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COURT BEAUTIES OF OLD WHITEHALL

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Cloth, 6s.

A DAZZLING REPROBATE.

A GIRL OF THE MULTITUDE.

THE SITUATIONS OF LADY PATRICIA.

Paper Cover, 1s.; Crown, 2s.

THE LETTERS OF HER MOTHER TO ELIZABETH.

THE GRANDMOTHER'S ADVICE TO ELIZABETH.

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN

COURT BEAUTIES OF
OLD WHITEHALL
HISTORIETTES OF
THE RESTORATION
BY
W. R. H. TROWBRIDGE

WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS

"A Court without fair women is like a year without a spring, a spring-time without flowers."

A Sigh of Francis I., when prisoner in Spain

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MCMVI

[All rights reserved.]

TO
ETHEL and HERBERT NICOL

[Preface]

IF we may believe so eminent an authority as M. Emile Bourgeois, whose "Le Grand Siècle," is a fascinating proof of his statement, "the age we live in delights in inquiry into the private lives of the great and into the spirit of society of the past. It loves to interrogate them directly, so that it may get at the secrets of their passions and find out their state of mind at different periods. This curiosity is not culpable. 'It almost ceases to be curiosity,' said Voltaire, 'when it has epochs and men who attract the gaze of posterity for its object.'"

Such an epoch in English history is par excellence the Restoration. It is a subject on which an immense number of books has been written. Of the eight beautiful women whose extraordinary careers are described in the following pages, the names of all are probably more or less familiar to the reader, while some—such as "Madame" and the Duchess of Portsmouth—have provided several historians with themes that have elevated them to the proud height of classical authority. Forneron's "Louise de Kéroual" is not only a monumental study of the English Restoration, but a fascinating romance and a work of real literary merit. And many distinguished writers, from the spirituelle Madame de La Fayette down to M. Anatole France, have found in the life of "Madame," the most brilliant of all the Stuarts, a constant source of inspiration.

To enter, therefore, into competition with such a galaxy of talent would seem almost presumptuous, more especially as this book makes no claim to literary erudition or grace. On the contrary, my object has been not to paint finished portraits of beautiful women, but rather to popularise characters who helped to colour one of the most memorable periods of our history. From this point of view the Restoration will be found to be a mine containing a vein from which ore may still be extracted—the ore of amusement from the vein of curiosity.

As regards the illustrations, I am especially obliged to—

The Duc de Guiche for obtaining for me the permission of his father, the Duc de Gramont, to engrave his portrait of Armand, Comte de Guiche. This portrait is, I believe, the only one of the Comte de Guiche known to exist, and is now published for the first time.

I am also indebted to Earl Spencer, the Earl of Sandwich, Dr. G. C. Williamson, and the Strand Magazine for their courtesy in granting me permission to reproduce the portraits respectively of the Countess of Shrewsbury, the Duchesse de Mazarin, "Madame," and the medals of the Duchess of Richmond.

*****

A list of the principal sources from which the information necessary to compile this book has been gathered is herewith appended:—

W. R. H. TROWBRIDGE.

London, February, 1906.

[Contents]

[List of Illustrations]

[HORTENSE MANCINI, DUCHESSE DE MAZARIN]
AN ADVENTURESS OF THE RESTORATION

IT was the dream of Richelieu, as everybody knows, to make the French monarchy independent and absolute. This dream was only half realised when the Cardinal died, but as he was too astute not to foresee that after his death there would be a violent reaction against his policy, he had sought a successor who would be capable of finishing what he was obliged to leave undone. He found the man he wanted in an obscure Italian, who proved in the end to be even more subtle and slippery than his Eminence Rouge himself. It was not so much hatred of Mazarin that inspired the civil war with which France was rent during the childhood of Louis XIV. as inarticulate hatred of Richelieu's statecraft. The Fronde was the dernière espérance of a proud and turbulent nobility bent on reducing their King to the condition of a Venetian doge. This revolt against the throne ended with the complete triumph of Mazarin—a triumph embellished by the passion with which he inspired the haughty, treacherous Anne of Austria. There are men who on finding themselves in his shoes would have given free rein to ambition and desire. The sly Italian adventurer, however, apparently considered himself sufficiently recompensed by amassing the greatest fortune in Europe and winning the heart of a queen. Having "arrived," as we say nowadays, the Cardinal sent to Rome for the children of his sister, Hieronima Mancini, to come to France and share his prosperity.

Five little girls and a little boy, perfectly beautiful children, according to all accounts, on receipt of this invitation were got ready as soon as possible, and sent off to the Palais Mazarin in Paris, where they had a king and his brother for playmates. Few children ever had more splendid advantages—certainly no children in that day—and none ever benefited less by them. Perhaps it was not altogether their fault, for though affectionate and intelligent they were afflicted with an incurable spiritual infirmity. The Mancinis altogether lacked the moral sense. Furthermore, the system of education to which they were subjected, with its espionage and inducements to deceit, coupled with the demoralising mixture of indulgence and severity with which their uncle treated them, was anything but calculated to correct the faults of nature. These quick-witted, wilful children were, as retribution for his sins, said his enemies, constantly dashing the hopes and outraging the feelings of their uncle, whose life within the splendid walls of the Palais Mazarin they caused to resemble that Fronde with which he had battled so desperately in the State.

"At least," he used to plead when they objected to hearing Mass, "if you don't hear it for God's sake, hear it for the world's."

But the Mancinis never showed the slightest aptitude for learning lessons in hypocritical respectability; vice with them was ever naked and unashamed.

The Cardinal had intended, as was but natural, to leave his immense fortune and his name, which he desired to perpetuate, to his nephew, Philip, on whom he had already bestowed the title of Duc de Nevers. But this young man, who had as little brains as he afterwards lacked importance, took it into his head one Good Friday to celebrate Mass over a pig, an enormity that cost him Mazarin's name and fortune. In other respects the Duc de Nevers was a harmless nonentity and turned out well—for a Mancini. He seems to have spent the greater part of his useless life in composing doggerel verses which he addressed to his sisters. The names of these celebrated beauties were Laure, Olympe, Marie, Hortense, and Marie Anne. The Cardinal married the first to the grandson of the "Charmante Gabrielle" and Henri IV., by whom she had a son destined fifty years later to win renown in the Marlborough Wars as the Duc de Vendôme, a man whose memory Saint-Simon has preserved for us in vitriol. Laure was the only one of Mazarin's nieces on whom there is no slur. She died young.

The youngest, Marie Anne, became the Duchesse de Bouillon. She had the ready wit of all the Mancinis, and her repartees in the "Poison Affair," the cause célèbre of the reign of Louis XIV., should still be remembered, as well as her patronage of La Fontaine. Her life was, on the whole, decorous enough, according to the seventeenth-century standard of propriety, but, while more or less eventful, extremely uninteresting by contrast with that of Olympe, Marie, and Hortense. It is these three that one means when one mentions Mazarin's nieces. They gave Europe much to talk of in their day, and have given it much to write about since.

It was lucky for Olympe that she was not born in the present century; if she had lived now she would probably have spent the greater portion of her career in prison and died on the gallows. But with over two hundred years between her and us she seems rather picturesque. Brought up in the same nursery, so to speak, with Louis XIV. and his contemptible brother, Philippe d'Orléans, Olympe Mancini aspired to be Queen of France. This splendid destiny seemed possible of fulfilment, for the young King was smitten and the Cardinal was favourable. But if Anne of Austria was ready enough to be Mazarin's mistress, she objected to marrying her son to Mazarin's niece. Anne was a Spaniard and a Hapsburg; she could stomach anything but a mésalliance. The result of Olympe's aspirations was, we know, such a mauvais quart d'heure with Anne for the Cardinal as to terrify him. Olympe, however, was intrigante, and waged a sort of Fronde of her own in the Palais Mazarin, till Louis, who had never been very fond of her, fell head over ears in love with her sister Marie. Then she suffered her uncle to marry her to a younger son of the House of Savoy, the Comte de Soissons. One of their sons was afterwards world-famous as Prince Eugene of Savoy. But marriage did not, unfortunately for her, "settle" the Comtesse de Soissons; plotting and mischief-making generally, mixed up with a liaison or two, kept her busy till the bursting on society of the "Poison Affair," in which she was implicated. The order for her arrest was issued, but Louis, glad to be rid of her, gave her the chance to flee the country. She lived henceforth the shadiest of lives wandering about Europe.

Quite as chequered was the career of Marie. The harassed Cardinal, who had no intention of incurring a second time the displeasure of the Queen Mother, no sooner discovered the attachment of the young King for his lovely niece than with all possible haste he sent her back to Rome, where she eventually married the Constable Colonna. Her parting with Louis is celebrated; it has inspired poems, novels, essays, and plays. For the sake of the story it is a pity that he should have treated her so shabbily years after when she appealed to him in her troubles. As these were mixed up with those of her sister, Hortense, with much éclat at a later period, we will defer their description and hasten to introduce our heroine, the most beautiful and best known of the famous nieces of Mazarin.

Hortense's intelligence and sweet disposition had from the first made her the Cardinal's favourite, and after his nephew had offended him he decided that she should be his heir. The report that she was to inherit the Mazarin millions naturally induced many splendid offers for her hand, which her own dazzling charms quickly coloured with a passion for herself. "The destiny," she declared in the memoirs she dictated, "that has rendered me the most unhappy of my sex began by dangling a crown before my eyes." It is a notorious fact that Charles II., roi sans couronne, twice proposed for her hand, and was twice refused by the Cardinal, who was at the time the ally of Cromwell and not shrewd enough to foresee the future. In like vain manner the splendid prize was sought by the Prince, afterwards King, of Portugal; the Duke of Savoy; and the great Turenne. Her uncle finally gave her to Armand de la Porte de la Meilleraye, son of a brilliant Maréchal of that name, for no other reason, apparently, than because he was a relation of Richelieu—an evidence of Mazarin's sense of gratitude that throws a curious light on the cunning Italian's character.

It was not a bad match for Hortense Mancini, whose father was but a petty Roman knight. De la Meilleraye was rich and boasted a great name, although Saint-Simon in his caustic way makes him descend from an apothecary, adding that one of his ancestors was a porter, whence the name de la Porte—a slur to which de la Meilleraye might have replied like the witty Marquise de Créquy when some one suggested that La Rochefoucauld was descended from a butcher: "Ah," she said, "that must have been when the kings were shepherds." Be it as it may, the bridegroom got with his bride the title of Duc de Mazarin and some thirty million francs. His wedding gift to his wife was a cabinet containing ten thousand pistoles in gold, which the Duchesse, not without craft, at once proceeded to share with her brother and sisters to propitiate their jealousy of her huge fortune. But she carried this generosity to a degree that augured ill for the preservation of Mazarin's millions. For she had so little regard for money that she left the key in the cabinet that any who cared might help himself, and at last literally flung out of the windows what remained for the amusement of watching the passers-by scramble for the coins. This prodigality so alarmed the Cardinal that it was thought to have hastened his end; eight days later he died. The news of this event was received by the Duchesse de Mazarin's brother and sisters, who, though well provided for, not unnaturally resented their uncle's favouritism, by exclamations of, "God be thanked, the Cardinal's gone!"

This marriage of convenience might possibly have been fairly happy, as such marriages go, but for the strange character of the Duc de Mazarin; for his wife was amiable and long-suffering, if giddy and volatile. Considering all that we have read of this man, we are almost inclined to agree with Madame de Sévigné when she says, that "the mere sight of him was a justification of his wife's conduct." Molière took him as the model of Orgon in his "Tartuffe." Religion was the subject on which his peculiarities were most offensively noticeable. He was a Jansenist, a sort of Roman Catholic Puritan, and the willing tool of the Jansenist monks and nuns with whom he surrounded himself, and on whom he, in other respects miserly, lavished enormous sums.

For nearly sixty years his outré acts of devotion afforded small-talk for the Court of France. The superb statues and pictures in the Palais Mazarin—now the Bibliothèque Nationale—in which he resided having offended his sense of decency, he proceeded, with a handkerchief in one hand and a hammer in the other, to cover up or destroy his rare marbles and subject his Titians and Coreggios to the same radical reforms. Colbert, whom the King, on hearing of this vandalism, sent to expostulate with him, arrived during the process of demolition. The Minister, who knew to a farthing what the chefs d'œuvre had cost the Cardinal, did what he could to save such works of art as remained undesecrated. But the Duc de Mazarin complained to the King, who, being in the habit of borrowing money from him, contented himself with deploring his aberration.

His zeal in behalf of purity did not, however, rest here. His mind, crippled with bigotry and superstition, imagined temptations in the most innocent and natural things. He wished to pull out the front teeth of his daughters to prevent coquetry; and he forbade the women on his estates to milk the cows for fear of the evil thoughts that such an employment might suggest. From conscientious scruples he likewise resigned the governorship of several provinces and the important post of Grand Commander of Artillery. Further, as the devil was ever in his thoughts, he fancied he appeared to him in his sleep, and he would wake his wife in the middle of the night to look for evil spirits by the light of flambeaux. He was, in a word, one of those mad people who are just sane enough to keep out of an asylum.

To such a man the dazzling beauty of his wife was a perpetual torment. It filled him at once with a horrible jealousy and a fear for the safety of her soul. She seemed to him the incarnation of temptation. He dared not let her out of his sight, and subjected her to an espionage as base as it was intolerable. To retain the servants she liked she was obliged to pretend she hated them; if she wished to go into society or to the play her husband preached her a sermon on the evil of the latter, and objected to the toilette a woman of rank and fashion was obliged to wear at the former. The innocent "patch," then the rage, was the cause of many a quarrel between this ill-matched pair.

"Ah," said people on rare occasions when they appeared in public together, "the Duc and Duchesse de Mazarin have 'patched' up their differences again."

For seven years their private life was the pièce de résistance at every feast of scandal served at Paris and Versailles. But, as if this asphyxiating atmosphere of suspicion and religious prudery that the Duc de Mazarin forced his lovely wife to breathe was not sufficient penance for her charms, he dragged her about with him from province to province in all sorts of weather and seasons, compelling her to sleep in peasants' huts and sheds, or lodge for weeks in lonely castles. Once even she was forced to accompany him two hundred leagues when she was enceinte.

To this vindictive religious mania he was afflicted with another for law-suits. He was said to have had more than three hundred, nearly all of which he lost.

At the end of seven years the Duchesse de Mazarin, who had borne her husband three daughters and one son, in spite of her own disregard of the value of money, became alarmed at the rapidity with which her uncle's millions were being squandered on the crowd of becowled hangers-on who directed the life and conscience of their cranky dupe. She protested on behalf of her children. The Duc de Mazarin answered by seizing her jewels, on the ground that jewels encouraged vanity and immodesty, and ordered her to accompany him to Alsace, of which province he was governor, intending to keep her with him there for the rest of her life. After a scandalous attempt at force, witnessed by the entire domestic establishment of the Palais Mazarin, the Duchesse escaped to her brother's, the Duc de Nevers.

In this age of the emancipation of women it is amusing to read of the grave scandal the Duchesse de Mazarin caused by leaving her husband. Such an action, which to-day would scarcely cause a ripple of excitement, was then a criminal offence. It was the first step in defiance of convention that gave her freedom and deprived her of her reputation. But, considering the life she had led, the wonder is not that she did not leave her husband sooner, but that she had ever put up with him at all. Arguing, perhaps, from her indolent and easy-going temperament, which, because it had endured for seven years the vagaries of such a husband, seemed to prove an unlimited capacity of endurance, she was pestered by the Duc, her relations, and even the King himself, to return to the Palais Mazarin. But she refused to listen to all offers of reconciliation and mediation. Any fate, she declared, was preferable to living again under the same roof with her husband. He, in his exasperation, seized the power the law gave him and had her arrested and imprisoned in the convent of Les Filles de St. Marie, a sort of aristocratic home for fallen women. The Duchesse, now as alert and vindictive as she had previously been indolent and submissive, retorted from her convent-prison with a demand for her jewels, an allowance, and a separation.

As usual in a scandal of this sort, the sympathy of society was divided between the husband and the wife. For while there was no excuse for the absurd and irritating behaviour of the Duc de Mazarin, there was no doubt but that the Duchesse herself was not above reproach. The looseness of her later life is of itself a sufficient warrant for the suspicion that the corruption associated with her name was of early origin. We read of strange flirtations before her marriage, one with a handsome eunuch attached to the household of her uncle, the Cardinal; of a duel fought over her by servants; of visits paid her by the King; and of the charge brought against her by her husband of too close an intimacy with the Duc de Nevers, her poetising, godless brother—a charge which she passionately resented and denied, which we, personally, do not know whether to credit or not, and which of itself was a justifiable cause for separation.

While the case between her husband and herself was pending, Madame de Mazarin made the most of her imprisonment. Philosophic resignation is nothing to the airy indifference with which she appeared to regard her situation. Perhaps this unrepentant frame of mind could have found its vindication, if it required one, in nothing more likely to encourage it than the companionship of a young and fascinating woman who was also a prisoner at Les Filles de St. Marie. Even more talked about at this period than the Duchesse de Mazarin herself was Sidonie de Lenoncourt, Marquise de Courcelles, who was also the victim of an insupportable husband. This "Manon Lescaut of the seventeenth century," as she has been wittily called, deserves a word or two, not so much on her own account as on account of the light she casts on certain phases of the social life of her day.

Born heiress of a noble family, Sidonie, who had lost both parents in her infancy, was brought up by an old aunt, an abbess of Orleans. When she was fifteen the orphan, who was as innocent as she was beautiful, was suddenly removed from the pure life of the abbey at Orleans, by order of the King, whose ward she was, and placed at the Hôtel de Soissons, then the centre of the gayest and loosest society in Paris. The instigator of this spiritual seduction was Colbert, who, wishing to enrich and ennoble his family, conceived the idea of marrying the heiress to his brother. But at the Hôtel de Soissons the lovely Sidonie fired all sorts of ambitions. If Colbert coveted her name and wealth, Louvois lusted for her person. During the intrigues to which she was exposed she was married off-hand to the Marquis de Courcelles, a man devoid of all principle, who helped to corrupt her on purpose on the day of her ruin to get complete possession of her fortune. Surrounded by such pitfalls, it is not surprising that Sidonie fell, and fell noisily. To escape the thought of her villain of a husband, the girl flung herself into the arms of Louvois. This powerful Minister was able to protect her from the designs of de Courcelles for a time, but she sought consolation elsewhere, and got herself so talked and written about in the lampoons that deluged Paris and were said to "temper despotism," that her husband had no trouble in getting an order from the King to shut her up at Les Filles de St. Marie.

