A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (16 page)

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’.
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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.
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Anthony Wood put it more tersely, and prophetically: ‘a little woman, no breeder’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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:

The passion and noise of the night reached too many ears to be a secret the next day: the whole court was full of that, which ought to have been known to nobody. And the mutual carriage and behaviour between their majesties confirmed all that they had heard or could imagine: they spake not, hardly looked on one another. Every body was glad that they were so far from the town, (for they were still at Hampton Court,) and that there were so few witnesses of all that passed. The queen sate melancholic in her chamber in tears, except when she drove them away by a more violent passion in choleric discourse: and the king sought his divertisements in that company that said and did all things to please him; and there he spent all the nights.
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Catherine kept to her room, while Charles went out with his court, kissing ‘that company’, Barbara, in public. When the royal couple met, they still did not speak.

As if in accordance with their mood, the weather changed and floods swamped the land. In late July, in pouring rain, Charles was ferried in his barge downriver to join the Duke of York as both brothers were preparing to sail in their yachts with the flotilla collecting Henrietta Maria from France. Storms caught the little fleet off the Goodwin Sands. James lost his mast and Charles’s yacht went aground and was in danger of breaking up, but was rescued by Prince Rupert and other experienced seamen. The fleet was driven back to Kent, denuded of cables, sails and spars.
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Finally James and Charles brought their mother back. She set herself up at Greenwich, in the hunting lodge built for her long ago by Inigo Jones, until quarters were fitted out for her at Somerset House. For months now, builders had been enlarging and refitting the Queen’s House at Greenwich, smartening it up with ‘Egipt marble’ chimneypieces and new plaster ceilings.
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The windows were re-glazed and the rooms were swept. But when she stepped ashore from the royal barge, Greenwich was still scurrying with builders. It was Charles’s most ambitious building work, a visible embodiment of his drive to become a monarch in the continental style. The previous year he had sent Denham and Evelyn to discuss the site.
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Plans were drawn for a new palace and models made. Within months, much of the Tudor palace was pulled down, rooms and towers, roofs and galleries. Everything was carefully stored to be used again: between February and October 1662 nearly half a million bricks were cleaned and stacked.
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The queen mother thus walked into dust and mud and timber. But nothing daunted, she summoned her supporters and paid gracious calls on them at home, although her conversation may have made some demands on their patience. ‘Went to see the Q: Mother’, wrote Evelyn in his diary, ‘who was pleased to give me thanks for the Entertainment she receiv’d at my house, after which she recounted to me many observable stories of the Sagacity of some Dogs that she formerly had.’
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A month after Henrietta Maria arrived, on 23 August, Charles and Catherine were rowed back on the royal barge from Hampton Court to Whitehall. Every boat that could be hired was taken and the water around Westminster was thick with wherries and sculls, decorated in celebration. Cheering crowds lined the banks and wharves and the slippery water stairs. It was, thought Evelyn, ‘the most magnificent Triumph that certainly ever floted on the Thames’, greater even than the Venetian pageant on Ascension Day when the Doge embraced the ocean: ‘His Majestie & the Queene, came in an antique-shaped open Vessell, covered with a State or Canopy of Cloth of Gold, made in the forme of a Cupola, supported with high Corinthian Pillars, wreathed with flowers, festoones and Gyrlands.’
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