Catherine of Braganza marries Charles II: Portsmouth, 21 May 1662

Charles II changed out of his travelling clothes before he went in to see his bride. He had driven down from London in a hurry, slept two hours on the way and reached Portsmouth at about two in the afternoon of 20 May 1662. Catherine of Braganza, 23, was in bed with a sore throat and a slight fever. They spoke in Spanish. At eight the next morning the king wrote to his Lord Chancellor that her face was “not so exact as to be called a beuty”, but that he thought himself very happy.1 source1 source

That morning, with almost nobody told, Catherine's almoner, Lord Aubigny, married the couple by the Catholic rite in her room. To a Catholic princess an Anglican service alone was no marriage, and the king's Protestant subjects were not to know that he had gone through a Catholic one. The only witnesses, according to the Duke of York, were her godfather, the Portuguese ambassador, three other Portuguese nobles and two or three of her women.1 source1 source

The public wedding followed in the main hall of the Governor's House, the king's lodging beside Portsmouth's medieval Domus Dei, now the Royal Garrison Church. The hall had been fitted out as a presence chamber. Gilbert Sheldon, Bishop of London, read the Church of England service. Both copies of the marriage contract were read aloud, Charles made his vows, and Catherine, who spoke no English, signed her consent.2 sources2 sources

She wore an English dress of rose pink trimmed with knots of blue ribbon. When it was over, Lady Suffolk cut the ribbons into scraps and handed them out to the court as keepsakes, until there were none left for the queen. In London that day Samuel Pepys heard that on the night of the bonfires for the queen's arrival there had been none at the door of Lady Castlemaine, the king's mistress, who was expecting his child, “which was much observed”.2 sources2 sources

Catherine was born at the ducal palace of Vila Viçosa, in the Alentejo, between eight and nine on the evening of 25 November 1638, the feast of St Catherine, which gave her her name. Her father was then only Duke of Braganza. Two years later, on 1 December 1640, a group of nobles in Lisbon threw off the Spanish Habsburg kings, who had ruled Portugal since 1580, and made him João IV.2 sources2 sources

Spain did not accept the loss. The war of the Restoration ran on until 1668, and when João died in 1656 his widow, Luísa de Gusmão, governed as regent for their son Afonso VI. In 1659 Spain and France made peace in the Treaty of the Pyrenees, and France could no longer openly help Portugal. The regent needed another friend.3 sources3 sources

England had just restored its own king. Charles II returned from exile in May 1660, with debts and a navy to pay for. In February 1661 the Portuguese envoy Francisco de Melo arrived in London with a generous offer. According to the Lord Chancellor, Clarendon, it was £500,000 in ready money, the North African port of Tangier, the island of Bombay and free trade with Brazil and the East Indies.2 sources2 sources

Spain's ambassador in London threatened war if Charles accepted, and the Dutch, rivals of both countries in Asia and Brazil, were hostile too. A secret assurance that Louis XIV of France favoured the match helped tip the balance, and Charles took the Portuguese offer. The two crowns had been allies since the Treaty of Windsor of 1386.2 sources2 sources

The marriage treaty was concluded in London on 23 June 1661, and Portugal's ratification of that date is kept at the Torre do Tombo, the national archive in Lisbon. It was a military alliance as much as a marriage contract. It confirmed every Anglo-Portuguese treaty since 1641 and, in return for the dowry and two ports, committed England to fight for Portugal.3 sources3 sources

Paying for it was another matter. A country at war had little cash. On 10 November 1661 the regent ordered the sisa, a tax on sales, to be doubled to raise the dowry. The English took over Tangier first: the Earl of Peterborough's fleet anchored in the bay on 29 January 1662, and the next day he marched in and received the keys from the Portuguese governor.2 sources2 sources

When Lord Sandwich came with the English fleet to fetch the bride, the regent told him that the Spanish war had eaten into the money and she could pay only half of what was due. What came down to the ships was mostly sugar, spices and other goods. Sandwich refused jewels and would not take the goods at the Portuguese valuation. In the end he carried them as a cargo for merchants in London to sell, as the treaty allowed, and the regent gave a bond for the rest within a year. English envoys were still chasing the arrears years later.1 source1 source

Dirk Stoop's print of her state procession through Lisbon is dated 20 April 1662. On the 23rd, St George's Day, she took leave of her mother at the palace and drove under arches of flowers to Mass at the cathedral and on to the quay. Her brothers took her by barge out to Sandwich's flagship, the Royal Charles. Contrary winds then held the fleet in the Tagus for two days, and the city lit up the river with fireworks.2 sources2 sources

The crossing was long and stormy. Sandwich's secretary told Pepys that she never came on deck, but would send for Sandwich's musicians and listen from her cabin. On 14 May, the date in Sandwich's journal (some later writers give the 13th), the fleet came up the Solent. The Duke of York handed her ashore, and at her request her coach went through the main streets of Portsmouth so that the crowds could see her.1 source1 source

