King Charles II (41 page)

The one thing which had troubled no-one throughout all these prolonged negotiations towards matrimony – least of all the King – was the character of the bride herself. After doubts about her piety had been set at rest by the Portuguese Ambassador, he considered it enough to describe her, rather casually, as having an exceptionally good and modest nature, and having been brought up in a ‘hugely retired’ manner.
²⁴

Convent-bred – and certainly reared in a most secluded fashion, having made very few appearances in the outside world – Catharine of Braganza was already twenty-three years old, which one sour commentator said was like a woman of forty in English terms.
^fn5
When she was told of her impending marriage, she made one of her rate sorties from the royal palace, to make a religious pilgrimage to some Saints’ shrines in Lisbon: not perhaps the best preparation for marriage to King Charles
II
. The suite of over a hundred people that she brought to England sounded more like the cast of a grandiose opera than something suitable to the informal English way of life: it included numerous confessors, a deaf duena, a Jewish perfumer and a barber. Her ladies-in-waiting in particular – ‘six frights’, wrote the wicked Comte de Grammont – aroused English national
prejudice, in their vast skirts, known as farthingales, or
gardas Infantas
, because no man could get near them.
²⁵

It was unkindly rumoured that the Queen herself clung obstinately to these Portuguese fashions, so unalluring to English eyes. In fact, she was on arrival pathetically anxious in all ways to do whatever might please the King, and first set foot on English soil wearing English clothes; it was the Duke of York, out of curiosity or a desire to put her at her ease, who desired her to change back into her own national dress. In
cuisine
Catharine was conservative: there are continual payments to ‘Portugall cooks’ in the royal accounts. But in costume at least she adapted quickly, showing a coquettish desire to wear man’s clothing, which set off her pretty, neat legs and ankles; it was incidentally something she had in common with Nell Gwynn, who chose parts which enabled her to wear breeches on the stage for the same reason. Quite a fashion for a type of seventeenth-century trouser suit followed the Queen’s lead – ‘women like men’ in velvet coats and caps with ribbons. Like many another grand lady, Catharine also enjoyed dressing up in general, as a village maiden, and so forth: the year after her marriage she was described by Pepys as looking ‘mighty pretty’ in a white-laced waistcoat and crimson short petticoat, her hair dressed
à la negligence
.
²⁶

Catharine of Braganza also came to enjoy such typically English preoccupations as fishing and picnics. For all her slight frame, she was not unathletic, particularly for one who had been nurtured in such a claustrophobic fashion. Catharine’s skill at archery was noted; she was sufficiently interested in the whole sport to become patroness of the Honourable Fraternity of Bowmen. In 1676 its marshal was awarded a heavy silver badge engraved ‘Reginae Catharinae Sagittarii’ (the Queen was born under the sign of Sagittarius the Archer).

But that of course was once the Queen had learned to relax. The first impression given to the English was of a hieratic, almost doll-like, figure:

See how unmov’d She views the Crowd and show

As Stars above behold men’s toils below,

wrote James Annesley, son of the Earl of Anglesey, in one of the Oxford University congratulatory verses. Catharine’s tiny figure also militated against her at first sight (although she was taller than Queen Henrietta Maria). It is unlikely that King Charles exclaimed that they had brought him a bat, not a woman, when he first saw her: such an unchivalrous remark would have been quite out of character. But the malicious tale does reveal how Catharine must have appeared to the English: small and dark and very, very foreign. ‘Swarthy,’ wrote Evelyn, adding that she had sticking-out teeth. ‘A long nose,’ wrote another unsympathetic critic. She even made up or ‘painted’ in what was considered to be an un-English manner.
²⁷

As against this, the King himself, the person most intimately concerned, was charitable; ‘her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty,’ he told Clarendon, ‘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.’ Moreover, Catharine’s character passed muster too (this type of analysis was after all the King’s speciality). He went on, ‘And if I have any skill in physiognomy, which I think I have, she must be as good a woman as ever was born.’
²⁸
Finally, Charles described Catharine as having two other qualities pleasing in a woman, wit, and a most agreeable voice – a fact confirmed by the man appointed as her Chamberlain, Lord Chesterfield, who also called her voice very pleasing.

