The king gave her a quick kiss, then went to his own chamber and sank into bed relieved. He was tired from his journey and wrote his sister that he was glad he would not be expected to make love to Catherine that night. Trying to remain optimistic about his bride, the next day Charles told his chancellor, “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.”7
The day of the royal wedding, in protest Lady Castlemaine ordered her underclothes to be washed and hung out to dry on the palace grounds for all the world to see. The diarist Samuel Pepys, walking in the Privy Garden, “saw the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine’s, laced with rich lace at the bottoms that I ever saw, and did me good to look upon them.”8
Catherine had immediately fallen deeply in love with her tall, darkly swashbuckling husband, and Charles insisted a bit too often that he, too, was delighted. A sexual athlete, Charles likely found in Catherine a tightly furled bud, a bud that would never unfurl further. We can picture her, shy and chaste, a dutiful wife in bed, while Lady Castlemaine reveled with him in sexual abandon.
Beneath the smile Charles wore when beginning his married life simmered a secret which he knew would devastate his bride. To pacify Lady Castlemaine’s wrath at his marriage, he had promised her the honor of becoming a lady of the queen’s bedchamber. Not only would she live at court, but as a lady of the bedchamber Lady Castlemaine would be concerned with the most intimate details of the queen’s life, including sexual relations with her husband, bodily functions, menstruation, and pregnancy. The position offered great status, as it was one of the few that could officially be given to a woman directly. It would cement Lady Castlemaine’s standing in an envious, backbiting court.
Two months after the king’s wedding, the royal mistress gave birth to their second child, and Charles glumly decided it was time to fulfill his promise to her, even at the risk of alienating his bride. He invited Lady Castlemaine to Hampton Court and, taking her by the arm, walked up to the queen to present her. Admiring the beautiful visitor, Catherine stood up smiling and extended her hand as her husband introduced Lady Castlemaine. Upon hearing the name, Catherine’s reaction was gut-wrenching. She blanched and sank down visibly upset. Tears fell fast and heavy down her cheeks. Suddenly, blood dripped from her nose and she passed out on the floor. She was carried into an adjoining room, but Charles did not follow. He interpreted his wife’s illness as defiance; wrath clouded his dark face as he took his mistress back to her coach.
When he reproached the queen for her insolent behavior, she was intransigent rather than contrite. Charles retaliated by sending home Catherine’s retinue of Portuguese ladies and monks—many of them her childhood friends. Charles further isolated his wife by ignoring her completely. He caroused through the night with friends as the queen lay sleepless in her cold bed.
Charles’s faithful lord chancellor, Edward Clarendon, begged him to give up Lady Castlemaine and restore his marriage. This would also quiet any dissent among his people, some of whom had already lost respect for the king’s personal life. But Charles indignantly defended Lady Castlemaine. “I have undone this lady,” he said, “and ruined her reputation, which was fair and untainted till her friendship with me, and I am obliged in conscience and honor to repair her to the utmost of my power.”9
Charles was uneasy about becoming “ridiculous to the world” if he did not win this very public debate with his new wife.10 He forced poor Lord Clarendon, who despised Lady Castlemaine, to persuade the queen to accept her as a lady of the bedchamber. To this request the queen replied, “The King’s insistence upon that particular can proceed from no other ground but his hatred of my person. He wishes to expose me to the contempt of the world. And the world will think me deserving of such an affront if I submitted to it. Before I do that I will put myself on board any little vessel and so be transported to Lisbon.”11
Charles stubbornly presented his wife with a list of ladies to be approved for bedchamber positions. At the top of the list was the name of Barbara, Lady Castlemaine. Equally stubborn, Catherine crossed out the name and again threatened to get on the next boat home.
The king moved his mistress to luxurious apartments in Hampton Court, above his own, their suites connected by a secret stair. He sat next to Lady Castlemaine at meals, laughing and talking gaily with her, while the queen sat in mute dejection. No one wanted to be seen talking to the queen, as it might awaken the prejudice of the king and Lady Castlemaine. As soon as Catherine retired, courtiers made insulting jokes about her.
By the end of summer, Catherine broke. Lonely, far from home, she simply couldn’t stand the isolation anymore. She apologized to Charles and welcomed his mistress into her inner circle as a friend. The queen and Lady Castlemaine were often crammed into a coach with the king between them. Grateful Charles became an attentive husband. His respect for Catherine became friendship and eventually a kind of love. When Lady Castlemaine demanded that she be the first to ride with the king in a revolutionary new open carriage—and threatened to have a miscarriage on the spot if she was not—Charles selected Catherine for the honor. As the king held the hand of his beaming wife, his mistress was forced to join the procession that followed on horseback, and dejectedly kept her distance from the boisterous courtiers.
While bending her husband to her will by cheerful obedience, Catherine sometimes found herself in a position to exact revenge. Two days after Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her third royal bastard in September 1663, the queen—pretending to know nothing of royal bastards—insisted that Lady Castlemaine ride on horseback with her to Oxford or lose her position as lady of the bedchamber. The new mother, still sore and bleeding, clambered on top of the horse and rode uncomplaining, but gritting her teeth.
It is ironic that when Queen Catherine became seriously ill in 1663, no one in England was more interested in her recovery than the king’s mistress. Lady Castlemaine knew that if Catherine died, Charles would marry the beautiful sixteen-year-old noblewoman Frances Stuart, who had aroused his lust but refused to assuage it. Lifted from the depths of bereavement into the heights of passion, Charles would have no need of his rancorous mistress. Barbara prayed heartily for the life of her royal lover’s wife.
Similarly, in 1670 Charles’s mistresses—he now had a harem—rallied around Queen Catherine when Lord Buckingham presented Parliament with a bill enabling the king to divorce his stonily barren wife and remarry. Clucking and cackling, the royal mistresses insisted that the barren, powerless queen stay exactly where she was. A nubile new queen would certainly sink their ships with all their cargo. And heaven forbid the new queen would bear a passel of royal children. Certainly Charles would neglect his numerous royal bastards.
But Charles, in an act of conscience, stopped the bill, stating, “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.”12
“An old, dull, deaf, peevish beast”
In contrast to the glory of England’s merry monarch Charles II a half century earlier, beginning in 1714 “the Hanoverian dynasty seem[ed] to have brought in…a sort of triumph of pudding, turnips, and muddy ale, over the lace, maypoles, champagne and burgundy of the preceding period,” according to the courtier Brimley Johnson.13