It really is a very tangled story—this inner history of the fall of Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a sense, it is also the story of the King’s marriage and of Catherine of Braganza, his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have suffered as much as any woman wedded to a sultan in any country where the seraglio is not a natural and proper institution.
If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the marriage, at least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by Portugal, which was anxious to establish an alliance with England as some protection against the predatory designs of Spain. He had been influenced by the dowry offered—five hundred thousand pounds in money, Tangier, which would give England a commanding position on the Mediterranean, and the Island of Bombay. Without yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the freedom to trade in the East Indies—which Portugal had hitherto kept jealously to herself—were to enable England to build up her great Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were obvious enough to make the match desirable.
Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May, 1662, Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his bride at Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall—he stood a full six feet high—lean and elegantly vigorous. The ugliness of his drawn, harsh-featured face was mitigated by the glory of full, low-lidded, dark eyes, and his smile could be irresistibly captivating. He was as graceful in manner as in person, felicitous of speech, and of an indolent good temper that found expression in a charming urbanity.
Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the wife they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth year, was of an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and short in the legs that, dressed as she was in an outlandish, full-skirted farthingale, she had the appearance of being on her knees when she stood before him. Her complexion was sallow, and though her eyes, like his own, were fine, they were not fine enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her black hair was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a pair of miniature wings.
It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious voluptuary, with his nice discernment in women, should have checked in his long stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
“Lord!” was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him. “They’ve brought me a bat, not a woman.”
But if she lacked beauty, she was well dowered, and Charles was in desperate need of money.
“I suppose,” he told Clarendon anon, “I must swallow this black draught to get the jam that goes with it.”
The Chancellor’s grave eyes considered him almost sternly what time he coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did not presume to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant.
Catherine was immediately attended—in the words of Grammont—by six frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a governess who was a monster. With this retinue she repaired to Hampton Court, where the honeymoon was spent, and where for a brief season the poor woman—entirely enamoured of the graceful, long-legged rake she had married—lived in a fool’s paradise.