Court Beauties of Old Whitehall: Historiettes of the Restoration

by W. R. H. Trowbridge

The first to emerge from the labyrinth of the Popish Plot was the Duchess of Portsmouth. On her heels came Louis and Barillon. Behind them in the dark groped Shaftesbury and Sunderland, Monmouth and the Prince of Orange, and a host of "faith and freedom" men who were taking French money and salving their consciences by trying to cheat those who gave it to them. The tide of revolution was ebbing fast; a calm succeeded the tempest. Whitehall recovered its gaiety and levity; the Restoration its license; King Charles his health and cynicism. By the help of Louis he believed himself secure for the rest of his life, and he did not care in the least what happened to England and the House of Stuart afterwards. Reresby has given us the following account of a typical day in his life at Newmarket about this time: "He walked in the morning till ten o'clock, then he went to the cock-pit till dinner-time. About three he went to the horse-races; at six he returned to the cock-pit for an hour only. Then he went to the play, though the actors were but of a terrible sort; from thence to supper, then to the Duchess of Portsmouth's till bedtime, and so to his own apartment to take his rest."

In this distribution of his time it will be seen that no mention is made of business. As a matter of fact he did none, because, Parliament being dissolved indefinitely, there was none. Such routine work as there was Sunderland and the Duchess did between them. The only business that the English King was called upon to transact was the signing of the receipt for his French subsidy every quarter, which he managed to get paid in advance. The extraordinary indifference he manifested in his deportment accounts entirely for the Duchess of Portsmouth's continued favour. She had long ceased to be his mistress in anything but name, yet never was her position so secure. She had become one of the habits to which Charles had enslaved himself. The dream of her life had been to appear at Versailles for a brief moment and have the exquisite satisfaction of sitting on her tabouret, and compelling the proud, contemptuous ladies of the French Court to treat her as their equal. And it was now that, absolutely confident of her place, she dared to run the risk of losing it by visiting France. She, however, took the precaution to draw her quarter's pension in advance. Her reception at the Court of France was triumphal. "There has never been a parallel for the treatment she meets with," says Saint-Simon. "When, on a high holiday, she went to visit the Capucines in the Rue St. Honoré, the poor monks, who were told beforehand of her intention, came out processionally to receive her, with cross, holy-water, and incense. They received her just as if she had been the Queen, which threw her all in a heap, as she did not expect so much honour." Perhaps it was at this time that "her portrait as the Madonna with her son as the Child was painted for a rich convent in France, and used as an altar-piece."

Her Grace's ostensible reason for visiting her native country had been to take the waters of Bourbon, and on completing her cure she gave herself the pleasure of visiting Aubigny. So pleased was she with her feudal castle, feudal rights, and feudal acres that she could have received the worst news from England with but little genuine distress. Her presence, however, was required at Whitehall as much by Charles as Louis, and after a four months' holiday she returned to England. Her visit was not without profit. Among the items of private business she transacted during her absence were the investing of her English fortune in French securities; the wheedling of an abbey out of Louis for one of her aunts who was a nun; and her recognition of the Duke of York's right to the Succession, whereby she made a friend of James, whose star was once more in the ascendant.

The splendour of her social success in France was, on her return to Whitehall, reflected in the cordiality with which she was welcomed by the great English peeresses who had formerly snubbed her. Far from losing ground during her absence, she had gained it if possible. The English Court regarded her quite as one of the royal family. She received the foreign envoys even before they presented their credentials to the King. For speaking slightingly of her the Dutch Ambassador was obliged to apologise in person; while for the same reason she complained to Queen Catherine of one of her maids of honour, who was punished for her insolence by the loss of a quarter's salary. She effaced Charles's unfortunate consort more completely even than had the Duchess of Cleveland. In justice to her, however, it must be confessed that her conduct to Catherine was nearly always respectful. From the time of the Popish Plot to the end of the reign, nothing of any importance transpired without her initiative or sanction. When Louis decided that it was time to marry the Princess Anne, the Duchess of Portsmouth provided the necessary husband in Prince George of Denmark. It is true she had many enemies, notably the Duchess of York, who despised her, but none of them dared offend her. She was virtually the proconsul whom Louis XIV. had appointed to govern England, which he had reduced to a "province of France."

