CHAPTER SEVEN
A Wealthy Wife
‘I have often been put in mind by my friends that it was high time to marry’
The king’s speech to Parliament, 8 May 1661
CHARLES II’S RESTORATION had made him the most eligible bachelor in Europe. Yet he did not marry for another two years. There had been other, more pressing concerns: the shape of government, the settlement of the Church of England, suppression of discontent and pursuit of the regicides. His coronation at Westminster Abbey took place on 23 April 1661, nearly a year after his return, the hiatus caused not just by the demands of his new situation but the absence of the regalia needed for the ceremony, which had been melted down or sold by the republican regime. A new crown, based on the one supposedly worn by Edward the Confessor, was made. It was extremely heavy at over two kilograms and encrusted with jewels. Charles can be seen wearing it in his coronation portrait, in which the dandified glamour of his doublet and hose contrast uncomfortably with his almost threatening expression. He was thirty-one when the portrait was painted but looks older. He enjoyed being the centre of attention without the distraction of a consort but he was now under pressure to find a bride, though he would claim that he had ‘thought so myself ever since I came into England.’ The delay, he said, had been caused by the difficulty of finding a suitable wife but he had concluded that it would be impossible ‘to make such a choice, against which there could be no foresight of any inconvenience that may ensue’, without so much loss of time that the lords and gentlemen assembled ‘would live to see me an old bachelor.’ He went on to announce in his speech to Parliament in May 1661 that he had resolved to marry ‘the daughter of Portugal.’1 It may seem strange that this lady was not even referred to by name but such were the formalities of the time.
The future queen consort was born Catarina Henriqueta de Bragança in the Palace of Vila Viçosa, in the Alentejo region of Portugal, east of Lisbon, in 1638. At the time of her birth, Catherine of Braganza, as she would be known in England, was a duke’s daughter. Her father, John of Braganza, came from a noble line, descended from an illegitimate son of John I of Portugal, who had reigned in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Luisa de Guzmán, Catherine’s mother, came from an equally venerable Spanish family, the Medina Sidonias. Catherine was high-born, but not yet a king’s daughter.
Portugal had a long and often fractious relationship with its neighbouring kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula, centuries before the birth of a united Spain. It had survived Roman, Visigoth and Moorish occupation before breaking away from the kingdom of León Castile in the twelfth century. The height of its power and influence had come during the period from the mid-1490s to the 1540s, when its explorers discovered new lands as far apart as Brazil, Africa and the islands of south-east Asia. Trade brought the burgeoning Portuguese empire enormous wealth, a cultured society grew up and the daughters of Portuguese kings married into the Spanish Habsburgs. But a series of personal tragedies and premature deaths depleted the Portuguese royal family and the advent of the Inquisition sucked the lifeblood out of society. The crisis came in 1580, when Philip II of Spain, whose mother was a Portuguese princess, claimed the throne following the death of the childless King Henrique. To his vast domains in South America, Philip now added the entirety of Portugal’s empire, making him perhaps the first and only truly global monarch. England’s paltry gains on the world stage under Elizabeth I pale in comparison. In his person, Philip united the crowns of Portugal and Spain, rather as James I would, just two decades later, for England and Scotland – though in his case, with much less immediate impact on the world. In one respect, however, there was a strong similarity. Portugal, though retaining its autonomy, was very much the junior partner in this new arrangement, as Scotland was to England in 1603. For a while, Philip considered moving his court to Lisbon, but it remained in Madrid. The Portuguese had lost their nation but not their sense of identity. In 1640, they would regain it again, with a new king, John IV – Catherine’s father.