No worse influence could have come into the life of the freshly emancipated and besmirched Duchesse de Mazarin than this captivating young adultress, whose misfortunes, though unworthy of sympathy, won it and admiration as well, by reason of the gaiety with which they were borne. "The pleasure of remaining innocent does not make up for the pain of being continually browbeaten and insulted," she said—an opinion to which the Duchesse was only too ready to agree. For three months these two were inseparable. Although Sidonie was the younger, a mere child, she was the more experienced, the cleverer. It was she who instigated the Duchesse to kill the tedium of imprisonment by filling the nuns' holy-water stoup with ink, putting wet sheets on their beds, letting loose dogs in their dormitory, and by perpetrating practical jokes continually.

At last the unfortunate nuns pleaded to be relieved of such intolerable charges. The Duchesse was transferred to another convent to await the settlement of her case, while Sidonie was herself shortly after released and went back to her husband, and more adventures. Escaping from one convent in which she was afterwards imprisoned, she met a young man who fell in love with her at sight and joined her in her flight. But she ran away from him too in the end, and many another, and finished sadly enough. The Abbé Prévost might, indeed, have taken her for the model of his Manon Lescaut. To see Sidonie was to adore her, and she was not without an agreeable wit, as her poor little memoirs, which she found time to write, testify. "I am tall," she wrote, in her gay way that suggests a wink of the eye, "I have a good figure, the best possible deportment, fine hair, and a beautiful complexion, although pitted in a couple of places by small-pox. My eyes are big, and I never open them completely, which, though an affectation, gives them a very sweet and tender expression. I have not much to boast of in the shape of my mouth, but my teeth are like pearls. Hands exquisite, arms passable—that is to say, they are rather thin—but I find compensation for this defect in knowing that my legs are perfect." Poor little Sidonie!

At length the Duchesse de Mazarin's suit for separation and an allowance was settled in her favour. She returned to the Palais Mazarin, and the Duc took up his abode at the Arsenal. But it was merely a truce. M. de Mazarin appealed, and fearing lest she might once more fall into his hands, the Duchesse, who had tasted liberty, aided by a friend of her brother's, the Chevalier de Rohan, fled in male attire, accompanied by her maid similarly disguised and two men-servants. The Duc de Mazarin wormed a lettre de cachet out of the reluctant King, and had his wife hotly chased. The fugitives, however, succeeded in getting out of the country in safety, and had a series of adventures that are very suggestive of Dumas. No one ever fled with a lighter heart or more casually, so to speak, than the Duchesse de Mazarin; and no one ever more thoroughly entered into the spirit of adventure than she.

At Neuchâtel they took her for the Duchesse de Longueville, the celebrated heroine of the Fronde, and she received an embarrassing ovation. Only Madame de Longueville, they said, went about dressed as a man. At a small garrison town in the Alps "we were all liked to be knocked on the head, owing to our ignorance of the language," and on arriving at the village of Altdorf, on Lake Lucerne, the party were quarantined for forty days, on account of the indisposition of the Duchesse, caused by an injury to her knee received some days before. In this wretched little village she says that a farrier was the local surgeon, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty he could be got to agree that it would not be necessary to amputate her leg. Finally Milan was reached, where the Constable Colonna and his wife, Marie Mancini, the Duchesse's sister, were waiting to receive her.

At Paris the scandal caused by this flight was the talk of the town and the Court; the reputation of the Duchesse de Mazarin was torn to shreds. She considered her freedom, however, cheap at the price, and, joined by her brother, the Duc de Nevers, she and the Colonnas spent several months touring about Italy. This delightful jaunt was but a lull in the cyclone that had swept her into Italy, and was to sweep her back to France. At Rome, where she hoped to make her residence, humiliations as insupportable as any she had known in the Palais Mazarin awaited her. Penniless and déclassée, the beautiful fugitive was an embarrassing incubus to her Roman relations. They passed her on from one to the other, snubbing and quarrelling with her, till at last, reduced to pawning her "little" jewels, as she called them, to distinguish them from her "big" ones still in the Duc de Mazarin's hands, she decided that the fire from which she had escaped was preferable to the frying-pan into which she had fallen. So, accompanied by her brother, who was returning to marry a niece of Madame de Montespan, she went back to France with the intention of throwing herself on the mercy of her husband. Like true Mancinis, they spent six months on the journey. In the meantime the Duc de Mazarin, warned of his wife's intention, took the course that might have been expected of him.

On arriving at the Château de Nevers, the Duchesse found the park infested with police, who had orders to arrest her and imprison her in the Abbey of Lys. But her relations were active at Court as well as her husband, and within a week the King, whose playmate she had been as a child, sent a company of dragoons to force the doors of her prison and release her. And to the mortification of her husband, and the astonishment of society, Madame de Mazarin entered Paris in the carriage of Colbert, and had an audience of Louis. The King, who arrogated to himself the right to arbitrate in the domestic squabbles of his subjects, high and low, tried to induce the Duc de Mazarin to take his wife back, but at this suggestion the emancipated Duchesse replied wittily but firmly with the cry of the Fronde: "Point de Mazarin! Point de Mazarin!" The King, however, concluded an arrangement, much to the stingy Duc's despair, by which Madame de Mazarin was to return to Italy on an allowance from her husband, as long as she remained out of the country, of 24,000 francs a year—a sum inadequate enough for one whose dot had been the greatest in Europe!

"She will eat it at the first inn she comes to," remarked the courtier Lauzun cynically.

In much less time than it had taken her to reach France from Rome, Madame de Mazarin found herself back in the Eternal City, and once more under the roof of her sister, Madame la Connétable. Much had transpired in the Palazzo Colonna since her departure. The Constable and his wife were no longer on friendly terms. The Constable had become faithless and cruel, while Madame la Connétable was in bad odour in Roman society on her own account—mixed bathing in the Tiber, Madame la Connétable in a gauze bathing costume, and the Chevalier de Lorraine all but living in the Palazzo Colonna! When the Duchesse arrived on the scene she found her sister, egged on by the Chevalier, the handsomest and most disreputable man of his century, and whose wit, vices, and exploits are plentifully sprinkled through its literature, bent on flight. At first, seeing in such a proposition fresh trouble for herself, she tried to smooth matters. But her efforts proving ineffectual, and perhaps also from a love of further adventures, she finally determined to aid and accompany her sister.

One night, when the Constable was visiting at a country house near Rome, Madame la Connétable and the Duchesse de Mazarin donned men's clothes and, attended by their maids in similar apparel, drove off in a coach to Civita Vecchia. They arrived there at two in the morning and, not finding the fishing-boat they had engaged beforehand, were obliged to wait till dawn in a wood without the town. "The coachman," says the Duchesse in her memoirs, "having hunted high and low without finding our boat, was fain to hire another, which he got for a thousand crowns. While he was thus employed the postilion becoming impatient took one of the coach-horses and had the luck to meet with our boat, but it was late when he came back, and we were obliged to walk five miles on foot and go on board about three in the afternoon without having eaten or drunk since we left Rome. We had the luck to fall in with a very honest captain; for, as it was easy to see that we were women and not beggars, any other but he would have murdered us and thrown us overboard. His crew asked us 'if we had not killed the Pope?'" In eight days these two extraordinary grandes dames disembarked from their fishing-smack at the little port of Ciotat, near Marseilles, whither they went on horseback, after one of the most thrilling journeys the Duchesse de Mazarin ever took. For their boat had been nearly lost in a storm and chased by Turkish pirates; the latter was a peril perhaps less terrifying to them than shipwreck, as it would have meant a new series of adventures.

At Marseilles they were met by the Chevalier de Lorraine and another dazzling reprobate, and the four, who had no longer any reputations to lose—for, as the Duchesse says, "there was no fable horrible enough to be invented by the wickedness of man but was reported of us"—set out light-heartedly on a tour through Provence. The ladies, still wearing men's clothes, which mightily became them, at length reached Aix-les-Bains. Here their rank and unparalleled adventures afforded them the reception curiosity always offers to unconventionality—if it is feminine and beautiful. Some were for whipping them at a cart's wheel, others for putting them in a lunatic asylum; while Madame de Grignan, the wife of the governor, sent them proper clothing with the message "that they travelled like true heroines of romance, with abundance of jewels but no clean linen," and wrote to her mother, Madame de Sévigné, that their beauty was divine. Their stay at Aix, however, was but of short duration, for the approach of the Duc de Mazarin's police agents so alarmed the Duchesse that she abandoned her sister and slipped across the frontier to Chambéry, where one of her former suitors, now become the reigning Duke of Savoy, afforded her his protection.

As for Madame la Connétable, she soon after fell into the hands of her ruthless Constable, who shut her up in various convents, from which she was always escaping, only to be caught again. Her last prison was a convent in Madrid, where she passed the greater part of her life—an imprisonment, however, nominal rather than real, for we find her frequently at the Spanish Court festivities. Madame de Villars, who saw her there, wrote to a friend in France that "she was even more beautiful at forty than at twenty, when Louis XIV. had loved her." But she was never happy. Of a different temperament from her sister Hortense, Marie Mancini had not the bravade necessary to conquer the hostility of the world. She could never live down her past, and finding herself free at the death of her husband, who begged her pardon in his will for the misery he had caused her, she returned to Italy, only to meet everywhere with a cold reception. History is not quite clear as to her last years, but it is believed that her children, at any rate, forgave her, as there is a monument to her memory in the cathedral at Pisa, where she died.

For the first time in her career the fates were really kind now to the Duchesse de Mazarin. In Savoy she found the peace and quiet that her naturally indolent temperament craved, and for three years the infatuated Duke supported her in luxury at his Court. Pleasure, of which she was ever a devotee, was agreeably tempered by a taste for literature, art, and philosophy, which she developed at this time. Nor was love abandoned. She shared her heart between the unexacting Duke and a certain César Vischard. It was to the latter that she dictated her memoirs during her stay in Savoy, and as he played for a time a rather important part in her life a word about him will not be amiss.

The Abbé de St. Réal, as he called himself, though never consecrated, was a chevalier d'industrie with a literary bent. Among his works, which had a certain ephemeral popularity, were a romance entitled "Don Carlos," which Schiller afterwards made use of for the stage, and a "Vie de Jésus." But he was best celebrated at the time and remembered now for the profligacy of his career. He may be said to have plumbed the bottomless pit of vice, and some of his letters which were intercepted by the agents of the Minister Louvois, whom Forneron says was a connoisseur in indecency, made even him shudder. Such was the man whom Madame de Mazarin now admitted to the closest intimacy, and with whom, on the sudden death of the Duke, she fled from Savoy to escape the vengeance of the jealous Duchess.

"I learnt on arriving here," wrote from Geneva her whilom friend, the Marquise de Courcelles, with whom she had fallen out before her first flight from France, "that Madame de Mazarin had some days ago gone to Germany, I believe to Augsburg, and that because the Duchess of Savoy, immediately after the death of her husband, had ordered her out of the country. How miserable it must be for her to see herself hunted from place to place! But what is uncommon is that this woman triumphs over disgrace by follies that have no parallel, and that after having tasted shame she thinks only of enjoying herself. When passing through here she was on horseback dressed as a man and with twenty men in her suite, talking only of music and hunting and everything that suggests pleasure."

In such costume and company she arrived at Amsterdam with the lightest of hearts after passing through countries aflame with war. As if she had taken the idea to visit her former suitors in turn, she decided upon going to England, which she reached in the month of December, 1675, and where she was destined to remain till her death in 1699, twenty-four years later. The real motive of the greatest heiress in Europe, now become a pure adventuress, in going to England was, no doubt, to lay siege to the heart of Charles II. But her ostensible motive was to visit her cousin by marriage, Mary of Modena, whom she had met when that princess passed through Savoy on her way to marry the Duke of York, and with whom she had struck up a friendship. The Duchess of York, as she expected, welcomed her warmly. Charles II. fell an instant victim to her charms, and she entered London society with unprecedented éclat.

She was now thirty, and of the fourteen years since her marriage she had passed seven principally on the highway dressed as a man. This life, which would have broken the health of any other woman, had agreed with her wonderfully. Her appearance on her arrival in London may be imagined by the following description by Forneron: "The Duchesse de Mazarin was one of those Roman beauties in whom there is no doll-prettiness, and in whom unaided nature triumphs over all the arts of the coquette. Painters could not say what was the colour of her eyes. They were neither blue nor grey, nor yet black nor brown nor hazel. Nor were they languishing nor passionate, as if either demanding to be loved or expressing love. They simply looked as if she had basked in love's sunshine. If her mouth were not large, it was not a small one, and was suitably the fit organ for intelligent speech and amiable words. All her motions were charming in their easy grace and dignity. Her complexion was softly toned and yet warm and fresh. It was so harmonious that though dark she seemed of beautiful fairness. Her jet-black hair rose in strong waves above her forehead, as if proud to clothe and adorn her splendid head. She did not use scent." Though fond of it, he might have added, and unlike her uncle the Cardinal, who was always perfumed like the garden of Armida.

Ruvigny, the French Ambassador, wrote to Louis: "She is to all appearances a finely developed young girl. I never saw any one who so well defies the power of time and vice to disfigure. When she arrives at the age of fifty she will have the satisfaction of thinking when she looks in the mirror that she is as lovely as she ever was in her life."

King Charles, in that characteristic way that made him most popular when most undeserving popularity, gave this superb beauty apartments in St. James's Palace and a pension of four thousand pounds sterling a year. The ball was at the feet of the adventuress. She at once became the centre of State intrigues, a party was formed around her. She saw herself on the point of dethroning, not the Queen, but the favourite, the all-powerful Duchess of Portsmouth. The corruption of the Court had reached the Parliament, and tinged even the patriotism of the people. The Duchess of Mazarin was chosen by Protestant England as the means of ridding the country from the harlot who had made it the satellite of France. They accepted her as the avenging champion; she at least was above-board and never resorted to trick or artifice. The situation is one of the most extraordinary spectacles in English history. Louis XIV. became alarmed. Ruvigny, honest Huguenot, was not the man to succeed in threading the maze of the foul diplomatic labyrinth in which he suddenly found himself by the success of the Duchesse de Mazarin. He suggested that, as the star of the Duchess of Portsmouth appeared to be declining, the French Court should throw her over and make terms with her rival. But the shrewd French Court was unwilling to desert a harlot whom they could trust for a harlot who had a grievance against them.

Ruvigny was replaced by the crafty Courtin, one of Louis' ablest servants. Before going to England he went to see the Duc de Mazarin in the hope of ingratiating himself with that Tartuffe-ridden man, as well as the nation to which he was accredited, by bringing the Duchesse news that her plea for a fitting maintenance, strongly backed by Charles to Louis, was heard. But he little understood the man he had to deal with. The Duc de Mazarin, thoroughly unable to admit that he had ever given the least cause for the scandalous conduct of his wife, demanded that she should return to France and suffer herself to be incarcerated in a convent. The answer of Madame de Mazarin, who was living sumptuously at St. James's and the object of almost universal admiration, was such as might have been expected.

When Courtin arrived in London the French influence seemed ruined at Whitehall. Every night Charles visited the fascinating Duchesse, and every day on repairing to the Duchess of York, his sister-in-law, who was ill at the time, he found the enchantress at her bedside. Nevertheless Courtin paid his court to the new favourite and studied her every action. "I saw Madame de Mazarin at High Mass at the chapel of the Portuguese ambassador, who is dying of love for her," he wrote to Louis, "but could not help noticing that she betrayed disgust at the length of the service." The conversion of England to Catholicism, no less than the French influence, seemed doomed by the sway of the fair agnostic. Her position was so important that Courtin advised Louis to force the Duc de Mazarin to accede to her demand that he should allow her fifty thousand a year of the Cardinal's fortune, send her her jewels, laces, and precious furniture, and swear never more to molest her if she returned to France. The great Louis humbled himself to plead with her; even the Abbé de St. Réal, who still hung about her and talked of Charles like an aggrieved husband, was not neglected. Courtin promised him the favour of the French Court.

But suddenly in the heyday of her triumph the fears and hopes that the Duchesse had raised to such a pitch were dashed by the Duchesse herself. She was not equal to the position; none of the Mancinis had the ambition or political instinct of their famous uncle, the Cardinal. Pleasure, not power, was what Madame de Mazarin really craved. Never had the enemies of the Duchess of Portsmouth leant on a weaker reed. As usual the Duchess let her heart get the better of her head; she flung herself, cost what it might, into the arms of the dashing Prince of Monaco, who was on a two months' visit to the English Court and stayed two years for sake of La Belle Mazarin. Her political rôle was over, and perhaps to no one connected with this intrigue did it give greater relief than to the protagonist herself. St. Réal, who had got together for his light-hearted mistress a good library, including such works as Appian and Tacitus, eaten up with jealousy, took the violent resolution of leaving England in the hope that she would call him back at Dover. But, as Forneron says, "she bore his absence with Roman fortitude and perhaps, like Louvois, who had perused some of his letters seized in the post, thought his room more agreeable than his company."

As for Charles, he was furious and stopped her pension. But Charles's furies never lasted long; like the Duchesse, whose character and exciting career closely resembled his own, he was too easy-going to cherish resentment. He gave her back her pension shortly afterwards, saying, "It was in repayment of sums advanced him years before by the Cardinal," and treated her henceforth as the best of friends. But this method of repaying debts was not at all to the fancy of the Duc de Mazarin. He despatched a friend to England to tell the King that he considered such payment valueless, to which Charles replied with a cynical laugh, "Quite so; I do not ask for a receipt."

Now began for the Duchesse the happiest and most brilliant period of her life. It lasted for the rest of the reign, during which, basking in the favour of the King and the Royal Family, and worshipped by the young Countess of Sussex, Charles's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland, she gave herself up to a life of pleasure. The consideration she enjoyed gave her great influence, which, as she detested politics, she made no use of save to increase her credit with the tradespeople. At first she did not feel the chain of debt to which she was fastened. Courtin wrote to Louvois, "If you had seen her dancing the furlano to the music of a guitar, which she thrummed herself, you would have been captivated." To which Louvois replied, "If I were at the English Court, I am sure that all I should do would be to feast my eyes on Madame de Mazarin"—a curious sidelight on despatches of State of that day, considering, as Forneron says, that "the only serious man at Whitehall was the French Ambassador."

