Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  In October 1663, after returning from Bath to Whitehall, Catherine became gravely ill, having miscarried for the second time. Charles remained by her bedside even as her fever spiked. In her delirium, she imagined they had three children, including a girl who very much resembled the king, and that she had given birth to twins—but the boy was so ugly, she feared that Charles could never grow to love him. “No, it’s a pretty boy,” he assured Catherine.

  “If it be like you, it is a fine boy indeed,” she finally agreed. But if he failed as her husband, Charles succeeded as her nurse. In her peril now, he was as solicitous as possible, preferring to stay by Catherine’s side day and night, despite the fact that if anyone had thought her homely before, she was no oil portrait now. The priests insisted that her head, which had been shaved for health reasons, be covered with a tight cap believed to possess miraculous powers. The queen was also deathly pale from numerous bleedings. Scandalizing the team of physicians, Charles ordered all the windows to be opened, unsealing the fetid chamber in which his wife would surely die if she did not receive fresh air and better care. He ejected the doctors and personally fed her orange juice by the spoonful, helping her own attendants give her wasted little body sponge baths and change her soiled bed linens. Days later, still gravely ill, when Catherine asked Charles, “How do the children?” he gently humored her, fearing that to disabuse her then might kill her.

  A master of amorous multitasking, Charles tried to impregnate his wife while simultaneously juggling his passions for his many mistresses. By 1663, he had fallen for one of Catherine’s teenage maids of honor, the exceptionally beautiful but childlike and maddeningly virtuous Frances Stuart. Meanwhile, he also maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Holland. During the summer of 1664, the English defeated the Dutch in North America. Charles wrote to Minette to inform her that his forces had captured a “very good town, but we have got the better of it and ’tis now called New York.”

  The conquered city was named for Charles’s brother, James, Duke of York. Three of the five boroughs that comprise New York City were also named for members of the royal family. Brooklyn is formally called Kings County—for Charles. Queens honors Catherine of Braganza, and from time to time local politicians discuss placing a statue somewhere in the borough to honor her. However, it hasn’t happened yet because of her father’s participation in the slave trade. The borough of Staten Island, officially known as the county of Richmond, would eventually be named for the 1st Duke of Richmond and Lennox, Charles’s royal bastard by his French mistress Louise de Kéroualle.

  Charles’s subjects seemed to be spoiling for a fight with Holland, but the royal treasury was almost empty. Charles was on the fence, because he was never keen about going to war. Yet he was envious that the Dutch dominated shipping and trade, and wanted a piece of it. He was also obsessed with sailing and all things naval, and was eager for England to surpass the Netherlands’ famous light, fast fleet.

  So in February 1665, he declared war on them in what was known as the Second Dutch War. One of Charles’s conditions of peace was that the States of Holland improve the position of his nephew William. He was being excluded from inheriting the title of stadtholder after the death of his father, Prince William II of Orange.

  It was a terrible year. Not only was England at war, but there were rumors that Charles was planning to divorce the childless Catherine so that he might marry Frances Stuart. The king was so madly in love with Frances that Lady Castlemaine staged a mock wedding in an effort to convince her to become Charles’s next official mistress. Nonetheless, Frances is said to have preserved her chastity, continuing to resist the king’s efforts to seduce her.

  The first signs of plague appeared in early May. The heat wave of June spread the disease, and while Londoners were decimated, by the summer of 1665 the court had decamped to the more healthful air of Oxford. The greatest number of deaths took place that summer; by the autumn the rates declined, and by the late winter and early spring of 1666, things had resumed a semblance of normalcy. A Harvard University article on the subject estimated the preplague population of London in 1665 at approximately four hundred and sixty thousand, and the Great Plague killed between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand of them. However, according to the contemporary Bills of Mortality, by the time the epidemic had run its course, the death toll of the Great Plague across the whole of England was 68,596, although Lord Clarendon, the chancellor, believed that figure should have been doubled at the very least. And the chaplain to the Duke of Albemarle, who had remained in the capital for the duration of the plague, estimated the total number of deaths nationwide from the epidemic at two hundred thousand. In any event, although there is little concurrence on the actual death toll, it represented a sizable percentage of England, and particularly London’s populace. And the disasters kept coming.

