The kings bed, p.10
The King's Bed, page 10
It galled the new duchess that the title was not an English one. It had to be Irish because the warrant for an English title would require the stamp of the Great Seal of England, which Clarendon would not easily have allowed.
As Catherine’s arrival loomed ever nearer, Barbara became more obviously agitated and aggressive and her enemies more confident. In January 1662 Pepys overheard snatches of gossip concerning ‘private factions at court about Madame Palmer’. He was unable to fathom what that meant, only that they involved ‘something about the king’s favour to her now that the queen is coming’. The diarist learned nothing more about Barbara until April, when he heard of a row between Barbara and her Villiers cousin, Mary, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox. Pepys recorded that Lady Richmond and Lady Castlemaine ‘had a falling out the other day’, with the Duchess of Richmond calling Barbara a ‘Jane Shaw’† and then telling her she hoped ‘to see her come to the same end’.
Barbara was evidently in no mood to be put down. Far from retiring to the sidelines once the new Queen arrived, she threatened to go centre stage. Well into her pregnancy, she declared that she would have the child in the most embarrassing place possible – the palace of Hampton Court where Charles and Catherine were due to spend their honeymoon.
* Rake is short for rakehell, an archaic English word of uncertain origin meaning a dissolute person, particularly of fashionable circles.
† Jane Shaw or Shore was the beautiful mistress of King Edward IV, who as a penance after his death was forced to walk semi-clothed through the streets and died in poverty.
7
THE BRIDE’S PRICE
In April 1662, an English fleet put into the Portuguese port of Lisbon under the command of Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich. Montagu was a professional survivor, a man so adept at reading the political weather that he perennially sailed with the breeze. During the British civil wars he had fought on the Parliamentary side and sat as an MP during Cromwell’s Protectorate, before executing a dazzling tack before a changing wind to become admiral of the fleet that carried King Charles II home from exile. Now, two years later, on his flagship the Royal Charles, he had another royal mission – to carry the Portuguese princess to England. As befitted his rank, Montagu was invited to take part in a grand parade in which Princess Catherine processed before adoring crowds in Lisbon before sailing away to her new life as queen to a foreign king.
In an engraving made of the occasion, we see Catherine resplendent in a gilded coach, preceded by an equally ornate coach containing her brother, King Alfonso VI, and followed by another containing Montagu and the English ambassador. The procession looks suitably grand, with many carriages carrying assorted royals, aristocrats and dignitaries, accompanied by hundreds of foot soldiers and cavalry, all wheeling around through triumphal arches erected in front of the huge Renaissance Ribeira Palace while the English fleet waits at anchor. In another engraving, the artist shows the princess embarking from a canopied pier onto a richly decorated barge that will carry her out to Montagu’s flagship. The whole scene is so full of gaiety and colour that it seems the most auspicious of all days.
The artist who captured these scenes was Dutchman Dirk Stoop, who had studied painting at Utrecht. Having accompanied Charles (and therefore his admiral) on his voyage to England in 1660, Stoop was already acquainted with Montagu. Since painting Charles’s triumphant entry into London, Stoop had chiefly been employed in the Portuguese royal household. His portrait of Catherine, sent to England in the spring of 1661 to show Charles what he was getting in his bargain with the Portuguese, is the best record we have of what she was like as a young woman just grown into her maturity.
The young princess is depicted three-quarter length, seated beside a red curtain and with a brooding sky behind her. She looks young for her age (which was about twenty-one) with an oval face and hair arranged in long, crimped waves over her collar. She appears slim, even delicate, with small hands and a slight frame. Her dress is particularly interesting, being of a dark cloth, with slashed sleeves and a high, embroidered shawl collar which sits across her shoulders leaving no flesh visible below her neck. Her bodice is stiff and straight – the costume of a young and very devout Catholic woman of high status and, most crucially, a virgin. Her skirt juts on either side at an alarming angle, held out by a farthingale at right angles from her waist in a fashion that would never have been countenanced at the royal court in London. To an English eye, her style was antiquated, Elizabethan even, for the Virgin Queen had worn a farthingale, exploiting the geometric volume provided by the hoops under her skirts to add gravitas and presence. With Elizabeth’s death the fashion had died too. Apart from the stuffy clothes, Catherine’s portrait reveals a woman nearing the end of her shelf life. She has lived in the most secluded fashion, in her early years hardly ever leaving the convent where she was reared, except to visit her parents.
