CROWN OF CHARLES II.
FIVE-GUINEA PIECE OF CHARLES II.
On the 13th of May the Portuguese princess arrived at Spithead; Charles was not there to receive her, pretending pressure of Parliamentary business, but he sent to request of her that the marriage ceremony after the Catholic form, which he had promised, might be waived. Catherine would not consent. On the 20th, Charles having arrived at Portsmouth, they were, therefore, married in private by Catherine's almoner, Stuart D'Aubigny, in the presence of Philip, afterwards Cardinal Howard, and five other witnesses, and subsequently in public by the Bishop of London.
HALFPENNY (WITH FIGURE OF BRITANNIA) OF CHARLES II.
On the journey to Hampton Court, and for a few days afterwards, Charles appeared extremely pleased with his wife, who—though she could not compete in person with the dazzling Lady Castlemaine, and has been described by some contemporaries as a homely person, as "a little swarthy body, proud, and ill-favoured"—is stated by others also to have been "a most pretty woman." According to Lely's portrait of her, she is a very pleasing brunette beauty, and by all accounts she was extremely amiable; but the misfortune was, that she had been brought up as in a convent, completely secluded from society, and therefore was little calculated, by the amount of her information, or the graces of her manners, to fascinate a person of Charles's worldly and volatile character.
How was such a woman to support her influence with such a man against the beauty and determined temper of Lady Castlemaine, a woman as dissolute and unprincipled as she was handsome? In her fits of passion she often threatened the king to tear their children to pieces, and set his palace on fire; and when she was in these tempers, a contemporary says, "she resembled Medusa less than one of her dragons." Charles was the perfect slave of her charms and her passions. She had wrung from him a promise that his marriage should not cause him to withdraw himself from her, and having borne him a son a few days after his marriage, she only awaited her convalescence to take her place as one of the queen's own ladies. Catherine had heard of his amour before coming to England, for it was the talk of Europe, and her mother had bade her never to allow her name to be mentioned in her presence. But very soon the king presented her a list of the ladies of her household, and the first on the list she saw, to her astonishment, was Lady Castlemaine. She at once struck it out and, notwithstanding the king's remonstrances, declared that sooner than submit to such an indignity, she would return to Portugal. But she was not long in learning that no regard to her feelings was to be expected from this sensual and unfeeling monster. He brought Lady Castlemaine into the Queen's chamber, leading her by the hand, and presenting her before the assembled Court. Such a scandalous offence to public decorum, such a brutal insult to a young wife in a strange land, was perhaps never perpetrated before. Catherine, who did not recognise the name uttered by the king, received her graciously, and permitted her to kiss her hand; but a whisper from one of the Portuguese ladies made her aware of the outrage. She burst into tears, the blood gushed from her nostrils in the violent effort to subdue her feelings, and she fell senseless into the arms of her attendants. Instead of feeling any compunction for the pain thus inflicted on his wife, the demoralised reprobate was enraged at her for thus, as he called it, casting a slur on the reputation of the fair lady. He abused the queen for her perversity, and vowed that she should receive Lady Castlemaine as a lady of her bedchamber, as a due reparation for this public insult. It was in vain, however, that he stormed at his unhappy wife; she remained firm in her resolve, either to be freed from the pollution of the mistress's presence, or to return to Portugal. Clarendon and Ormond ventured to remonstrate with Charles on his cruelty, but Charles was especially indignant that they should "level the mistresses of kings and princes with other lewd women, it being his avowed doctrine that they ought to be looked upon as above other men's wives." However opposed such a doctrine may be to the more refined taste and purer morality of the present age, it was quite in harmony with the habits and feelings which regulated the social system of Europe at that period. Charles was at least no worse than Louis XIV., whose mistresses were admitted to the intimacy of married ladies of approved virtue and chastity. The same, too, may be said of the English Court under the first two kings of the House of Brunswick.
The part which Clarendon played on this occasion is greatly at variance with that reputation for honour, wisdom, virtue, and true dignity with which his admirers invest him. It shows that however much he might recoil at it, however deeply disgraceful and degrading he might feel it, he was ready to stoop to this disgrace and degradation, rather than sacrifice his interest at Court. Accordingly Charles let him know that he expected him not only to cease to object to his unmanly conduct to his wife, but to make himself the instrument of inducing her to submit to the ignominy; and the hoary moralist, the great minister and historian, showed himself humbly pliant, and set to work in earnest to bend the mind of this virtuous and outraged woman to the shame of receiving her husband's harlot as her daily companion and attendant. And this Clarendon did perseveringly, and at length successfully. When Catherine talked of returning to Portugal, he bade her understand that she was utterly in the power of her husband; that so far from going to Portugal, she could not even go out of the palace without his permission; and, in fact, he so worked upon the poor creature's terrors, backed by the savage threats of the king, that he broke her spirit, and taught her to acquiesce in an example of profligacy, which at once scandalised and corrupted the morals of the age. Charles, when Catherine repeated her determination to return to Portugal, told her rudely that she must first see whether her mother would receive her, and that he would send her Portuguese servants to ascertain that point; and he discharged all her attendants. Thus abandoned in a foreign country, the miserable queen told the Chancellor that she had to struggle with greater difficulties than any woman of her condition before; but that pattern minister only showed her that it was the more necessary to submit. And thus Clarendon complacently writes:—"In all this the king preserved his point; the lady came to Court, was lodged there, was every day in the queen's presence, and the king in continual conference with her, whilst the queen sat untaken notice of; and if her Majesty rose at the indignity, and retired into her chamber, it may be one or two attended her; but all the company remained in the room she left, and too often said those things aloud which nobody ought to have whispered. She alone was left out in all jollities, and not suffered to have any part of those pleasant applications and caresses which she saw made abroad to everybody else; a universal mirth in all company but in hers, and in all places but in her chamber, her own servants showing more respect and more diligence to the person of the lady than towards their own mistress, who, they found, could do them less good. All these mortifications were too heavy to be borne, so that at last, when it was least expected or suspected, the queen of a sudden let herself fall first to conversation, and then to familiarity, and even in the same instant to a confidence with the lady; was merry with her in public, talked kindly of her, and in private used nobody more friendly."