W. R. H. Trowbridge

“ Judging from the virtuous, no less than the vicious, men on whom she cast her spells, my Lady Shrewsbury, like King Arthur's sister Morgan le Fay, must have possessed the secret of enchantment. Not otherwise can one explain how the Earl of Arran, the noble Duke of Ormond's noble son, became the first and most ardent of her many lovers. This brave and upright young man long languished a slave to the passion with which she had inspired him. Perhaps, so powerful and seductive was her charm, he might never have been freed but for her own caprice. ”

“ Who would have thought that the amiable, charming King, whose frivolity and sensuality seemed to guarantee a weak and pliable nature, would prove to be more than a match for his people? The versatile and shifty monarch made his power felt from the start, and clearly let it be understood that in the firm of Charles Stuart, England and Company, it was he who furnished the brains and England the capital. In such partnerships as a rule the capitalist buys experience dearly. And so it was in this case. Under that good-natured, happy-go-lucky manner of Charles there lurked the cunning of a Mazarin. ”

“ Fifty years after the death of Charles she died in the full possession of her faculties at the age of eighty-five, having seen all she had toiled for undone, the House of Stuart driven from England and even from its refuge in France. She had outlived Louis and all his splendour and all her contemporaries. It was time for this relic of a crumbling despotism to depart. The mills of God had begun to grind. Another fifty years and the Revolution was to sweep the ancien régime away for ever. ”

“ But as the world is ever more ready to believe evil than good of one—a platitude especially applicable to a maid of honour at Whitehall—the mere consciousness of being virtuous is not enough for the world. Of virtue the world always demands proofs. It was impossible to believe that a mere chit of a maid of honour—with such a mother too!—could resist a royal duke. He, however, clumsy at love-making as at everything else he undertook, himself furnished the world with proofs of Miss Jennings's innocence. ”

“ Buckingham, who not only used him as a pimp but as a spy and mistrusted him, knowing Killigrew's weakness, delighted to intoxicate him as the surest means of pumping the truth from him. But Killigrew, whose self-love was enormously flattered by being the accepted lover of such a woman as the Countess of Shrewsbury, no sooner got drunk than his tongue would wag by the hour in praise of her ladyship's "most secret charms and least visible beauties, concerning which more than half the Court knew quite as much as he knew himself." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it did not last long, for a few years after her marriage her husband was killed in Flanders. Once again, with every prospect of winning a brilliant station in life her schemes were upset, and she was left a widow with three little daughters and a petty pension from the French Government on which to eke out a miserable existence. But her courage was not broken; she still had youth, beauty, and ambition—three qualifications with which a clever woman may make a successful bid for fortune. She returned to England, and it was not long before her star was again in the ascendant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the poor Duchess of Buckingham, who was as saintly as her husband was impious, this was the last straw. "It is impossible for both of us to live under the same roof," she protested, when the Shrewsbury arrived. "So I thought," retorted the Duke, "and therefore I have ordered your carriage to be got ready to carry you back to your father's."
The public, staggered by the contempt with which this brazen couple treated their laws and opinions, were reduced to the usual futile expedient with which virtue when baffled by vice seeks to console itself. ”

“ Nevertheless, in this hour of her deepest humiliation she rose proudly above despair. As soon as the worst was told her she bore herself with as high a spirit as when years before she had faced Jermyn. When the fleeing King arrived, faint and covered with mud so as to be hardly recognisable, the Duchess of Tyrconnel assembled her household in state, and dressing herself magnificently received him with all the splendour of Court etiquette. Never has Dublin Castle witnessed a function more dramatic than this of Dick Talbot's Vicereine on the night of the Battle of the Boyne. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Shaftesbury was dislodged from power by his rival Sunderland, who maintained himself largely by the aid of the cunning Frenchwoman who by her devotion, by the knowledge she had of Charles's shameful secret understanding with Louis, and by her ability, with which she deeply impressed her royal lover, still continued maîtresse en titre and spy of the Court of France at Whitehall.
But in the darkness in which all groped the adventures of none were more curious than Louis'. He bribed lavishly every one he stumbled against, so to speak, to show him the way towards the light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [138] 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. ”

“ It was, however, the easiest of the Duchess of Portsmouth's tasks. The "principles" were circumvented, reasoned, excused, explained away, conscientiously, be it understood—oh, very conscientiously!—as is always the way with a brave "principle" when confronted with an interest. At the bottom England was jealous of Holland's naval and commercial supremacy. Charles, like the cowboy, knew his broncho; he declared war on Holland to please his mistress and win his French subsidy, and England bucked, and bucked—and fought. ”

“ With the restoration of Charles to the throne of his ancestors, Stuarts of every degree of consanguinity had flocked to London. They came from all over Europe, rich and poor, blood relations and collaterals; there never had been in the history of the family such a reunion. As most of them wanted something, a young king in the hour of victory could not but be generous; offices and honours rained on Stuarts of Blantyre and Stuarts of Richmond; places and pensions on aunt-Queens of Bohemia, on princely cousin Ruperts, and dowager sisters of Orange. ”

“ 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 all the wish in the world, he had not the will to be brave. And life demanded bravery, spirit, initiative from him at every turn.
The other influence fatal to his career was his mother. He could never rid himself from the fear in which he stood of her. To the Countess of Shrewsbury, become now as fierce and vindictive in political intrigue as she had formerly been in her amours, such a son was an asset of the highest value. Married to her second husband, middle-aged, and buried in a remote part of the country, the once notorious Messalina had long ceased to be remembered. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”