Catherine valued Stoop’s work so highly that she was taking him along to become her court painter in England. He was well suited for the job, being able to rise to depicting the big, ceremonial event as well as a good but flattering likeness. For the Dutchman, it must have seemed the most enormous opportunity to become an official painter at the Court of St James. He was not to know that his ambitions were to be thwarted by another savvy Dutch painter, one whose beautiful muse had woven an erotic spell over the King.
On 23 April, the English fleet set sail from Lisbon, bearing away Catherine, her entourage (or family, as it was called) of a hundred attendants and servants and a thousand boxes of sugar. Presiding over the sugar, at Montagu’s insistence, was a well-established merchant brought along to sell it in London at the best possible price.
Following a rough crossing of the infamously stormy Bay of Biscay, Montagu’s fleet arrived off Portsmouth on 13 May. It did not carry Catherine’s dowry – at least, not the entire two million crowns that the cash-strapped Charles had hoped for. The Portuguese did not have the cash to hand. Most of it had been spent on war with Spain. Montagu was informed that he would receive half the dowry now and the rest later. This put the Earl in a dilemma. If he insisted upon the letter of the treaty – that the entire dowry would be paid before the Infanta set sail for England – then the marriage and the treaty were off. If he agreed, he had the responsibility of allowing the Portuguese to get away with it and of breaking the news to a king who valued the money more than his new bride.
Montagu decided the only option was to go ahead. But worse was to come. He discovered that the half of the dowry being loaded into his ships was not made up of cruzados, solid gold and silver coins stamped with a cross. Instead, it consisted of sugar and spices. This was extremely awkward for Montagu. He had already sailed to the mouth of the Mediterranean and secured Tangier, which was ceded to the English as part of the treaty. Ships had sailed to ensure Bombay also passed into English hands. It would be impossible to undo the treaty now. Montagu saw that he could only take his hosts’ word that the rest of the dowry would be paid within the year.
Charles sent the Duke of York to Portsmouth as head of the reception party to receive his new queen and oversee arrangements prior to his arrival. Along with the Duke, hordes of courtiers and their ladies went down to Portsmouth too. The arrival of Catherine on 14 May was turned into a fashionable event. A crowd dressed à la mode waited to set eyes on the new queen. When Catherine came ashore from the Royal Charles, what the crowd saw was a small, rather dainty woman dressed thoughtfully in the English fashion. The Duke of York greeted her on behalf of the King. When she smiled she displayed crooked, protruding teeth.
Those who came with her made no better an impression, for there followed a large company of servants dressed in clothes so reticent as to be dowdy, a large platoon of priests, and a small group of ladies-in-waiting dressed in the most severe Portuguese court style, with large farthingales holding their dresses stiffly out to the sides like wings. The weight and bulk of these dresses made movement difficult, forcing those who wore them to walk in a penguin’s waddle, much to the delight of the English, who were far too fashionable to hide their amusement. The urbane Irish soldier and writer Anthony Hamilton christened the ladies-in-waiting ‘the six frights’. He had no better word for their deaf duenna, saying she was ‘another monster, who took the title of governess to these extraordinary beauties’.1
The Duke enquired whether Catherine would like refreshment after the voyage. She replied she would like a cup of tea. This caused embarrassment, for there was no tea available. Catherine was offered a glass of beer. The cultural differences between the two nations were clear to see. In a country where beer was the national drink, tea drinking was yet to take hold. Catherine would turn England into a land of ale drinkers and tea drinkers.