Yet the first crisis of Queen Catharine’s married life nearly undid her.

At the court of King Charles
II
there was already an uncrowned queen in the shape of Barbara Palmer. Indeed, the Duchess of Richmond had already nicknamed her Jane Shore after the mistress of Edward
IV
, and hoped she would come to the same bad end (Richard
III
forced Jane Shore to do public penance as a harlot after Edward’s death). Barbara, later Countess of Castlemaine and later still Duchess of Cleveland, has had a bad press from historians who have been only too well aware of her greed, extravagance and tempers and have been therefore inclined to agree with John Evelyn’s verdict – ‘the curse of the
Nation’. They have not had the opportunity to admire at first hand her sheer physical appeal, like that of a magnificent animal. Grammont described her as having ‘the greatest reputation of the court beauties’; Sir John Reresby called her the finest woman of her age, while Bishop Burnet referred to her as ‘a woman of great beauty’ whose looks, even at the age of forty-two, were extraordinary.
²⁹
Pepys made her out of all the royal mistresses his firm favourite: she was his ‘lovely Lady Castlemaine’.

Pepys went as far as to buy a portrait of his pin-up, one of the many copies made by Sir Peter Lely for admirers of the great courtesan. Lely adored painting Barbara. With her heavy-lidded, slanting eyes and sensuous sulky mouth, it is Barbara of all the Restoration beauties who calls to mind those immortal lines of Pope:

Lely on animated Canvas stole

The sleepy Eye that spoke the melting soul …

The sight of her smocks and her pretty linen petticoats edged with lace drying in the Privy Garden affected Pepys so headily that even today his account of the sight retains the erotic thrill it gave the great diarist.
³⁰
For all Lely’s animated canvas, it is from this contemporary admiration, as from Homer’s description of the old men turning their heads to watch Helen as she walked along the walls of Troy, that one learns more than from any portrait.

Barbara had great buoyancy of spirit: the sort of gusto which prompted her in later years to take as a lover not only the playwright Wycherley, but also Jacob the Rope-dancer; his gymnastics inspired in her an adventurous desire to know how he might be ‘under his tumbling clothes’.
³¹
Another recipient of her favours was the actor Cardonnell Goodman, who would shout out ‘Is my Duchess come?’ before allowing the curtains to rise in the theatre. The act of love on which her fortunes were founded was certainly no chore to Barbara – later the satirists would even use the word insatiable. In youth however the impression is of enjoyment rather than of excess, and the
kind of magnetism such unabashed hedonism always gives its possessor.

Perhaps her famous temper came from the same uncontrolled spirit. Certainly Barbara could be a termagant when aroused; the King, like many another man, quailed before her furies and gave in to them. He did not however find them particularly lovable, and as she grew older there was a law of diminishing returns in such things. Nevertheless, Barbara when young was clearly great fun. She kept a good table, as reported by the French Ambassador (a connoisseur).
³²
She also showed heart as well as temper, being, for instance, the only Court lady to go to the assistance of a child hurt when a scaffold collapsed at the theatre.

Early reports coupled Barbara’s name with that of Lord Chesterfield, and at one point she was said to have ‘talked wantonly’ (like many others) to the Duke of York. Her husband, Roger Palmer, to whom she was married at the age of eighteen, appears as a sensitive and somewhat gloomy figure, his depression hardly surprising in view of the outrageous cuckolding by his young wife. In the autumn of 1661 he accepted the title of Earl of Castlemaine, with the further humiliation that its inheritance was limited to ‘heirs of his body gotten on Barbara Palmer his now wife’ – making the source of the honour quite clear. Shortly after the birth of Barbara’s second child by the King in June 1662, the new Earl separated from her, having first caused the boy to be baptized a Catholic. Barbara was to become a Catholic herself. But at the time she had the baby ostentatiously rechristened in the Anglican Church.