The taste that she had developed during her stay in Savoy for art and letters was now assiduously cultivated. Like a true femme galante of the seventeenth century, she coloured her very frivolities with an air of culture. But in the case of the Duchesse de Mazarin the cult of learning was not altogether an affectation by means of which she sought to gain the respect she had lost. She was an omnivorous reader, especially of philosophic works, and very fond of discussing what she read. If intellectually superficial, she was a brilliant conversationalist, and had the art of so disguising her thefts from the brains of the clever men whose society she really enjoyed that they were undiscovered. She could not write, but she could talk. In her salon, one of the first of the kind in England, all manner of subjects were discussed: philosophy, religion, history, wit, gallantry, the stage, music, art, ancient and modern literature. The use of the word "Vast" once gave rise to a controversy that was finally settled by an appeal to the French Academy. Intellectuality was the frame in which she set pleasure; for she still continued her life of aristocratic harlotry, and was sometimes among the number, from duchesses to demi-reps, that Chiffinch, the vicious but amusing concièrge of the back-stairs of Whitehall, smuggled of nights into the royal bedchamber. But these blots on her spiritual life, which possibly in our times in the case of such a woman might be excused by the words, "artistic temperament," required no excuse at all then. Moreover, Madame de Mazarin kept a good table and an open house—two means of silencing scandal that are not yet ineffective.

Among the men of distinction who comprised her little court were: the poet Waller, "who had visited several Courts and was at home in none"; Vossius, the sceptic prebendary of Windsor, "understanding most European languages and speaking none well, possessing a profound knowledge of the manners and customs of the ancients, but entirely ignorant of those of his contemporaries, talking as if he were commenting on Juvenal or Petronius, and at the very time he was writing books to prove the Divine inspiration of the Septuagint, intimating privately at Madame de Mazarin's that he believed in no revelation at all"; my Lord Rochester, who needs no description; the respectable Justel, whose Huguenot faith had made him an exile; and last, but not least, St. Evremond.

Of all the brilliant moths that flitted round the beauty, charm, and hospitality of the Duchesse de Mazarin, St. Evremond was the wittiest, gayest, best educated, most popular, and sincerest. He was over thirty years her senior, a man past sixty when she came to England, and, from the day of their meeting to the day of her death, Madame de Mazarin found in him a devoted friend and a sensible adviser. He was to her father-confessor and duenna in one; while her house was his to enter at will, her society his chief happiness, and her death the one real grief that perhaps he ever knew. The relation that existed between them was purely platonic; and if there are those who see merely a psychological phenomenon in a clean, honest attachment between an upright old philosopher and a young wayward woman, we prefer in this instance to claim it as a virtue for both. Madame de Mazarin's account at least in the Book of Life is so heavily against her that, without letting her off, we can afford to credit her with so small a virtue.

She used to call him playfully her "old satyr," for he was given to satire, and his views of life were so generous as to be Epicurean. His philosophy, he declared, consisted in hatred of vice, indulgence to guilt, and grief for misfortune—a view of duty that alone was calculated to make him a favourite in such loose society as that of the Restoration. But St. Evremond had not always been a sage with "a disfiguring growth of a large wen between his eyebrows which he treated as a subject for a joke." He had once upon a time been young, good-looking, and unsteady, one of six sons in an old Norman family. In their youth, he says, his brothers were known at home by nicknames that hit off their characters well. There was St. Evremond the Honest, St. Evremond the Crafty, St. Evremond the Soldier, St. Evremond the Beau, St. Evremond the Hunter. He himself, even then, was known as St. Evremond the Wit. His father gave him a brilliant education and destined him for the Bar, but the Thirty Years' War was just then seducing all the young men of Europe to the career of arms, so St. Evremond gave up studying law and got a commission. He saw a vast amount of active service and was dangerously wounded at the Battle of Nordlingen. He who for forty years wielded the pen had previously carried a sword for thirty. In fencing he had few, if any, superiors—St. Evremond's pass was famous in the art of self-defence.

Even in those days he was noted for his sarcasms, and it was to his pen that he owed the loss of his sword. An intercepted letter ruined him. It contained a scathing satire on Cardinal Mazarin, in which he declared, with poisoned irony à propos of a certain treaty which Mazarin had signed, that "a Minister does not so much belong to the State as the State to the Minister." Mazarin was dead, but Anne of Austria took upon herself to resent the sneer. St. Evremond was obliged to flee in order to escape the Bastille. He arrived in England in 1661, aged forty-eight, and of all the French exiles who lived on the charity of Charles none were so worthy of it. When Madame de Mazarin came to England he had been established fourteen years in that country. His reputation was European, and among his many admirers and correspondents abroad he counted the famous courtezan, Ninon de Lenclos. Most of his friends led openly profligate lives, his was conspicuously clean. In an age of corruption he preserved his honour without earning the contempt of his companions. Over-rigid in morals, he was indulgent to others; irreligious, he respected religion. He was one of the forerunners of Voltaire, or, rather, Voltaire might have been like him had he been born a century earlier. St. Evremond's wit was Voltairean with the poison left out. Once towards the end of her long life Ninon wrote him repining she had come to the conclusion with La Rochefoucauld that "old age was the hell of women." "Don't let M. de La Rochefoucauld's hell frighten you," he replied; "it is a hell specially contrived for a maxim. Speak boldly the word Love and let that of Old Woman never come out of your mouth."

Regarded then as one of the most intellectual luminaries of his time, he is remembered now merely as one of the flashlights that history turns on the Court and times of the last Stuarts. His place is with Pepys and Evelyn and Gramont; no book on Restoration society could be written without mentioning him. It was the age of Satire. At Whitehall the good-natured, cynical King and his courtiers enjoyed the lampoons and couplets of the coffee-houses, provided they were witty. At the Duchesse de Mazarin's the satire was refined, the banter delicate. "Ah, Monsieur Vossius," she cried, as the clerical sceptic entered her rooms one day, "perhaps you who read all sorts of good books, except the Bible, will explain a point we are discussing?" As she never cherished resentment, and detested nothing so much as dissension, it was understood that those who wished to enjoy her hospitality and friendship should leave their private spites and ill-temper at home. At no place in London was pleasure so unclouded as at the Duchesse de Mazarin's. "The greatest freedom in the world is to be seen there," wrote St. Evremond, "and an equal discretion; everybody is more commodiously served at Madame de Mazarin's than at home and more respectfully than at Court. 'Tis true there are frequent disputes, but then it is with more knowledge than heat; it is not done out of a spirit of contradiction, but only to discover fully the matters in agitation; rather to animate conversation than to inflame it. What they game for is inconsiderable, and as they play only for diversion, you cannot discover in their faces either the fear of losing or the annoyance of having lost. Gaming," adds the honest old Epicurean, "is relieved there by the most delicious repasts in the world."

In time, however, to St. Evremond's dismay, the spirited, cultured discussions began to flag, and finally almost entirely ceased. The passion of gambling took possession of the Duchesse; with her to flee from temptation was to yield to it, desire only ceased when she had drained it to the dregs. A shady croupier, Morin by name, obliged to leave Paris, came over to London and introduced basset. This game became the rage, and Morin dethroned the whole intellectual areopagus at Madame de Mazarin's. St. Evremond protested in vain, but he could not resist lending her money when she asked for it. To show that she was alive to his remonstrances at her extravagance, he was the only one of her creditors she ever repaid. In this way the gay, thoughtless years sped by; but if the thrilling adventures of her early life, consisting chiefly of flights in men's apparel, were over, there were still many strange and dramatic sensations in store for her. The most indolent of women, she was destined from first to last to live in a whirl of excitement.

Oates denounced her as an accomplice of all the Popish plots that agitated the country. That was an anxious time for the Duchesse as to all the French at Court. But it was as nothing to the experience that followed. In 1683, when not far off her fortieth year, the Baron Banier, a handsome, romantic young boy and son of one of Gustavus Adolphus's generals, came to London, and fell in love with Madame de Mazarin. It mattered not to him that she laughed at him, he went about the town with her name on his lips heedless of ridicule. Suddenly this harmless flirtation became tragic. Her nephew, the young Chevalier de Soissons, a brother of the yet-to-be-famous Prince Eugene of Savoy and son of her sister Olympe, came at this time to pay his aunt a visit. Like Baron Banier, the Chevalier de Soissons fell head over ears in love with her. Maddened by his horrible passion, he must needs take it into his head to be jealous of his Swedish rival. The two young fellows, blind to all sense of decency, to the éclat of such a duel, met, and the Chevalier de Soissons left Banier dead upon the field of dishonour. The noise of such a scandal may be imagined. The Chevalier would not, or could not, flee; he was arrested and tried, and without doubt, but for the pulling of many strings behind the scenes, would have been executed. "It is fire not blood that flows in the veins of us Mancinis," he is reported to have said. Thanks to the laxity of the laws in his time, the flaming young Chevalier was suffered to go to Malta and join the Order of the Knights Templars, among whom, far from his beautiful aunt, the fates granted him a few years of obscurity in which to cool.

"I could not have believed it possible," wrote Madame de Sévigné, "that the eyes of a grandmother could have wrought such havoc." But this shocking scandal, which called to mind the things that had been said of Madame de Mazarin and her brother years before, and made people even in that day of antique vice shudder, overwhelmed her. Shame, despair, and perhaps cunning, made her dive till the storm was spent. She closed her house, hung her salon in black, and saw nobody but the ever-faithful St. Evremond.

The scandal had not yet subsided when a fresh one burst over her head. Her eldest daughter, whom she had not seen for nearly twenty years, escaped from a convent, in which, in spite of her prayers, her father insisted she should take the veil, and fled to her mother. She was accompanied by the Marquis de Richelieu, a younger son, penniless, profligate, and as handsome as Adonis. The arrival of the couple could offer nothing but embarrassment to the Duchesse de Mazarin. For this elopement had attracted universal attention by the absurd behaviour of the Duc de Mazarin and the ridicule to which it exposed this strange family. Instead of removing every obstacle at once to his runaway daughter's marriage, even with so undesirable a parti as the marquis, the Duc de Mazarin went about consulting monks and priests all over France as to whether he should consent to the marriage or not. In the meantime the fugitives were obliged to live as lover and mistress for two years before M. de Mazarin yielded.

Perhaps the fact of such a rake as de Richelieu remaining faithful for a period of such duration may be more mercenary than it appears. But if he counted on this unexceptional fidelity to win him some of the Mazarin millions that his father-in-law had not yet frittered away, he was mistaken. The Duc gave his daughter a paltry dowry and a pardon signed by the King—the first ever granted for the abduction of a novice from her convent. Marriage, however, spoilt the romance, for the habits contracted when she was an outlaw, and perhaps also the Mancini "fire not blood" in her veins, prevented the Marquise de Richelieu from settling down. She climbed over a wall one night and went off with another man, to a life which, while possessing all the elements of that adventurous libertinage that history so often condones in condemning, can be described by no stretch of the imagination as anything else than vulgar prostitution. As for M. le Marquis, he went back to his pot-house companions and the bottle—the latter a liquid solace that enabled his mother-in-law as well to sustain the shafts of outrageous fortune.

For the ridicule that never made the least impression on the Duc de Mazarin was the only thing apparently that could make the least impression on his scandal-proof Duchesse. Ridicule and debt produced in her a black melancholy which she tried to drown in whisky. In sober moments the once insouciante beauty talked of retiring to the same convent in Spain as her still more unhappy sister, Madame la Connétable. St. Evremond was in despair and used all his powers of persuasion and influence to combat so morbid a resolution and the drunkenness that prompted it. At the same time her ridiculous husband slyly took advantage of her unnerved state to try to get her into his power; he invited her to return to his roof and submit her life to his will. But unlike the Bourbons, Madame de Mazarin had learnt something from experience. She still had the sense to refuse and the wit to reply, "Point de Mazarin!"

The result of all these accumulated troubles was a serious illness, but with the recovery of her health she regained her former gaiety. To St. Evremond's delight the drink habit lost its hold upon her—for a time; her salon was once more the rendezvous of wit and fashion; cowed by her dazzling beauty, that nothing could impair, ridicule slunk out of her path. The last year of the orgy of the Restoration found her still basking in the sunshine of prosperity; she was one of the three sultanas who were with Charles that Sunday night in the grand gallery at Whitehall when the Merry Monarch was stricken with apoplexy. What a scene that must have been! What a terror and warning! The death of Charles in the prime of life finished the mad dance of pleasure; to none of the dancers had it been sweeter than to the Duchesse de Mazarin.

She shed floods of tears over her royal companion to whom she owed so much happiness, and whose Queen she might have been but for a miscalculation on the part of her uncle, the Cardinal. Well might she weep, for with the passing of Charles the dam that she had so successfully erected against misfortune burst. It is true that James II. continued to her the pension his brother had allowed her; but his reign was short, and his successor, the cold William of Orange, had other uses for his money than the pensioning of beautiful exiles. Moreover, the Restoration was over; public opinion had changed; it was a disgrace to have been connected with the Stuart Court. The very people who had once welcomed the Duchesse de Mazarin as a possible and popular King's mistress in place of the hated Duchess of Portsmouth now clamoured that she should be packed out of the country. Nothing could have been more disastrous for her than an order of banishment; it meant the choice between sordid poverty in Amsterdam or Brussels, or submission to her persecuting husband and imprisonment in France. What a fate for one who had queened it for fifteen joyous years at Whitehall! Fortunately, yet strangely, her enormous debts saved her from this degradation. Her creditors noisily protested against her expulsion, which would have meant to them a total loss, and they interceded with the new King in her favour. William finally granted her a pension of two thousand pounds and his protection.

For the next ten years, tormented by her creditors, whose prisoner now she virtually was, and persecuted by her husband, who brought a suit to deprive her for ever of any claim to her uncle's fortune, the Duchesse de Mazarin led a feverish life. "In the daytime," says Forneron, "she might be seen searching for Oriental curiosities in the ships that had freshly arrived from India. At Newmarket, she was up and out on horseback at five in the morning. On racing days there were the excitements of betting and of being jostled in the crowd on the course. In the evening there was the theatre. After the play came the oyster supper and then basset. Bacchus consoled her as she descended towards the grave." Occasionally her sisters and children visited her, and St. Evremond and a little court of admirers were ever in attendance. But her day was over, and the shadows of the everlasting night had begun to fall on her. In the summer of 1699, in her fifty-third year, her health failed rapidly; death had no terrors for her, she met it with indifference. The end to this turbulent life came at Chelsea, then a riverside village, whither she had gone for a change of air. Her sister, the Duchesse de Bouillon and her son, the Duc de la Meilleraye, had come over a few days before from Paris, and were with her at the last. St. Evremond, her constant friend for twenty-five years, was inconsolable; the famous wit followed her four years later at the age of ninety, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

But even in death the adventures of the Duchesse de Mazarin were not finished; the corpse of the notorious beauty could not get buried. It was seized by her creditors, who wrangled and haggled over it with her husband, whom the news of her death overwhelmed with a late remorse. He was obliged to pay her debts in full before her body was suffered to leave the country. But even when he finally got possession of it he did not bury it. This strange, half-mad old man, who had so often compelled his wife when alive to accompany him on his interminable wanderings, once more set out with her when dead. "For over a year," says Saint Simon, "M. de Mazarin, who had been so long separated from her, carried her body about with him from one estate to another. Once he suffered it to rest for a short time in the church of Notre Dame de Liesse, where the peasants treated it as that of a saint and touched it with their beads. At last he took it to Paris and buried it beside her famous uncle, the Cardinal, in the church of the 'Collège des Quatre Nations'"—now the Palais de l'Institut!

The following pasquinade of the day will serve as well as another for her epitaph:—

"Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,

Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!

Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin!

Ses enfants seraient sans chagrin

Si leur père était avec elle;

Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,

Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!"

[BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND]
A COURTEZAN OF THE RESTORATION

THE difference between Hortense Mancini and Barbara Villiers is the difference between the refinement and the grossness of vice. If we had met them in fiction we should have said that the former might have been created by Balzac and the latter by Zola. The history of Barbara Villiers is like a study of the progress of vice.

At the first glance it would seem that such a statement was calculated to cause the respectable reader to skip the following biographical account of this British Imperia. But on considering that her name must possess some powerful interest for the imagination, from the quantity of ink that has been spilt over it, and the impassioned diatribes it has inspired, we are inclined to believe that what we have to relate of the famous beauty will fire rather than extinguish curiosity. For no emotion is so pleasant to most of us creatures of circumstance as that of righteous indignation, and that is what her Grace of Cleveland usually excites. Yet it has always seemed to us one of the strangest psychological phenomena that men should fly into a literary passion over the iniquities of persons who have been dead for centuries. Personally, we have never been able, like most people, to look upon Nero as if he were a notorious criminal of our own day, whose trial at the Old Bailey filled a column or two in the morning papers. Nor can we work ourselves up to any heat over a profligate woman, who lived two hundred years ago when she enjoyed considerable public esteem, as if she were still living, when we should, no doubt, have her arrested, tried, and given the full penalty of the law. No people are more ridiculous than the literary policemen who nab historical offenders and prosecute them at the bar of a remote posterity, unless it be the literary whitewashers who defend the same criminals at the same bar. Such convictions and acquittals of the dead are like a burlesque of Justice which lacks the sense of humour. One should remember that Charles II., with all his vices so repugnant to us now, was perhaps from first to last the most popular king that ever sat upon the English throne. People talk of the whole period of the Restoration as if he personally were responsible for its shameless license, quite ignoring the well-known fact that the nation was heartily tired of the "weel-spread looves and lang, wry faces" of the Cromwellian régime. Instead of heaping a late ignominy upon him, it would be more sensible, if equally impractical, to arraign the British people who made him possible. He was but the crowned representative of their own unbridled vices. To us this man, who "never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," seems, at the distance we have got from him, to be as imaginary as if he had occurred in one of Oscar Wilde's comedies. After two hundred years to treat him seriously is out of the question. His answer to an indignant generation he knows not might very well be his own cynical laugh.

From this it must not be supposed that we intend to flatter the memory of Barbara Villiers. On the contrary, we should prefer to forget her, but this the period in which she lived will not permit us. No mention of the Restoration would be possible without reference to her. So, as we are obliged to consider her, we shall imagine that the "trough of Zolaism" in which we have found her is frozen, and try to skate on it without breaking through.

If Hortense Mancini was non-moral, Barbara Villiers was immoral; she was consciously, unblushingly, gratuitously vicious. There might have been some excuse on grounds of heredity and education for Hortense, but it is impossible to find any excuse whatever for Barbara. It was said of her, when created Duchess of Cleveland, that "the King might add to her titles, but nothing to her birth." She was a Villiers. From her father who died at Oxford, when she was an infant, from wounds received at the battle of Edgehill in the Royalist cause, she should have inherited all the virtues. He must indeed have been a very noble character to judge from the panegyrics pronounced at his death, even by those belonging to a party bitterly opposed to his. But so little did she resemble him, that when we first meet her we find her at sixteen in London—whither she had come to live with her stepfather on the death of her mother—engaged in an intrigue with the second Earl of Chesterfield, a young widower five years her senior, gifted with very agreeable manners and a fine head of hair. That she was allowed full control of her actions by her stepfather may be taken for granted from the following letter addressed to Chesterfield:—

My Lord,

"My friend" (Lady Anne Hamilton) "and I are now abed together contriving how to get your company this afternoon. If you deserve this favour, you will come and seek us at Ludgate Hill at about three o'clock at Butler's shop, where we will expect you, &c."