  While the court was still at Oxford, in January or February of 1666, Catherine suffered a miscarriage. By that time, Charles had returned to Whitehall in London and for some reason refused to believe it had occurred.

  It would not be the only tragedy of 1666. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, September 2, a fire began in a bakery on Pudding Lane. London at the time was constructed primarily of wooden buildings densely packed together, often only a handspan apart. The blaze spread rapidly, driven across the city by a strong east wind, leaping the River Fleet and threatening Charles’s court at Whitehall. By the next day, the conflagration covered a half mile. It was not brought under control until September 5, by which time thirteen thousand homes and eighty-seven churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, had been destroyed. For days, King Charles and James, Duke of York, had pitched in, sleeves rolled up, joining bucket brigades until they were exhausted. Because the fire took place during the Second Dutch War, rumors spread that it had been started by French or Dutch immigrants; consequently, innocent residents of London were accosted and accused, beaten and lynched, while the firestorm raged around them.

  The Great Fire of London forced the evacuation and resettlement of thousands, and crippled the tax yield at a time when the war was already sapping the lion’s share of England’s income. In 1667, the first year since her marriage that Catherine’s royal allowance was finally paid in full, the Peace of Breda was signed with Holland, France, and Denmark. The Dutch got Surinam, Pulo Run in the Banda Islands of Indonesia, and parts of West Africa. England received New York, New Jersey, and New Delaware. By 1668, Charles was still on good terms with the Netherlands, signing a pact with Holland and Sweden—the Triple Alliance—intended to check French aggression.

  In matters of international diplomacy, Charles realized that he had a secret weapon—his sister, Minette, who was married to the younger brother of Louis XIV. Minette was an obvious correspondent, as Charles had always written candidly to her about his marital situation. On May 7, 1668, the king confided to Minette that Catherine had miscarried that morning, writing, “And though I am troubled, yet I am glad that ’tis evident she was with child, which I will not deny to you till now I did fear she was not capable of.” Samuel Pepys also wrote that day that the queen had miscarried “of a perfect child.”

  Unless Catherine was significantly further along in this pregnancy—sources say ten weeks—than she had been when she had miscarried previously, it’s unclear why Charles would only now believe her capable of conceiving. One can only imagine that he must have assumed her prior spontaneous abortions were merely the “abundance of her menses” referred to earlier, or related to some other ailment.

  For the past six years, Catherine’s infertility had been a source of perpetual gossip and speculation. It was even more humiliating to her that she was the problem; Lady Castlemaine’s increasing brood proved that it wasn’t Charles who was deficient. After Catherine’s May 1668 miscarriage, the rumors began anew that her husband might divorce her. Others suggested that he might legitimize his first bastard, the Duke of Monmouth, who was very
popular in some court circles. A third rumor made the rounds that Charles and Lucy Walter had been legally wed, meaning that young Monmouth was legitimate after all. Lucy was dead by the time Charles was crowned, so his marriage to Catherine in 1662 would never have been considered bigamy. Yet the king adamantly denied any marriage to Lucy Walter. Nor, he assured Catherine, did he ever intend to divorce her, or send her back to Portugal for barrenness.

  In May 1669, the queen believed herself with child again. Pepys wrote in his diary that she was pregnant, and his suspicions were confirmed when he spied her a week later dressed in a pinner and apron, Restoration-era maternity wear.

  On May 24, 1669, Charles wrote to Minette, “She missed those [her periods] almost, if not altogether, twice, about this time she ought to have them, and she had a kind of colic the day before yesterday which pressed downwards and made her apprehend she would miscarry, but today she is so well she does not keep her bed. The midwives who have searched her say that her matrix is very close, though it be a little low; she has now and then some shows of them, but in so little quantity as it only confirms the most knowing women here that there is a fair conception.”

