Court Beauties of Old Whitehall: Historiettes of the Restoration

by W. R. H. Trowbridge

Of mimic'd statesmen, and their merry king.

No wit, to flatter, left of all his store!

No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.

There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,

And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends."

As for Lady Shrewsbury, she was not only compelled to separate from her lover and provide a surety of ten thousand pounds to that effect, but obliged to leave the country. There were thousands of honest people who would, no doubt, have liked to see her burnt or hanged, as would probably have been her fate had she been a woman of the people. But Lady Shrewsbury was a peeress and the widow of a Talbot, and criminal rank in those days was banished not executed. She had not committed the aristocratic crime of high treason, for which alone rank could suffer death. There was, however, a very irksome durance to which offenders of her sex and station were subjected, and in banishing her to Dunkirk Charles obliged her to retire to a convent. How long she remained there, or what intrigues finally freed her from what to such a woman must have been a rigorous imprisonment, history does not relate. As far as the public were concerned she had ceased to exist.

Lady Shrewsbury was, however, very much alive, and having spun her web round the younger son of a Somerset baronet, she married him, and under the name of Mrs. Bridges played a secret and dangerous game in the coming years. For her passions having burnt themselves out, from their ashes sprang a fresh lust—the lust of political intrigue. Its victim was her eldest son, the new Earl of Shrewsbury. A boy when his father was slain, he had resented the ignominy of having to live with his mother under Buckingham's roof; and though the spirit which urged him to appeal to the House of Lords that he and his brother might be removed from the care of such a mother was nipped in the bud, nevertheless it was sufficient to make both children distasteful to Buckingham. They were sent to their maternal grandfather, Lord Cardigan, to whom the young Earl owed his education. At the time his mother married Bridges he was one of the most promising young peers in England. A worthier representative of the proud line from which he sprung it had, perhaps, never had. Gifted with great personal beauty (his mother's legacy) and a shy, gentle manner, he at once attracted all who met him. The seriousness of his character corresponded with the high hopes he raised. Born in a profligate and indulgent age, he had, like most young men of spirit, yearned to taste all the pleasures of the senses. With the blood of such a mother in his veins, to resist desire was impossible. He tasted the cup of vice. It intoxicated him, and in that moment of delirious pleasure it seemed to him, as to many another youth before and since, that to be the slave of lust was a fate more enviable than that of the conqueror of the world. The reputation of being a "king of hearts," a title satirically applied to him at this period, he never quite lost. But this young Talbot was not one of your commonplace striplings who sway like reeds before the wind. He had a thoughtful, intelligent mind and a great ambition. Already, by "a very critical and anxious inquiry into matters of controversy," assisted by the celebrated Tillotson, the young nobleman, a Roman Catholic by birth, heredity, and education, had publicly professed his adherence to the Anglican faith. A youth who could of his own initiative reason himself into taking such a step was not to be long entangled by vice. The world was to be won, and he meant to win it; he would be the greatest of all the Talbots, the champion of liberty, the hope of Protestant England. It was a noble ambition, and the times were favourable.

But from the very start two influences stronger than he pulled him back at every step he took. One of these was his temperament. The conduct of his mother, the death of his father, and that of a dearly loved only brother—who within five days of his twenty-first birthday was killed in a duel by one of the Duchess of Cleveland's bastards—had combined to deepen the morbid tendencies of a naturally hyper-sensitive nature. To the influence of these terrible family tragedies was added that of a perpetual and vain struggle to subdue the lust he had inherited. He lived, as it were, under the shadow of some fatal curse which seemed to predestine all his actions to failure. Knowing full well the value of self-confidence, he doubted himself constantly, and, like a man from the brink of a precipice, was ever recoiling from great crises which he had enthusiastically helped to create. With all the wish in the world, he had not the will to be brave. And life demanded bravery, spirit, initiative from him at every turn.

The other influence fatal to his career was his mother. He could never rid himself from the fear in which he stood of her. To the Countess of Shrewsbury, become now as fierce and vindictive in political intrigue as she had formerly been in her amours, such a son was an asset of the highest value. Married to her second husband, middle-aged, and buried in a remote part of the country, the once notorious Messalina had long ceased to be remembered. But there lived not in England in that day of plots and counterplots a more inveterate conspirator. In the obscurity of her retired life she was steeped to the throat in intrigue. Long before the Revolution she was a spy and pensioner of the French King, and with the fall of the Stuarts, under whom she had fared so safely, she became, as was natural, a rabid Jacobite. The young Earl, her son, long separated from her, was developing on quite opposite lines. In the endeavour to realise his ideals, the year before the Revolution he showed his disapproval of King James's policy by resigning all his Court appointments, and in 1688, in behalf of the cause of freedom he had publicly professed, joined the party that deprived the stubborn, stupid Stuart of his throne. It was natural, as Miss Strickland says, that this young man "might be considered (when all his advantages were computed) the mightiest power among the aristocracy of Great Britain." William of Orange, like all great statesmen, was quick to recognise talent; he readily offered high office to this young Earl of Shrewsbury who had helped to make him King of England, and on whom such high popular hopes were built. It may be said that a young career never bloomed under a more vivifying sun.