The consequences of such a correspondence were such as might be expected. Barbara began to look about her for a husband, and as Chesterfield, who at the beginning of this intrigue proved the quality of his passion for the beautiful wanton he was in the habit of meeting at "Butler's shop in Ludgate Hill" by marrying some one else, he was out of the question. In this extremely awkward position she had the luck to meet one of those impressionable, inexperienced youths who, under the glamour of a first and absorbing passion, fancy that nothing is so likely to ennoble, intensify, and immortalise it as the act of marriage. The name of this dupe was Roger Palmer, and he was a young fellow of respectable means and family studying law at the Temple. Where, when, or how Barbara made his acquaintance is unknown; perhaps it is not doing her memory, already sufficiently lurid, an injustice to suggest that the first meeting might have been in the streets when she was on her way to "Butler's shop." For Roger Palmer, excellent young man though he was, by no means belonged to the same rank or moved in the same society as Barbara Villiers. In fact, her stepfather, the Earl of Anglesea, strongly opposed the match, but as he eventually yielded it is to be supposed that Barbara's arguments were irresistible.

Having got the necessary husband, she returned without compunction to her liaison with Chesterfield, whom she was too much in love with to bear him any resentment. As for Palmer, poor creature, he was so blinded with love of his dazzlingly beautiful wife as to remain apparently long in ignorance of the real state of affairs of which he had been the dupe. But the "Mounseer," as his wife spoke of him in her letters to Chesterfield, was not so great a fool as not to be jealous, if still unsuspicious, of the attention Mrs. Palmer received from her admirer. He suggested that they should go into the country to live, where he might have her all to himself.

An unexpected event, however, soon rid him of Chesterfield. This nobleman—of whom Swift many years after declared "I have heard he was the greatest knave in England"—having killed his man in a duel, was obliged to flee the country, and the liaison was interrupted. Shortly afterwards Palmer, who was employed by the Royalists to carry messages to Charles, went to Holland and took his wife with him. Although it is not known with any certainty what sort of reception the Palmers met with at the exiled Court at Breda, there can be little doubt that Barbara, whose character experience had already begun to develop, used Chesterfield, whom she found at Breda, to serve her ends in his turn as cunningly as she had previously used Palmer for the same purpose. It was to her, as all the world knows, that King Charles slunk off privately to spend the first night of the Restoration, treating the joyous acclaim of the people, such as no King of England has ever received before or since, quite as cynically as the pompous official welcome of Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Speaker of the House of Commons. Henceforth, the career of "the finest woman of her age," as she was described by one of her enemies, emerges from obscurity and passes into the full light of history.

So far there was nothing in her life to mark it from that of hundreds of other loose women. She had given no sign of the chef-d'œuvre she was to execute; "like most great artists," says one of her biographers, "she had begun her career by copying conventional methods." But now she was to show a remarkably original talent in the design of vice. Her opportunity, that "tide in the affairs of men" which the great majority of mankind are incapable of using to their advantage, had come; she was not the one to let her chance slip. That she was fully alive to the fortune that dropped on those on whom Royalty smiled is evident from her attempt to capture the favour of the Duke of York while still uncertain of Charles's. We read of a flirtation carried on in church with the heir-presumptive; if she could not be the mistress of the King, she resolved to be that of his brother. Of the necessary qualifications for playing her game successfully, Mrs. Palmer possessed a perfect self-confidence and the power to fascinate. As we do not believe that it is possible to convey any real idea of physical beauty by enumerating its component parts, we will content ourselves with saying, on the authority of her friends and enemies, that Mrs. Palmer was dazzlingly, maddeningly, triumphantly beautiful.

At the Bartholomew Fair, to which she had the hardihood to go, the curses of a mob that threatened to wreck the carriage of the "King's Miss" were turned, at sight of her lovely face, to blessings. She was one of those women who appeal directly to the senses, a rare creature with the irresistible smile of a Circe and the temper of a Medea. Such women do not require intellect.

The siren played her part cunningly. Her husband had at the Restoration been returned to Parliament for Windsor, and lived in London in King Street, Westminster, in the house which had been the regicide Whalley's, now a fugitive in America. Next door, Pepys, as consummate a snob and gossip as he was diarist, used to hear "great doings of music; the King and Dukes at Madam Palmer's, a pretty woman they have a fancy to." It is strange to note how Pepys's admiration for her rose and fell with the King's favour. Exactly nine months after that Restoration night a daughter—afterwards Lady Sussex, bosom friend of the Duchesse de Mazarin—was born in "Whalley's house," about whose birth there was much scandal. The King, already the slave of Mrs. Palmer, acknowledged the child as his, but it was generally believed to be Lord Chesterfield's, "whom she resembled very much." But Palmer, who was either a fool or a very chivalrous man, claimed the baby as his!

Shortly after this scandal the negotiations for Charles's marriage with Catherine of Braganza were begun. At once Mrs. Palmer, who dreaded in the unknown queen a rival to supplant her, prepared to soften her fall and at the same time to prevent it if she could. Already political factions had formed around her, but it was by relying on herself more than on others that she managed to get Charles to send the following note to Morrice, the Secretary of State:—

"Whitehall, 16 Oct., 1661.

"Prepare a warrant for Mr. Roger Palmer to be Baron of Limerick and Earl of Castlemaine in the same form as the last, and let me have it before dinner.—C."

Owing, however, to the hostility of Clarendon, the famous Chancellor, one of those men whose great abilities and integrity are characterised by a total absence of tact, Mr. Palmer did not become Earl of Castlemaine till the 11th of December, instead of "before dinner." In spite of this coveted honour Lady Castlemaine was very nervous as to the future. As she foresaw clearly that with the arrival of the Queen her position was at stake, she determined not to lose it without a struggle. By her termagant temper, by which strangely she held Charles as much as by her beauty, she hectored and caressed the King into appointing her lady of the bedchamber to the Queen. Nevertheless, the interval before the battle-royal began was very trying to her. She quarrelled with Chesterfield and threw him aside like an old glove lest his former connection should damage her at such a juncture in the eyes of Charles. Pepys and his wife saw her at this time at the play of "The French Dancing Mistress," where "with much pleasure we gazed upon my Lady Castlemaine; but it troubles us to see her look dejectedly and slighted by people already."

But nothing tried her temper more than her husband. The poor disillusioned man, thinking of her good name perhaps, if not of his own, had a child born to his wife in these days, of which Charles was undoubtedly the father, baptized as his own by a Roman Catholic priest, to which faith he was a convert. To Lady Castlemaine, hoping to hold the King by the children she had by him, nothing was more vexatious than this well-intentioned spoke in the wheel from a husband whose worth she knew in her heart and whom she had shamefully treated. She burst like a fury upon Castlemaine; had the child re-baptized by the rector of St. Margaret's; and ten days later left her husband for ever, taking with her "the plate, jewels, and other best things, every dish and cloth, and servant, except the porter"—the first indication of the rapacity for which she was later to be famous. On this day, in such a temper as one may imagine, she went to Hampton Court to kiss the Queen's hand for the first time and fight out with her royal rival the battle for which it seems both had been preparing.

Catherine of Braganza, poor, little, lonely, inexperienced creature, had arrived in England with the fixed determination not to admit Lady Castlemaine into her presence. She came prepared to conquer the heart of her fascinating husband, and lost her own at sight of him. To receive Lady Castlemaine as her lady of the bedchamber was, as Clarendon told the King, "more than flesh and blood could stand." But Charles, who dreaded the ridicule of his courtiers if he yielded to his wife and under the spell of his passionate mistress, remained firm. The Queen was equally obstinate. She declared that rather than submit she would go back to Lisbon "in any little vessel." The honourable Clarendon, to whom such a woman as Lady Castlemaine was personally no less abhorrent than her influence in State affairs was to be dreaded, sided with the Queen, and with his customary tactlessness tried to persuade the King he was in the wrong. The hatred of Lady Castlemaine for Clarendon dates from this period; she never forgave him for "meddling in her business," as she expressed it. As she never hid her dislikes, and in the war of interest fought squarely enough, the Chancellor had much to do to keep his own position secure.

It was she who made Charles write to Clarendon during his thankless rôle of peacemaker—

"Nobody shall presume to meddle in the affairs of the Countess of Castlemaine. Whoever dares to do so will have cause to repent it to the last moment of his life. Nothing will shake the resolution I have taken with regard to her; and I shall consent to be miserable in this world and the next, if I yield in my decision, which is that she shall continue a bedchamber lady to the Queen. I shall to the last hour of my life regard any one who opposes me in this as my enemy; and whosoever shows himself hostile to the Countess will, I swear by my honour, earn my undying displeasure."

The vituperative exaggeration of this letter betrays the real author. Charles merely penned what the beautiful termagant dictated to him.

Such was the state of affairs when Lady Castlemaine left her husband, plundering his house of all it contained before she went, and on the same day got herself presented at the Queen's Drawing-Room by the King himself. Catherine, who till now had never seen her and did not catch her name, received her graciously; a moment later, discovering the trick that had been played upon her, and stung by the publicity with which she had been insulted, the wretched Queen fainted, bursting a blood-vessel. Far from feeling shame at being the cause of such an indecent scandal, not to speak of the misery of a fellow-creature, Lady Castlemaine gloried in her triumph. It is true the Duchess of Richmond, unable to control herself, before the whole Court called her a Jane Shore, and hoped she should live to see her come to the same end! But the Queen's powers of resistance were broken by exhaustion. Not long after Pepys saw the "King, Queen, and my Lady Castlemaine and young Crofts (the Duke of Monmouth) in one coach." Catherine shut her eyes, and Lady Castlemaine moved to Whitehall, into apartments close to the King's.

As for the husband she had degraded and deserted, his state of mind as well as his temperament may be imagined from the fact that he went to France to hide his shame and grief under a cowl in some monastery. This cure for his sick spirit did not, however, prove as efficacious as he had expected. He soon returned and tried a sort of political activity as a substitute, which from time to time drew him for a brief moment out of a respectable obscurity, from which but for his notorious wife he would never have emerged at all.

Great as was her victory and long as her sway lasted, we very much doubt if Lady Castlemaine's power over the King, marked as it was by plunder of the State, was ever so real as before the arrival of the Queen. For some ten years or more, it is true, she continued a sort of maîtresse en titre, but never before or since was such a position assailed by so many storms, or filled by a woman whose actions were so calculated to cause her to forfeit it. No royal mistress has ever treated her lover so brutally, so indecently, so faithlessly as Lady Castlemaine treated Charles, and continued to be a power. He liked wit, and she had none; he liked peace in his establishment, and she scolded him like a Xantippe; he liked flattery, and she reviled him; he dreaded ridicule, and she made him the laughing-stock of his Court and the jest of his people. Even affection was lacking between them; neither of them ever evinced the pretence of it for the other. It is true she had beauty, but others were more beautiful; and after the chain that bound him to her, many times snapped, was finally broken beyond repair, this strange couple continued on good terms. Perhaps psychologists may explain the secret of her hold over him, for never was connection between such a King and such a mistress so inexplicable.

Her first indiscretion, which, one would think, should have proved fatal to her position, occurred shortly after her triumph over the Queen. Charles, whose affection for his numerous progeny was one of the traits of his subtly complex character, had young Crofts, his eldest bastard, brought to Whitehall and publicly acknowledged. He was a singularly handsome and attractive youth, and Lady Castlemaine, under the pretence of "mothering" him, began at once to weave her spells around him. This intrigue did not escape the King; but, instead of overwhelming both with his royal wrath, he paid his mistress the compliment of being jealous, and cynically removed his son from her path by marrying him to the richest heiress in Scotland and creating him Duke of Monmouth. The termagant took her revenge by carrying on a double intrigue with James Hamilton, the brother of the famous Anthony, and Sir Charles Barkeley. It was no secret. "Captain Ferrers and Mr. Howe," wrote gossip Pepys, "both often through my Lady Castlemaine's window have seen her go to bed and Sir Charles Barkeley in her chamber." But Charles merely shrugged his shoulders in his cynical fashion and declared himself "past jealousy." The report, the first of many similar ones, ran "that Lady Castlemaine had fallen from favour." Pepys, however, is able to state that the King still continued to visit her "four nights a week," and was told that "my Lady Castlemaine hath all the King's Christmas presents, made him by the peers, given to her; and that at the great ball she was much richer in jewels than the Queen and Duchess (of York) put together."

It is de rigueur, no doubt, that the reconciliations between a monarch and his mistress should be richly lacquered with gold; but in the annals of royal tiffs there is no gilding so heavy as that which calmed the termagant outbursts of my Lady Castlemaine. If it be true that lovers often quarrel for the pleasure of "making up," how great must that pleasure have been to Barbara Villiers, whose greed of gain was only equalled by her man-hunger!

For these two passions, money and men, consumed her between them. After one of their quarrels Charles gave her £30,000 to pay her debts; after another he made her a present of Berkshire House, a splendid property near St. James's Palace; after yet another her dukedom. But titles were of as little account to this woman with the blood of the Villiers in her veins as silver in the time of King Solomon. What she coveted was cash—cash to squander upon her pleasures, cash to pay her huge debts, cash to stimulate her lovers. As Burnet says of her, "she was enormously ravenous"; so the Customs were farmed for her benefit to the extent of ten thousand a year; likewise she mulcted the revenue derived from the tax on beer of a similar sum, and the Post Office of half this amount annually. But this great income was as nothing compared to the vast sums paid her from the Irish Treasury, instead of from the English, because the corruption was less easily to be detected. As for the Privy Purse, she never went shopping without it. "Make a note that this is to be paid for out of the Privy Purse," she used to say to her maid when anything in the London shops took her fancy. Further, during the period that my Lady Castlemaine played the Montespan to Charles's Louis, all offices that fell vacant, whether spiritual or temporal, were auctioned for her benefit. And, like the true courtezan she was, this literal shower of gold in which she lived ran off her like water through a sieve.

One night she lost £25,000 at play, and her usual stake on a cast was from £1,000 to £1,500. Money had neither meaning nor value for her, but she wanted it and was prepared to get it at all costs. Once too, like the harlot again, she stripped Charles of everything, so that he himself lacked linen and the very servants at Whitehall had not bread to eat!

This abnormal appetite, which consumed even the money set aside for the purchase of the royal stationery, was the concomitant symptom of the nymphomania from which she suffered—a disease perfectly well known to medical science. Without some such explanation it seems impossible to us to account for the innumerable infidelities that Lady Castlemaine indulged in while maîtresse en titre. As Charles had some knowledge of medicine and chemistry, and was very far from being a fool—as the beautiful shrew once called him to his face—one is almost tempted to hazard the suggestion, as an explanation of his long bondage to this woman, that he found a scientific excuse for her conduct which has been overlooked by historians. Be this as it may, it was not long before the lovely Lady Castlemaine found room again for others beside the King in her capacious heart.

To enumerate her lovers, the number of whom exceeded the King's, would not only be impossible but scarcely amusing. Of this legion devoted to the worship of Priapus there are a few, however, that may be cited. As Lady Castlemaine consumed money irrespective of the source from which it was derived, so she never gave a thought to the rank from which her lovers were recruited. My Lady Castlemaine's taste in men was thoroughly catholic. From Barkeley and Hamilton her fancy flitted to her cousin, Buckingham, one of the most extraordinary men of an extraordinary age, of whom more later. From this great Duke what she termed her affections roamed through the various grades of society, and finally rested on a "compound of Hercules and Adonis," who supplemented his living on the tight-rope. With this man, Jacob Hall, she was, as Pepys would say, so "besotted" for a time that she gave him a salary, diverting the money for this purpose from a sum voted by Parliament for the National Defence. From the rope-dancer, who is said to have treated her after her own vituperative fashion, she probably suffered less than from the polished villainy of Buckingham.

Nor, when the ice of the trough on which we are skating is cracking under our feet, should we fail to mention the actor, Hart, a great-nephew of Shakespeare. Her liaison with this handsome and justly celebrated tragic actor had apparently a less voluptuous motive than such amours usually had with her. Pepys, gossiping with Mrs. Knipp, the actress, in his customary prurient curiosity to glean news from any source, learns that "my Lady Castlemaine is mightily in love with Hart, of their house; and he is much with her in private, and she goes to him and do give him many presents; and that the thing is most certain, and by this means she is even with the King's love to Mrs. Davis." (Moll Davis, an "impertinent slut" of an actress, and as beautiful and brazen as my Lady Castlemaine herself.) As one of many instances of the bond, of which history does not afford a parallel, between a king and a maîtresse en titre this attempt of Lady Castlemaine to get "even with" Charles is striking.

How the ice cracks under us!

It is not always on dukes and rope-dancers, actors and dandies that my Lady Castlemaine casts her hungry glance. No one, provided he be fair and shapely to the eye, escapes her attention. History does not relate the number of times Chiffinch let her through that little gate at Whitehall by which the crowd of duchesses, actresses, and meaner beauties passed secretly to and from the private closet of Majesty. But on one of these masked assignations, as my Lady Castlemaine scuttled down the back-stairs, she spied with her observant eyes a page loitering there. The page passed after that meeting with the King's mistress from the back-stairs of Whitehall to the stage, assassination plots, and many a questionable adventure, but for nigh on twenty years my Lady Castlemaine was "interested" in him. His shallow, handsome head being turned, Goodman boasted openly of the patronage he enjoyed. Once at the theatre—it was in William and Mary's time—the audience being seated, the Queen in her box, and the curtain ready to rise, he shouted from behind the scenes to inquire "whether his duchess had come," and forbade the raising of the curtain till she should appear. Fortunately at that moment her Grace of Cleveland arrived and Queen Mary was spared the insult of having to wait an actor's pleasure. Such was her passion for this scoundrel that she was content to share his affections with his wife and another woman of the town. But this was at a later period when her money and rank rather than her charms attracted.

Perhaps no better instance of the morals of the Restoration could be cited than the manner in which this female Don Juan commenced her notorious acquaintance with Wycherley. He was at the time a good-looking young man, in the bud of his dramatic career, and she was a middle-aged woman with such a past! He had, with design to secure her patronage, flattered her in his play, "Love in a Wood, or a Night in St. James's Park" (!), just then running to crowded houses, when she passed him one morning in her carriage in Pall Mall. With the gross humour of Restoration manners she shouted at him a low epithet that might with perfect justice and much more fittingly have been applied to her own sons. He at once turned, and the following dialogue, according to Dennis, Pope, and others, took place:—

"Madam," said Wycherley, "you have been pleased to bestow on me a title which generally belongs to the fortunate. Will your ladyship be at the play to-night?"

"Well," she replied, "what if I am there?"

