Mistresses

by Linda Porter

  Catherine was still at Hampton Court when she was introduced to the woman who would ruin her brief happiness. Speedily recovered from giving birth to her first son by the king, Barbara was living close by, at her uncle’s house, in Richmond. In an age in which many women still died in childbirth and infant mortality remained high, Barbara and her offspring were remarkably robust. Many of Charles’s biographers, as well as the writer of the only major life in English of Catherine of Braganza, have been at pains to excuse him for what is often passed off as an unfortunate, if understandable, lapse of judgement in thrusting his mistress in the face of his wife and then proceeding, with a determination that bordered on calculated cruelty, to insist that Barbara become one of the ladies of the queen’s bedchamber. One wonders if Charles and his mistress had discussed their strategy beforehand, while Catherine was lying in bed with a cold and a heavy period at Portsmouth. Certainly, whatever his protestations at the time of his marriage, Charles never seems to have had the slightest intention of giving up the countess of Castlemaine or of adopting a course of action which might, at least, have allowed his wife and mistress to be kept apart. Catherine was presented with a fait accompli. The difficulty arose in her inability to curb a highly emotional reaction and assert herself effectively and consistently thereafter. But for this she can hardly be blamed, and Charles and Barbara gave her no quarter.

  The queen was no innocent in the matter of her husband’s mistress. She already knew about Barbara and had, according to Clarendon, made up her mind that she would never, ever, allow this rival to be in the same room as her, subsequently telling those closest to her that ‘her mother had enjoined her so to do.’ Charles had other ideas about how his wife should conduct herself. ‘The king thought that he had so well prepared her to give her [Barbara]a civil reception, that within a day or two of her majesty’s being there, himself led her into her chamber, and presented her to the queen.’ As Barbara did not give birth to her son until 18 June, her first meeting with Catherine cannot have been within a few days of the queen’s arrival at Hampton Court and was probably not before mid-July. Catherine had met many English courtiers by this time. In the heat of what was an unusually warm summer, she had sat on public display, her make-up sometimes sliding off her face, striving to keep up with English formalities and the press of people who wanted to be presented to her. At first, this new arrival seemed no different than many other ladies of the court. Catherine was still struggling with English names and titles and either did not hear, or did not understand, at first, the identity of this handsome woman. She nevertheless responded graciously and held out her hand to be kissed. Some sources say that the queen’s chief Portuguese lady-in-waiting, the countess of Penalva, standing behind her chair, hissed in Catherine’s ear that this was the countess of Castlemaine. Clarendon describes it somewhat differently, saying that recognition dawned on the queen almost instantly. Everyone there saw her anguished reaction: ‘her colour changed and tears gushed out of her eyes and her nose bled and she fainted; so that she was forthwith removed to another room.’

  The king, far from being concerned about his wife’s evident distress, took this very public embarrassment as a personal affront. He looked on it ‘with wonderful indignation and as an earnest of defiance for the decision of supremacy and who should govern, upon which point he was the most jealous and most resolute of any man; and the answer he received from the queen, which kept up the obstinacy, displeased him more.’2 So the brief honeymoon period of the marriage came to an abrupt end. There would be no more sightings of the royal couple eating cherries together in the window seats of Hampton Court.3 Both parties dug in their heels. But there would only be one winner.

  Like other queens consort before her, Catherine discovered that she had little real influence over the personnel of her household as a new wife. Charles I and Henrietta Maria had quarrelled about the same subject and that also led to a public spat. Henrietta Maria had also been compelled to accept the existence of someone her husband valued far more dearly than herself – in this case, his male favourite, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, Barbara’s kinsman. After several years, an assassin conveniently removed the queen’s rival. Catherine was not so fortunate. Perhaps if she had remonstrated with the king privately and less emotionally she could have retained more dignity but he would still not have given way. Charles knew that Barbara had her enemies at court and perceived that a faction might form around the queen, encouraging further defiance. He was determined to regain control of the situation quickly and, since Barbara made it abundantly clear to him that she expected to be appointed as a lady of the bedchamber, he would brook no opposition. Clarendon was ordered to state the case for accepting Barbara as one of her ladies to the queen. It was not a task he undertook with any enthusiasm, given his own dislike of ‘The Lady’, but he had no option. The king told him that anyone who tried to thwart his determination to make the appointment, ‘I will be his enemy to the last moment of my life.’ He continued in the same vein:

  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 . . . 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.