So complete was her power that her life dragged monotonously till there came one to colour it in the person of Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prieur de France. This man was the grandson of Henri IV. and the Charmante Gabrielle, and his mother was Mazarin's eldest niece, Laure Mancini, the only one about whom there was never any scandal, and who had died shortly after his birth. He was, consequently, a nephew of the Duchesse de Mazarin. He was also the younger brother of the famous Duc de Vendôme of whom Saint-Simon has said so many infamous things. But perhaps his special attraction in the eyes of the Duchess of Portsmouth was that he was the nephew of the Duc de Beaufort, her first lover, and the man who had given her her first start in life. He had been banished from France, for what reason is not clear. Perhaps it was for the cowardice he had displayed in action, for he was an arrant coward and braggart. "He slipped out of a duel," says Forneron, "about the Duchesse de Ludre with M. de Vivonne by riding off to the country and out of the army on the eve of the battle in which Turenne was killed." Be this as it may, he had been obliged to quit France. Like most exiles in the seventeenth century, his personal knowledge of the various countries of Europe was extensive and intimate—especially of the "night-life" of Courts and capitals. Among his adventures was the partnership, terminable without notice, that he formed at Rome with his cousin, the Duchesse de Mazarin's daughter, the Marquise de Richelieu, "a wanderer like himself." If one may believe Saint-Simon, whose portraits of the Vendôme brothers are of the kind that one is inclined to consign to the flames with the tongs, the Grand Prieur "never went to bed sober during thirty years, but was always carried there dead drunk; was a liar, a swindler, and a thief; a rogue to the marrow of his bones, rotted with vile diseases, the most contemptible and yet most dangerous fellow in the world."

Saint-Simon made these agreeable remarks about the Grand Prieur many years after his visit to England. At the time the Duchess of Portsmouth "retained him in London with a tenderness so undisguised as to excite the raillery of the whole Court," he was a handsome and attractive rake of twenty-eight. At first mere love of notoriety made him pay his attentions to the Duchess, who, from some motive best known to herself, appeared to be flattered by them, whereupon King Charles did the Grand Prieur the honour to be jealous of him. As a scandal was the last thing the prematurely worn-out epicurean Charles wished, he dared not show his jealousy openly by ordering Vendôme out of the country. He preferred to apply to Barillon to help him get rid of his odious rival. Barillon, at once alarmed at the consequences the King's jealousy might have upon the Duchess of Portsmouth's position, expostulated with the Grand Prieur. But the grandson of Henri IV. and the charming Gabrielle, recognising from Charles's jealousy and Barillon's anxiety to what profit to himself he could put certain letters her Grace had had the imprudence to write him, refused to quit Whitehall. Tableau: Charles in a white-hot rage (very, very rare with him); the Duchess of Portsmouth in terror; Barillon in a state of stupefaction. Louis, however, helped her Grace out of her scrape by paying the blackmailing Grand Prieur his price, which was the privilege to return to France.

There is no proof whatever that the Duchess was guilty in this affair of anything more serious than the indiscretion of confiding to paper the fascination her dashing countryman had for her. And though her name was coupled wantonly with the Duke of Monmouth, Sunderland, and her favourite minister Danby, it is perhaps safe to say that the Duchess of Portsmouth was the most faithful to Charles of all his mistresses. Certainly, in spite of the ennui the security of her power might have induced, she never again ran the risk of dissipating it by flirtations with unprincipled Grand Prieurs.

Ennui, however, was not an emotion that even a Duchess of Portsmouth, sated with power, could long experience at such a Court as Whitehall. Shortly after her Vendôme fright came the Rye House Plot. This plot within a plot had for its object the guaranteeing of the Protestant Succession. It was really the backwash of the Popish Plot, and was the last vain effort of Shaftesbury to regain power by compelling Charles to summon a Parliament, in which he and his party intended by a coup d'état to humble or, if necessary, to banish the dynasty. By some fatality a group of fanatical Protestants were at the same time independently conspiring to bring about Shaftesbury's end by murdering both Charles and the Duke of York. One of their number proved a traitor. Charles was warned and the assassins captured. The Court, which was perfectly aware of the political aspirations of Shaftesbury and his party, unscrupulously but adroitly seized the opportunity to implicate the principal members of the Protestant or Whig party in the Assassination Plot of which they were wholly ignorant. Never was a triumph more remorseless and complete. With Shaftesbury fled and the others beheaded, the Catholics more than got their revenge for what they had suffered at the time of the Popish Plot. There was no longer any question but that the Duke of York would succeed his brother and France continue to direct the policy of England. Louis XIV. promptly seized Luxemburg. The Grand Siècle was now at its zenith.

The French king, however, was not destined to drink deep of the wine of success; the cup he had so craftily fashioned was to be dashed from his lips by William of Orange, and his fair vineyard utterly devastated by the Duke of Marlborough. But who now would have thought, while under a cloudless sky Louis pressed the juice from his grapes, that at fifty-five Charles II.'s race was run? Or that in three short years "France's Poland" would have for ever freed herself from the Sun King? Certainly not the Duchess of Portsmouth, when one Sunday night in February, 1685, Death entered the Grand Gallery at Whitehall, and in a twinkling confounded all the deep and cunning intrigues of the subtlest brains in Europe.