  Yet on June 7, the king sorrowfully told his sister that the thirty-year-old Catherine had miscarried, “after all our hopes” and “without any visible accident.” Some sources believe that the miscarriage occurred late enough in the pregnancy to determine the sex of the fetus, but it has never been stated whether the queen was carrying a boy or girl.

  Catherine of Braganza never conceived again. And after the tragedy of her 1669 miscarriage, Charles evidently did not expect her to do so.

  Despite the king’s misgivings, his courtiers continued to pressure him to divorce her. James was against it; as he was now the heir presumptive, a new, fertile queen would likely bear heirs that would knock him further down the line of succession—although he feared that his brother would keep Catherine, but declare the Duke of Monmouth his legitimate heir. The royal mistresses were also eager for the queen to stay put, as they were loath to entertain the possibility of their paramour falling in love with a beautiful and nubile replacement.

  Divorcing a barren queen had royal precedent. In Catholicism, it was grounds enough for annulment. A number of suggestions were made: If Catherine volunteered to quietly retire to a convent, things could discreetly blow over. But if she insisted on remaining Charles’s wife and refused to withdraw, the Duke of Buckingham had the gall to sketch out a scenario in which he would have her kidnapped and dispatched to some distant plantation after she left the palace to attend a fair. Charles was appalled. In 1670, Buckingham introduced a bill into Parliament that would grant the king the right to divorce Catherine and remarry. But Charles would not repudiate her. He halted the proceeding of the bill, declaring, “It was a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because she was his wife and had no children by him, which was no fault of hers.” Charles also refused to legitimize Monmouth. The status quo would remain.

  The first decade of Charles II’s reign was a period of freedom and hedonism, curiosity and inquiry. By the end of the 1660s, he had granted a charter to the British East India Company, and awarded a royal charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which would control that vast swath of territory in North America.

  But the next decade would be marred by religious tensions. Charles was himself tolerant and had intended to make freedom of worship a cornerstone of his reign. However, England was not an autocracy. Among many of his subjects, including several members of Parliament, the mistrust of papists continued to run high, whether the Catholics were foreign (i.e., French, Spanish, or Portuguese) or domestic.

  However, in 1670, under what would come to be known as the Secret Treaty of Dover, enabled by Minette on behalf of her brother and brother-in-law, Charles did get into bed with Catholic France, an alliance that Louis XIV had desired since Minette’s marriage to his brother in 1661. After Minette’s sudden illness and swift death just days after her return to the Continent, Charles also tried to get into bed with one of her maids of honor. On parting from her brother at Dover, Minette had refused to cede him one of her “jewels”—the virginal (or so she claimed) Louise de Kéroualle, a curvaceous Breton brunette with rosebud lips and a squint in one eye, having promised Louise’s parents to keep the girl from the wolves. But later that year, Louise was bestowed upon Charles as a gift from Louis XIV, and made as much of a game of “keep-away” with her virtue as Frances Stuart had done. The French girl eventually succumbed after many make-out sessions with the king and another mock wedding staged by Barbara Castlemaine, as well as the promise of several gifts. Louise was as avaricious as Barbara; she was raking in cash and costly trinkets from Charles as her lover, and from her paymaster, Louis XIV, for whom she was said to be spying on the English king and court.

