Fielding knew nothing whatever of the widow he so ardently coveted; but he, like love, could find out the way. There was a Mrs. Villars, who had dressed the widow’s hair, and she undertook, for a valuable consideration, to bring the pair gradually together. Fielding was allowed to see the grounds at Waddon. As he passed along, he observed a lady at a window. He put his hand on the left side of his waistcoat, and bowed a superlative beau’s superlative bow; and he was at the high top-gallant of his joy when he saw the graceful lady graciously smile in return for his homage. This little drama was repeated; and at last Mrs. Villars induced the lady to yield so very much all at once as to call with her on Fielding at his lodgings. Three such visits were made, and ardent love was made also on each occasion. On the third coming of Hero to Leander, there was a delicious little banquet, stimulating to generous impulses. The impulses so overcame the lady that she yielded to the urgent appeals of Mrs. Villars and the wooer, and consented to a private marriage in her lover’s chambers. The ecstatic Fielding leapt up from her feet, where he had been kneeling, clapt on his jaunty hat with a slap, buckled his bodkin sword to his side with a hilarious snap, swore there was no time like the present, and that he would himself fetch a priest and be back with him on the very swiftest of the wings of love.
That was the occasion on which, at a rather late hour, Fielding was to be seen knocking at the front door of Leicester House. When the door was opened his first inquiry was after the imperial ambassador’s chaplain. The beau had, in James II.’s days, turned Papist; and when Popery had gone out as William came in, he had not thought it worth while to turn back again, and was nominally a Papist still. When the Roman Catholic chaplain in Leicester House became aware of what his visitor required, he readily assented, and the worthy pair might be seen hastily crossing the square to that bower of love where the bride was waiting. The chaplain satisfied her scruples as to the genuineness of his priestly character, and in a twinkling he buckled beau and belle together in a manner which, as he said, defied all undoing.
‘Undoing?’ exclaimed the lover. ‘I marry my angel with all my heart, soul, body, and everything else!’—and he put a ring on her finger bearing the poesy Tibi soli—the sun of his life.
In a few days the bubble burst. The lady turned out to be no rich widow, but a Mrs. Wadsworth, who was given to frolicking, and who thought this the merriest frolic of her light-o’-love life. Fielding, who had passed himself off as a count, had not much to say in his own behalf, and he turned the ‘sun of his life’ out of doors. Whither he could turn he knew right well. He had long served all the purposes of the Duchess of Cleveland, the degraded old mistress of Charles II.; and within three weeks of his being buckled to Mrs. Wadsworth by the Leicester Square priest he married Duchess Barbara. Soon after he thrashed Mrs. Wadsworth in the street for claiming him as her lawful husband, and he beat the Duchess at home for asserting that Mrs. Wadsworth was right. Old Barbara did more. She put two hundred pounds into that lady’s hand, to prosecute Fielding for bigamy, and the Duchess promised her a hundred pounds a year for fifteen years if she succeeded in getting him convicted. And the handsome Hercules was convicted accordingly, at the Old Bailey, and was sentenced to be burnt in the hand; but the rascal produced Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. And so ended the Leicester Square wedding.
As long as the Emperor’s envoy lived in Leicester Fields he was the leader of fashion. Crowds assembled to see his ‘turn out.’ Sir Francis Gripe, in the ‘Busy-body,’ tempts Miranda by saying, ‘Thou shalt be the envy of the Ring, for I will carry thee to Hyde Park, and thy equipage shall surpass the what-d’ye-call-’em ambassador’s.’
Leicester House was, luckily, to let when the Prince of Wales quarrelled with his father, George I. In that house the Prince set up a rival court, against attending which the ‘London Gazette’ thundered dreadful prohibitions. But St. James’s was dull; Leicester House was ‘jolly’; and the fields were ‘all alive’ with spectators ‘hooraying’ the arrivals. Within, the stately Princess towered among her graceful maids. With regard to her diminutive husband it was said of his visitors,
In his embroidered coat they found him,
With all his strutting dwarfs around him.
Most celebrated among the Leicester House maids of honour was the young, bright, silvery-laughing, witty, well-bred girl, who could not only spell, but could construe Cæsar—the maid of whom Chesterfield wrote—
Should the Pope himself go roaming,