Catherine and her entourage were under intense scrutiny. She had to endure it for many days, staying first on board the Royal Charles in the Solent and then at the home of the governor of Portsmouth, before Charles arrived and their wedding could at last take place. The Duke of York asked her to exchange her English clothes for native Portuguese dress and Catherine obliged, either thinking he was advising her on the best thing to do or intending to hold her up to ridicule – we just don’t know. In her dowdy, straitlaced bodice and huge farthingale, the foreign princess was immediately in danger of appearing as strange to local eyes as her ladies-in-waiting. But despite her looks and solemn demeanour, Catherine was clever and quickly took the lesson to heart. She switched again to the English fashion, changing into a white dress trimmed in gold to come ashore.2
While Catherine waited passively, in a sort of limbo, Barbara was all action, plotting a reception the new woman in the King’s life would live to remember: she went ahead with her threat to move into Hampton Court. The King and Queen would honeymoon in the same house as a heavily pregnant and domineering mistress. Charles was so much under his mistress’s thumb that he allowed her to have her way. He had a more pressing issue on his mind: the dowry. By now, Montagu had no doubt informed his master of what had happened at Lisbon. Six days passed between the arrival of the Queen and Charles’s departure for Portsmouth.
Just as Montagu had had to make a decision whether or not to agree to carry the Infanta to England, now Charles had to decide whether or not to proceed with marrying a woman whose family had shown such bad faith over the conditions of the treaty. As matters stood, the Portuguese were gaining a valuable ally in their fight against their old adversary Spain, while Charles found himself robbed of the huge cash dowry which had secured the treaty with Portugal in the first place. Sadly, we have no record of the King’s reaction to Montagu’s news but the delay in his departure for Portsmouth can at least partially be put down to his pondering what to do. The most extreme reaction would have been to send Catherine packing home to Lisbon. This might have made both parties the laughing stock of Europe and would have seriously decreased Charles’s chances of finding a suitable alternative spouse. Whatever went through his mind, he decided to make the most of it.
But before greeting his new queen, Charles ensured he had his fill of his mistress. For four days running he dined and supped with Barbara. On the fourth night he sent for a set of scales so that he and his pregnant mistress could compare their weights. Appropriately, Barbara was the heavier.
The next morning, Charles set off in his finest coach to greet his queen. Pepys, who was clearly infatuated with Barbara, wrote in his diary in May of his erotic excitement at seeing her fine petticoats and other intimate garments hanging to dry on a washing line in the Privy Garden. He lusted after Barbara, calling her ‘my lovely Lady Castlemaine’. He bought a copy of a portrait of her and put it up above the fireplace in his office at the Admiralty.3 The ardent diarist does not record whether he realised Barbara’s petticoats were hung out like flags of war.
When Charles arrived in Portsmouth, Catherine was unwell, having caught a cold during the stormy voyage. She was unable to greet her husband as she had hoped in fine English clothes but was in bed in her nightdress. The woman Charles saw propped up in bed was in most respects like the image in Dirk Stoop’s portrait, except that for the first time he could see her unfortunate teeth. As he reported in a letter to Clarendon, he was underwhelmed: ‘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.’4
Charles must have thought himself the most cursed king in Europe. He had a new bride whose looks fell below the levels of feminine beauty and sexuality he favoured, and she brought very little of the promised fortune. Neither his purse nor his heart swelled up, but he had no alternative but to keep his side of the deal. The wedding went ahead, first in a secret Catholic ceremony carried out in Catherine’s private chamber in the governor’s house and then in a public Anglican ceremony in one of the reception rooms on 21 May. Bishop Gilbert Sheldon (later the Archbishop of Canterbury) officiated. According to one source, the ceremony was an awkward affair, with Catherine resenting the Anglican rites and Charles ill at ease. This seems unlikely, for Charles was a master of poise. Catherine wore a dress she had commissioned expressly for the wedding in the English style, covered with little blue bows which were later snipped off and distributed to well-wishers after Portuguese tradition.
