For these two passions, money and men, consumed her between them. After one of their quarrels Charles gave her £30,000 to pay her debts; after another he made her a present of Berkshire House, a splendid property near St. James's Palace; after yet another her dukedom. But titles were of as little account to this woman with the blood of the Villiers in her veins as silver in the time of King Solomon. What she coveted was cash—cash to squander upon her pleasures, cash to pay her huge debts, cash to stimulate her lovers. As Burnet says of her, "she was enormously ravenous"; so the Customs were farmed for her benefit to the extent of ten thousand a year; likewise she mulcted the revenue derived from the tax on beer of a similar sum, and the Post Office of half this amount annually. But this great income was as nothing compared to the vast sums paid her from the Irish Treasury, instead of from the English, because the corruption was less easily to be detected. As for the Privy Purse, she never went shopping without it. "Make a note that this is to be paid for out of the Privy Purse," she used to say to her maid when anything in the London shops took her fancy. Further, during the period that my Lady Castlemaine played the Montespan to Charles's Louis, all offices that fell vacant, whether spiritual or temporal, were auctioned for her benefit. And, like the true courtezan she was, this literal shower of gold in which she lived ran off her like water through a sieve.
One night she lost £25,000 at play, and her usual stake on a cast was from £1,000 to £1,500. Money had neither meaning nor value for her, but she wanted it and was prepared to get it at all costs. Once too, like the harlot again, she stripped Charles of everything, so that he himself lacked linen and the very servants at Whitehall had not bread to eat!
This abnormal appetite, which consumed even the money set aside for the purchase of the royal stationery, was the concomitant symptom of the nymphomania from which she suffered—a disease perfectly well known to medical science. Without some such explanation it seems impossible to us to account for the innumerable infidelities that Lady Castlemaine indulged in while maîtresse en titre. As Charles had some knowledge of medicine and chemistry, and was very far from being a fool—as the beautiful shrew once called him to his face—one is almost tempted to hazard the suggestion, as an explanation of his long bondage to this woman, that he found a scientific excuse for her conduct which has been overlooked by historians. Be this as it may, it was not long before the lovely Lady Castlemaine found room again for others beside the King in her capacious heart.
To enumerate her lovers, the number of whom exceeded the King's, would not only be impossible but scarcely amusing. Of this legion devoted to the worship of Priapus there are a few, however, that may be cited. As Lady Castlemaine consumed money irrespective of the source from which it was derived, so she never gave a thought to the rank from which her lovers were recruited. My Lady Castlemaine's taste in men was thoroughly catholic. From Barkeley and Hamilton her fancy flitted to her cousin, Buckingham, one of the most extraordinary men of an extraordinary age, of whom more later. From this great Duke what she termed her affections roamed through the various grades of society, and finally rested on a "compound of Hercules and Adonis," who supplemented his living on the tight-rope. With this man, Jacob Hall, she was, as Pepys would say, so "besotted" for a time that she gave him a salary, diverting the money for this purpose from a sum voted by Parliament for the National Defence. From the rope-dancer, who is said to have treated her after her own vituperative fashion, she probably suffered less than from the polished villainy of Buckingham.
Nor, when the ice of the trough on which we are skating is cracking under our feet, should we fail to mention the actor, Hart, a great-nephew of Shakespeare. Her liaison with this handsome and justly celebrated tragic actor had apparently a less voluptuous motive than such amours usually had with her. Pepys, gossiping with Mrs. Knipp, the actress, in his customary prurient curiosity to glean news from any source, learns that "my Lady Castlemaine is mightily in love with Hart, of their house; and he is much with her in private, and she goes to him and do give him many presents; and that the thing is most certain, and by this means she is even with the King's love to Mrs. Davis." (Moll Davis, an "impertinent slut" of an actress, and as beautiful and brazen as my Lady Castlemaine herself.) As one of many instances of the bond, of which history does not afford a parallel, between a king and a maîtresse en titre this attempt of Lady Castlemaine to get "even with" Charles is striking.
How the ice cracks under us!
It is not always on dukes and rope-dancers, actors and dandies that my Lady Castlemaine casts her hungry glance. No one, provided he be fair and shapely to the eye, escapes her attention. History does not relate the number of times Chiffinch let her through that little gate at Whitehall by which the crowd of duchesses, actresses, and meaner beauties passed secretly to and from the private closet of Majesty. But on one of these masked assignations, as my Lady Castlemaine scuttled down the back-stairs, she spied with her observant eyes a page loitering there. The page passed after that meeting with the King's mistress from the back-stairs of Whitehall to the stage, assassination plots, and many a questionable adventure, but for nigh on twenty years my Lady Castlemaine was "interested" in him. His shallow, handsome head being turned, Goodman boasted openly of the patronage he enjoyed. Once at the theatre—it was in William and Mary's time—the audience being seated, the Queen in her box, and the curtain ready to rise, he shouted from behind the scenes to inquire "whether his duchess had come," and forbade the raising of the curtain till she should appear. Fortunately at that moment her Grace of Cleveland arrived and Queen Mary was spared the insult of having to wait an actor's pleasure. Such was her passion for this scoundrel that she was content to share his affections with his wife and another woman of the town. But this was at a later period when her money and rank rather than her charms attracted.
Perhaps no better instance of the morals of the Restoration could be cited than the manner in which this female Don Juan commenced her notorious acquaintance with Wycherley. He was at the time a good-looking young man, in the bud of his dramatic career, and she was a middle-aged woman with such a past! He had, with design to secure her patronage, flattered her in his play, "Love in a Wood, or a Night in St. James's Park" (!), just then running to crowded houses, when she passed him one morning in her carriage in Pall Mall. With the gross humour of Restoration manners she shouted at him a low epithet that might with perfect justice and much more fittingly have been applied to her own sons. He at once turned, and the following dialogue, according to Dennis, Pope, and others, took place:—
"Madam," said Wycherley, "you have been pleased to bestow on me a title which generally belongs to the fortunate. Will your ladyship be at the play to-night?"