"Why, then, I shall be there to wait on your ladyship, though to do so I disappoint a very fine woman."

"So you are sure to disappoint a woman who has favoured you for one who has not?"

"Yes," was the gallant reply, "if she who has not is the finer woman of the two. But he who will be constant to your ladyship till he can find a finer woman, is sure to die your captive."

It is stated that hereupon the lady blushed! But she was at the theatre that night and sat with him in his box.

After this episode, which if it caused talk did not cause scandal, we need no longer wonder at the tone of Wycherley's comedies.

One would think that such flagrant infidelities would have snapped the mysterious spell Lady Castlemaine had cast upon the King. But perhaps there was safety in the openness of her amours, and it was not often that Charles was jealous; he was too cynical, and gave his mistresses the same license he took himself. There were, however, times when his pride was hurt, and two of these are worth citing: one as an incident in the life of the great Marlborough, the other as the means through which Lady Castlemaine finally lost the King.

No light has been shed on the character of Marlborough clearer than that in which it is exposed by the story of his start in life. John Churchill came up to London to seek his fortune with empty pockets, no influence, and a face of such beauty as few young men have ever been endowed with. He was an obscure youth of seventeen, with ambition already unbridled, when the eyes of my Lady Castlemaine first fell upon him. At the first exchange of glances desire was born in both of them. The courtezan saw in him a new emotion to be gratified; he saw in the King's mistress a stepping-stone to fortune. But the game to both was full of danger; detection, in this instance, was thought by Lady Castlemaine to spell her ruin. For she was shrewd enough to perceive that her sway over Charles had begun to wane; and in her falling it was to her interest to fall softly. To bind young Churchill to secrecy was easy; he was naturally cunning, and the prize he sought was slippery. Careful, however, as they both were, they could not escape the alert, vindictive suspicion of his Grace of Buckingham. Five years before this nobleman and his "cousin Barbara" were on the best of terms; she had saved him from the Tower and paved the way for him to the Ministry, but they had now fallen out, over what is not related, and Buckingham, as usual, flung all his ability into his hate. Being informed by his spies of the visits John Churchill paid the courtezan, he laid a trap in which the King might catch the culprits in flagrante delicto. Doubtless every one remembers how the handsome young guardsman—who had already got out of his mistress enormous sums of money as well as his commission in the army—hearing the sound of the King's voice as he lay in her arms, leapt out of the window to escape recognition, while Charles, with his consummate cynicism, cried after him, "I forgive you, for you do it for your bread."

Charles had one great virtue which seems to us at times to cancel most of his vices—a fine sense of humour. May we suggest that the kingly hand may be seen in the fate of the child whom, after this episode, the Duchess of Cleveland bore to Churchill? Surely, it could only be his sense of humour that made a "nun at Pontoise" of the issue of this liaison? For Barbara Villiers, who never had a sense of humour at all, was not religiously inclined, though she once made a bishop and liked to be painted as a madonna; nor was John Churchill the man to give a second thought to liabilities he had helped others to incur—a statement that reminds us of a story of a game of basset at which the Duke of Marlborough refused to lend the Duchess of Cleveland half-a-crown, when he was keeping the bank, and had a thousand pounds lying on the table before him!

The other instance in which Charles was recalcitrant was my Lady Castlemaine's fondness for the "invincible Jermyn," with his big head and little legs and forced wit. As the records of the period quite fail to convey the charm this vain, shallow dandy exercised on all the women of the Court, we are inclined to agree with the King that he was a creature to be despised. But Lady Castlemaine, like the rest of her sex, thought differently. This was one of the rare occasions when the termagant was strangely chary about giving offence. To cover up one's tracks at Whitehall was very difficult, and Lady Castlemaine was only partially successful. The arrival of Frances Stuart at Court gave her an opportunity to practise her powers of dissimulation. Lady Castlemaine professed a great friendship for the beauty and had her to sleep in the same bed, not so much as a compliment on the part of my lady as a ruse to throw Charles off the scent. For when the King came, as was his habit, every morning and nearly every night, to visit Lady Castlemaine he found La Belle Stuart in bed beside her ladyship. But while this friendship tended to extinguish Charles's jealousy of Jermyn, it finished by firing my Lady Castlemaine's of Miss Stuart. It is not here that we shall relate in full the amusing particulars of the game of cross-purposes, of which the prize was sexual emotion, that to the ribald delight of the town and the more decorous gratification of Mr. Pepys now took place. The shrew had to fight the prude for her position, her plunder, and her royal paramour. From being friends the rival beauties became deadly enemies. The quarrel was taken up by their servants; the nurses of the mistress's bastards assaulted the maids of the prude; once the King had to leave the Council of State to make peace!

All her powers of coarse vituperation, all her powers of intrigue, all her knowledge of the King's character were brought into play by Lady Castlemaine. She dished her rival, but it is a marvel, with the strange means she employed, that she was not utterly ruined. The secret of her success is to be found, we think, in that she was fighting not for possession of the King's affections, she cared nothing about them, but for the possession of his influence.

It is to be borne in mind that this Stuart-Castlemaine-Jermyn affair continued for nearly five years. Once during this time, on some slighting words from the King, Lady Castlemaine packed her boxes and trunks and, swearing she had shaken the dust of the Court from her feet, quitted the palace for Richmond. But in spite of Miss Stuart, or perhaps on account of her prudery, Charles, after a couple of days, missed the termagant, and went a-hunting in her neighbourhood, to the amusement of the Court. The next day my Lady Castlemaine was back at Whitehall, but before she came she made the King implore her on his knees! The reconciliation was, however, of short duration. The talk of the town was of nothing but the wrangling that went on in the royal palace between the mistresses. Pepys's diary is for the time a thermometer registering the rise and fall of the temperature of a mercurial royal favour and its effect on my Lady Castlemaine's looks and moods.

Had her beautiful prudish rival possessed less virtue and more wit Lady Castlemaine's star would have set long before it did. But she finally ruined La Belle Stuart in the same contemptible, unprincipled fashion as Buckingham later ruined herself. Warned by the pimps of the back-stairs, whom she took care to secure to her interest, she was able to notify Charles in time for him to surprise Miss Stuart in a situation which deprived her of his regard. With the prude's elopement from Whitehall the day after this adventure, Lady Castlemaine's position was more secure than ever, and her reign continued as before, punctuated with infidelities and Billingsgate quarrels.

In the morning of the Restoration decency was not wholly flung to the winds. Then when my Lady Castlemaine presented her lord with a son, the new-born babe was smuggled out of her bed secretly, and "carried off by a coachman under his cloak," to be publicly acknowledged by the King years later when the sun of the Restoration was at its zenith. It is said that several dukes came into the world in this mysterious fashion. But as time passed the coming of a bastard was noised about the Court and the coffee-houses long before he arrived. During the Great Plague, when the Court was at Oxford, Pepys states that "every boy in the streets openly cries, 'The King can't go away till my Lady Castlemaine be ready to come along with him.'" On this occasion the poor Queen, who, under the mask of friendship which she wore even in private, studied revenge for the insults she received from this brazen courtezan, called upon her lady of the bedchamber to fulfil her duties, and my Lady Castlemaine, scarcely able to leave her bed, had to mount and ride in Catherine's suite.

Another time she contented herself with laughing at Lady Castlemaine's jealousy of La Belle Stuart. Yet another, the King himself revenged her. Overhearing his mistress one day making a slighting remark of the Queen, Charles burst into one of his rare fits of anger and ordered the woman to leave Whitehall forthwith. Lady Castlemaine went off imperiously enough, but took the precaution to leave her baggage behind her. At the end of three days, hearing nothing from him, she became alarmed and wrote him submissively to ask for permission to send for her things. He told her she might come in person and fetch them if she wished them, and the quarrel ended as usual in a reconciliation. Her hold over him seemed magical—a hold the secret of which, one would say, was the fearlessness of her abuse. Under that terrible lash Charles cowered to the end like a whipped dog.

During her struggle for supremacy with the Stuart, when even the most witless of frailties would have cunningly manœuvred the whole artillery of flattery, kisses, smiles, sighs, and tears, Lady Castlemaine exploded her vituperative bombs in the royal presence, and taunted the King like a poissarde. Nor, what is perhaps more remarkable, in the duel of these Restoration Brunhildas and Fredregondes for Charles's heart, did either one or the other subject her private inclinations to interest.

When the Queen was supposed to be dying and the gamesters of the Court were backing Miss Stuart for her place, Lady Castlemaine continued her intrigue half-openly, half-secretly with Jermyn. On the authority of a Mr. Cooling, from whom Pepys was in the habit of pumping the gossip of the Court when that gentleman was primed with wine, history learns that Charles, venturing a little cynical raillery on the subject of Jermyn, whom he considered more despicable a rival than Goodman or Hall, remarked that though always willing to oblige the ladies, he could hardly be expected to father all the babes about to be born at Whitehall. To which Lady Castlemaine, who saw an allusion to herself in the remark, "made a slight puh at him with her mouth." In this instance, however, Charles proved very inconsiderate of my Lady Castlemaine's state of health. Whereupon with curses and tears of rage she rushed from the palace to a friend's house in Pall Mall, swearing that "she will have it christened in the Chapel at Whitehall and owned for the King's; or she will bring it into Whitehall gallery and dash the brains of it out before the King's face!"

But whether it was because he was afraid that this woman, unique in the annals of palace prostitution, was capable of putting her Medea-like vengeance into effect, or from the more likely fear of her threat to publish his letters, Charles followed her and prayed her on his knees to return. From one of his Povys, or Fenns, or Coolings the prurient Mr. Pepys learns that my Lady Castlemaine allowed herself to be persuaded to yield, but "not as a mistress, for she scorned him, but as a tyrant to command him! And so she is come to-day, when one would think his mind should be full of some other cares, having this morning broken up such a Parliament with so much discontent, and so many wants upon him, and but yesterday heard such a sermon against adultery."

It has been said that the English take their pleasures sadly; it might have been added with more reason that they take their vices grossly. Never was this latter sardonic reproach more applicable than at the Restoration. The contrast between Whitehall and Versailles is striking in this respect. At the former the very duchesses were demi-reps; at the latter even the termagant Montespan never forgot the dignity and breeding due to her position. In England, in our respectable age, the language of a Nell Gwynn or a Duchess of Cleveland are alike impossible of printed quotation. In France, after more than two centuries, the attic wit of a Ninon de Lenclos or a Madame de Maintenon has lost none of its savour. But if we have lacked the refinement of the French we have had compensation. We paid for our gross vices on the spot, cash down, so to speak. We settled our little Restoration bill, with a discount of course, at the Revolution of 1688. A Duchess of Cleveland has, after all, only cost us a couple of dukedoms. France's bill for a similar article was presented in the Reign of Terror, with another for interest in the Commune. In a word, if a nation wishes such luxuries, as nations have done before and may do again, we should recommend on the whole a coarse-mouthed Cleveland to a spirituelle Pompadour. They both wear equally well in the public memory, and the price paid in pounds sterling for the former is incalculably less than that paid in human blood for the latter.

But it must not be supposed that Charles and his favourite were always quarrelling and making up, or that he, in the intervals between one rupture and another, regarded her with indifference while cynically permitting her to plunder the State and enjoy the liberties which he took himself. On the contrary, he treated as personal affronts the many insults offered to her. Overhearing Lady Gerard maligning Lady Castlemaine behind her back, he ordered her to quit the Court. For an obscene jest at her expense he likewise banished Killigrew, the wit, whom personally he liked. On one occasion he ordered the gates of St. James's Park to be shut and everybody found within to be arrested because three masked men assailed her as she was taking a walk and frightened her into a fit by swearing she should die in a ditch like Jane Shore. And his splendid gift of Berkshire House was the means he took of consoling her after a quarrel for the famous "Poor Whores' Petition to the Illustrious Lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine," which was followed a few days later by "A Gracious Answer" to the same. But perhaps Charles showed as much defiance as pity in this act; for these lampoons were levelled at the favourite at the time of the riot of London apprentices, who, fired with religious zeal, pulled down the brothels in the city, and when suppressed with bloodshed declared that "they had only done ill in not pulling down in place of the little ones the big one at Whitehall."

The security of her position, which neither her vituperation nor her infidelities, nor the King's, seemed able to shake, naturally caused her to be regarded as a political factor of the greatest importance. Early in her reign Lady Castlemaine became the centre of the cunningest, most dangerous, and most profligate ambitions in the nation. In her apartments the famous Cabal was formed which had the fall of the honest Clarendon for its immediate and the plunder of the State for its ulterior object. She had no political ability, no inclination for political affairs, but she was at once the tool and guiding genius of the Cabal. She was willing to essay the rôle of stateswoman with no other principle than revenge and no other policy than plunder. Never before or since in English history has a conspiracy had baser motives than that which made the nation the slave, dupe, and plaything of Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington, and Lauderdale. Never, perhaps, in any country were talents so nearly akin to genius so corrupted. To call these men statesmen is to debase the name, but they ruled the State, thanks to my Lady Castlemaine. Of this crew of brigands Buckingham was the most notorious. As the stately Ormond represents, we think, the highest type of nobleman, so Buckingham represents the lowest. He was one of the most extraordinary men of the century; with the power, had he wished, of rising to the summit of human virtue, he sank to the lowest depths of animal vice. In few men have the possibilities of the good and evil in human nature been so apparent. That such a character had the power to charm the stern Puritan Fairfax, whose daughter and Cromwell's niece he married, and at the same time to appeal to the dissolute Charles, would alone make him remarkable. As the chief ornament of the Court, the lover and foe alike of Barbara Villiers, and her male counterpart, the following striking portrait by the author of "Hudibras" strikes us as worthy of attention. It breathes more than anything else we remember to have read the very atmosphere of the Restoration, and explains all that seems incomprehensible in the characters of Charles, Lady Castlemaine, and the rest of the monstrous anomalies of Whitehall.

"The Duke of Bucks," wrote Butler, "is one that has studied the whole body of vice. He has pulled down all that Nature raised in him and built himself up again after a model of his own. He has dammed up all those lights that Nature made into the noblest prospects of the world and opened other little blind loopholes backward by turning day into night and night into day. His appetite to his pleasures is diseased and crazy, like the pica in a woman, that longs to eat that which was never made for food, or a girl in the green sickness, that eats chalk and mortar. Perpetual surfeits of pleasure have filled his mind with bad and vicious humours, which make him affect new and extravagant ways, as being sick and tired with the old. Continual wine, women, and music put false value upon things, which, by custom, become habitual and debauch his understanding, so that he retains no right notion or sense of things. He rises, eats, and goes to bed by the Julian account, long after all others that go by the new style, and keeps the same hours with owls and the antipodes. He does not dwell in his house, but haunts it like an evil spirit, that walks all night to disturb the family, and never appears by day. He lives perpetually benighted, runs out of his life, and loses his time as men do their ways in the dark, and as blind men are led by dogs, so he is governed by some mean servant or other that relates to his pleasures. He is as inconstant as the moon which he lives under; and though he does nothing but advise with his pillow all day, he is as great a stranger to himself as he is to the rest of the world. His mind entertains all things very freely, but, like guests and strangers, they are not welcome if they stay long. This lays him open to all cheats, quacks, and impostors, who apply to every particular humour while it lasts and afterwards vanish. He deforms Nature while he intends to adorn her, like Indians that hang jewels in their lips and noses. His ears are perpetually drilled with a fiddlestick. He endures pleasure with less patience than other men do their pains."

And this man ruled England after Cromwell! What a swing of the pendulum of fate! Considering the period, it is not at all surprising to learn that he died miserably in a peasant's hovel and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Restoration is made up of these theatrical contrasts.

Opposed to Lady Castlemaine's Cabal, or the Cabal's Lady Castlemaine—for each was the tool of the other—Clarendon and Ormond tried to protect the honour and dignity of the nation. These men had rejected with scorn the bribes of Louis XIV., which the Cabal were eager to accept; they had lofty and patriotic aims, the respect of the people, and the greatest claim to that of the King. While they held power they acted as a dam to the sea of profligacy that threatened from the day of the King's restoration to inundate the State. But around such a man as Charles it could be but a question of time before their fatherly advice, incorruptible honour, and grave demeanour would become a bore. Nevertheless, though he regarded them as a boy does a schoolmaster, he was not prepared at the instigation of a Buckingham or a Lady Castlemaine to break loose from their tutelage. It was one of the strangest traits of Charles's character that he always respected virtue even while he paraded vice.

And though the Cabal have had the credit of accomplishing the fall of Clarendon and Ormond, it is perhaps truer to say that Charles sacrificed them to public opinion rather than to private spite. To those who are interested in the history of political wire-pulling the intrigues of the Court of Charles II. will afford an entertainment second to none of the same kind. But this is not the place to expose them, and we merely refer to them in passing for the sake of such light as they may throw into the dark corners of Lady Castlemaine's political career.

This woman fought Clarendon and Ormond as she fought the King. Both had offended her in many ways—ways such as a courtezan never forgives. Clarendon had been the best friend of her noble father, and she was Barbara Villiers, the subject of lewd jests alike in the ante-rooms of Whitehall and the coffee-houses of the town. The contrast between them, with the unuttered reproach, pity, and scorn it implied, was sufficient cause for hatred. But Clarendon was tactless; a statesman himself, he laughed at the idea of a woman of her lack of ability attempting to rule the State. Nothing whetted her hatred for him like her powerlessness to hurt him; he seemed to stand out of the reach of her coarse abuse. When it was a question of Clarendon between them, the King told her that "she was a jade that meddled with things she had nothing to do with at all." But neither she nor the Cabal ever dreamt of throwing up the sponge. That such men as Clarendon and Ormond should have been under the necessity of taking her seriously into account was perhaps a greater humiliation than their struggles with Buckingham and Company. The Chancellor having declared, when refusing to put the seals to some grant of a place the courtezan had disposed of, that "the woman would sell everything shortly," she, on its being repeated to her, sent word to tell him that what he said was quite true and that she would sell his place too before long. She used openly to express a desire to see his head on a stake and a "hope to see Ormond hanged," for refusing to pay her drafts on the Irish Treasury. But this great nobleman, whose character was as stainless as the Chancellor's abilities were great, merely replied to her virago outburst that, "far from wishing her ladyship's days shortened in return, his greatest desire was to see her grow old."

