"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 n.o.bleman 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 ba.s.set at which the Duke of Marlborough refused to lend the d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland half-a-crown, when he was keeping the bank, and had a thousand pounds lying on the table before him!
[Ill.u.s.tration: M.^R DE MARLEBOROUGH.
As he was in 1668 when ensign in the Gardes Francaises.
_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 s.e.x, 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 s.e.xual 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds a.s.saulted the maids of the prude; once the King had to leave the Council of State to make peace!
All her powers of coa.r.s.e 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed the coming of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 prost.i.tution, 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."
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 d.u.c.h.esses 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 coa.r.s.e-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 a.s.sailed her as she was taking a walk and frightened her into a fit by swearing she should die in a ditch like Jane Sh.o.r.e. And his splendid gift of Berkshire House was the means he took of consoling her after a quarrel for the famous "Poor Wh.o.r.es"
Pet.i.tion to the Ill.u.s.trious 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 _role_ 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 n.o.bleman, 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 n.o.blest prospects of the world and opened other little blind loopholes backward by turning day into night and night into day. His appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 coa.r.s.e 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 n.o.bleman, 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 pa.s.sed 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 grace_ to the _maitresse en t.i.tre_, though it was left to others to provide her successor. Just why or how Charles ceased to crave the society of this woman whose coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sion 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 _conge_ 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 "_pet.i.te 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 _pet.i.te 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 t.i.tles, as he was in the habit of gaming every day at ba.s.set 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume that _role_. 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 Suss.e.x (the d.u.c.h.esse de Mazarin"s _friend_) and Barbara, her youngest, and young John Churchill"s receipt for the big sums he had got from her. The d.u.c.h.ess 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 Lumiere, she succeeded in fascinating Montague, the English Amba.s.sador, 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 pa.s.sion for her Grace to her daughter, Lady Suss.e.x. Whereupon the d.u.c.h.ess, 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 circ.u.mspect 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 ign.o.ble retirement, the d.u.c.h.ess pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l our ancestors believed in, may possibly derive some satisfaction from the fact that the d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.sions of a prost.i.tute, and the conscience of an embezzler, there was a seeming retribution as terrible as it was deserved. If Buckingham"s end was sinister, the d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland"s was grotesque and brutal--a scene fit for a Latin comedy.