  By 1671, Charles’s affection for Barbara was on the wane. He had honored “la Belle Stuart,” commanding that her profile personify the realm on his victory medals over the Dutch in 1664. This image of Frances Stuart would later become “Britannia,” for three centuries on all British coinage. But Frances had not been as grateful for this distinction as Charles would have liked. To his fury, not only had she continued to refuse him, but she had gone and married another Charles Stuart, the 3rd Duke of Richmond and 6th Duke of Lennox. But the king now had Louise as his lover. And he still had the most adorable, and genuinely loving, of his mistresses, “pretty, witty Nell Gwyn,” as Pepys dubbed her, a vivacious redhead with an irrepressible sense of humor whose father had fought for the royalist cause and died in debt. Nell, whose alcoholic mother ran a brothel, came from the underbelly of London. In her early adolescence, she became an orange seller at the newly reopened Drury Lane theater, and was soon discovered by the company manager, who offered her the opportunity to be an actress. The illiterate Nell learned her roles by rote, was a natural mimic, and became the toast of the London stage. Charles was also sleeping from time to time with another actress, Moll Davis. And of course there were numerous one-night stands, overseen by the king’s Keeper of the Privy Closet, William Chiffinch. Over the course of just a few years, Chiffinch made more than ten thousand pounds, quietly funneled to him from Secret Service accounts, for discreetly escorting the king’s nocturnal diversions up to his bedchamber and down again by means of a private staircase.

  Charles was not promiscuous in the sense of being an indiscriminate sexaholic. He was a serial adulterer—although he did juggle multiple long-term mistresses simultaneously. He explained his temperament to Sir John Reresby with the disclaimer “because that his Complexion [meaning his personality, not his skin tone] was of an amorous sort,” women often succumbed to his embraces.

  But by 1671, Catherine of Braganza was sick of it. She moved out of her rooms at Whitehall and into Somerset House on the Strand overlooking the Thames, which had been Henrietta Maria’s dower house; after the king’s mother died in August 1669, he gave the property to Catherine. Continuing to fulfill her duties as queen consort, she accompanied her husband on his journeys outside London, where she was tremendously popular. But the stress created by the omnipresence of Charles’s myriad mistresses, as well as the increasing anti-Catholic sentiments throughout the kingdom, began to have an effect on her emotional and physical health.

  In February 1673, Catherine suffered a serious illness and believed she had been poisoned, sparking a fear of future attempts to poison her, which she thought were connected in some way with the Duke of York’s conversion to Catholicism. Charles’s brother had embraced popery, as the English called it, in 1672, although it did not become widely known until the following year, and James continued to attend Anglican services until 1676.

  The whole issue of religion was heating up far more than the king had ever wanted. On March 29, 1673, Charles II reluctantly gave his assent to the Test Act. The act required all persons serving in civil or military office to swear an oath upholding the supremacy of the Anglican
Church and denying the concept of transubstantiation (the conversion of the two elements of the Eucharist into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ).

  Catherine’s Catholic servants were exempted from the Test Act, but James resigned his office as Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy rather than take the oath. Charles evidently commented that he was willing to rid his own entourage of Catholics, with the exception of his barber, “whom he meant to keep in despite of all their [Parliament’s] bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand.” It was the king’s subtle way of conveying his trust of papists, no matter their proximity to the throne, as the hand that daily brought the razor to the royal throat practiced this now-proscribed religion.

  During the Restoration, coffeehouses had replaced ale houses as loci for progressive, often dissenting political discourse. Coffee, drinking chocolate, even sherbet were considered signs of dissidence then. In December 1675, with religious tensions still running high, an order was issued to suppress the coffeehouses. That year, all English and Irish Catholic priests were commanded to leave the country. The queen was at least allowed to attend Mass conducted by her Portuguese clerics, and quietly opened her own chapel to English Catholics so that they could worship there.

  By this time, the forty-five-year-old king had gone almost totally bald beneath his curly black periwig. His rakish air was tinged with a veneer of melancholy. He and Catherine were more or less separated. In 1674, the royal marriage had reached a nadir and she decided not to accompany her husband to the horse races at Newmarket as she had always done. Instead, she remained at Hampton Court “in retirement.” The Venetian ambassador wrote, “Contrary to her usual custom, stifling the pangs of jealousy by which she is tormented, her Majesty made an effort to amuse herself during the whole of this last season with hunting and dancing,” returning “unwillingly to London where the customary freedoms of the king and even more the flaunting of his mistresses dispirit her and render her incapable of disguising her sorrows.”