Following the marriage, the bride and groom processed to their private chambers, where the merry throng accompanied them to wish them well before finally leaving the couple in private. Neither could speak the other’s language and they had no other language in common. The wedding night went badly, the marriage remaining unconsummated. Apart from having a cold, Catherine was having her period. Charles put a bold face on this early setback. After his first meeting with his wife to be, he had written to Clarendon, saying, ‘I think myself very happy.’5
Immediately after the wedding, the King was attentive to his new bride, and was as gallant as any husband might have been expected to be. But as the days passed, some of the Whitehall coterie noticed that he was not as happy as he pretended. One of those present, Sir John Reresby, wrote about what he saw as the heart of the matter: ‘the King was not much enamoured of his bride. She was very little, not handsome (though her face was indifferent) . . . she had nothing visible about her to make the King forget his inclinations to the Countess of Castlemaine.’6
Not only was Catherine on the plain side compared to the beautiful women with whom Charles was used to having sexual relations, she was coy and modest in her behaviour and had been brought up to be an obedient wife, traditional attributes taught in a strict convent attached to the royal palace in Lisbon – where she had also learned that no lady of quality, let alone a princess, would use her sexuality openly. This was utterly unlike Barbara, who used sex as the key to her whole life. Although Bishop Gilbert Burnet attempted in his history to paint Catherine with a very rough brush, this seems to have been little more than propaganda by the famously inaccurate bishop. Third hand, he reported that the King had told a confidant, ‘They have brought me a bat to marry.’7 The veracity of this remark is questionable but it seems uncharacteristically ungallant. What is beyond doubt is that Catherine was cut from very different stuff from the women whose looks and sexuality appealed to the King. But Catherine had her qualities – she was clever for a start – and Charles gradually began to appreciate them. Beneath the demure, religious surface there was a sharp wit and an ability to act and dance. Charles also appreciated Catherine’s mellifluous voice and he began to teach her English. Given her new position, Catherine had few ways of using her intelligence except by trying her best to fit into her new surroundings and to mould herself into the life of a wife to a foreign king.
After sixteen days of celebrations, the King and Queen set off for Hampton Court, where they were to spend their honeymoon. The palace had lain unused since the death of Oliver Cromwell. In its Tudor heyday it had been the venue for three of Henry VIII’s honeymoons and for that of Mary I when she married Philip II, the Spanish king who sent an armada in an attempt to invade England in 1588. It was at Hampton Court that Henry was told of Kathryn Howard’s infidelity.
In readiness for its first royal honeymoon in more than a hundred years, the palace was given a facelift. The neglected gardens were replanted and the palace was swiftly redecorated and refurnished. As the couple settled in, Charles was gallant and paid great attention to his new wife. Not only did the couple appear happy, at least one of them genuinely was. Charles arranged recreations for himself and his queen. They went boating and fishing and tried their hand at archery. Catherine turned out to be a natural archer – she had coincidentally been born under the sign of Sagittarius. In the fine weather of the English spring the small Portuguese princess began to unwind. She cast off her drab, restricting Portuguese dress for good and took to wearing English clothes that allowed freer movement. She even took to wearing men’s clothes, which was something of a fad at the time. Charles seemed genuinely taken with his new wife.
Could Charles genuinely have fallen for his new queen and forsaken his old ways? Of course not; self-development was an alien concept in the seventeenth century, and the inability of men to toe the marital line was the stuff of the theatre of the time. However, Charles, though cynical enough, also had a soft spot that was touched by the company of women. He could not resist a woman’s allure and appeared to be in love with whichever woman he happened to be with at the time. Perhaps he even felt he was – for is this not a secret of the success of the true Don Juan? This individual spell seemed to linger for a while after each encounter – long enough for him to write to his sister and others a series of letters including what seemed to be truthful representations of his feelings for Catherine – truthful at least at the time. Once he moved on to the company of another woman, Charles’s attention became entirely focused anew. And so it went.
