Evelyn, in his account of his visits to Newmarket, ‘where was racing, revelling, and feasting with jolly blades’ during the King’s residence there, mentions the Duke of Buckingham with that abandoned woman, Shrewsbury, with fiddlers, and the like, ‘all of which,’ he said, ‘did ill become a Christian court.’
Her lover also installed her in his beautiful country house on the banks of the Thames, to which Pope alludes—
‘Cliveden’s proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury, and love.’
But the incident by which she is best remembered is the famous duel, which ended so fatally. Whether Buckingham’s boasts were too loud, when he expatiated on the constancy and devotion of the hitherto fickle beauty, or from some other cause, the patient husband’s indignation was at length roused, and he sent a challenge to the Duke. We subjoin Pepys’s account: ‘Much discourse of the duel 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. It was all about my Lady Shrewsbury, who is, and hath been for a long time, mistress to the Duke of Buckingham. The husband challenged him, and they met yesterday, January the 16th, 1667, in a close, near Barne Elmes, and Lord Shrewsbury is wounded, run through the body from the right breast, through the shoulder, and Sir John, all along one of his arms, and Jenkins is killed, and the rest all in a measure wounded.’ Pepys makes a sapient remark on the subject: ‘This will make the world think that the King has some good councillors about him, when the Duke, the greatest man, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight a duel about a mistress.’ He tells us that the King, having got wind of the matter, had sent a message by the Duke of Albemarle to Buckingham, forbidding him to fight, which message, like many others, was never delivered. ‘There was great talk of the business, and Lord Shrewsbury’s case was considered very bad, and if he should die, it might make it worse for the Duke of Buckingham, and I shall not be much sorry for it, as we may have some more sober man in his place, to assist in the Government.’
On the 16th of the ensuing March, Lord Shrewsbury died of his wounds. There is a story currently believed, that his shameless wife held her lover’s horse, during the duel, in the disguise of a page.
The Queen put herself at the head of a party that declaimed against the Duke and his wicked transactions; but she was soon silenced, and the whole matter hushed up.
Lady Shrewsbury lived to find a man adventurous enough to marry her, in the person of the son of Sir Thomas Brydges of Keynsham, county Somerset. She died at the age of eighty-one.