And challenged you to fight;
And he so stood to lose his blood,
But had a dreadful fright.
Among minor figures about the court two of the most familiar were Lord Lifford and his sister, Lady Charlotte de Roussie. They were the children of a Count de Roussie, a French Protestant who came over to England with William of Orange in 1688, and was created by him Earl of Lifford in the peerage of Ireland. They were typical courtiers of the baser sort, and would perform the meanest offices and indulge in the grossest flattery in order to win some rays of the royal favour. They were not popular with any of the English people about the court. Hervey tells us: “They had during four reigns subsisted upon the scanty charity of the English Court. They were constantly, every night in the country and three nights in the town, alone with the King or Queen for an hour or two before they went to bed, during which time the King walked about and talked to the brother of arms, or to the sister of genealogies, whilst the Queen nodded and yawned, till from yawning she came to nodding, and nodding to snoring. These two miserable Court drudges, who were in a more constant waiting than any of the pages of the backstairs, were very simple and very quiet, did nobody any hurt, nor anybody but His Majesty any pleasure, who paid them so ill for all their assiduity and slavery that they were not only not in affluence, but laboured under the disagreeable burdens of small debts, which £1,000 would have paid, and had not an allowance from the Court, that enabled them to appear there even in the common decency of clean clothes. The King nevertheless was always saying how well he loved them, and calling them the best people in the world, but though he never forgot their goodness he never remembered their poverty.”
Another foreign dependent was Schütz, a Hanoverian. Pope, who had lost the favour of the Court, was very bitter upon those who retained it; in one of his ballads he sings:—
Alas! like Schütz I cannot pun,
Like Grafton court the Germans,
Tell Pickenbourg how slim she’s grown,
Like Meadows run to sermons.
Hervey satirises Schütz’s dulness as follows:—