In the sixty years of Habsburg domination of Portugal, unrest had grown. Popular uprisings were put down and, while some of the senior Portuguese nobility were content to mingle with their counterparts in the Castilian court, other, younger men grew progressively discontented. In December 1640, a group of lesser nobility led what was, in effect, a coup d’état against Spanish rule, spurred on by the convenient distraction of a revolt in Catalonia, another disaffected Iberian region. They murdered the secretary of the Council of State in Lisbon and proclaimed the duke of Braganza king, as John IV, summoning him from Vila Viçosa to Lisbon to begin his reign. He acted swiftly in calling the Cortes, Portugal’s representative body, but he had not sought the throne and he accepted it with some reluctance. He knew the dangers that threatened the restored dynasty of Braganza, and his own limitations: ‘His background was that of a country gentleman who before his elevation to the throne had never left Portugal.’2 This of course made him more acceptable to the junior aristocrats who wanted him as their king. John had not bent the knee to the Habsburg kings in Madrid and could be represented as a true patriot. But the early years of his rule were uneasy, as he sought to promote himself and his country in Europe. Spain tried to frustrate him at every turn, using its greater power and diplomatic experience, and even France, Spain’s traditional enemy, was slow to recognize an independent Portugal, pointedly refusing the offer of Catherine as a bride for Louis XIV, despite the promise of a very generous dowry. The only country that was willing to negotiate with him and offer him protection was Oliver Cromwell’s republican England. A treaty was signed in 1654 but not ratified for another two years, and its commercial terms were highly favourable to England. When John IV died in 1656, the Portuguese empire was under threat in both Brazil and south-east Asia and Portugal’s survival as an independent country was once more menaced by Spain after the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees ended a century and a half of conflict between France and Spain. Philip IV’s daughter, Maria Teresa, married Louis XIV, while Catherine of Braganza remained unwed in Lisbon.
She was – as her mother, the very capable Queen Regent Luisa, recognized – a natural choice of bride for the newly restored Charles II and, feeling let down by the French, Luisa pursued the idea with determination. She was ruling on behalf of her son, Afonso VI, who had been badly affected both mentally and physically as a child by meningitis. The years since her husband’s death had been a challenge but the marriage negotiations, led by the experienced Francisco de Mello, Portuguese ambassador to London, eventually bore fruit. Ratified in the Treaty of London of 1661, Portugal’s future seemed much more secure. But it had been bought at a very high price, not just for Portugal but for the twenty-three-year-old Catherine of Braganza herself.
The bargaining had taken longer than Charles and Edward Hyde, who played a major part in the negotiations, let on in Charles’s speech to Parliament, though many of the king’s leading politicians had known something of what was going on, for the simple reason that Mello, armed with a very sizeable fund to back up the Portuguese case, had bought off most of them. Though Charles had begun his reign with a desire to restore good relations with Spain after Cromwell’s regime had sided with the French and vilified the Spanish as the fount of all evil, he swiftly discovered that Spain wanted concessions he could not give. Turning to Portugal, with its long history of alliance with England going back to the fourteenth century, seemed a natural alternative as well as a very attractive one financially. For Charles and his advisers, including his brother, the offer was too good to miss. The Spanish ambassador, though dangling the promise of impressive dowries for various minor princesses in different Habsburg lands, in a desperate attempt to match the Portuguese, was outmanoeuvred by Mello’s bribes and hamstrung by the not unreasonable scepticism of the English that Philip IV simply could not find the money he was promising. In addition, the French, despite their newly discovered friendship with Spain, were more than happy to support the Anglo-Portuguese match, hoping that it might prove an annoyance and preoccupation for the Spanish government.
In return for supplying Portugal with 10,000 men to back up its still inadequate army, Charles received the most generous marriage settlement of any English monarch. He was given the ports of Bombay and Tangier, privileged access for English merchants throughout the Portuguese empire and a lump sum cash payment of about £330,000 (worth over £11 billion today), as well, of course, as a royal bride. This was an exceptional windfall and the king’s reference to his marriage in his speech to Parliament seems almost casual in comparison with the reality of what he was getting. The Portuguese, now much more secure in their place in Europe, had gained much as well, for, though Bombay and Tangier seemed powerful inducements, the Portuguese were, in reality, in danger of losing both of them as the Dutch challenged them in the east and the Spanish in North Africa. Catherine was to be guaranteed a personal income of £30,000 (nearly £4 million today) per year and she was permitted to practise her Catholic religion, as Charles II’s mother had been when she married his father in 1625. In retrospect, Catherine thought these concessions were a small price for England to pay. She would remark, years later, after Charles’s death: ‘There were reasons for my coming to this kingdom, solely for the advantage of Portugal, and for this cause and for the interests of our house, I was sacrificed.’3 It was a bitter comment, born of the long years of humiliation and unhappiness she endured, though this could not have been foreseen when she eventually set sail from Lisbon on 23 April 1662.