  This letter, remarkable for its repetition and cold vindictiveness, shows just how little Charles II thought of his wife. He had been nice enough to her for a few weeks but if she opposed him, especially when it came to Barbara, he would have as little to do with her as possible. Clarendon saw the queen several times and attempted on each occasion to make her accept the reality of the situation, while yet flattering her that she must not have such a low opinion of her own attractions to feel threatened by another woman. As a wife, she must expect her husband to recommend servants and submit to his commands in this respect. Wisely, he advised her to give in with as much good grace as she could. Catherine, adrift from her homeland, struggling with a new language and new customs, insulted and distressed, could not comply. Each meeting with Clarendon had led to floods of tears. She tried desperately to have the last word: ‘the king might do what he pleased, but that she would not consent to it.’4

  The king retaliated by dismissing most of Catherine’s Portuguese servants and allowing Barbara to take up residence in Hampton Court. He brought his mistress into Catherine’s presence every day, conversing with her freely and pointedly ignoring his wife. Catherine was excluded from court entertainments and treated disrespectfully by some of her English servants, who believed that her influence was negligible and likely to remain that way. The final straw for the unhappy queen was the arrival from France of the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, a fellow Catholic, who might have been expected to support her. Instead, the queen mother appears to have played a part in persuading Catherine that what could not be prevented must be endured. She did little to help her new daughter-in-law and actually acknowledged the countess of Castlemaine in public. By the time the royal couple arrived at Whitehall at the end of August 1662, Catherine was reported as declaring that ‘she had no other will but his Majesty’s.’5

  It was subsequently claimed that Catherine’s capitulation was so complete that she changed her stance and became friendly towards Barbara, laughing and chatting with her, and that Charles viewed his wife with even more contempt as a result. The evidence, however, points to a rather different interpretation of relations between the two women and suggests that the queen only ever accepted Barbara as one of her ladies under sufferance. Barbara was determined to be seen to fulfil her duties publicly, even attending the queen at mass before her own conversion to Catholicism became known. But there was a delay in making further appointments to Catherine’s bedchamber until the spring of 1663, much to the irritation of
the earl of Chesterfield, and the ladies were not actually sworn in, on the king’s warrants, until June of that year. This was probably because of continued friction about appointments between the king and queen. There is no evidence that Catherine herself ever authorized a warrant for the countess of Castlemaine. She had been forced to put up with much but submitting to her husband’s will and having this woman, with whom he spent all his nights, flaunting herself in Catherine’s bedchamber by day did not mean that Catherine agreed to pleasant socialization with her. Despite her anguish, Catherine always knew that she was a queen and that Barbara was a servant. She derived from this what little comfort she could.

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  CATHERINE’S HOPE, AS she was compelled to endure the presence of this rival, was that she would bear the king a son. Though it is highly unlikely that the arrival of a legitimate heir would miraculously have cured Charles II’s priapism, Catherine’s position would have been enhanced and she could have directed much of what was undoubtedly a loving nature towards her children. But in this, as in so much else in that miserable first eight years of her marriage, she was to be disappointed. The king himself had first alluded to the gynaecological problem that seems to have been at the root of Catherine’s inability to give the king a child. She suffered from abnormal uterine bleeding, which results in frequent, heavy periods and a tendency towards miscarriage. The causes of this condition are still not fully understood but modern techniques of imaging and management with drugs can produce more positive outcomes for patients than were available to women in the seventeenth century. Aside from the discomfort and disruption to the normal marital relations Catherine would have liked to have established with the husband she adored, she had to put up with the embarrassment that knowledge of her condition was widespread. Even foreign visitors like the Italian Lorenzo Magalotti commented on ‘the extraordinary frequency and abundance of her menses’, while Sir John Reresby, a client of the duke of Buckingham who wrote extensive memoirs for his descendants, noted that she had ‘a constant flux upon her.’6 Since, in the twenty-first century, we are only just beginning to talk openly about women’s periods and their associated problems, it may seem extraordinary that there should be such references 350 years ago, but the reproductive aspects of a queen’s body were bound to be of interest when one of the key arguments for the monarchical system was the idea of legitimate descent. Queens were reproductive machines. There was essentially no difference, despite the passage of a century and a half, between the plight of Catherine of Aragon and that of Catherine of Braganza, except that Henry VIII’s first wife had more pregnancies than her Portuguese namesake and did eventually manage to produce one child, Mary I, who survived into adulthood.

  Charles II’s wife was denied even this comfort, though the king, like Henry VIII, wanted sons rather than daughters. At the outset of his marriage, he would have settled for any sign of pregnancy. None came. By the end of 1662, rumours began that Catherine could not conceive and the first of many whisperings that Charles might legitimate his eldest son, the duke of Monmouth, fluttered round the court. Monmouth was now high in his father’s favour. He was thirteen years old when he arrived back in England in August 1662, accompanied by his grandmother, Henrietta Maria, and was soon established at court, where Charles II suddenly discovered a fondness for the boy that had been hard to discern in the years following his abduction from Lucy Walter and removal to Paris. James Crofts, as he had been known up till then, was showered with favours and titles and found a suitably rich bride in the eleven-year-old Anna Scott, countess of Buccleuch. This young Scottish aristocrat was summoned to London to acquire the polish which would be required of someone about to become a duchess. Her mother, being a canny woman, took steps to ensure that most of Anna’s inheritance was entailed outside the teenage bridegroom’s grasp. Her caution proved especially prescient where James was concerned, though her daughter would prove to be equally extravagant. When James married Anna in the summer of 1663, he was given the title of duke of Monmouth. Neither he nor his father could then have had any real idea of the trouble he would cause.