Some time in 1662 Barbara was accorded her own apartments within Whitehall. The accommodation included nurseries which proved most necessary since she bore a total of six children, all but the last acknowledged by the King. After her conversion to Catholicism in 1663 an oratory was provided. When quizzed on this
volte-face
, King Charles remarked with spirit that he never concerned himself with the souls of ladies, but with their bodies, in so far as they were gracious enough to allow him. The popular reaction – if the Catholic Church gained no more from her than
the Church of England lost, ‘the Matter is not Much’ – displayed less charm.
³³

It was the coincidence of the Queen’s arrival, Barbara’s second pregnancy, and the resignation of Roger Castlemaine from his role as official husband, which brought about the unhappy ‘Bedchamber Crisis’ of the summer of 1662. After her marriage in Portsmouth, Catharine was welcomed to the capital with all the pomp due to a royal consort. John Evelyn called the floating procession which carried her from Hampton Court to Whitehall at the end of August the most magnificent ever seen on the Thames (although an eye-witness told Ormonde that the Queen, in the middle of it all, looked like a prisoner being carried in a Roman triumph).
³⁴
But already at Hampton Court ‘my lady Barbary’ had exercised those powers she knew well that she possessed over the King.

On a petty level, she refused to light a fire outside her bedroom door to welcome the Queen – the only person not to do so. More flagrantly, Barbara insisted that her latest
accouchement
should take place at Hampton Court during what was in fact the royal honeymoon. Worse was to follow. The trouble was that Barbara at this stage understood perfectly how to manage Charles – she appealed on this occasion not so much to his lust, but to that other potent emotion he felt towards the female sex, a sense of guilt. Perhaps the feeling was rooted in a suppressed dislike and resentment of his own mother; perhaps, more simply, in the strength of his physical desires, which he knew to be unaccompanied by love. We shall certainly meet this sense of guilt later, in his treatment of his wife. Now it worked towards Barbara’s, not Catharine’s, advantage.

All his life, King Charles’ method of dealing with a woman’s complaints or tears was to attempt to cozen her with something to cheer her up, as a parent gives a lollipop to a child. Where Catharine was concerned, her piety gave him plenty of opportunities. Although normally a lazy correspondent, he was for ever sending off to his sister in France for little objects of devotion to please her. Catharine had such a passion for relics that she had brought them with her in a series of great coffers
which had to be cloaked in red velvet cloths embroidered with the royal arms of England and Portugal. Barbara was made of sterner stuff. In a series of hideous scenes Barbara demanded, besought, and implored Charles to make her Lady of the Bedchamber to the new Queen. Eventually, out of pity for her abandoned, husbandless, pregnant condition (and worn out by the scenes), King Charles succumbed sufficiently to agree. He explained rather lamely that ‘he had undone this lady and ruined her reputation, which had been fair and untainted till her friendship with him’.
³⁵

In doing so he risked an extraordinary insult to his wife. Catharine might have been brought up ‘hugely retired’, but she was not a fool, while the Portuguese Ambassador in London was an exceptionally well informed and worldly man, to whose machinations some critics ascribed the King’s marriage. Catharine certainly recognized Barbara’s name, having been doubtless warned of her existence in advance, and, on seeing it in the list of Ladies of the Bedchamber presented for her agreement, crossed it angrily out. However, when she was first presented with Barbara in person, she received her rival cordially, her poor understanding of English preventing her from realizing who Barbara was. The moment she discovered, Catharine’s eyes filled with tears of rage; her nose began to bleed and she collapsed to the floor in hysterics.

King Charles shrugged his shoulders and sent Clarendon to reason with her. One dreads to think of the task of this elderly Anglican, left to explain to a devout Catholic princess exactly what she was going to have to tolerate in the name of marriage and concord. At first, Clarendon failed totally. He merely elicited further torrents of tears and threats to return to Portugal. The scandal reverberated. Madame in France was outspokenly shocked by her brother’s behaviour to his wife. ‘It is said here that she is grieved beyond measure,’ she wrote, ‘and to speak frankly I think it is with reason.’
³⁶

It took Queen Catharine a little time to discover that hysteria and threats were no way to play her cards where Charles was concerned – those were best left to Barbara, the mistress. In repose, Catharine discovered the strength of her own hand: not
only was sheer goodness of character her strongest suit, but it was also as effective in its own way, where Charles was concerned, as sensuality and tantrums.