Princesses had always been diplomatic fodder but Catherine, unlike the more spirited Dutch princess, Henrietta, who might have been Charles’s wife, had no say in the matter. In truth, little was known about her because there was little to know. The English consul in Lisbon reported that she had been ‘bred hugely retired. She hath hardly been ten times out of the palace in her life.’4 There is no evidence, however, as earlier writers claimed, that Catherine was brought up in a convent. Her early life seems to reflect that of her father, no traveller himself. As the only surviving daughter of King John and Queen Luisa, the royal couple knew that her marriageability was an important asset but they do not seem to have given much thought to preparing her for a future that would inevitably be outside Portugal itself. She was brought up to be devout, ladylike and respectful. Catherine could speak Spanish (or at least understand it well enough to communicate with Charles II until she learned sufficient English) and her subsequent interests as queen indicate that she had an appreciation of music and art. In dress and hairstyle, she favoured the stiff and, by other European standards, conservative fashions of her country. These looked heavy on Catherine, who was short and slim. Her eyes were acknowledged to be very attractive, though her portraits suggest that she might have been short-sighted. In days when few people had good teeth into their adult years, Catherine’s were her worst feature. They protruded badly (none of her portraits show this, as smiling with your mouth wide open, such a feature of celebrity in our time, would have been considered unseemly), but observers did not fail to remark on it when she came to England. Queen Luisa praised her daughter as gentle, virtuous and prudent. Charles II pronounced himself eager for her arrival, telling Catherine in July 1661, ‘I am going to make a short progress into some of my provinces . . . seeking in vain tranquillity in my restlessness, hoping to see the beloved person of Your Majesty in these kingdoms, already your own, and that with the same anxiety with which, after my long banishment, I desired to see myself in them.’5 He had a good way with words. However, there was little public comment in England and certainly no great rejoicing when the match was announced. In September 1661, Sir Richard Fanshawe was despatched as ambassador to Lisbon to hasten the signing of the treaty by the Portuguese. Charles sent a diamond-framed miniature of himself and a wardrobe of silk dresses for Catherine. It seems, in retrospect, rather a cheap gesture for what he was getting. Catherine’s reaction to this limited largesse is unknown.
The Portuguese, however, were determined that their princess’s marriage would be an occasion of great display, a public demonstration of the clout of the Braganza dynasty. Nor were they in any hurry to send Catherine to England until they had fully milked this opportunity. Their willingness to spend money on public celebrations to mark Catherine’s betrothal and the signing of the treaty was remarkable for a small country still struggling to establish itself. The Portuguese empire may have been extensive but wars with the Spanish and the Dutch had weakened the exchequer. Visitors to Lisbon were not impressed: ‘it is a very poor dirty place – I mean the City and the Court of Lisbone’, wrote Pepys in his diary. He had dined with an English sea-captain, recently returned from Portugal, who reported that the young king was ‘a very rude and simple fellow’. He went on to add that fine dining was a rarity at the Portuguese court. The king, he had been told, ‘hath his meat sent up by a dozen of lazy guards . . . and sometimes nothing but fruits and now and then half a hen.’ Catherine’s enhanced status meant that she got the pick of the rather meagre diet of the royal family: ‘she is come to have a whole hen or goose to her table – which is not ordinary.’ It certainly was not and, in an apparent effort to broaden their future queen’s culinary experiences, English diplomats in Lisbon had requested ‘neats (beef) tongues, bacon, oil anchovies, pickled oysters, Cheshire cheese and butter’ be sent over.6
The celebrations in the autumn of 1661 may have lacked sophisticated fare but in every other way the Portuguese Crown stepped up to the occasion. Over an entire week, there were marvellous spectacles. Fireworks, bullfights, pageants and processions announced Catherine’s marriage to the populace. Proceedings were chronicled by an anonymous writer, thought to be António de Sousa Macedo, the Portuguese secretary of state, who had represented the country in London during the reign of Charles I. He told his readers that the occasion ‘much exceeded the Coliseum of Rome.’ Conspicuous at the bullfights, among the assorted members of the aristocracy and Church, as well as professional dancers and musicians, was ‘Her British Majesty’, Catherine herself. Her upbringing may not have prepared her for such occasions but by the time she left Portugal the following spring, she would have fully understood the importance of her marriage to her own country.
Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, arrived with a fleet to bring Charles II’s wife to England on 1 March 1662, having secured the new English possession of Tangier. His stay in Lisbon was more fraught and protracted than he had hoped, though his dealings with the Portuguese royal family the previous autumn had alerted him to their talent for prevarication. Montagu’s background as a staunch supporter of both Oliver and Richard Cromwell while in joint command of the English fleet under the republic had turned to pragmatic acceptance of the likelihood of a Stuart restoration in the first months of 1660. He was a competent naval commander and diplomat, who, unlike his cousin, Ralph Montagu, in France, was able to avoid getting into serious difficulties. In the spring of 1662, he faced considerable challenges in getting both Queen Catherine and her dowry back to England.
Sandwich started by making sure that he observed all the proprieties. ‘I came with my whole fleet,’ he recalled, ‘and rode above the palace (on the river Tagus), which I saluted with 41 guns and my flag struck.’ The next day, he went ashore ‘to wait upon the Queen of England to see whether she had any commands for me and to present the compliments of my Lord Chancellor (Clarendon) and my Lord Treasurer (the earl of Southampton) unto Her Majesty.’ Catherine received these good wishes graciously and, apparently mindful that there was an important financial dimension to all of this, ‘she did very earnestly recommend into my care the schedule of the portion delivered me the day before by the Conde da Ponte.’ She went on to tell the earl that she had ‘overcome almost all impossibilities to hasten her voyage and that I must put myself to mastering some difficulties also; and that I should consider the poverty of the Portuguese nation caused by the oppression of their enemies.’7 The new queen of England was also concerned to impress on Sandwich that he would need to reinforce Portugal’s naval defences because, as soon as he left, the Spanish would be waiting to invade at the mouth of the Tagus. Catherine was no doubt briefed on what to say by her mother and other political advisers but she clearly handled this interview with firmness and an understanding of the awkward underlying issues that remained between Portugal and England where her marriage was concerned. She does not come across as the clueless ingénue that the English would soon be depicting.
Sandwich gave reassurances about reinforcing the fleet and, on the other matters, of the payment of the dowry and Portuguese obligations under the terms of the Treaty of London, he proceeded with a mixture of tact and rigour. ‘Concerning the schedule of the portion (the dowry), I gave Her Majesty a paper, to avoid uncertainties of interpretation.’ This was a polite way of saying that he did not trust the Portuguese government to pay in full – and, indeed, they never did. Nor was it the only disappointment that he faced. The Portuguese were dragging their feet on loading the sugar that formed part of the treaty. He urged Ponte ‘to put merchandise aboard and not bills of exchange. He told me it was both unreasonable and impossible for all Portugal to do it.’8 Although irritated, Sandwich forbore from pointing out that Portugal seemed to be reneging on key parts of the alliance.
By mid-April, he was relieved to be able to set sail finally with the new queen of England on the Royal Charles, the ship that had brought Charles II and his brothers from Breda two years earlier. Catherine was given an appropriately regal send-off by her family, going aboard with her brothers, King Afonso and Dom Pedro, after she had taken an affectionate but restrained farewell of her mother outside the royal palace. She knew that it was unlikely that she would ever see any of them again. Her last gesture to the country of her birth was heavily symbolic. ‘As I passed by the Castles,’ Sandwich wrote in his diary, ‘the Queen commanded me to loose the Standard, which was done.’ But very soon human frailty overcame regal bearing. Once they were out on the open sea, Catherine and her ladies were all violently seasick.9
The voyage to England was stormy and Sandwich’s fleet of fourteen ships, five ketches and three accompanying merchantmen only sighted Land’s End on 4 May. A week later, off Torbay, James, duke of York, came aboard with the duke of Ormond to greet Catherine, and did so every day until she reached Portsmouth. She landed from his yacht, the Anne, on 14 May, and almost immediately took to her bed to recover from the journey and a heavy cold. The king, who had been in Barbara Palmer’s bed until just before he set off for Portsmouth, was in no hurry to meet his bride.
