Court Beauties of Old Whitehall: Historiettes of the Restoration
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Title: Court Beauties of Old Whitehall: Historiettes of the Restoration
Author: W. R. H. Trowbridge
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT BEAUTIES OF OLD WHITEHALL: HISTORIETTES OF THE RESTORATION ***
Transcriber's Note: Italic text is represented by _underscores_ and
boldface text by =equals signs=.
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
[Illustration: _Elizabeth Hamilton_
_Countess of Gramont._
_from the picture by Lely._]
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:--
Amédée Renée's "Les Nièces de Mazarin."
St. Réal's "Mémoires de la Duchesse de Mazarin."
St. Evremond's "OEuvres."
{Vizetelly's Notes.
Hamilton's "Mémoires de Gramont" {Walpole's "
{Scott's "
Madame de Sévigné's "Lettres."
Saint-Simon's "Mémoires."
Marquise de Courcelles' "Mémoires."
Steinman's "Memoir of the Duchess of Cleveland."
Vincent's "Lives of Twelve Bad Women" (Duchess of Cleveland).
The "Life" of Robert Feilding.
The Wentworth Papers.
Pepys' "Diary."
Evelyn's "Diary."
_Tatler_ No. 50.
Delman's "Barbara Villiers."
Mrs. Manley's "Rivella"
Clarendon's "Life."
"Archæologia Cantiana," Vols. XI., XII.
Mrs. Jameson's "Beauties of the Court of Charles II."
{Catherine of Braganza.
Strickland's "Lives of the Queens {Mary of Modena.
of England" {Mary II. and Queen Anne.
_Ulster Journal of Archæology_, Vol. V.
Pennant's "Account of London."
" "Antiquities of London."
Steinman's "Althorp Memoirs" {Duchess of Tyrconnel.
{Countess of Shrewsbury.
Walpole's "Anecdotes."
Lodge's Portraits.
Burnet's "History of My Own Times."
Macaulay's "History of England."
" "The Comic Dramatists."
Mrs. Cartwright's "Madame."
Jusserand's "French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II."
Rait's "Five Stuart Princesses" ("Madame").
Baillon's "Henriette-Anne d'Angleterre."
Bossuet's "Oraison Funèbre sur Henriette d'Angleterre."
Mrs. Green's "Lives of the Princesses of England" ("Madame").
Bussy-Rabutin's "Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules."
The Princess Palatine's "Correspondance."
Marquise de La Fayette's "Mémoires."
Forneron's "Louise de Kéroual."
Jesse's "Court of England."
Bourgeois' "Le Grand Siècle."
Reresby's "Memoirs."
"La Grande Encyclopédie."
"Nouvelle Biographie Générale."
"Dictionary of National Biography."
W. R. H. TROWBRIDGE.
LONDON, _February, 1906_.
Contents
PAGE
HORTENSE MANCINI, DUCHESSE DE MAZARIN 17
An Adventuress of the Restoration.
BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND 59
A Courtezan of the Restoration.
"LA BELLE STUART," DUCHESS OF RICHMOND 105
A Prude of the Restoration.
"LA BELLE HAMILTON," COMTESSE DE GRAMONT 137
A Good Woman of the Restoration.
"THE LOVELY JENNINGS," DUCHESS OF TYRCONNEL 163
A Splendid Failure of the Restoration.
"WANTON SHREWSBURY," ANNA MARIA, COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY 193
A Messalina of the Restoration.
"MADAME," HENRIETTA, DUCHESS OF ORLEANS 221
The French Court--The Evil Genius of the Restoration.
LOUISE DE KÉROUAL, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH 271
A Spy of the Restoration.
List of Illustrations
"LA BELLE HAMILTON," COMTESSE DE GRAMONT _Frontispiece_
_Facing
page_
DUCHESSE DE MAZARIN 17
DUC DE MAZARIN 24
ST. EVREMOND 47
"MY LADY CASTLEMAINE," BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF
CLEVELAND 59
EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF CLARENDON 68
WYCHERLEY 77
JOHN CHURCHILL, DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH 80
NELL GWYNN 86
JACOB HALL 95
"HANDSOME FEILDING" 101
THE DUCHESS OF RICHMOND 105
CHARLES THE SECOND 111
THE ROTIERS' MEDALS 124
THE DUKE OF RICHMOND 131
THE CHEVALIER DE GRAMONT 144
COUNT ANTHONY HAMILTON 159
"THE LOVELY JENNINGS," DUCHESS OF TYRCONNEL 163
THE DUKE OF YORK 166
RICHARD TALBOT, DUKE OF TYRCONNEL 184
"WANTON SHREWSBURY," ANNA MARIA, COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY 193
THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM 204
THE DUKE OF SHREWSBURY 215
"MADAME," DUCHESS OF ORLEANS 221
"MONSIEUR," PHILIPPE D'ORLÉANS 237
ARMAND, COMTE DE GUICHE 241
MADEMOISELLE DE LA VALLIÈRE 246
THE CHEVALIER DE LORRAINE 266
THE DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH 271
LOUIS XIV. 281
PHILIPPE DE VENDÔME, GRAND PRIEUR 313
[Illustration: HORTENSE MANCINI, DUCHESSE DE MAZARIN.
_From the Portrait by Mignard, in the possession of the Earl of
Sandwich._
_Photo._ _Goupil._
]
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.
[Illustration: DUC DE MAZARIN.]
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'oeuvre_ 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.
[Illustration: 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!"
[Illustration: "MY LADY CASTLEMAINE."
(BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND.)
_After Wissing._]
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 _im_moral; 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'oeuvre_ 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.
[Illustration: EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF CLARENDON.
_After Sir Peter Lely._]
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.
[Illustration: WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.
_After Sir Peter Lely._]
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!
[Illustration: M.^R DE MARLEBOROUGH.
As he was in 1668 when ensign in the Gardes Françaises.
_From an Engraving after Vandermeulen._]
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 manoeuvred 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."
[Illustration: NELL GWYNN.
_After Sir Peter Lely._]
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.
[Illustration: JACOB HALL, THE ROPE DANCER.]
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.
[Illustration: "HANDSOME FEILDING."
_After Wissing._]
"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."
[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OF RICHMOND.
_From the Medal by Rotier._
_Reproduced by the courtesy of the "Strand Magazine."_]
"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'oeuvre_,
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."
[Illustration: CHARLES THE SECOND.
_From a youthful portrait by Gerard van Honthorst._]
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.
[Illustration: NAVAL VICTORIES, 1667.]
[Illustration: THE PEACE OF BREDA, 1667.
The Rotiers' Medals for which the Duchess of Richmond sat as Britannia.
_Reproduced by the courtesy of the "Strand Magazine."_]
The medal, like most works of genius conceived in despair, was a _chef
d'oeuvre_. 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.
[Illustration: THE DUKE OF RICHMOND.]
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.
[Illustration: THE 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,
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