The court went to Hampton Court for the honeymoon. John Evelyn watched the queen arrive with her Portuguese ladies in their wide farthingales, which he called monstrous. He found her own face the handsomest of the party. Pepys, who saw some of the ladies in London, thought their farthingales “a strange dress”.2 sources2 sources

The first months were miserable. Charles insisted that Lady Castlemaine join the queen's household as a lady of the bedchamber. Catherine, “bred hugely retired” as Thomas Maynard, the English consul in Lisbon, had put it, refused. Clarendon was sent to wear her down, and after weeks of being shunned by the court she gave in. Most of her Portuguese household was sent home. Pepys, who first saw her in September, thought that “though she be not very charming, yet she hath a good, modest, and innocent look”.3 sources3 sources

There were no children. Catherine miscarried more than once, and the king's letters to his sister record losses in May 1668 and June 1669. Charles had children by several mistresses but refused to put his wife aside, whatever some of his courtiers hoped.2 sources2 sources

Her religion made her a target. In 1678 the informers Titus Oates and William Bedloe claimed that Catholics were plotting to kill the king, and they named the queen. On 28 November the House of Commons asked Charles to remove “the Queen, and all her Family, and all Papists” from Whitehall. He stood by her, and the regent in Lisbon, her brother Pedro, sent the Marquis of Arronches to London to support her.3 sources3 sources

Charles died in February 1685 after being received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, which Portuguese chroniclers credited to her persuasion. She stayed on at Somerset House through the reign of his brother James II and the revolution of 1688 that replaced him with William and Mary.2 sources2 sources

Much of the story goes back to a ten-line poem by Edmund Waller, “Of Tea, Commended by Her Majesty”, written for one of her birthdays. It is often dated to 1663, but the 1893 edition of Waller prints it among his poems to the queen of the 1680s. Its editor called it the first poem in English in praise of tea and said the drink became fashionable at court through the example of the queen, who was used to it in Portugal.2 sources2 sources

Tea stayed a luxury, and partly a medicine, for years. In June 1667 Pepys came home to find his wife making tea, which the apothecary had told her was good for her cold. Portugal's national archive puts the claim cautiously: Catherine “terá introduzido”, may have introduced, the habit of tea-drinking in England.2 sources2 sources

Neither port turned out as the English hoped. Tangier had to be held against Moroccan armies, and year after year the crown struggled to pay its garrison and the great harbour mole it was building. In 1683 Charles sent Lord Dartmouth to give it up. His engineers blew up the castle, forts and walls, and on 5 February 1684 the last mines were sprung and the garrison withdrew.1 source1 source

Bombay was a slower story. The Portuguese in India refused at first to hand the island over, and Humphrey Cooke took possession only on 18 February 1665. By a charter of 27 March 1668 Charles passed it to the East India Company for £10 a year. From that grew the city of Mumbai.1 source1 source

Catherine left London in the spring of 1692, crossed to Dieppe and travelled through France and Spain. She fell ill with erysipelas at Matapozuelos, in Castile, and wrote to her brother from Almeida, the Portuguese border fortress, on 30 December. On 20 January 1693 she entered Lisbon. Her brother, now King Pedro II, drove out to meet her on the road at Lumiar.2 sources2 sources

She moved from one borrowed house to another, at Alcântara, Santa Marta, the Bairro Alto and Belém, before building her own. In 1694 she began a palace, chapel and gardens on land she had bought in the fields of the Bemposta, then on the edge of the city. She was living there by 1702, and the Portuguese called it the Paço da Rainha, the Queen's Palace.4 sources4 sources

Portugal was at war again, this time in the War of the Spanish Succession, on the side of England and the Dutch against France and Philip V of Spain. In 1704, when Pedro II left for the front in Beira, he made his sister regent, with decrees to every court of law and a council of state to advise her. In 1705, when he fell dangerously ill, she governed a second time.2 sources2 sources

The campaign of 1705 went well for the allies. Portuguese and allied troops took four towns across the Spanish border, which the chronicler António Caetano de Sousa lists as Valença de Alcântara, Albuquerque, Salvaterra and Çarça. Sousa gave her regency the credit for pushing the war with energy. She did not long enjoy it. On the night of Thursday 31 December 1705, at ten o'clock, she died at the Bemposta of a colic, aged 67.2 sources2 sources

Her will, drawn up in 1699, made Pedro her heir; the palace passed to the crown, and in 1707 João V gave it to his brother, the Infante Francisco. She was buried at the Jerónimos monastery in Belém, beside her brother Teodósio. Her remains now lie with her mother's in the Bragança pantheon at São Vicente de Fora.3 sources3 sources

The secret article of her marriage treaty, England's promise to defend Portugal's colonies, was still in force more than two centuries later. In a secret declaration signed in London on 14 October 1899, during the Boer War, Britain and Portugal quoted its first part word for word and confirmed it.1 source1 source

Her reputation has moved too. English writers long treated her as a dull, plain wife at a brilliant court, and a sympathetic biography of 1908 swung to the other extreme. Recent historians, Portuguese and English, read her as a political figure in her own right: a queen who kept her faith through the Popish Plot and ended her life running a country at war.2 sources2 sources