King Charles II (42 page)

A year after the marriage, relations between the royal couple had settled down most amicably, thanks to Catharine’s tact and restraint. Once she had actually supped in Barbara’s apartments, the crisis was over – although to the end of her days as Queen of England, Catharine remained extremely touchy on the subject of royal protocol in so far as it concerned her own position. As late as 1684 tears stood in her eyes when she found the King’s mistress, Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, waiting at dinner as Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘contrary to custom’, although in other ways she favoured Louise. More immediately, she formed a tactful friendship with Charles’ bastard son James; but when he was created Duke of Monmouth, and had the baton sinister, which proclaimed his illegitimate birth, omitted from his coat of arms, Catharine felt it necessary to protest. (A second grant of arms included it.)
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It was of course far pleasanter for the Queen to join in the fun of the Court than to mope disapprovingly with her Portuguese ladies. Soon Charles was praising her ‘simplicity, gentleness and prudence’ to Catharine’s mother – it was the third quality which had been lacking on her arrival. To Madame he spoke with a slightly stunned respect of her piety, how she would say the great office of the Breviary every day, as well as that of Our Lady,
and
go to chapel.
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In the autumn of 1663 Catharine became violently ill, possibly with peritonitis: the King became quite frenzied with anxiety over her condition (although he still managed to sup nightly with Barbara).

She learnt to speak pretty, broken English, rather like that practised by another foreign princess, also a Katharine, prattling of her ‘bilbo’ to Henry
V
. It amused Charles to tease his Catharine by teaching her English swearwords without telling her what they meant, and then listening to her innocently repeating them. He also, like many unfaithful husbands, managed to work up a fit of illogical jealousy against Edward Montagu, the Queen’s Master of the Horse, because he was thought to have squeezed her hand; Montagu was sacked. In time, Catharine
was notably more spontaneous with Charles in public – grown quite ‘debonair’, as it was described; she even hugged him in public, something unthinkable to that grave Portuguese Infanta who had arrived at Portsmouth. There is also a pleasantly tart air about her exchange with Barbara, as reported by Pepys, in the summer of 1663. Barbara commented on the length of time the Queen had been under her dresser’s hands: ‘I wonder your Majesty can have the patience to sit so long a-dressing.’ To which Catharine replied, ‘I have so much reason to use patience that I can very well bear with it. …’
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It was, in the contemporary slang, a considerable ‘wipe’ or put-down; in more ways than one the Queen was learning how to survive at her husband’s Court.

Only one thing was lacking: an heir. It was not for lack of effort on the King’s part. It was reported that he slept regularly with the Queen. (All contemporary evidence indicates that, while Charles kept many mistresses, he also made love to his own wife a great deal – no doubt this contributed to the marital
status quo
.) But royal brides were watched for signs of pregnancy virtually from their wedding night. Any failure to conceive immediately was converted into total barrenness by the unkind rumour-mongers within and without the Court. It was suggested that the Queen was barren as early as December 1662, surely a premature conclusion. Catharine had only been married a year when she was to be found taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, as her mother-in-law had done a generation earlier. Catharine took the waters repeatedly that summer without success. Later she turned to the spa at Bath.

It was hardly surprising that, during her severe illness of the autumn of 1663, the delirious Queen raved of pregnancy and childbirth. To the King at her bedside, Catharine confided that she had been delivered of a ‘very ugly’ boy.

‘No, it’s a pretty boy,’ Charles answered gently.

‘If it be like you, it is a fine boy indeed,’ whispered the Queen. There followed further rambling remarks on the same subject: at one time the Queen thought she had three children, including a girl who did look like the King.

‘How do the children?’ she enquired anxiously.
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The King might equip her chapel, redecorate her apartments,
employing Catharine’s favourite greens and yellows, start to build her a new palace at Greenwich – none of this could bring the Queen true security or happiness without the longed-for heir. Yet for all the impatience of the Court gossips, there was a precedent. The example of Henrietta Maria was in itself encouraging – four years of marriage without conception, followed by a quiverful of healthy children. For the present, Catharine continued to justify Dryden’s high praise of her and of her devotion to Charles:

The best of Queens, the most obedient wife …

His life the theme of her eternal prayer.

The Marvell who called her an ‘Ill natured little goblin … designed/For nothing but to dance and vex mankind’ reflected his own dislike of the royal family, rather than the prevailing opinion of Catharine’s character.

The day would come when Catharine’s unarguable goodness would stand her in good stead. By the time of the Popish Plot, even the prickly, suspicious English had been so won to the side of their little foreign Catholic Queen that she was preserved from serious harm throughout this whole inflamed period. No-one could seriously believe ill of her. This was a major achievement in such an age, and can be compared with the very different treatment earned by the equally Catholic and foreign Henrietta Maria.

King Charles, in view of his preoccupation with the study of physiognomy, must have been delighted that his first impression of her character proved so accurate.

1
Charles
II
was however the last English monarch to take part in this eve-of-ceremony procession.

2
Although Pepys, who had had to get up at four a.m. and had been for hours in the Abbey in his sumptuous velvet suit, needed to piss (as doubtless did some others).
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3
There was of course the King’s first cousin, Prince Rupert; if not wholly English, he had served the English Crown faithfully on land and at sea during the recent war and was a Protestant. But Rupert was by now over forty and hopes of his marriage – his own and other people’s – died away after the Restoration.
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4
The date is wrongly given in the entry in the registry of St Thomas’s Parish Church (made to comply with the Commonwealth Act of 1654), preserved today in Portsmouth Cathedral.

