The house was a commanding square structure, of three stories in height, besides the terrace (440 feet long), and it had wings connected with the main building by a colonnade. It was built of red brick, with stone dressings. He furnished it in a sumptuous manner, and hung its walls with fine tapestry and valuable pictures. Here the Duke brought his mistress, the Countess of Shrewsbury, and here gave full bent to his licentious habits. Thus Cliefden gained an unenviable notoriety, and has been immortalised in song and in prose:—
“Gallant and gay, in Cliefden’s proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love.”
In 1667-8 the Duke had taken part in a singular triple duel about the Countess, and had mortally wounded her husband by running him through the body. Pepys thus wrote of this duel:—“January 17th. Much discourse of the duell yesterday between the Duke of Buckingham, Holmes, and one Jenkins, on one side, and my Lord of Shrewsbury, Sir John Talbot, and one Bernard Howard, on the other side: and all about my Lady Shrewsbury, who is at this time, and hath for a great while been, a mistress to the Duke of Buckingham. And so her husband challenged him, and they met yesterday in a close near Barne-Elmes, and there fought: and my Lord Shrewsbury is run through the body, from the right breast through the shoulder; and Sir John Talbot all along up one of his armes; and Jenkins killed upon the place, and the rest all in a little measure wounded.
Cliefden: the Cottage.
This will make the world think that the King hath good counsellors about him, when the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest man about him, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a mistress. And this may prove a very bad accident to the Duke of Buckingham, but that my Lady Castlemaine do rule all at this time as much as ever she did, and she will, it is believed, keep all matters well with the Duke of Buckingham; though this is a time that the King will be very backward, I suppose, to appear in such a business. And it is pretty to hear how the King had some notice of this challenge a week or two ago, and did give it to my Lord Generall to confine the Duke, or take security that he should not do any such thing as fight: and the Generall trusted to the King that he, sending for him, would do it; and the King trusted to the Generall. And it is said that my Lord Shrewsbury’s case is to be feared that he may die too: and that may make it much worse for the Duke of Buckingham: and I shall not be much sorry for it, that we may have some sober man come in his room to assist in the Government.”
Cliefden: the Summer Cottage.
The Countess of Shrewsbury (the Duke’s mistress), who was Anna Maria, daughter of Robert, Earl of Cardigan, is said to have held the Duke’s horse, habited as a page, while the duel was being fought, and that she thus not only saw her husband mortally wounded, but then went home with the murderer, where she took him to her arms “in the shirt covered with her husband’s blood.” The Duke was married to the Hon. Mary Fairfax, daughter and heiress of Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentary general—a woman of pure tastes and faultless habits—whom he shamefully neglected. Pepys, under date the 15th of May, 1668, says, “I am told also that the Countesse of Shrewsbury is brought home by the Duke [the Earl had died of his wounds in March] of Buckingham to his house, where his Duchesse, saying that it was not for her and the other to live together in a house, he answered, ‘Why, madam, I did think so, and therefore have ordered your coach to be ready to carry you to your father’s;’ which was a devilish speech, but, they say, true; and my Lady Shrewsbury is there, it seems.”
Large as was the income of the Duke, his profligacy, extravagance, and immoralities so swallowed it up that he did not complete Cliefden, and died in wretchedness; and but for the timely help of Lord Arran, a few days before his decease, in abject poverty and loneliness. “There is not,” wrote Lord Arran, “so much as one farthing towards defraying the least expense;” and Pope, in one of his epistles to Lord Bathurst, remarks—