*
CATHERINE HAD LEFT her native land in a blaze of fireworks, serenaded on her last night by sweet music below her cabin. She was to find a much colder, quieter reception in England. Surrounded by her Portuguese ladies-in-waiting, she was no longer a proud Iberian princess but a virgin queen, waiting to have sex with a stranger. What she felt about her husband’s dilatory attitude to welcoming her we do not know but it cannot have been an easy time. Charles I had been so keen to meet Henrietta Maria in 1625 that he had made an early-morning dash from Canterbury to Dover and arrived before she was ready to receive him. His son’s attitude was in stark contrast. Charles justified his tardiness by claiming he needed to be in London for an important parliamentary session at which the Act of Uniformity, settling the shape of the restored Church of England, was passed. His presence did not, in the end, assure the passage of any of the amendments to the legislation that he wanted. He found consolation elsewhere. Pepys reported that ‘the King dined at my Lady Castlemaine’s and supped every day and night the last week. And that the night that the bonfires were made for the joy of the Queen’s arrival, the King was there.’10 There were joys of another sort to be found in the arms of the heavily pregnant Barbara.
Apart from bonfires, the greatest celebrations of Catherine’s arrival were left to the writers of ballads, often in the most appalling verse. One such was ‘A Votive Song for Her Sacred Majesty’s Happy Arrival’, composed, if that is the right word, by Edmund Gaiton, a captain in the duke of York’s regiment at Oxford. In its triumphal tone, it captures both the national and international implications of the Portuguese marriage:
What general joy is here in our glad land
All parties will agree, join hand in hand,
Contented loyalists do patient stay
And swear, if ever, now they’re like t’have pay.
Come then and quickly land, thy Charles doth fear
No winds blow fast enough till thou art here.
’Tis not your fragrant oranges are wanting
Of China breed, but better by transplanting.
Nor your rare bacon, fed from chestnut-trees,
(which brings Westphalia hams upon their knees)
Nor Brasil sugar nor your Indian gold.
Thou art the purchase, which thy Charles will hold.11
At breakfast time on the morning of 21 May, the king wrote to Clarendon with details of his first meeting with Catherine. He had found her in bed, ‘by reason of a little cough and some inclination to a fever, which was caused, as we physicians say, by having certain things stopped at sea which ought to have carried away those humours. But now all is in their due course and I believe she will find herself very well in the morning as soon as she wakes.’ He was somewhat relieved to find that ‘I was not put to the consummation of the marriage last night; for I was so sleepy by having slept but two hours in my journey as I was afraid that matters would have gone very sleepily.’12 The king’s frankness about his postponed wedding night was amplified in a letter written two days later to his sister, Minette, in France: ‘I was married the day before yesterday but the fortune that follows our family is fallen upon me, car Monr. Le Cardinal m’a ferme la porte au nez, and though I am not so furious as Monsieur [Minette’s husband, the duke of Orléans] was, but am content to let those pass over before I go to bed with my wife, yet I hope I shall entertain her at least better the first night than he did you . . .’13 Poor Catherine. Already her menstrual cycle was becoming the subject of international comment.
Charles did not reveal much about his wife and her appearance to Minette, saying that Lord St Albans, his mother’s right-hand man, would do so, though he added, ‘I must tell you I think myself very happy.’ To his mother-in-law, Queen Luisa of Portugal, he managed a more flowery response, saying how much he was enjoying, ‘in this springtime, the company of my dearest wife.’ He was the happiest man in the world, ‘and the most enamoured, seeing close at hand the loveliness of her person and her virtues . . .’ All these reminded him of his obligations to Portugal itself but it was Catherine who was his chief delight: ‘I wish to say of my wife that I cannot sufficiently either look at her or talk to her.’14 Perhaps the canny Queen Luisa, who had apparently heard the tales of Charles II’s fondness for women and the fact that he had a mistress, was comforted, if not entirely convinced, by these professions of devotion. If so, she would have been right. The king was an accomplished liar.
To Clarendon, he was much less effusive in his description of his bride:
Her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty, 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: and if I have any skill in physiognomy, which I think I have, she must be as good a woman as ever was born. Her conversation, as much as I can perceive, is very good; for she has wit enough and a most agreeable voice. You would much wonder to see how well we are acquainted already. In a word, I think myself very happy; but am confident our two humours will agree very well together.15
Much of this was damning with faint praise and Charles was later reported to have reacted to Catherine’s unusual hairstyle by saying that he thought they had brought him a bat rather than a queen. The diarist John Evelyn was also struck by Catherine’s hair, which he described as, ‘her foretop long and turned aside very strangely.’16
Unaware that she and her ladies were being viewed as deeply unfashionable, olive-skinned oddities by the English, Catherine was soon entranced by her husband, who was dark himself. She seems to have fallen deeply in love very quickly and her affection for him never diminished. He was always her Prince Charming, despite his behaviour towards her. The marriage ceremonies – one Anglican, the other Catholic (despite Charles having been explicitly warned by Clarendon that he could not be married by ‘a Roman priest’) – took place on 21 May 1662. Whether deliberately or through carelessness, Charles was playing a dangerous game, potentially undermining his position as head of the Church of England by marrying in a secret Catholic ceremony. The officiating priest was Ludovic Stuart, Lord d’Aubigny, a member of a distinguished Scottish Catholic family whose links with France went back into the Middle Ages. He was Henrietta Maria’s almoner and would serve Catherine in the same capacity. This marriage ceremony, which took place in Catherine’s bedchamber, actually preceded the Anglican ceremony in the Governor’s House in Portsmouth, which was conducted by the bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon.
