"I shall be a duchess," decided La Belle Stuart.
Every carnal inclination, if one of so cold and passionless a temperament was capable of being tempted, was subjected to her end. A girl of sixteen who can reason like this may be a coquette, immodest in her actions, impure in her thoughts, and open to slanderous imputations, but she must of necessity be a prude. La Belle Stuart was one par excellence; in her the hypocrisy of prudery was double-distilled. The situation in which she found herself was the only possible one open to her. The road to her goal was a filthy and dangerous quagmire; she took it fearlessly, never once lost her presence of mind, and by trusting in a remarkable degree to herself, arrived safely at her destination. Frivolous, shallow, brainless, childish are some of the epithets that have been applied to her; but to us she seems to have possessed an exceptionally subtle intelligence and power of calculation which, as Clarendon declared, she "used for the convenience of her own fortune." No; whatever she was, La Belle Stuart was not a fool.
To Lady Castlemaine belonged the honour of "discovering" the new beauty. Confident of her own charms, and partly from a real liking, partly to use the appearance of friendship to cloak her intrigue with Jermyn, the maîtresse en titre patronised the maid of honour, displayed the greatest fondness for her, and almost forced her upon the King's notice. It was not long before Charles, who knew a pretty woman when he saw her, became "besotted with Miss Stuart" to such an extent that he would kiss her for half an hour at a time, quite regardless of observation. Such proceedings, at Whitehall of all places, afforded the necessary amount of food on which scandal thrives. Lady Castlemaine tore her hair and roundly abused her quondam friend, the "besotted" King became love-sick for the first and only time in his life, and La Belle Stuart defied the one and tormented the other almost out of his senses, staining her reputation, if you like, but keeping her virtue intact. This state of affairs lasted with varying degrees of intensity for about five years. It was like a great war in which battles and sieges, campaigns and winter quarters, followed regularly from year to year.
The political aspirations that spring from the soil on which the vivifying beams of royalty have fallen never lack reapers. The wily crew of sharpers who hung about my Lady Castlemaine for sake of what they could pick up, no sooner perceived the passion that La Belle Stuart had inspired in Charles than they gathered around her. Considering the witless, ingenuous character that, judging from her behaviour, the beautiful maid of honour was supposed to possess, never was there a finer opportunity for those politicians, who, like pickpockets, were planning at Lady Castlemaine's how to steal the seals of office from the statesman Clarendon. Had La Belle Stuart been the fool that they took her for, not only they, but Charles himself might have succeeded. But along the dirty and dangerous road she was going not a pitfall escaped her; to save herself from slipping she shod herself in dissimulation. The little prude, whose indifference of the benefits of the King's passion was only matched by her indifference of Lady Castlemaine's hate, encouraged the King, Lady Castlemaine, and the whole Court to attribute her "simplicity" to lack of intelligence. To save herself from Charles it was not sufficient merely to play the prude, he was capable of overpowering prudery by brute force. La Belle Stuart took advantage of her youth to play the child as well. Never was beauty so silly; she laughed at everything, and affected tastes suited to a girl of twelve or thirteen. "She was a child," said Hamilton, who was duped like everybody else, "in all respects save playing with dolls."
Blindman's-buff and hunt the slipper were her favourite games, and the charm with which she invested these romps gave them a vogue. Pepys saw some of the greatest personages at Court sitting on the floor in the gallery at Whitehall playing at "I love my love with an A, because he is so-and-so," and "I hate him with a B, because of this and that." "Some of them," he added, "were very witty," which we can very well believe. There was, too, not infrequently a dash of malice in her artlessness. It was, perhaps, not altogether for effect that she chose the presence-chamber in which to let her childishness speak for her, by interrupting the deepest play with an ingenuous but imperious command that the cards should be given her to build castles with!
These artifices, which were cleverly designed as an armour for her prudery, increased the King's passion and protected her from it, both of which to one with La Belle Stuart's end in view were necessary aids. To Buckingham and Company the idea of governing such a "simpleton," and thus ingratiating themselves with the King, was enticing. To them the road to power by means of one who appeared to have as little ambition as she had experience, was infinitely more attractive than by means of such a woman as my Lady Castlemaine, whose terms staggered even the Cabal, and who was quite capable of bringing every one of them to the scaffold. The Duke of Buckingham, whose genius was as universal as it was the subtlest of the unprincipled gang of self-seekers at Whitehall, lost no time in cultivating the new favourite.
La Belle Stuart was fond, or pretended to be, of music; the Duke of Bucks had a sweet voice. She, like all prudes, was not averse to scandal; his Grace was both the father and mother of scandal, and gifted with a particular talent of mimicry. He sang to her and told her stories by the hour; and when it came to romping and other childishness, no one could build finer towers of cards. He was equal to every occasion. To outwit such a man was difficult, to fail to was dangerous; one false step, and La Belle Stuart's career at Whitehall would have been ruined irretrievably. The "silly" creature realised this, and did her best, not to win his friendship—that would have been "silly," the Duke of Buckingham had no more principle in friendship than in anything else—but to use him to further her ends. Had it been possible there is no doubt but that she would have married him, and thus gained at once the position she craved. For the Duke of Buckingham was, as far as rank went, a first-class grandee, extremely handsome, and equally fascinating. The Puritan Fairfax had been so charmed with him as to give him his daughter in marriage, to the anger of Cromwell who himself would like to have stood in the same relation to him. La Belle Stuart found him so entertaining that she would send for him to come and "play" with her whenever she felt bored. But, alas, for his too clever Grace! The "simpleton" was so beautiful. In a moment of weakness he discovered a passion himself for his would-be dupe. The repulse he received from the artless child, suddenly turned prude, was so severe as to compromise him with the King. Instead of ruling her, he was forced now to be ruled by her. Poor Villiers! how irksome the building of card-castles must have become!
Nor where Buckingham failed did others succeed. The subtlety with which it was necessary to repulse him would have been wasted on Arlington. So La Belle Stuart treated the attempt of this stupid and unscrupulous mediocrity to make her his political cat's-paw by bursting out laughing in his face. Her exceedingly keen sense of humour—one of her many charms for Charles—was tickled by the absurd gravity with which he played his game. For, said the inimitable Hamilton, "having provided himself with a great number of maxims and some historical anecdotes, he obtained an audience of Miss Stuart, in order to display them; at the same time offering her his most humble services in the situation to which it had pleased God, and her virtue, to raise her. But he was only in the preface of his speech, when she recollected that he was at the head of those whom the Duke of Buckingham used to mimic," and Arlington and his intrigues were laughed away.
That the consummate prude was quite alive to the value of reporting to the King the unsuccessful attempts on her chastity, as well as the political designs on her influence, may be taken for granted. Yet though La Belle Stuart had no inclination for political intrigue—and what is indeed stranger, no greed of gain, though very poor—she was remarkably wide awake where her own advantage was concerned. It is possible that the prudery which kept her virtue safe, while destroying her reputation—the loss of which at such a Court was almost unavoidable—may have been the effect of a temperament incapable of passion. We know that she never loved, and when married never had children. But if naturally prudish, La Belle Stuart made full use of the profit to be derived from such moral infirmity. It certainly never occurred to her, or her cunning mother, when she arrived at Whitehall from France and fascinated Charles, to dream of playing there the rôle of Anne Boleyn. Catherine of Braganza was a young and complaisant Queen, and Charles, though a faithless husband, respected her. But as time passed and the desire of all kings—save Frederick the Great—for issue became more and more remote, intrigue lifted its snaky head and threatened the helpless Portuguese.