Great stress has been laid on Lady Castlemaine's political influence from the fact that Clarendon finally fell. But of this there is no real proof; for, though she succeeded in fastening the King's anger on him at the time of the discovery of Miss Stuart's elopement, his disgrace was already imminent. The Chancellor, like most statesmen, sooner or later, was the victim of unforeseen complications. He made enemies by his want of tact; his popularity had already been impaired when the Dutch War broke out. The reverses sustained then aroused the desire for vengeance, which is one of the most effective ways public opinion has of expressing its will. Charles was not the man to resist the popular clamour, and Clarendon fell. Every schoolboy has heard the story of his fall—how, on leaving Whitehall after his dismissal, Lady Castlemaine jumped out of her bed and reviled her enemy like a fishwife as he passed under her window. Two years later Buckingham got rid of Ormond. In the place of one Minister who made a single mistake—the Dutch War—public opinion got the Cabal. As soon as the welcome news reached France, Louis XIV. sent each member of Lady Castlemaine's junto his portrait framed in jewels, valued at £3,000.

Three years later, as might be expected, Lady Castlemaine and the Cabal fell out, like brigands over their booty. Buckingham, who had once been her lover, gave the coup de grâce to the maîtresse en titre, though it was left to others to provide her successor. Just why or how Charles ceased to crave the society of this woman whose coarse and disgusting behaviour had amused him for ten years is not clear; but the fact remains that he was anxious to break with her, and Buckingham offered him the opportunity, perhaps quite as much from the sheer love of a low intrigue as from hate of a woman who had offended him. Charles, who was still strangely afraid of the terrible termagant, was at a loss for a plausible excuse for dismissing her. To find one after all he had so long suffered from her with indifference, if not delight, indeed required ingenuity. But Buckingham discovered it for him in Jermyn, for whom his aversion was well known. Her liaison with Jermyn had continued more or less masked for years; for though Lady Castlemaine's passion for him had been the cause of more than one rupture with the King, the issue of which even she dreaded, she could not bring herself to give him his congé while bestowing the questionable favour of her regard on a score of others. Buckingham, who kept paid spies for the purpose of shadowing every person at Court, gave himself the contemptible pleasure of enabling Charles to surprise Lady Castlemaine and Jermyn precisely as she had enabled the King to surprise Miss Stuart and the Duke of Richmond.

The scandalous finale to the most shameful royal liaison in the history of such things has been told by Count Hamilton with the inimitable gloss that he alone has been able to give to the vulgarity of the Court of Charles II. As an example of the refinement with which it is possible to handle vice no less than the purity of literary style, his account of the way in which Charles broke with Lady Castlemaine is worth reproducing. His Majesty, having summoned up the courage to face her, "advised her rather to bestow her favours upon Jacob Hall, the rope-dancer, who was able to return them, than lavish away her money upon Jermyn to no purpose. She was not proof against his raillery. The impetuosity of her temper broke forth like lightning. She told him that it very ill became him to throw out such reproaches against one who, of all the women in England, deserved them the least; that he had never ceased quarrelling with her, ever since he had betrayed his own mean, low inclinations; that, to gratify such a depraved taste as his, he wanted only such silly things as Stuart, Wells, and that 'petite gueuse de comedienne' (Nell Gwynn). After which, resuming the part of Medea, the scene closed with menaces of tearing her children to pieces and setting his palace on fire. What course could he pursue with such an outrageous fury who, beautiful as she was, resembled Medea less than her dragons when she was thus enraged? The indulgent monarch loved peace, &c."

So the Chevalier de Gramont came to the rescue, and that prince of humorists drew up an agreement that Lady Castlemaine should for ever give up Jermyn, whom, as a proof of her sincerity, she would consent to have banished the town, while she would never abuse any more for ever the fair friends of the King, including that petite gueuse of an actress. In return for such condescension his Majesty would no longer put any restraint on her conduct, and immediately created her Baroness Nonsuch, Countess of Southampton, and Duchess of Cleveland, with parks and privileges and an income suitable to maintain such dignities. There were some at Whitehall who, while laughing over this buffoonery to which the royal seals were affixed, suggested that the Chevalier was not without a personal interest in the income he added to her titles, as he was in the habit of gaming every day at basset with her Grace, and never losing. Thus fell my Lady Castlemaine!

The rest of her career was destined to be no less notorious than that of which we have already given a sketch. As Duchess of Cleveland she still hung about the Court, and for the rest of the reign was treated by Charles with the cynical good-nature that in him passed for friendship, and which he bestowed on all his discarded favourites. The next few years her Grace spent in getting her children acknowledged by the King—we are inclined to agree with his Majesty that they would be wise indeed if they ever knew their real father; but sooner than they should never have had a father at all, he graciously consented to assume that rôle. This urgent and profitable business finished, she set about marrying them, in which she showed as much zeal for their material, as neglect for their moral, welfare. A rather nasty libel action was the result of her match-making; but though she covered herself with ridicule, she got for her daughters the husbands she intrigued for. They were married on the same day, and his Majesty gave the elder £20,000 and the younger £18,000 as a dowry, while the Duchess, with characteristic greed, sent the bill for the wedding banquet and the trousseaux, some £3,000, to her old friend the Privy Purse.

Shortly afterwards she decided, having been so successful at Whitehall, to try her fortune at Versailles. She went to France with her eldest daughter, the Countess of Sussex (the Duchesse de Mazarin's friend) and Barbara, her youngest, and young John Churchill's receipt for the big sums he had got from her. The Duchess remained several years in France, and though very ill-received, as we can well imagine, at polished Versailles, she led her usual life in Paris. Among her adventures in the Ville Lumière, she succeeded in fascinating Montague, the English Ambassador, and ruining him. For this man, having in his infatuation confided to her how little he thought of Charles, had the misfortune some time after to transfer his passion for her Grace to her daughter, Lady Sussex. Whereupon the Duchess, who only objected to her daughters' escapades when they were at her own expense, immediately wrote to the King and informed him of Montague's treachery to him as well as to herself.

She was in England again before the King's death—an event as disastrous for her as it was for the rest of the seraglio of the Merry Monarch. Compared with her past wealth her revenues were now shorn by debt, but she still lived in considerable luxury, and though less and less seen in public, still kept up her amorous intrigues. Her especial favourite, it would seem, was Goodman, with whom on her return to England she had resumed her old relation. Her day with the Buckinghams and Jermyns and men of rank was past; it was now entirely the turn of actors, lackeys, and impostors. The year after Charles's death, when she was forty-five, there was born at her house in Arlington Street a child, "which the town christened Goodman Cleveland."

A little later her daughter Barbara, who had taken the veil at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Paris, where she was known as Sister Benedicta, played on the Order to which she belonged an indecent practical joke, that, however, did not prevent her from becoming the prioress of a nunnery at a later and, we hope, a more circumspect day. This "love-jest" of the Sister Benedicta was adopted by its grandmother—almost the only generous act to her credit—and became in time a man of note in the eighteenth century.

Thus, in a partial and ignoble retirement, the Duchess passed the remaining years of the century, to emerge suddenly and with much scandal in the reign of Queen Anne before the curtain dropped upon her for ever.

Those who doubt, not without a certain righteous regret, the existence of the hell our ancestors believed in, may possibly derive some satisfaction from the fact that the Duchess of Cleveland did not escape some punishment in this world at least for her sins. In the tragi-comic close of this woman with the temper of a fishwife, the passions of a prostitute, and the conscience of an embezzler, there was a seeming retribution as terrible as it was deserved. If Buckingham's end was sinister, the Duchess of Cleveland's was grotesque and brutal—a scene fit for a Latin comedy.

In the summer of 1705 her husband, the unlucky Earl of Castlemaine, died, and a little while later, in her sixty-third year, she married a man sixteen years her junior. In his youth he had been called Handsome Feilding and the name was still given him in ridicule, which, however, his blustering vanity prevented him from feeling. Once, when walking in the Mall with a companion, he inquired if his sword touched his right heel and whether the ladies ogled him. "Yes," was the reply. "Well, then," he swaggered, "let them die of love and be d——d!" The anecdote is characteristic of him. But of his original charms he possessed nothing now save the belief in their continued existence—a belief with which he had managed to inspire her Grace. Everybody but the doting old Duchess knew him to be a bully, a coward, and a knave. Fortune, never very kind to him, had completely deserted him; he kept up a certain appearance and out of gaol by gambling. On the wedding-day "he hired a coach and two footmen, who, that they might know to what fop they belonged, were clothed in yellow, and as foppishly wore black sashes, which he bought at a cheap rate as being only old mourning hatbands bought of such as cry about the street 'Old clothes.'" In such fashion did her Grace of Cleveland, who had been in the habit of drawing ad libitum on the purse of the nation, enter upon what she hoped was the late St. Martin's summer of her life.

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."

["LA BELLE STUART," DUCHESS OF RICHMOND]
A PRUDE OF THE RESTORATION

LA BELLE STUART! The glamour of the Restoration is in that romantic name. At the sound of it our thoughts at once rush back to childhood, when we learnt English History out of story-books and picture-books; and old, half-forgotten tales of the Merry Monarch, and the gay doings of cavaliers with periwigs and swords, of maids of honour all lace and perfume, crowd upon the memory. La Belle Stuart! To the very children of the Board Schools—if Imagination be a faculty looked upon with favour at those practical seats of municipal learning—must come visions of a far-off romantic time. And even now in maturer life, when the naughty gossip of Mr. Pepys and Hamilton's wit have torn off the magic veil that hid the truth from us, the name still fascinates, and our fancy delights to be lured back from the utilitarian virtues and Philistine vices of to-day to the joie de vivre of the Restoration. No, we have not the heart to scold La Belle Stuart; for childhood's sake she is still dear to us.

But enough of reflection. To the story, and as the giant Moulineau said on a similar occasion, "Bélier, mon ami, commencez au commencement."

Frances Theresa Stuart was one of the daughters of a Scotch cavalier, whose capital consisted of a sword broken in the royal cause and a pedigree dipped in royal blood. After the capture or execution of King Charles, England being clearly no longer a country in which any one bearing the name of Stuart could live in safety, Stuart of Blantyre fled with his family to France. Broken swords and pedigrees were capital of a sort in those days across the Channel, and the starving cavalier applied for the interest on his to Queen Henrietta Maria. Her exiled Majesty, who was so poor herself that but for the pity of Cardinal de Retz she would have passed a winter without a fire in her apartment at the Louvre, could not do much for the ruined loyalist, but she did what she could. Stuart of Blantyre, like many another, was provided with a new sword by Condé or Turenne, and his year-old daughter, Frances, was adopted by the ex-Queen.

Much water was to flow under the bridge before the Stuarts and their followers were to come to their own again, and it was more French than English that La Belle Stuart arrived at Whitehall in her sixteenth year. As the protégée of Henrietta Maria she had enjoyed superior advantages, and it is not surprising that, brought up at the Louvre in constant intercourse with the best society of France, she should have spoken French as if it were her native tongue, and acquired that breeding and air de parure which in that day of French pre-eminence gave the possessor a peculiar distinction. Perfect manners and a perfect taste in dress have of themselves been known to redeem the looks of many a plain woman, but to these attractions Nature had bestowed on Frances Stuart the most perishable but most highly prized of all her gifts—beauty; beauty in its perfection, exquisite, statuesque, éblouissante. There was but one flaw in this chef d'œuvre, according to the critics, and that was the lack of sense. "It was hardly possible," said Hamilton, "for a woman to have less wit or more beauty."

The opinion of this judge, who was capable of twisting, exaggerating, or suppressing the truth if by so doing he could polish a period, has passed unchallenged, presumably because many of La Belle Stuart's actions seem to confirm it. Yet nothing would be easier than to prove the contrary. It is quite true that she lacked the gift of saying smart, witty things, and the ambition to grasp at dazzling shadows, like the majority of her contemporaries. But she never lost sight of the main chance, and as she had the patience to wait for it, the courage to seize it, and the skill to take advantage of it, there is no exaggeration in saying that no more artful and calculating woman stepped at Whitehall than this canny Scot, whose mother, said Pepys, "is one of the most cunning women in the world."

It is quite useless to predict what would have been her fate had there been no Restoration; but from her apparently witless refusal of Louis XIV.'s splendid offer to provide for her suitably if she would remain and adorn his Court instead of returning to England with the Stuarts, it may be taken for granted that the inducement was not as attractive as it seemed. In spite of Louis XIV. and his promises, no one knew better than Frances Stuart and her "cunning mother" that it required something more than a pretty face, a taste in dress, and a bel air to induce a French lord worth having to marry a penniless girl. But in England men were less fastidious, and if she played her cards cleverly there was no reason why her attractions should not secure her the husband she wanted. The Restoration was Frances Stuart's first opportunity, so, gracefully declining Louis' offer and accepting his valuable present, she went to England in the train of Henrietta Maria. Shortly afterward, through her protectress's influence, her own beauty, and her family's claims, she was appointed maid of honour to Queen Catherine. At the Court of Charles II. such an appointment was equivalent to that filled by the houris who luxuriate behind the ivory and ebony lattices of the Imperial seraglio at Stamboul.

Frances Stuart assumed her post at Whitehall with the firm intention of winning a husband; the supreme object of her life was marriage. She did not ask for love, or even great wealth, but rank, prestige. To have lovers galore, or even to be a king's mistress, made no appeal to her. Any woman with a pretty face could have the former and the To-morrows of the latter——!

"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.

The passion of the King for La Belle Stuart, kept at fever heat by her prudish resistance to his advances, made the possibility of Catherine's death a stepping-stone to the throne. During a short and severe illness of the Queen it was openly hinted that Frances Stuart was to be her successor. There can be no doubt but that she, trusting in Charles's absorbing passion and her kinship to the House of Stuart, did at this time hope to step into Catherine's shoes. "She was greatly pleased," said Hamilton, "with herself for the resistance she had made; a thousand flattering hopes of greatness and glory filled her heart, and the additional respect that was universally paid her contributed not a little to increase them."

But the Queen recovered. Charles, however, who saw no means of reducing the fortress of virtue he had so long and unsuccessfully stormed, now began to think of divorce. He went so far as to ask Archbishop Sheldon "if the Church would put any obstacle in the way of his putting away a wife who was sterile." Sheldon promised to consider the matter, but as he was the creature of Clarendon, and the Chancellor was the friend of Catherine, whatever real hope Charles might have had was dashed. Intrigue, however, was still busy. The Duke of Buckingham, who had not yet indiscreetly placed himself in the power of the "simpleton" whose influence he was courting, suggested to the King a plan for abducting the Queen and carrying her off to the West Indies, where it would be easy to get rid of her! Charles, to his credit, instantly scorned the suggestion, and the rôle of Anne Boleyn became less and less possible for La Belle Stuart.

The part she played in this situation, when, surrounded with enemies, one false step might have ruined her utterly, was admirable. She gave no one the slightest opportunity of injuring her, and, whatever her hopes or disappointments, satisfied the Queen at any rate that her intentions were honest. Without doubt, if the road to the throne had been open she would have taken it; but it was not from lack of ability or courage to set out to open it that she failed. It was never really a possibility, and she was cunning enough to appreciate the fact.

During this period La Belle Stuart had to parry the hate with which she was assailed by Lady Castlemaine with all the energy of which that fury was capable. The danger from first to last that she ran from the maîtresse en titre was always more present than the chance of succeeding the Queen. There was but one way for Frances Stuart to crush Lady Castlemaine, and that was at the cost of her virtue. It was the condition on which the King promised to dismiss the termagant. But the beauty, who was as obstinate as she was cunning, was firmly resolved to be no man's mistress, she wished to make a grand match, and it was certainly not at the Court of Charles II. that an ex-mistress was likely to find a duke to marry her. The value she set upon virtue was that of all prudes who angle in a muddy stream. She had her price—it was marriage—and she took care to publish the fact. It was her way of cleansing her reputation of the stains left on it by the King's attentions. So as she elected to put up with Lady Castlemaine she was obliged to continue to defend herself from her. She would not have been human if she had not tried to score off a rival from whom she had to endure so much.

One of their many quarrels convulsed the Court, and afforded Hamilton an opportunity for the display of his caustic wit. It was known as the "Affair of the Calash." This ridiculous feminine enmity, of which the following description by Count Hamilton is not to be improved, was one of the beautiful prude's ways of testing her power over the King:—

"Coaches with glass were then a late invention; that which was made for the King not being remarkable for its elegance, the Chevalier de Gramont was of opinion that something ingenious might be invented, which should partake of the ancient fashion, and likewise prove preferable to the modern; he therefore sent away Termes privately with all the necessary instructions to Paris; the Duke of Guise was likewise charged with this commission; and the courier, having by the favour of Providence escaped the quicksand, in a month's time brought safely over to England the most elegant and magnificent calash that had ever been seen, which the Chevalier presented to the King.... The Queen, imagining that so splendid a carriage might prove fortunate for her, wished to appear in it first, with the Duchess of York. Lady Castlemaine, who had seen them in it, thinking that it set off a fine figure to greater advantage than any other, desired the King to lend her this wonderful calash to appear in it the first fine day in Hyde Park. Miss Stuart had the same wish, and requested to have it on the same day. As it was impossible to reconcile these two goddesses, whose former union was turned into mortal hatred, the King was very much perplexed. Lady Castlemaine was with child, and threatened to miscarry if her rival was preferred. Miss Stuart threatened that she never would be with child if her request was not granted. This menace prevailed, and Lady Castlemaine's rage was so great that she had almost kept her word."

Hamilton added that this triumph was believed to have cost the prude her virtue. But this was merely the malice of gossip. Miss Stuart had the art of granting small favours and of holding out alluring hopes without really conceding anything. Charles, tantalised to desperation, continued more devoted than ever.

Royal admiration, while it invariably serves to recruit desirable partis who might otherwise evince no inclination to confer the blessing of matrimony upon a young and portionless beauty, is not without great disadvantages. In the case of La Belle Stuart the attentions she received from her sovereign tended to defeat the very object for which she was trying to employ them. "Point de raillerie avec le maître, c'est à dire, point de lornerie avec la maîtresse" was a maxim particularly applicable to the present situation. For Charles, who laughed cynically at the numerous rivals a Duchess of Cleveland gave him, had no intention of bearing patiently with those a Frances Stuart might offer him. In this instance he let it be clearly understood that he would brook no competitors in the game he had afield. Such suitors as she longed to treat seriously were conspicuous by their absence; fear of incurring the royal displeasure, and perhaps the imputations to which the royal favour had exposed her, prevented those she would have deemed eligible from coming forward. The possibility of a grand match, as time went by, must have seemed to her as remote as that of being obliged to yield to the impatient King must have seemed imminent. In her despair she was reduced to the necessity of declaring that she would marry "any man with fifteen hundred a year who would have her."

