Of the beauty for which "the Lovely Jennings" had been so celebrated at Whitehall, when she scattered the Duke of York's love-billets "like hailstones around her," there had long ceased to remain the slightest trace.
["WANTON SHREWSBURY"—LADY ANNA MARIA BRUDENELL, COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY]
A MESSALINA OF THE RESTORATION
IN all ages there are persons of whom it may be said that they have been born out of their proper era. The manner in which such beings are received by the times in which they find themselves depends entirely on the standard of public opinion then existing. The Countess of Shrewsbury was one of these strange individuals. She should have flourished in France under the Valois and the great Dumas should have been her historian. In times like our own, for instance—for whether in or out of her proper period her individuality was too striking to have permitted her to pass unnoticed—she would undoubtedly have proved the truth of the verse that declares—
"Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows' need."
It was certainly fortunate for her that Fate did not retard her appearance until after the Stuarts had vanished. As it was, even the Restoration looked askance at her; and it was only to her rank that she owed the immunity she enjoyed. There was a magic in rank in those days that secured liberty for its crimes. And no name appeared grander to the popular imagination than that of Talbot.
In the remote past when, first coming out of Normandy into Britain, that family of which Tyrconnel was the most illustrious representative had settled in Ireland, its titular chief had remained in England. From him in the course of the centuries had sprung a line which yielded to none in pride of birth. Before the Howards or Percys had been heard of the English Talbots had become famous. One family alone boasted a more ancient lineage. This was de Vere, of which at the time we are now contemplating Aubrey, twentieth Earl of Oxford, was the last of his race. Since the fifteenth century the earldom of Shrewsbury had been the chief of the many dignities honourably borne by the head of the Talbots—a title whose unbroken succession the family boasts down to the present day. At the Restoration this distinguished house was represented by the eleventh of the line. He was a colourless aristocrat who, the year before the return of the Stuarts, had been married in London to his second wife, Lady Anna Maria Brudenell, daughter of the Earl of Cardigan, by a Justice of the Peace in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.