Her dream was short. In those days a wife and her property were the chattels of her husband. Handsome Feilding at once proceeded to materialise his bargain, and at last the termagant was tamed. Terrible was the life he led his aged bride. He took her money from her violently, and when she could not, or would not, give him more, he was in the habit of "drawing his sword and threatening to kill her, swearing it was no more sin to kill her than a dog." At last the terrified old woman, in deadly fear of her life, who had never before been afraid of any one, plucked up the courage to implore the protection of her children.
"Just as I came down here," wrote Lady Wentworth from Twickenham to her son, "I heard that the Duchess of Cleveland's Feilding was dead, and she in great grief for him; but it was no such thing, for instead of that she has got him sent to Newgate for threatening to kill her two sons for taking her part when he beat her and broke open her closet and took £400 out. He beat her sadly, and she cried out 'Murder!' in the street out of her window, and he shot a blunderbuss at the people."
During the legal proceedings which followed she was too terrified to testify against him, and the case was dismissed. But immediately afterwards he was arrested on a charge of bigamy, lodged against him by one Mary Wadsworth, "a jilt of the town," whom it was proved he had married three weeks before the Duchess.
His trial was a cause célèbre. Few have ever lent themselves so conspicuously to the venomous humour of the press. Court and coffee-house alike roared over the satires and lampoons that flooded the town at the expense of these two surviving relics of the rakes of the Restoration. Before the idea of marrying the Duchess had occurred to him, Feilding had promised a Mrs. Villars five hundred pounds if she would help him to marry a Mrs. Deleau, a rich City widow, of whom he had heard but never seen. Mrs. Villars, who was Mrs. Deleau's hairdresser, being anxious to get the bribe, passed off the prostitute, Mary Wadsworth, in her name. At the second meeting they were married by a priest from one of the embassies. Dupe of his dupes, Feilding gave a supper on the occasion, at which, to the delight of the lampooners, he gave the supposed rich Mrs. Feilding a ring inscribed with the words Tibi Soli, as a mark of his passion, offering this sentimental token in a song "from the Greek," addressed to "Ianthe the lovely." By the light of Wycherley's comedies one may imagine the Restoration saturnalia of this wedding feast! When Handsome Feilding discovered the joke played upon him we are not told what he thought, but Mrs. Villars in open court assures us what he did. Having tried to persuade Mary Wadsworth that the marriage was a mere pretence, with sufficient success to enable him to marry the Duchess of Cleveland three weeks later, "it is duly set out that he, the said Robert Feilding, did lock five Locks upon the said Charlotte Henrietta Villars, and did beat and abuse her in a most Barbarous and Cruel manner, and did hold up to her head an Instrument or Weapon being a Hatchet on one side and a Hammer on the other, and did say to the said Charlotte Henrietta Villars that he the said Robert Feilding would slit her skull and nose if she should dare say to the Duchess of Cleveland anything of the marriage."
Freed from this horrible nightmare, a foretaste, perhaps, of what awaited her in the next world, her Grace, with the ribald laughter of the world in her ears, shut herself up, a broken old woman, in her house at Chiswick, and soon died there of "a dropsy which swelled her to an enormous bulk."
Her heirs proved her will the day after her death in greedy haste to secure her supposed wealth. But of the vast sums she had plundered from the State nothing remained; they had vanished like the Restoration. As for Handsome Feilding, he was lucky to escape with a light sentence and have the shelter of the attic of his "Ianthe the lovely" to die in.
It is the commonplace habit of the Duchess of Cleveland's historians to sign their portraits of her with a moral. But such hackneyed reflections on the career of a glorified courtezan of yesterday are not apt. An angry moralist, like a schoolmaster with a birch, is an incapable instructor; his stripes are resented by dissimulation. For our part, in passing by the Duchess of Cleveland, as she hangs, whether one likes it or not, for ever in the Gallery of English History, we feel neither indignation nor sympathy. Perhaps the chief impression we have carried away, with which the reader may also agree, is the arresting contrast between the ribald ha-ha of her dropsical and lonely end and Leigh Hunt's portrait of my Lady Castlemaine at twenty. As it is quite as captivating as any of Lely's it is worth reproducing.
"Lady Castlemaine was dressed in white and green, with an open bodice of pink, looped with diamonds. Her sleeves were green, looped up full on the shoulders with jewelry, and showing the white shift beneath richly trimmed with lace. The bodice was long and close with a very low tucker. The petticoat fell in ample folds, but not so long as to keep the ankles unexposed; and it was relieved from an affluence of too much weight by the very weightiness of the hanging sleeves, which counterpoising its magnitude, and looking flowery with lace and ribbons, left the arms free at the elbows and fell down behind on either side. The hair was dressed wide with ringlets at the cheeks, and the fair vision held a fan in one hand, while the Duke led her by the other. When she had crossed the steps and came walking up the terrace, the looseness of her dress in the bosom, the visibility of her trim ankles, and the flourishing massiveness of the rest of her apparel, produced the effect, not of a woman overdressed, but of a dress displaying a woman; and she came on breathing rosy perfection like the queen of the gardens."