"Oh, sire!" answered the girl.
Thus did the King meet her who was to mean everything in his life, and more....
It was twilight in the forest, Raymond Waffle tells us, when the King rode away. In the opposite direction rode a pensive girl, her eyes aglow with something deeper than had ever before illumined their translucency.
Budde Towers, according to Plabbin's "Guide to Hampshire," lay in the heart of the forest. Built in the days of William the Conqueror, 1066, and William Rufus, 1087, by Sir Francis Budde, it had been inhabited by none but Buddes of each successive generation. Madcap Moll's great-grandfather, Lord Edmund Budde,[4] added a tower here and there when he felt inclined, while her uncle Robert Budde—known from Bournemouth to Lyndhurst as Bounding Bob—built the celebrated picture gallery (which can be viewed to this day by genealogical enthusiasts), the family portraits up to then having been stored in the box-room.
Old Earl Budde, Moll's father, was as crusty an old curmudgeon as one could find in a county. His wife (the lovely Evelyn Wormgate, a daughter of the Duke of Bognor and Wormgate) had died while the radiant Moll was but a puling infant. Thus it was that, knowing no hand of motherly authority, the child perforce ran wild throughout her dazzling adolescence.
The trees were her playmates, the twittering of the birds her music—all the wild things of the forest loved her, specially dogs and children. She knew every woodcutter for miles round by his Christian name. "Why, here's Madcap Moll!" they would say, as the beautiful girl came galloping athwart her mustang, untamed and headstrong as she herself.
This, then, was the priceless jewel which George I., spurred on by an overmastering passion, ordered to be transferred from its rough and homely setting to the ornate luxury of life at Court, where he immediately bestowed upon her the title of Eighth Duchess of Wapping.
It was about a month after her arrival in London that Sir Oswald Cronk painted his celebrated life-size portrait of her in the costly riding-habit which was one of the many gifts of her royal lover. Sir Oswald, with his amazing technique, has managed to convey that suggestion of determination and resolution, one might almost say obstinacy, lying behind the gay, devil-may-care roguishness of her bewitching glance. Her slim, girlish figure he has portrayed with amazing accuracy, also the beautiful negligent manner in which she invariably carried her hunting-crop; her left hand is lovingly caressing the head of her faithful hound, Roger, who, Raymond Waffle informs us, after his mistress's death refused to bury bones anywhere else but on her grave. Ah me! Would that some of our human friends were as unflagging in their affections as the faithful Roger!
Her reign as morganatic queen was remarkable for several scientific inventions of great utility[5]—notably the "pushfast," a machine designed exclusively for the fixing of leather buttons in church hassocks; also Dr. Snaggletooth's cunning device for separating the rind from Camembert cheese without messing the hands! There were in addition to the examples here quoted many minor inventions which, though perhaps not of any individually intrinsic value, went far to illustrate Madcap Moll's influence on the progress of the civilisation of her time.
In Raymond Waffle's rather long-winded record of her life he dwells for several chapters upon the Papist plots which menaced her position at Court. After a visit to several of London's museums, I have discovered that most of the facts he quotes are naught but fallacies. There were undoubtedly plots, but nothing in the least Papist. She had her enemies—who has not? But, as far as religion was concerned, Papists, Protestants, Wesleyans, and occasionally Mahommedans, all joined together in unstinting praise of her character and judgment.