Two infatuated younger sons would have been only too willing to take her at her word, and dare the King's rage, if the beautiful prude could have made up her mind to abandon her grand desires, which she never could. One was George Hamilton, a younger brother of the famous Anthony, a brilliant, dashing, devil-me-care Irishman, as poor and blue-blooded as the Stuart herself. The other was Francis Digby, a younger son of the Earl of Bristol. This brave, handsome youth was consumed with one of those ardent and tender passions over which a sentimental world, revelling in romance, always drops a tear. Never was a cause more hopeless, never beauty colder, more obdurate. Digby worshipped his fair for six or seven years as men with strong, deep feelings worship women, and then in his despair, life being no longer tolerable, rushed off to the Dutch War and found the death he recklessly courted in a naval battle. This event and the circumstances which occasioned it were widely known, and Dryden tried to shed some poetical tears over poor Digby in the song, "Farewell, fair Armida." But his attempt at weeping was so poor, that Buckingham, ever seeking some one or something on which to practise his powers of ridicule, burst into mockery of poet, lover, and beauty in his own clever satire "The Rehearsal."

George Hamilton was, however, of the moth species, and after flitting round the flame for a time took de Gramont's advice and flew off before he was even singed. This hare-brained, fascinating young fellow was never happy unless he was in love, but his idea of a passion differed vastly from Digby's. The Irishman's was of the earth. One evening at a party in Frances Stuart's apartments at Whitehall his head was turned by the sight of the beauty's ankles, which in her childish and innocent way she displayed with such an artless lack of reflection as to strike the reckless George, as he afterwards told de Gramont, that "it would not be difficult to induce her to strip naked." He at once conceived one of his daredevil passions for the "inanimate statue," and boldly set out to attract her attention. His means were characteristic. Having noticed that the lady was "like to die with laughing" in her "silly way" at the sight of an old gentleman with a lighted candle in his mouth, young Hamilton, who had a fairly large mouth, "put two lighted tapers into it and walked three times round the room without their going out."

After this exhibition he was admitted to the prude's select coterie, and advanced to the point of persuading her to accept the gift of "one of the prettiest horses in England." La Belle Stuart looked her best on horseback. Pepys once had the good fortune to behold her at Whitehall on the return of a Court riding-party, and from some coign of vantage, very modest we may be sure, the chattering snob watched "all the ladies talking and fiddling with their hats and feathers, and changing and trying on one another's and laughing. But it was the finest sight to me, considering their great beauty and dress, that ever I did see in all my life. But, above all, Miss Stuart in this dress with her hat cocked and a red plume, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose, and excellent taille, is now the greatest beauty I ever saw I think in all my life."

These riding and hawking parties, of which Miss Stuart was very fond, afforded Hamilton the opportunity of wooing her under the pretext of teaching her how to manage the horse he had given her. Not that the beauty had need of lessons in horsemanship; she had made herself a mistress of the art before she left France, where in those days Frenchwomen were noted for their grace and skill on horseback. Such a flirtation could not pass unobserved, and people who knew the cold nature of the dazzling prude laughed or shook their heads and wondered, perhaps, how long George Hamilton's would be safe on his shoulders. For the wild young Irishman, who had begun his love-making with no more honourable intention than to outwit a beautiful girl and turn marble to life, ended by being enchanted by Armida.

This fatal spell was broken, fortunately, as stated above, by the ubiquitous Chevalier de Gramont, who kept a large supply of charity and good sense under his Joseph's coat of flippancy. Seeing the noose into which the infatuated brother of the future Comtesse de Gramont had thrust his head, he said to him one day with cynical levity, with which, if one wishes to make a present of advice to such a temperament as George Hamilton's, a warning is most effectively wrapped: "Friend George, point de raillerie avec le maître, c'est à dire, point de lorgnerie avec la maîtresse. I myself wanted to play the agreeable in France, with a little coquette whom the King did not care about, and you know how dearly I paid for it. I confess she gives you fair play, but do not trust her. All the sex feel an unspeakable satisfaction at having men in their train, whom they care not for, and to use them as their slaves of state, merely to swell their equipage. Would it not be a great deal better to pass a week or ten days incognito at Peckham with the philosopher Wetenhall's wife, than to have it inserted in the Dutch Gazette, 'We hear from Bristol that So-and-So is banished the Court on account of Miss Stuart, and that he is going to make a campaign in Guinea on board the fleet that is fitting out for the expedition under the command of Prince Rupert'?" And Hamilton, more lucky than Digby, escaped in time.

But these were not the only men whose heads were turned by La Belle Stuart. Charles, wishing to flatter and soften her in every imaginable way, decided that the memory of her loveliness should be commemorated on the medals and coins minted during his reign. The brothers Rotier, the famous medallists, who at the Restoration had been invited to England by the King and given the post of the Cromwellian Simon at the Royal Mint, received notice to prepare a medal engraved with Miss Stuart as Britannia, to commemorate the Peace of Breda. This commission was executed by the youngest of the Rotiers, Phillipe, an inflammable genius who had but recently joined his brothers. It is not to be supposed that the beautiful, passionless prude who could successfully keep a fascinating King at arm's length, and on whom neither a George Hamilton nor a Francis Digby could make an impression, was the woman to succumb to a medallist of the Royal Mint. La Belle Stuart had not the instincts of a Duchess of Cleveland. During the sittings that she gave the young artist she probably never honoured him with a thought. But he, from gazing upon her, became so devoured with Beauty-hunger as to nearly fit himself for Bedlam.

The medal, like most works of genius conceived in despair, was a chef d'œuvre. Rotier's Britannia became to him what Calais was to Queen Mary. The vision he had had of faultless beauty, at once blessed and baleful, was engraved upon his heart and brain. It stamped itself upon all the fine works that came from his hands, and found its way from that first glorious medal of Breda down to the humblest coins. Britannia has since had various faces and forms, but it is to be doubted if any have been so fair as the original. Poor Rotier's romance is now well-nigh forgotten, but his La Belle Stuart still survives, and is likely to for many a day, in a more or less imitative form on all the copper coinage of the realm.

It was during these very days when she was unconsciously turning the head of the medallist that the chance she had so long and almost hopelessly sought presented itself. Her cousin, the Duke of Richmond, on the death of his second wife made her an offer of marriage. This nobleman, notwithstanding his wealth and lineage, which made his rank second to none, was one of the most insignificant men at Court. To the King, of whom he stood in the greatest awe, he was particularly odious; although Charles, who in case the Duke died childless would as next of kin be his heir, had heaped honours and riches upon him. All the brilliant qualities for which the Stuarts of Richmond-d'Aubigny had been conspicuous had degenerated in this last representative of the line. The present Duke had none of the spirit or sense of his ancestors, and was, moreover, a dipsomaniac. In a Court like that of Whitehall, brimful of wit and malice, such a man was treated as a clown. "To court his Majesty's favour," wrote Hamilton gibingly, "he thought proper to fall in love with Miss Stuart." The fact that his passion, which he divided pretty equally between the beauty and the bottle, should have excited the jealousy of a man so callous as Charles may be taken as a proof of the strength of the spell La Belle Stuart had cast upon the King. But as the Duke of Richmond had a wife he could not be considered an eligible parti, and consequently the cunning prude treated her ducal admirer with her customary indifference.

The unexpected death of the Duchess, however, completely altered the aspect of things. Her Grace was scarcely cold when the Duke asked his lovely cousin to be his third wife. The offer was not one that La Belle Stuart had the slightest intention of refusing, but its acceptance, owing to the King's passion for her and dislike of the Duke, made her hesitate like one who recule pour sauter mieux. Before pledging herself to her infatuated cousin, to whom love and drink seemed to have lent their audacity for the occasion, she persuaded him to ask the King boldly for permission to marry her. Charles, who knew exactly the state of the Duke of Richmond's finances, concealed his rage under cover of a demand for a settlement that it was beyond the Duke's power to make. To the beautiful maid of honour, who had tantalised him for four years with her prudery and now implored him to allow her to marry honourably—not because she loved the Duke, as she confessed, but from a "desire to reform him"!—the King tempered his refusal with dazzling bribes. She should be a duchess in her own right; she should have her drafts to any amount on the Treasury or Post Office or Customs honoured like my Lady Castlemaine's; she might shop with the Privy Purse; he would send away Lady Castlemaine and give up his Nell Gwynns and Moll Davises; in fine, he would do anything in the world she asked, provided she would consent to be his maîtresse en titre. La Belle Stuart's reply is, perhaps, the only instance of the refusal of such an offer on record. "I hope I may live to see you old and willing," retorted the baffled King, from whom consent to this marriage at any price was not to be wrung.

To a man of the mental calibre of the Duke of Richmond the position in which he had placed himself was well qualified to damp his ardour. To prevent such an undesirable eventuality, Miss Stuart, while seeking a happy end to her troubles, was in the habit of giving her ducal lover midnight assignations, which though of a strictly virtuous type, be it understood, kept the heat in him. It was one of these secret interviews that brought matters to a head. For Lady Castlemaine, having learnt from one of her spies, of whom she kept a well-paid staff at Whitehall, of these midnight meetings, made her plans accordingly. One night, as Charles was returning in very ill-humour from Miss Stuart's, who had pleaded a headache as an excuse for refusing to see him, Lady Castlemaine waylaid him and informed him in her vixenish fashion of the cunning with which his "angelic Stuart" was duping him. As the termagant swore she could prove her words, Charles at once returned to the prude's apartments. At his wholly unexpected reappearance some maids opposed his entrance instead of trying to warn their mistress, but the King pushed them aside roughly, and entered La Belle Stuart's bedroom, where he found the Duke of Richmond sitting at her bedside. The anger of Charles was only equalled by the consternation of the others. The Duke, speechless and petrified from the torrent of abuse poured upon him, had thoughts of jumping from the window, but as he reflected that if he did so he would probably fall into the Thames which flowed beneath it, he chose to make a discreet rather than a valorous exit and left the room in silence.

This attack on the Duke gave Miss Stuart time to compose herself, and after his departure, instead of attempting to justify herself, she gave the surprised Charles such a talking to as perhaps he had never had before, save from my Lady Castlemaine. "If," she said, "she were not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of Richmond's rank, who came with honourable intentions, she was a slave in a free country; that she knew of no engagements that could prevent her from disposing of her hand as she thought proper; but, however, if this was not permitted her in his dominions, she did not believe that there was any power on earth that could hinder her from going over to France and throwing herself into a convent to enjoy there the peace which was denied her in his Court." And she ended by asking him to be good enough "to leave her in repose, at least for the remainder of that night."

Such effrontery dumfounded the King. He went off in a towering rage. We are not told what sort of, if any, "repose," after such a scene, the maid of honour got that night; but the next morning, with a craft worthy of a Madame de Maintenon, she appealed to the Queen with the due tears to help her to retire to a convent. So well did she play her part that Catherine, who had every reason to hate her, wept with her; but reflecting that if she were to have a rival, such an innocent Magdalene as Miss Stuart would be infinitely preferable to a Lady Castlemaine, her Majesty actually brought about a reconciliation between her husband and her maid of honour! It was exactly what La Belle Stuart desired; under cover of this reconciliation she had time to prepare her plans without exciting suspicion.

One "foul night" the beautiful prude stole from her room at Whitehall and joined the Duke of Richmond, who, the day after that surprise visit of the King's had fled the Court without waiting to be banished. The assignation on this occasion was at the Bear Tavern by London Bridge, where the Duke had a chaplain and a coach ready. And here, having at last been properly made a duchess by the chaplain, her Grace and her husband, who one suspects from his habits must have kept up his courage artificially for this occasion, "stole away into Kent" in the coach.

Charles's anger, when he discovered the flight of the prude, may be imagined. Its consequences were far-reaching. On coming from the cage from which his beautiful bird had flown, the King chanced to meet a certain Lord Cornbury in the door. The sight of this man, who was the son of Clarendon, at such a time and place confirmed the suspicions aroused in him by Lady Castlemaine of the Chancellor's complicity in a plot to help La Belle Stuart marry the Duke of Richmond. And it is, perhaps, no exaggeration to say that at that moment Charles's opposition to the many enemies in Court, Parliament, and the country of the ablest of his Ministers, to whom also he not a little owed his throne, was finally broken down. On the morrow of this "marriage affair" of La Belle Stuart's the great Clarendon fell.

As for the happy couple, they were banished the Court, whereupon her Grace saw fit to return his Majesty the trifling presents she had allowed herself to accept from him, and to justify her conduct by what, from the notoriety given it, was practically a public confession of innocence preserved against great odds. And this subtle and calculating woman has been called by Hamilton, and those who have taken his mockery literally, a brainless, childish simpleton, with just sense enough to capture a Duke of Richmond! No doubt in a day when Gwynns, Castlemaines, and Portsmouths were fleecing the nation and making and unmaking Ministers, a woman who had only had a few jewels and a fixed salary of £700 a year for her services to the Queen, and took no interest in politics, must seem both virtuous and a fool. The "explanation," however, of her line of action at Whitehall produced a favourable effect. The public readily acquitted her of all the base imputations that had been cast upon her.

At Whitehall no one benefited by the absence of the beautiful and "wronged" Duchess of Richmond but Lady Castlemaine. She, indeed, was now established more firmly than ever in the Council and the Treasury, but La Belle Stuart was missed. When new beauties appeared at Court people compared them with the faultless loveliness of her who was banished for her virtues to the country. They remembered the charming grace with which she had danced and walked and rode; the elegance of her mode of dressing; the polished refinement of her manners. Poor Queen Catherine, who had to endure the insolence of Lady Castlemaine, sighed for the maid of honour who had always shown her respect, and "was never known to speak ill of any one." And even the King, who had never been able to love a woman as he had loved La Belle Stuart, longed to see her once more. So in the following year she was forgiven and came back triumphantly, as lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, with splendid apartments at Somerset House, where Catherine was living.

The Duke and Duchess of Richmond were now people of the highest consequence; and if scandal, as it did, chose to busy itself with her Grace, she, no doubt, endured it philosophically. At least, from personal experience, she was able to draw comparisons between the quality and quantity of the mud flung at a duchess and that with which a destitute maid of honour is bespattered. What effect marriage produced on the prudery of this beautiful creature we cannot learn. Slander had it that the King once, when drunk, boasted to the Duke of Richmond that the Duchess was no longer indifferent to him. A similar imputation was cast upon his Grace's appointment as Ambassador to Denmark. As his wife did not go with him, people said he was sent there to get him out of the way. And we require something more than the word of Mr. Pepys's "Mr. Pierce," before we accept as proved the statement and all that it implies, that Charles "did on a sudden take a pair of oars or a sculler, and all alone, or but one with him, go to Somerset House (from Whitehall), and there, the garden door not being open, himself clamber over the wall to make a visit to her (the Duchess), which is a horrid shame."

What, however, can be vouched for as true is that some time after her Grace returned to Court the King appeared as devoted as ever. His attention was especially solicitous during a severe illness when she was attacked by the small-pox. Notwithstanding the danger he ran of catching the disease, he visited her once, at least, in her sickroom, nor did his admiration for her appear to wane on her recovery, when her looks were so altered that Pepys was shocked to see her, and Ruvigny wrote to Louis XIV. that "her matchless beauty was impaired beyond recognition, one of her brilliant eyes being nearly quenched for ever."

The Duchess, however, bore the loss of her beauty with indifference, and consoled herself, if one may judge from tastes of which she had apparently given no previous evidence, with the cultivation of the artistic sense. Nat Lee, the tragic poet, whose "Rival Queens" long held the stage, owed much of his success to her encouragement. In dedicating his "Theodosius" to her he enthusiastically acknowledged her love of dramatic art as well as her kindness to himself. "Your extraordinary love," he wrote, "for heroic poetry is not the least argument to show the greatness of your mind. Your Grace shall never see a play of mine that shall give offence to Modesty and Virtue. My Genius was your favourite when the Poet was unknown, and I openly received your smiles before I had the honour to pay your Grace the most submissive gratitude for so illustrious and advantageous a protection. You brought Her Royal Highness just at the exigent time, whose single presence on the poet's day (benefit performance of 'Theodosius') is a subsistence for him all the year after." Her letters to her husband that have been preserved, it may be added, are evidence of her sound common sense. Of painting, too, she had a keen appreciation. After her death "her fine collection of original drawings of da Vinci, Raphael, and others, together with miniatures and engravings, was sold at auction." Such instances of artistic taste and kindness of heart go far to disprove Mrs. Jameson's statement as to the "frivolity of her mind and shallowness of her character."

With the coming of Louise de Kéroual all the scandal about the Duchess of Richmond and her royal lover ceased. The new and fresher beauty completely supplanted her in the King's affections. But La Belle Stuart had the consolation, if she required it, of proving that prudery fares better in the day of adversity than the courtezan. The ducal rank for which she had intrigued so questionably in her youth gave her a great prestige, which she enjoyed till her death. She continued, in spite of Louise de Kéroual, to be lady of the bedchamber—a post equivalent to that of Mistress of the Robes of the present day—to Catherine of Braganza during the rest of the reign; while on his accession James II. appointed her in the same capacity to his Queen. It was in fulfilling the duties of this office that she witnessed the birth of that Prince of Wales who was afterwards to be known as the "Old Pretender."

On the coming of William of Orange her services were dispensed with, but she passed the remainder of her life without suffering the misfortunes of exile and confiscation that fell upon so many Jacobites. As she had never taken the least interest in politics the troubles of the party to which she belonged by birth did not apparently concern her. The years rolled by serenely. While Jacobites were plotting she lived quietly among her pictures and books and a crowd of cats. At the coronation of Anne she emerged from her retirement for the occasion. It was her last public appearance. Shortly after she died, "devout in her way," and was buried, as she had requested, in her peeress's robes in the vault of the Dukes of Richmond at Westminster Abbey.

Her will revived public interest in the forgotten beauty of the past generation, and afforded many a gibe at her expense. Instead of dying comparatively poor, as was expected, it was found that she had accumulated a considerable fortune, saved out of the wreck of her husband's, whom she had survived thirty years. The bulk of it she left to her favourite nephew, Lord Blantyre, to purchase an estate to be called "Lennox's love to Blantyre." She had always been particularly proud of the fact that she was not only Duchess of Richmond, but of Lennox as well. This seat is still known as "Lennox-love."

But this reminder of the cunning prudery with which La Belle Stuart had hooked a double duchy out of the quagmire of Whitehall afforded the wits less amusement than the legacies she left her cats. Pope set the town a-laughing with his line, "Die, and endow a college—or a cat!" But there were some, perhaps, whose laughter turned to tears when a certain Lord Hailes, who had known her, declared "that the annuities she left to support her cats was a delicate way of providing for some poor and proud Jacobite gentlewomen, who had the care of them, without making them feel that they owed their livelihood to mere liberality."

It may, perhaps, be of interest to add that the beauty for which La Belle Stuart was so celebrated ran in her family. Her sister, Sophia, who was also a favourite at Court, and after the Revolution of 1688 a loyal adherent of the Stuarts, excited the admiration, among others, of Mr. Pepys, who pronounced her "very handsome." The daughters of the handsome Sophia, who married not so well as her sister Frances, were distinguished by the friendship of the famous Hamilton. The eldest, Ann, was particularly lovely. As the wife of the Maréchal Duc de Berwick, the right noble son of James II. and the sister of the Great Marlborough, she was long known at the French Court as "La Belle Nanette."