5
She was born on 25 November, the Feast of St Catharine; it was an unfortunate coincidence that by English dating – ten days different – this was close to the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth, an anniversary which later in the reign became an occasion for Pope-burnings and other manifestations of Protestant extremism.

‘All the news now is what will become of the Dutch business, whether war or peace. We all seem to desire it, as thinking ourselves to have advantages at present over them; but for my part I dread it.’

O
n 8 May 1661 King Charles
II
opened the newly elected Parliament: it was twenty years since a reigning English monarch had given the traditional speech from the throne. It was more than twenty years since there had been a legally elected Parliament. A comment was made on the youth of the members. ‘I will keep them till their beards grow,’ replied King Charles ominously.
¹
And he was as good as his word. This body, known as the Cavalier Parliament, would yield little to its predecessor in longevity, for it was not to be dissolved until 1679.

Yet its first tasks were still redolent of the past. For all the valiant work of the Convention Parliament, there remained much to achieve in the nature of settlement for this new body, quite apart from confirming the acts of its predecessor. One outstanding question was of course religion. That wonderfully open, peaceful desire of Breda, that no-one should be ‘disquieted or called in question’ for their religious opinions, so long as they did not disturb the peace, still remained to be implemented after the fiasco of the previous autumn. What finally emerged as a religious settlement – the so-called Clarendon Code enacted between 1662 and 1665 – was however as far from the heady spirit of Breda as could be imagined. Only two-and-a-half years
divided the Declaration of Breda from the first Act of the Clarendon Code, but it might have been an aeon.

The Clarendon Code was in fact a direct reversion to the harsh laws promulgated by the Puritans against the Church of England: such, sadly, was to be the Anglican revenge. It embraced a number of provisions. The Corporation Act, for example, excluded from municipal bodies all those who refused to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. These rites themselves were later defined by the Act of Uniformity to include not only episcopal government, but a standard liturgy: it was in essence a reinforcement of the Act of 1559, which had been generally enforced up till 1640. It was not even necessary to pass a new Act penalizing those who refused to adhere to the rites: the old Act of the reign of Queen Elizabeth
I
came happily to hand. The way was paved for the Conventicle Act; whereas the Act of Uniformity penalized those who did not attend Anglican services, the Conventicle Act penalized those who worshipped elsewhere. The subsequent Five Mile Act harried the nonconformist ministers by forbidding them to live in certain areas.

To understand this rigidity, one has to appreciate that it was certainly greater than Clarendon had contemplated, for all that the code bears his name. There is much argument over the exact nature of Clarendon’s Anglicanism and how far he was genuinely prepared to exercise tolerance to dissenters.
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What is however unarguable is the enormous decline of official toleration from the Breda high point to the Clarendon Code low, a decline to which Clarendon the man certainly acceded. We have also seen how staunchly he defended Anglicanism under attack during the Interregnum, how bitterly he resented the compromise with the Covenanters.

Breda itself had represented nonetheless a new deal. Yet almost immediately Clarendon found himself occupying that treacherous political territory, the middle ground. As plots and conspiracies, many of them found amongst the dissenters, darkened the political horizon, it was easy for Clarendon to revert to the exclusive Anglicanism which in his heart of hearts he had probably never really deserted.

For these measures King Charles himself held no brief at all. They represented if anything the exact reverse of what he conceived as the best religious settlement. Quickly he made his own position clear, by proposing a Declaration of Indulgence which would allow him to exempt certain individuals from the effects of the Act of Uniformity. To the fury of the Court and King (but not to that of Clarendon, who had thought it folly), the measure failed to pass through the Lords. ‘That which shocks most people in it is the favourable mention of Roman Catholics,’ wrote the King’s rising new assistant, Henry Bennet.
³

In August 1662 nearly a thousand nonconformist incumbents of livings had to vacate them or wrestle with their consciences for ever more. The Victorian division of ‘church and chapel’ was for the first time introduced into the fabric of English society, as nonconformity became a social force of its own, albeit a deprived one. And there was nothing whatsoever the King could do about it. William Denton, one of the King’s physicians and a political writer, described a significant incident in that same August 1662. Some Presbyterian ministers visited Charles as ‘humble suitors’ for an indulgence against the laws. They ended up before some judges who declared that the King could not dispense with an Act of Parliament. ‘So,’ commented Denton, ‘their cake is dough at present.’
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The King’s cake was in an equivalent condition. The rejection of the sovereign’s own measure, the Declaration of Indulgence, showed how ineffective the King was to control the Parliamentary will, once it ran contrary to his own.

Only one body of dissenters actually managed to derive benefit from the Clarendon Code. This was the Anglo-Jewish community.
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A series of historical accidents, as well as the genial nature of Charles
II
, contributed to this. The Jews had been expelled from England at the end of the thirteenth century, but had nevertheless been resettling secretly in the country for many years until their lot publicly improved under the Commonwealth. Cromwell was philo-semitic for philosophical reasons; practically, he also employed Jews in his intelligence service. It was therefore on his ‘nod’, as Lord Protector, that the Jews’ presence in England was once more tacitly acknowledged. However, a
large proportion of the English merchant community remained resolutely anti-semitic from traditional motives of commercial rivalry: to the great distress of the Jews’ leaders, they did not secure an official recognition of their position.