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Villiers ii. 239). As a means of freeing the young queen's mind of possible delusion, Barbara designed that her impending confinement should take place at Hampton Court during the honeymoon of the royal pair, and this intention was with difficulty overruled by the king. Her second child, Charles, was, born early in June 1662 at her house in King Street, Westminster. The child's baptism was performed by a Romish priest by order of Castlemaine, who had recently become a papist, and the ceremony gave his lady the requisite pretext for leaving the earl and conveying all her effects and 'all the servants except the porter' to the residence of her uncle at Richmond (, Life of Clarendon, iii. 208). The infant was rebaptised by the rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, on 18 June 1662, the king and Aubrey de Vere, twentieth earl of Oxford [q. v.], being the two godfathers (cf. , ii. 288-9 and n. Aubrey has a story that Barbara's cruelty to her eldest son when a mere child impaired an intellect which never promised very well; cf. , Wiltshire, ed. Britton, 1847, p. 72; Letters of Dean Prideaux; Camden Soc. pp. 21, 48, 55). On the very same day (18 June) the queen was surprised into receiving her rival at Hampton Court, and Clarendon relates how the unfortunate lady was carried from the apartment in a fit on discovering the cheat. Such an exhibition of ill-humour seemed to the king to need reparation. Lady Castlemaine's name was accordingly submitted to the queen upon a list of ladies designed for her bedchamber. The queen promptly pricked out the name, and a painful contest of two months' duration ensued. By the end of August, however, Clarendon, stimulated by messages of cumulative urgency from Charles, whose ferocity in this matter is justly likened to that of a wild boar showing his tusks (see the remarkable letter preserved in the British Museum, Lansdowne MS. 1236, f. 121; cf. Stowe MS. 154, f. 16), succeeded in breaking down Catherine's opposition. Barbara had official lodgings assigned to her hard by the cockpit at Whitehall, where her rooms thenceforth became a focus of intrigue against Clarendon (cf. , Autobiogr. p. 256). There during this autumn was matured her first political triumph, the supersession of the old and tried loyalist and friend of Clarendon, Sir Edward Nicholas [q. v.], in the secretaryship by Sir Henry Bennet (afterwards Earl of Arlington) [q. v.], who thus started in life as the minion of the royal mistress. The pacification of the royal household; seems to have been complete by 7 Sept. 1662, when Pepys observed the king, queen, and Lady Castlemaine in a coach together, and 'hanging much upon the favourite, Mr. Crofts, the king's bastard, who is always with her.' The king is believed to have hurried on the marriage of Monmouth in order to withdraw him from Lady Castlemaine's attractions.

Liaisons were already being spoken of between the Countess of Castlemaine and Sir Charles Barkeley and Colonel James Hamilton [see Hamilton, Anthony (DNB00)]. The king was alleged to be 'past jealousy,' but he still spent on an average four evenings a week at the lady's lodgings, going 'home through the privy garden all alone privately, so as the very sentries take notice of it and speak of it,'. . . 'which,' says Pepys, 'is a poor thing for a prince to do.' In his first irritation at the squibs and pasquils circulated about him and the countess, Charles meditated an order for the closing of the coffee-houses, but the proposal was soon dropped. Early in 1663 the countess was addressed in terms of extreme adulation in Dryden's fourth poetical 'Epistle,' in return, it would appear, for the patronage she had extended to his unsuccessful first play, 'The Wild Gallant' (see, Works, ed. Scott, xi. 18-22). Her second son, Henry, was born on 20 Sept. 1663. The king refused to acknowledge the child. Nevertheless that same Christmas Charles handed over to the rapacious beauty all the Christmas presents that he had received from the peers; and about the same time was announced her conversion to Roman Catholicism. 'If the church of Rome,' remarked Stillingfleet, 'has got no more by her than the church of England has lost, the matter will not be much' (, ii. 576). On 25 Jan. 1664 a fire broke out at her lodgings, whereupon the king gave orders for the buildings to be supplied with waterpipes, buckets, ladders, and other appliances (Hist. MSS. Comm. 15th Rep. App. ii. 19). On 5 Sept. in this year Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her fourth child, Charlotte, and three weeks later, to the wrath and indignation of Charles, she was rebuked as a Jane Shore while taking the air in St. James's Park (, ii. 222). A few months afterwards the French ambassador,Comminges, wrote mockingly to Lionne of the perturbation of the Earl of Castlemaine upon arriving at court and finding his family unexpectedly increased by two strapping infants (, p. 164). During the plague year the mistress en titre, as she was now termed, migrated with the court to Hampton Court, Salisbury, and Oxford; and at Merton