substantial dowry and provide healthy heirs. The European powers who had shunned him in exile were now keen to cement an alliance. The French ambassador allegedly offered the Chancellor £10,000 to push their interest, which Clarendon declined with public proclamations of horror. Instead he proposed protestant princesses from Germany, whom Charles roundly turned down, saying that German women were ‘all foggy and I cannot like any one of them for a wife’.
²
Tensions between the House of Orange and the Dutch government ruled out princesses from the Dutch Republic, and Charles also refused to consider any woman who had rejected him during his exile. In the end, since all protestant candidates were eliminated, and there were no possibilities in France or Spain, the choice fell on the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza.

Portugal was keen to claim an ally against Spain, from whom Catherine’s father King John had wrested his country’s independence twenty years before. Such a match had been proposed years earlier and now Portugal offered an unheard-of dowry of £360,000 – two million crowns – and threw in the trading posts of Bombay and Tangier (which Charles had to look up on the map). Mesmerised by such potential wealth, and intrigued by a flattering miniature proffered by the Portuguese ambassador, Dom Francisco de Mello de Torres, in return Charles promised ten thousand troops as support in the struggle with Spain.

The marriage contract took many months to bring to fruition. The Spanish were set against it, spreading rumours that Catherine was deformed and could never bear children. The pro-Spanish Earl of Bristol even travelled to Parma to look at two Habsburg princesses – abandoning the idea when he saw that one was very fat and the other very ugly. (Charles banished Bristol from court for his impertinent interference, not for the last time.) The French, by contrast, favoured the match, and Henrietta Maria, who had been so horrified by James’s marriage to Anne Hyde, for once sided with her old enemy Clarendon, seeing in Catherine a safe Catholic soul.

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:

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 concerned 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