Charles did not use the marriage as an occasion for prolonged public celebrations or spectacle. The idea that he was a man of the people, eager for his subjects to have access to him, is false. Like his father, he wanted display to be controlled. There was symbolism in the royal couple’s arrival at Hampton Court on 29 May, his birthday and the date of the Stuart dynasty’s restoration, but there was little possibility of crowds flocking to see their new queen, since the royal party did not arrive till late in the evening, as it was growing dark. There were spectators, as there had been along the route from Portsmouth, but they were kept well away from the king and his bride. The Scottish Stewarts had gone out among the people and their accessibility and visibility were key to the dynasty’s success. The English Stuarts lived in different times and had different priorities. There was still considerable discontent in England in 1662 and security could not be guaranteed at large gatherings. But it is possible to make too much of Charles II’s failure to put on lavish celebrations in connection with his marriage. The last major royal wedding had been that of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, to the elector palatine nearly fifty years earlier. There was not much of a tradition in England of royal weddings being public events or opportunities for the monarchy to enhance its standing – a contrast with such occasions nowadays. The opportunity for merchandising was not, however, lost. Commemorative plates and embroidered boxes of carved wood, decorated with silk, linen and metal threads, showing Charles and Catherine in central panels, were produced. It has been said that this was the first time a royal marriage was marketed for public consumption.17
The newlyweds did not make their official entry into London as king and queen for another three months. This may seem dilatory but was probably dictated by a number of factors, not the least of which was that the court always avoided London in the plague months of the summer. London was also prone to rioting and its sizeable population of Protestant dissenters was often at odds with the Crown on religious matters. When, at very short notice, the City of London was asked to put on a pageant to celebrate the king and queen’s arrival in the capital, it responded with an aquatic display that featured the livery guilds rather than the royal couple. Pepys wrote that he could not even make out which barge the king and queen were sitting in, though Evelyn, better positioned, gave a detailed description: ‘His Majesty and the Queen came in an antique-shaped open vessel, covered with a state or canopy of cloth of gold, made in a form of a cupola, supported with high Corinthian pillars wreathed with flowers, festoons and garlands.’18 The themes of the pageant were a mixture of chivalry and Roman values, with echoes of the kinds of entertainments so loved by the young Henry VIII. Almost overlooked, it was reported that Catherine appeared uncomfortable, ‘like a prisoner at a Roman triumph.’19 Certainly the speeches made by the sea deities reinforced the idea of an England cut off from the European continent but still powerful enough for its name alone to strike fear into its enemies’ hearts. There was also praise for the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, albeit in terms harking back to the past rather than the present.
Adrift on the Thames, surrounded by a gaggle of little bobbing boats, Charles took his wife to Whitehall. After the formalities of her departure from Portugal, this was probably not the stately entry into London that Catherine might have envisaged. Yet in its gaudy shallowness it was a metaphor for the Restoration court. It would be an exaggeration to claim that, during the three months they had spent together at Hampton Court, Charles had grown tired of his wife because, despite saying all the right things to his mother-in-law, the king’s lack of enthusiasm for his bride was always hard to disguise. He had signed himself, in his first letter to Catherine in 1661, as ‘the very faithful husband of Your Majesty’. The queen was soon to discover how very empty those words were. Charles did not actively dislike Catherine but his passion for Lady Castlemaine was unabated. The little Portuguese princess could not compete with Barbara or any of Charles’s subsequent mistresses. She would learn, eventually, to accept this reality and forge a life for herself, but only after much humiliation had been heaped upon her.