By the mid-1670s, Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza, had moved out of Whitehall Palace and taken up residence at Somerset House in the Strand, built about ten years earlier.

Pepys's Diary, 24 February 1664:

Down to the garden of Somerset House and up and down the new building, which in every respect will be mighty magnificent and costly. I stayed a great while talking with a man in the garden that was sawing a piece of marble - and did give him 6d to drink. He told me much of the nature and labour of that work; how he could not saw above 4 inch of the stone in a day; and of a greater, not above one or two. And after it is sawed, then it is rubbed with coarse and then with a finer and finer sand til they come to putty, and so polish it as smooth as glass. Their saws have no teeth, but it is the sand only which the saw rubs up and down that doth the thing.

When Catherine arrived at Portsmouth on 13 May 1662, she asked for a cup of tea only to be told there was none available; tea was at that time a very rare drink. She was offered ale instead. She was said to be at least partly responsible for the later popularity of tea-drinking, though it would be still be several years (not until 1678) before tea was imported into the country in any great quantities. It was believed to have medicinal qualities and one doctor recommended drinking at least ten cups a day.

Pepys's Diary,28 June 1667:

By coach home and there find my wife making of tea, a drink which Mr Pelling the apothecary tells her is good for her cold and defluxions.

Tea was not only an expensive brew - not everyone knew quite what to do with it and there was much contradictory advice as to how it should be prepared. According to one writer - a Jesuit priest recently returned from China - "the hot water should not stay upon the tea leaves any longer than you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely". Others mistook it for a vegetable, boiling the leaves then discarding the water.

On the morning of his wedding day, 21 May 1662, Charles wrote to Clarendon:

Her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty, though her eyes are excellent good, and not anything in her face that in the least degree can shoque one... and if I have any skill in visiognimy, which I think I have, she must be as good a woman as ever was borne. Her conversation, as much as I can perceave is very good, for she hath wit enough, and a most agreeable voyse. You would wonder to see how well we are acquainted already.

Charles was said to enjoy teaching his wife English swear words, then watching her use them in company with no idea what they meant. His marriage didn't curb his taste for other women in the slightest; Catherine was forced to accept his mistress, Barbara Palmer (later Duchess of Cleveland, then Duchess of Castlemaine), as a lady-in-waiting. (Years later, with the passage of the Test Act, the Queen was allowed only 9 Catholic Maids of Honour. They drew lots to see which of them should depart. When 8 had been chosen, the queen stopped the lottery and added the name of the 9th herself: Louise de Kéroualle.)

The queen's status was not helped either by her Catholicism or her inability to bear a child; within a few years of her marriage, Charles's advisers were pressuring him to divorce her and find a new queen to produce Protestant heirs.

When it was becoming a regular demand that James, as a Catholic, be excluded from the succession, Buckingham suggested to the king that he have Catherine kidnapped and sent to Virginia, where, after a suitable period, he could divorce her on grounds of desertion, marry a Protestant queen and give the country a Protestant heir.

Despite Charles's continual infidelity, they were never divorced and he determinedly stood by throughout the Popish Plot crisis, when she was accused of plotting his murder.

Somerset House was mentioned more than once during the enquiry into the death of the London Magistrate, Edmund Berry Godfrey. It was claimed that he was followed along the Strand, lured into Somerset House where he was strangled by a man named Hill, and that his body had remained hidden in a room there for several days before being transported to Primrose Hill where it was discovered on Thursday, 17 October 1678.

Extract from a letter written by Catherine to her brother during the Popish Plot:

There is nothing that concerns me more than to tell you how completely the King releases me from all trouble... by the care which he takes to defend my innocence and truth. Every day he shows more clearly his purpose and good-will towards me, and thus baffles the hate of my enemies... I cannot cease telling you what I owe to his benevolence, of which each day he gives better proofs, either from generosity or from compassion, for the little happiness in which he sees I live.