Lady Castlemaine

“ 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. ”

“ Thomas Maynard, who was at the court of Portugal, says in his report to Charles secretary of state, Nicholas, "She is as sweet a dispositioned princess as ever was born, a lady of excellent parts, but lived hugely retired. She hath hardly been ten times out of the palace in her life. For five years she was not out of doors until she heard of his majesty's intention to make her queen of Great Britain."
How was such a woman to support her influence with such a man against the beauty and determined temper of lady Castlemaine, a woman as dissolute and unprincipled as she was handsome. ”

“ She now became a central figure in the brilliant court of the merry monarch, being loved by the king, flattered by the wits, and tolerated by the queen, to whom—unlike the Duchess of Cleveland—she generally paid the greatest respect. Her card tables were thronged by courtiers eager to squander large sums for the honour of playing with the reigning sultana; her suppers were attended by wits and gallants as merry and amorous as those who had once crowded round my Lady Castlemaine in the zenith of her power. ”

“ If there were really such wickedness in the world, women so shameless and vile, was it right that good women should know of them, that pure lips should speak of their iniquity?
She was still more shocked when Hyacinth talked of Lady Castlemaine with a good-humoured indulgence.
“There is something fine about her,” Lady Fareham said one day, “in spite of her tempers and pranks.”
“What!” cried Angela, aghast, having thought these creatures unrecognised by any honest woman, “do you know her—that Lady Castlemaine of whom you have told me such dreadful things?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Once again I heard a distinct Allusion to the Countess of Castlemaine's avowed predilection for Lord Stour. It came from one of the Cavaliers, who said to Lord Douglas, with an affected little laugh:
"Perhaps my Lord Stour would do well to place himself unreservedly under the protection of Lady Castlemaine! 'Tis said that she is more than willing to extend her Favours to him." ”

“ How far the Duke's bride succeeded in putting Lady Castlemaine's "nose out of joint" must remain a matter of speculation. There seems little doubt that as a wife she proved more complaisant to Charles than as a maid. She had carried her virtue unstained to the altar and a Duchess's coronet, and this seems to have been the main concern of the beautiful prude. That Charles was more infatuated even with the wife than with the maid-of-honour is incontestable. ”

“ He turned, and saw Lady Castlemaine close at his elbow.
“Image of gloom, will you lead me to my rooms?” she asked, in a curious voice, her dark blue eyes deepened by the pallor that showed through her rouge.
“I shall esteem myself too much honoured by that office,” he answered, as she took his arm and moved quickly, with hurried footsteps, through the lessening throng.
“Oh, there is no one to dispute the honour with you. Sometimes I have a mob to hustle me to my lodgings, borne on the current of their adulation—sometimes I move through a desert, as I do to-night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There was a very bad woman at the English court, named Lady Castlemaine, whose husband was living in France This woman had managed by her wicked intrigues to gain great influence over the king, and she was universally despised by everybody excepting his majesty. The queen-mother in Portugal had heard of this creature, and warned her daughter to have no communication with her whatever. Therefore, when Charles, most unreasonably, presented her name, at the head of the list of ladies whom he recommended for appointments in the royal household, the queen crossed it off. ”

“ He commending Mrs Stewart for a great Beauty and so indeede she is, and one I do not weary in looking on, and do far outshine my Lady Castlemaine as I well perceive His Maj'tie do also thinke. Her Maj'tie appearing very comely in a Gown of silver lace, but Lord! how no one takes heed of her when my Lady Castlemaine is by, which is a great dishonour to a sweete Lady in her owne Court, and I am much mistook if Her Maj'tie be not the best Lady of them all, and that not saying much! But strange to see how beauty sways all and how Sam'l do uphold my Lady Castlemaine in all things. ”

“ We have some pity for one, who, like La Vallière, could be attracted by the attentions of a handsome, fascinating prince: we pity though we blame. But Lady Castlemaine was vicious to the very marrow: not content with a king's favour, she courted herself the young gallant of the town. Quarrels ensued between Charles and his mistress, in which the latter invariably came off victorious, owing to her indomitable temper; and the scenes recorded by De Grammont—when she threatened to burn down Whitehall, and tear her children in pieces—are too disgraceful for insertion. ”

“ In 1662 Charles II. married Catherine of Braganza, but [224] “Sarah” informed Pepys, that the King supped every night in the week preceding his nuptials, with Lady Castlemaine: “Likewise, when the whole street was aglow with bonfires, the night of the Queen’s arrival, there was no fire at my lady’s door.” On the birth of a second child a dreadful altercation took place between the husband, and wife, but the feud was ostensibly a religious one, for Lord Castlemaine, who had lately embraced the Roman Catholic faith, caused the infant to be baptized by a Popish Priest. ”

