Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!"
[BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND]
A COURTEZAN OF THE RESTORATION
THE difference between Hortense Mancini and Barbara Villiers is the difference between the refinement and the grossness of vice. If we had met them in fiction we should have said that the former might have been created by Balzac and the latter by Zola. The history of Barbara Villiers is like a study of the progress of vice.
At the first glance it would seem that such a statement was calculated to cause the respectable reader to skip the following biographical account of this British Imperia. But on considering that her name must possess some powerful interest for the imagination, from the quantity of ink that has been spilt over it, and the impassioned diatribes it has inspired, we are inclined to believe that what we have to relate of the famous beauty will fire rather than extinguish curiosity. For no emotion is so pleasant to most of us creatures of circumstance as that of righteous indignation, and that is what her Grace of Cleveland usually excites. Yet it has always seemed to us one of the strangest psychological phenomena that men should fly into a literary passion over the iniquities of persons who have been dead for centuries. Personally, we have never been able, like most people, to look upon Nero as if he were a notorious criminal of our own day, whose trial at the Old Bailey filled a column or two in the morning papers. Nor can we work ourselves up to any heat over a profligate woman, who lived two hundred years ago when she enjoyed considerable public esteem, as if she were still living, when we should, no doubt, have her arrested, tried, and given the full penalty of the law. No people are more ridiculous than the literary policemen who nab historical offenders and prosecute them at the bar of a remote posterity, unless it be the literary whitewashers who defend the same criminals at the same bar. Such convictions and acquittals of the dead are like a burlesque of Justice which lacks the sense of humour. One should remember that Charles II., with all his vices so repugnant to us now, was perhaps from first to last the most popular king that ever sat upon the English throne. People talk of the whole period of the Restoration as if he personally were responsible for its shameless license, quite ignoring the well-known fact that the nation was heartily tired of the "weel-spread looves and lang, wry faces" of the Cromwellian régime. Instead of heaping a late ignominy upon him, it would be more sensible, if equally impractical, to arraign the British people who made him possible. He was but the crowned representative of their own unbridled vices. To us this man, who "never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," seems, at the distance we have got from him, to be as imaginary as if he had occurred in one of Oscar Wilde's comedies. After two hundred years to treat him seriously is out of the question. His answer to an indignant generation he knows not might very well be his own cynical laugh.
From this it must not be supposed that we intend to flatter the memory of Barbara Villiers. On the contrary, we should prefer to forget her, but this the period in which she lived will not permit us. No mention of the Restoration would be possible without reference to her. So, as we are obliged to consider her, we shall imagine that the "trough of Zolaism" in which we have found her is frozen, and try to skate on it without breaking through.
If Hortense Mancini was non-moral, Barbara Villiers was immoral; she was consciously, unblushingly, gratuitously vicious. There might have been some excuse on grounds of heredity and education for Hortense, but it is impossible to find any excuse whatever for Barbara. It was said of her, when created Duchess of Cleveland, that "the King might add to her titles, but nothing to her birth." She was a Villiers. From her father who died at Oxford, when she was an infant, from wounds received at the battle of Edgehill in the Royalist cause, she should have inherited all the virtues. He must indeed have been a very noble character to judge from the panegyrics pronounced at his death, even by those belonging to a party bitterly opposed to his. But so little did she resemble him, that when we first meet her we find her at sixteen in London—whither she had come to live with her stepfather on the death of her mother—engaged in an intrigue with the second Earl of Chesterfield, a young widower five years her senior, gifted with very agreeable manners and a fine head of hair. That she was allowed full control of her actions by her stepfather may be taken for granted from the following letter addressed to Chesterfield:—
My Lord,
"My friend" (Lady Anne Hamilton) "and I are now abed together contriving how to get your company this afternoon. If you deserve this favour, you will come and seek us at Ludgate Hill at about three o'clock at Butler's shop, where we will expect you, &c."