  Eventually, Monmouth’s role in English history would endanger even Catherine of Braganza but initially he and his stepmother got on well. He spent considerable amounts of time with her, playing cards with her maids of honour and establishing his place as a member of the royal family. Yet already he was upstaging Catherine. When Pepys attended an audience with Henrietta Maria in Somerset House, her daughter-in-law sat beside her. But most people present only had eyes for ‘Mr Crofts, the king’s bastard.’7 James was the living proof of Charles II’s youthful virility and the queen had yet to prove that she was even fertile. As the countess of Castlemaine, never slow to see an opportunity, ingratiated herself with the king’s impressionable son, Catherine was packed off to Tunbridge Wells and Bath to take the waters, hoping, like others before her, that they would help her conceive. Still there was no sign of pregnancy, and then, in the autumn of 1663, Catherine fell seriously ill.

  For several days, as a high fever raged, the queen’s survival was thought to hang in the balance. Charles spent most of the daytime at her bedside, which seems to have calmed her, though she might have been less tranquil had she known that he left her most evenings to sup with Lady Castlemaine. In her delirium, Catherine revealed just how deeply she was affected by the overriding need to bear children. She believed that she had already given birth. She talked to Charles of a son and then to her doctor of three babies, asking him, ‘How do the children?’8 Gradually, the fever left her and, by 2 November 1663, the king was able to tell his sister that ‘my wife is now out of all danger, though very weak, and it was a very strange fever, for she talked idly four or five days after the fever had left her, but now that is likewise past, and desires me to make her compliments to you and Monsieur, which she will do herself as soon as she gets strength.’9 In his next letter to Minette, he asked her to send ‘some images to put in prayer books’ as a gift for Catherine, who attended religious services three times a day.10 He sounded almost wistful about his wife’s piety and ended with the information that he was just off to the theatre to see a new play. The contrast between this apparent frivolity and Catherine’s earnest religious devotions may or may not have been intentional. Minette, after all, knew her brother very well. Charles does seem to have been genuinely concerned about his wife’s illness. Catherine was touched by his tenderness but if she thought it marked a change in his essential nature, she was deceiving herself.

  Nevertheless, between 1666 and 1669, Catherine did conceive three times. Each pregnancy ended in early miscarriage. The first, in Oxford at the beginning 1666, seems to have happened when the king was away and took him so much by surprise that he doubted that his wife had actually been pregnant. When the queen lost a second baby, more than two years later, Charles told his sister that he had feared for a long time that Catherine could not conceive at all. After a third miscarriage, in June 1669, the royal couple abandoned any real hope that Catherine would produce children. There had already been talk of divorce and this reached new heights when the divorce of Lord Roos came before Parliament. Irritated by her husband’s interest in the case (he seems to have enjoyed it as theatre as much as a reflection on his own situation), Catherine apparently said that she would be perfectly content to retire to a convent. Despite a great deal of encouragement, much of it from the duke of Buckingham, Charles stood by his queen. She also had the support of the duke and duchess of York, who were well advanced on their own journey towards Catholicism and whose prospects would have been diminished by a new, fertile queen.

  The talk of divorce died down and Catherine’s rival, Lady Castlemaine, lost her hold on Charles II’s affections. The death of Minette in 1670 also removed the greatest female influence over her husband. There were other passions, not always requited, and other mistresses by then, but the queen had learned acceptance – and something more. She was beginning to see how she could use these women to her advantage when
it suited, allowing her to play a subtle role in court politics. The realization that she would never have children but that her position was safe, at least for the foreseeable future, allowed Catherine of Braganza to move on. She could now forge her own identity as queen. It was something she did with considerable aplomb.

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  IN CREATING A life for herself, Catherine drew on the rich cultural heritage of the Portuguese empire. She is often credited with introducing that most British of activities, tea drinking, to her adopted country. This is not true, as tea was already known in the British Isles, but, at the time of the Restoration, it had only a small following in comparison with the huge success of coffee. Coffee houses had flourished under Cromwell and those who frequented them were often suspected of harbouring radical ideas. Charles II closed them down temporarily in 1675 – though, by the turn of the eighteenth century, contemporaries believed there were over 3,000 such establishments in London. It was not so much that tea was thought to be somehow less political as a beverage but that it had not caught on in the same way. Catherine’s arrival began a slow change that would come to define the British character. Instead of viewing tea as a medicinal brew, Catherine introduced the ladies of her household to the drinking of tea ‘solely for pleasure.’11 It was one of a number of ways in which Catherine influenced the cosmopolitan nature of Charles II’s court, steering it away from being merely a cut-down version of the magnificence of Louis XIV’s court at Versailles. Charles II was impressed by all things French (unsurprisingly, given that he was half French himself and had spent a considerable number of his formative years in exile in Paris) but he always viewed his pint-sized cousin as a rival. He was happy to be able to display his own version of luxury and good taste.