["LA BELLE HAMILTON," COMTESSE DE GRAMONT]
A GOOD WOMAN OF THE RESTORATION

THE masterpiece of Sir Peter Lely, which forms the frontispiece to this book, scarcely needs the charming testimony of Anthony Hamilton to assure us that the fair subject of this historiette was a good woman. The portrait breathes goodness and refinement. The Court of Charles II. had no ornament so flawless. La Belle Hamilton was as chaste as Lady Castlemaine was polluted, as pure as La Belle Stuart was designing. If the "Mémoires de Gramont" has kept the recollection of the Restoration more vivid than that of perhaps any other period of English history, its heroine, more than all the characters who enliven its inimitable pages, has unquestionably aided the author in his wonderful effort to refine vice of its grossness. Her perfume seems to sweeten the noxious air of her times and to linger subtly in the memory of the unclean palace in which it was spilt.

If it be granted that rules may be proved by their exceptions, one wishing to defend the truth of the cynical aphorism that virtue, like happy nations, has no history, could choose no more convincing argument than to cite La Belle Hamilton. She seems, one is tempted to say, to have been born for the express purpose of proving that purity could exist undefiled in the vicious atmosphere of Whitehall. Her story cannot be compressed into the space of a footnote. It is too closely interwoven with that of her brilliant brother, his fascinating book, and her extraordinary husband.

The Hamiltons, like the Stuarts of Blantyre, were very poor and very highly connected. Miss Hamilton's father, like Miss Stuart's, was a younger son and a Royalist, and fled, like him, to France after the execution of Charles I. We have stated how Stuart of Blantyre was provided for in exile. Sir George Hamilton was no less fortunate. The young King, Louis XIV., gave him a military command, which enabled him to maintain himself, his wife, and his nine children till the Restoration. When Charles II. returned to England, Hamilton, like the rest of the banished cavaliers, returned with him and obtained preferment at Court. Appointments as pages, grooms-in-waiting, and army officers were provided for his sons; while his daughters, thanks to the influence of their uncle, the great Duke of Ormond, without being obliged to accept for their maintenance the doubtful distinction of becoming maids of honour to the Queen or the Duchess of York, lived with their parents and had the entrée to Court.

It was not long before the beauty and charm of Miss Hamilton attracted attention. The Duke of York was the first to admire her. The mind of this prince was so extraordinary that it sought, and apparently found, excuse for his lax morals, as well as at a later period encouragement for his political ambitions, in the zeal of his religious convictions. Where Charles II. took his pleasures with a cynical indifference of God or man, his dull brother pursued his armed with a breviary. His immoralities were as circumscribed as his religious views. When Charles wanted a mistress he went far afield; in his hunt he bagged anything that came his way, from a duchess to a demi-rep. James was only catholic as regards the mission of Rome on this planet; his quest for the same article as his brother was restricted to the entourage of his Duchess. He was satisfied with a maid of honour. As those in the Court of the Duchess of York were, with one or two exceptions, particularly unprepossessing, the cynical, witty Charles used to say that "he believed his brother's mistresses were given him as a penance by the priests."

There were times, however, when beauty appealed to the sanctimonious James. One of these was when he beheld Miss Hamilton. His admiration soon became the talk of the Court without, owing to her tact, compromising her; for she treated him with such dignity that James, who was shy in these matters, could never summon up the courage to get beyond a mild flirtation, while the Duchess of York felt there was so little cause to be jealous of such a rival that she showed her the greatest affection and esteem. This behaviour on the part of Miss Hamilton soon made the ogling of her royal admirer so fatiguing that it was not long before he carried his attentions elsewhere.

The Duke of Richmond, who, when contemplating matrimony was inclined to be guided in the choice of a wife by following in the steps of royalty, succeeded the Duke of York as a suitor for the favour of La Belle Hamilton. This was the Duke of Richmond who was afterwards, when in quest of his third wife, so cleverly hooked by La Belle Stuart. He was now, however, in search of his second Duchess, but, though apparently greatly in love, unable to bring himself to the point of a proposal—not from any timidity, like the Duke of York, but from purely mercenary motives. This man who afterwards married Miss Stuart without a penny hesitated on the present occasion to wed the beautiful Miss Hamilton, who was equally destitute. The King, it is true, from consideration of the claims of her family upon him, offered to overcome the Duke of Richmond's objections by himself dowering the beauty. But as she resented being bargained for like an odalisque in a slave-mart, she decided that the honour it was proposed to confer on her was not worth having.

The "invincible" Jermyn was the next suitor, but as his intentions were no more honourable than the Duke of York's Miss Hamilton soon treated him with the contempt he deserved. While the Duke of Norfolk, with his twenty-five thousand a year, could not get her so much as to look at him. And it was her refusal to become the premier Duchess in the kingdom that kept Lord Falmouth, one of the most talented and ambitious as well as one of the most dissipated of the younger peers of the realm, from declaring a passion which, as he told St. Evremond, "made him regard Miss Hamilton as the only acquisition wanting to complete his happiness."

The list of her unsuccessful lovers would not be complete without mention of the Russells, uncle and nephew. And as the portrait of the elder has been drawn by La Belle Hamilton's brother with a humour that elevates caricature to a fine art, we can do no better than reproduce it from the "Mémoires de Gramont."

"He was," says Anthony Hamilton, "full seventy, and had distinguished himself by his courage and fidelity in the civil wars. His passions and intentions in regard to Miss Hamilton appeared both at once; but his magnificence only appeared by halves in those gallantries which love inspires. It was not long since the fashion of high-crowned hats had been left off, in order to fall into the other extreme. Old Russell, amazed at so terrible a change, resolved to keep a medium, which made him remarkable; he was still more so by his constancy for cut doublets, which he supported a long time after they had been universally suppressed; but, what was more surprising than all, was a certain mixture of avarice and liberality, constantly at war with each other, ever since he had entered the list of love."

This Lord John Russell, whose favourite nephew, a tiresome, stupid young man, was also in love with La Belle Hamilton (though the fact was concealed from his uncle), had some difficulty in finding the courage necessary to propose to his youthful inamorata. But he managed to find it just as he was on the eve of leaving town, and his mode of declaration will complete the above portrait.

"I am," he said, suddenly coming to the point on finding her alone when he came to bid her goodbye, "brother to the Earl of Bedford. I command the regiment of Guards. I have three thousand a year, and fifteen thousand in ready-money. All which, madam, I come to present to you, along with my person. One present, I agree, is not worth much without the other, and therefore I put them together. I am advised to go to some of the watering-places for something of an asthma, which, in all probability, cannot continue much longer, as I have had it for these last twenty years. If you look upon me as worthy of the happiness of belonging to you, I shall propose it to your father, to whom I did not think it right to apply before I was acquainted with your sentiments. My nephew William is at present entirely ignorant of my intention; but I believe he will not be sorry for it, though he will thereby see himself deprived of a pretty considerable estate; for he has a great affection for me, and besides, he has a pleasure in paying his respects to you since he has perceived my attachment. I am very pleased that he should make his court to me, by the attention he pays to you; for he did nothing but squander his money upon that coquette Middleton, while at present he is at no expense, though he keeps the best company in England."

Miss Hamilton, who had a very keen sense of humour, had, as may be imagined, great difficulty to refrain from bursting into laughter. However, she kept her face sufficiently to tell him "that she thought herself much honoured by his intentions towards her, and still more obliged to him for consulting her before he made any overtures to her relations. 'It will be time enough,' she said, 'to speak to them upon the subject at your return from the waters; for I do not think that it is at all probable that they will dispose of me before that time, and in case they should be urgent in their solicitations your nephew William will take care to acquaint you. Therefore, you may set out whenever you think proper; but take care not to injure your health by returning too soon.'"

It is needless to say that neither the absurd uncle nor the stupid nephew succeeded in winning the beauty. Nor was the latter compensated for this loss by the long-anticipated possession of the wealth of the former. The uncle derived so much benefit from that visit to the waters, that he was enabled to defy the asthma for nigh upon another twenty years, so that his nephew grew tired of waiting for the deferred pleasures of this world and went into the next before him.

But while rank and fortune were being laid at the feet of La Belle Hamilton, she was being courted by a man whose remarkable personality had the power of making that of all others seem commonplace. This was Philibert, Chevalier de Gramont.

Of all the qualifications he lacked, by the possession of which alone one would have said he would have been acceptable to so charming a creature, he was at least, in point of birth, second to none of her suitors. The de Gramonts were one of the oldest and proudest feudal families in Europe, long settled in Navarre. The Chevalier, who was a younger son, boasted that he was descended from Henri IV. through his grandmother, "La Belle Corisande," one of the many mistresses of that gallant King. His eldest brother was the Maréchal Duc de Gramont, the head of the family, whose ancestral seat was the lordly Château de Gramont "at Bidache on the Bidouze." The titles of this stately house comprised a marquisate borne by the second brother, Louvigny, and a countship, which, together with a large fortune possessed by the third, Toulongeon, were to go in case he died without heirs to the Chevalier, the cadet of the family. Philibert, having nothing but expectations, which seemed extremely doubtful of ever being realised, was destined for the Church. His boyhood was spent at the Château de Seméat, the property of his luckier brother, the Comte de Toulongeon, in preparation for this career. But a trip to Paris made him turn his thoughts from the Church to the army. Like most of the well-born young men of his time, he had the honour of serving under the great Condé and Turenne, and distinguished himself for his insouciante bravery in numerous battles and sieges.

One of the many stories told of him at this period is very characteristic. While besieging some small fortress which capitulated after a short defence the governor, who was surprised at the easy conditions he received, said to him—

"I will tell you a secret, Chevalier; my only reason for capitulating was because I was short of powder."

"And I will tell you another," replied de Gramont; "my only reason for granting you such easy terms was because I was short of ball."

His incurable flippancy, however, stood in the way of his promotion and finally ruined him. For his colossal egotism made him dispute out of bravado the affections of Mademoiselle de la Motte-Houdancourt, whom he did not love, with the young Louis XIV., who promptly banished him. Like many who have been driven into exile, he carried with him nothing but his illustrious birth. At Whitehall, whither he came, he was, however, instantly welcomed by Charles, who never tired of his company. His brilliant wit and manners soon made him generally popular, and he was received everywhere on terms of intimacy. Among his closest friends was St. Evremond, who had preceded him a year, and in whom he was in the habit of confiding his impressions and troubles with that gaiety with which he knew how to captivate La Belle Hamilton and make her disdain splendid offers to marry him, who had neither character nor means of existence, save by gambling, at which he was an adept.

His fascination for the society of the Restoration is easily comprehended. The Chevalier de Gramont had the luck to be born at the right time. This mauvais sujet de l'esprit, as he has been called, was the first appearance in modern Europe of the Petronian cynic and arbiter elegantiarum of which there have been since so many examples. He was the immediate forerunner of the Regent d'Orléans and the Maréchal de Richelieu, the historical father of countless Brummels, d'Orsays, and Oscar Wildes. His wit, said Saint-Simon, who was jealous of it, was "mainly of the sort which shows itself in pleasantry and repartee; it was bold enough to detect a failing and describe it in one or two ineffaceable sentences. He was like a mad dog from whom none escaped. He had wonderful animal spirits and invulnerable self-complacency, never entertaining a serious feeling or a deep thought." This is the character given him by Bussy-Rabutin and St. Evremond, who were his friends, as well as by his brother-in-law, Anthony Hamilton. The portrait of him by the last, who has immortalised him, he himself applauded.

For when the "Mémoires de Gramont" were submitted to the censor Fontenelle before their publication he was so scandalised that he flatly refused his approval. The Chevalier on hearing this at once went to Fontenelle and asked him in his characteristic way "what business he had to be more solicitous of his reputation than he was himself, and demanded that the book should pass if the freedom with which his character was drawn was the only objection." As Mrs. Jameson has very aptly remarked, "Fontenelle might have replied to him as de Gramont did on another occasion to Madame de Hérault. The Count had visited this lady to pay her his condolence on the death of her husband; she received him with an air of extreme coldness, upon which, suddenly changing his tone, he exclaimed gaily, 'Is that the way you take your loss? Well, to tell you the truth, I don't care any more about it than you do!'"

Such an Epicurean as de Gramont scarcely needed the advice of St. Evremond. No one knew the world better than he, or was more deeply acquainted with all its vice, at which, without seriously polluting himself with it, he laughed in the gayest, most cynical way. He had so little religion that once in old age, when his wife in an attempt to convert him recited the Lord's Prayer, he remarked, "That is very fine, who wrote it?" His moral sense was entirely lacking. Women meant to him an amour, nothing more. And even La Belle Hamilton, whose virtue, to his credit be it said, he never attempted to attack, had so little real hold of his affections that on being pardoned by Louis he would have gone back to France without marrying her had it not been for her brothers. Two of them, who had no intention of letting her be compromised by such a desertion, rode after him and overtook him at Dover. "Chevalier," they cried, galloping up and addressing him in his own fashion, "haven't you forgot something in London?"

"Excuse me," he replied gaily, "I have forgotten to marry your sister."

He returned and married her, making her, it must be confessed, the best of husbands. His conduct when married was in this respect in striking contrast with that of the de Gramonts of his time generally. For his brother the Maréchal was notoriously brutal; while the private lives of the Comte de Guiche and the Princess of Monaco, his nephew and niece, could not in the present day be exposed in print.

Many people have often tried to guess the secret of the fascination of this Chevalier de Gramont for La Belle Hamilton, a woman on whom slander never breathed. Without ourselves entering the lists of those who vainly attempt to explain the mysteries of human emotions, we should suggest that a mutual sense of humour was not without its effect on first attracting each to the other. Both were gifted with a very keen sense of the ridiculous. The picture of Miss Hamilton in the exercise of hers is one of the most entertaining incidents in the "Mémoires de Gramont."

A splendid masked ball, which the Queen gave in honour of the King, afforded Miss Hamilton an excellent opportunity to amuse herself innocently at the expense of two silly women of the Court. These persons, whose actions and appearance certainly marked them as victims for the practical joker, were Miss Blague, a maid of honour, and Lady Muskerry. As Miss Hamilton, said her brother, "liked to do things in order, she began with her cousin Muskerry, on account of her rank." The appearance of her ladyship was ridiculous in the extreme. Her face, which was ludicrously plain, matched her figure, which seemed without being so to be perpetually enceinte. This deformity was further heightened by a limp, occasioned by an inequality in the length of her legs. But Lady Muskerry, far from being aware of her defects, was exceedingly vain. "Her two darling foibles were dress and dancing. Magnificence of dress was intolerable with her figure; and though her dancing was still more insupportable, she never missed a ball at Court; and the Queen had so much complaisance for the public as always to make her dance. But in a function so important and splendid as this masquerade it was impossible to give her a part. However, she was dying with impatience for an invitation, which she expected."

It was this impatience on the part of Lady Muskerry that gave Miss Hamilton her opportunity. She sent her ladyship an invitation, as if from the Queen, with the request that she should appear at the ball as a Babylonian princess. Lord Muskerry, who was particularly afraid of ridicule, and aware of the absurd figure his wife would cut if she were present at the ball, had begged her on no account to think of accepting the invitation in case she should receive it. But Lady Muskerry, believing that her husband had taken measures to prevent her being invited, was so exasperated that she had determined to go to the Queen unbeknown to him and ask for an invitation. It was at this juncture that the invitation arrived. She promptly decided to conceal the fact from Lord Muskerry, and "immediately got into her coach in order to get information of the merchants who traded to the Levant as to how the ladies of quality dressed in Babylon."

The practical joke that Miss Hamilton prepared to play upon Miss Blague was of a totally different kind. She had noticed that the maid of honour was in love with the Marquis de Brisacier, a Frenchman as insipid and silly as herself, who was visiting England and paying her considerable attention. Miss Blague had quarrelled with another maid of honour, Miss Price, over some man whom Miss Blague believed had been "drawn away" from her by Miss Price. With this material the inventive mind of La Belle Hamilton prepared to play. The gloves of Martial, a Parisian maker, were then the rage, and Miss Hamilton, who had several pairs of them, sent one to Miss Blague together with some yellow ribbon and a note from the Marquis de Brisacier, couched in the most ridiculous and affectionate language, asking the maid of honour to wear them at the masked ball as the means by which he might recognise her. Then, giving a similar pair of gloves and a piece of yellow ribbon to Miss Price, the merry mischief-maker induced her to wear them by letting her only so far into the secret as to make Miss Blague's enemy determined to cut her out with Brisacier as she had previously done with the former admirer.

To Miss Hamilton's intense delight, as well as that of the persons she had taken into her confidence, both jokes succeeded admirably, and without the betrayal of their originator. But Lady Muskerry got no nearer the ball-room than the state entrance to Whitehall. As it was understood that all the ladies who were to dance in the Queen's quadrille, of whom Lady Muskerry had no doubt that she was one, would be met at the entrance to the palace by their partners, and as in the secrecy she was obliged to practise to prevent her husband from knowing that she had been invited to the ball she had not been able to learn who her partner was, she was still patiently waiting when the Chevalier de Gramont passed her. His costume and the late hour at which he arrived attracted universal attention, and the King asking him the reason of his delay, de Gramont seized the occasion in his characteristic way to tell a witty story, concluding as follows:

"À propos, Sire, I had forgotten to tell you, that to increase my ill-humour" (at the cause of his late arrival), "I was stopped, as I was getting out of my chair, by the devil of a phantom in masquerade dress, who wished by all means to persuade me that the Queen had commanded me to dance with her; and, as I excused myself with the least rudeness possible, she charged me to inquire who was to be her partner, and desired me to send him to her immediately. Your Majesty will, therefore, do well to give orders about it, for she has placed herself in ambush in a coach, to seize upon all who pass through Whitehall."

The Chevalier went on to describe the costume worn by the mask, whose appearance must indeed have been laughable; for poor Lady Muskerry, not having the least idea how a lady of quality dressed in Babylon, had adopted from a crowd of different opinions she had consulted something of each. The Chevalier's description of this fantastic unknown not only amused those who heard it, but excited the greatest curiosity, inasmuch as the Queen declared that all whom she had invited were present. They began to wonder who it could be. The King, whose sense of the ridiculous was much more mocking than Miss Hamilton's, guessed it was the Duchess of Newcastle—a woman even more absurd than Lady Muskerry. For she was afflicted with a dramatic cacoethes scribendi to such a pitch that she would only wear theatrical costumes, and kept a secretary, who, according to Walpole, was often roused in the night to register the Duchess's conceptions, "which," added this English de Gramont of a later generation, "were all of a literary kind, for her Grace left no children."