“ Sincere love can be no insult to whomsoever proffered; Elizabeth Stuart saw no shame to her in the devotion of William Craven!"
Cecil Castlemaine stood in the crimson glory of the autumn sunset, her head erect, her pride unshaken, but her heart stirred strangely and unwontedly. It smote the one with bitter pain, to think a penniless exile should thus dare to speak of what princes and dukes had almost feared to whisper ”

“ 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 [68] she knew in her heart and whom she had shamefully treated. ”

“ Thus Lady Castlemaine fixed the fashion of mourning, by “forcing all the ladies to go in black, with their hair plain, and without spots.” It is a curious trait of the manners of other times that a royal concubine should order the tiring of honest women. She could hardly have influenced that “comely woman,” the Duchess of Newcastle, who went about, in the second Charles’s time, with a velvet cap, her hair about her ears, “many black patches, because of pimples about her mouth,” naked-necked, and in a black justaucorps. ”

“ The tidings came to Lilliesford, and Cecil Castlemaine clenched her white jewelled hands in passionate anguish that a Stuart should have fled before the traitor of Argyll, instead of dying with his face towards the rebel crew; that men had lived who could choose surrender instead of heroic death; that she had not been there, at Preston, to shame them with a woman's reading of courage and of loyalty, and show them how to fall with a doomed city rather than yield captive to a foe! ”

“ Lord Fareham stayed in his own house by the Thames, and nobody interfered with his liberty, though Henri de Malfort lay for nearly a fortnight between life and death, and it was only in the beginning of December that he was pronounced out of danger, and was able to be removed from Lady Castlemaine’s luxurious rooms to his own lodgings. Scandal-mongers might have made much talk of his lying ill in her ladyship’s house, and being tenderly nursed by her, had not Lady Castlemaine outlived the possibility of slander. ”

“ Castlemaine. "Sister Mona and I were watching in Sister Mildred's room--for the fever was very bad upon her last night, and she was restless and wandering, poor lady! It was all quite still. I was knitting and Sister Mona was reading; you might have heard a pin drop indoors or out; when there burst upon our ears a loud shot, followed by a human cry. A thrilling scream, it was, making me and sister Mona start up in terror."
"It was like a death scream," said John Bent. "And I cannot," he added, looking at Mr. Castlemaine, "get it out of my head that it was his scream--young Mr. Anthony's." ”

“ Before the year 1667 ended, she had several times visited his majesty at Whitehall. The king was now no less assured of her charms as a woman, than he had previously been convinced of her excellence as an actress. In due time, her intimacy with the monarch resulted in the birth of two sons; the elder of which was created Duke of St. Albans, from whom is descended the family now bearing that title: the second died young and unmarried.
Through influence of these women, my Lady Castlemaine's power over the king rapidly diminished, and at last ceased to exist ”

“ I know that I shall find my Lorraine violet without stain or soil. Madame, Favette is still dearer to me now, Heaven help me, than five years ago. Five years—five years—true! it is an eternity! Yet the bitterness of the past has faded for ever from me now, and I only see—the future!"
Madame de Vaudreuil listened in silence; his words stirred in her chords long untouched, never heard amidst [Pg 227] the mots, the madrigals, the laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She struck him a little blow with her jessamine-sprays, with a mist gathering over her lovely blue eyes. ”

“ The poor lady, hungering after a word of enlightenment that might tend to lessen her dread and horror, listened for it in vain.
"But what explanation can be given of it?" she urged, biting her dry lips to hide their trembling. "People cannot disappear without cause. Are you sure it was Mr. Castlemaine you saw go in at the gate, and thence into the Friar's Keep?"
"I am as sure of it, ma'am, as I am that this is a tea-cup before me. Mr. Castlemaine denies it, though." ”

“ A look of amusement glanced into the sparkling, yet languid eyes of my opposite neighbor.
"English!" she murmured to herself, with an almost imperceptible but sufficiently scornful elevation of her arched eyebrows, and a slight smile, just showing her white teeth, as I addressed her in French; and she answered me with the ease, the aplomb, the ever suave courtesy of a woman of the world, with that polish which gives the most common subjects a brilliance never their own, and that vivacity which confers on the merest trifles a spell to amuse and to charm. ”

“ Philip suffering, and suffering through her! Self glided far away from Lady Marabout's memory then, and she hated herself, more fiercely than the gentle-hearted soul had ever hated any foe, for her own criminal share in bringing down this unforeseen terrific blow on her beloved one's head.
"Philip, my dearest, what can I do?" she cried, distractedly; "if I had thought—if I had guessed——"
"Do nothing. A woman who could give herself to a man whom she did not love should be no wife of mine, let me suffer what I might." ”