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. Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King Charles she was no more than a wife _de jure_. With wives _de facto_ Charles would people his seraglio as fancy moved him; and the present wife _de facto_, the mistress of his heart, the first lady of his harem, was that beautiful termagant, Barbara Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl of Castle-maine.