Mumbai today is a large metropolis, teeming with 22 million people. The city moves faster than the country–everyone has places to go, things to do, and lives to live. Imagine if this place, with all its people, is given as dowry by a Portuguese woman to a British womaniser King? All the wealth of the people would be claimed by a King who, in all probability, would leave the woman he married for another. No need to imagine. This already happened, but many centuries ago. Fortunately, no one’s property is in danger.
After having many mistresses and dating ‘low-born’ actresses in the seventeenth century (Prince Harry was not the first), King Charles II finally decided to settle with a wife. In a parliamentary speech, he said that it has “often been put in mind by my friends that it was high time to marry; and I have thought so myself ever since I came into England. But there appeared difficulties enough in the choice, though many overtures have been made to me.” Many princesses were vying for matrimony with King Charles II, not because he was handsome, but because they belonged to countries that wanted alliances with England. There was only one way to settle it – the dowry system.
Portugal had proposed the fattest of dowry to King Charles II. This dowry was 300,000 pounds of cash, a place called Tangier in the Meditteranean, and Bombay, which was called Bom Bahia back then. Catherine of Braganza, the princess from Portugal who would give the dowry, trumped other princesses in line. King Charles already knew who he wanted to marry in the speech he gave to the parliament. He said, “I can now tell you, not only that I am resolved to marry, but whom I resolve to marry if God please trust me, with full consideration of the good of my subjects in general, as of myself; it is with the daughter of Portugal.”
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