Court Beauties of Old Whitehall: Historiettes of the Restoration

So complete was her power that her life dragged monotonously till there came one to colour it in the person of Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prieur de France. This man was the grandson of Henri IV. and the Charmante Gabrielle, and his mother was Mazarin's eldest niece, Laure Mancini, the only one about whom there was never any scandal, and who had died shortly after his birth. He was, consequently, a nephew of the Duchesse de Mazarin. He was also the younger brother of the famous Duc de Vendôme of whom Saint-Simon has said so many infamous things. But perhaps his special attraction in the eyes of the Duchess of Portsmouth was that he was the nephew of the Duc de Beaufort, her first lover, and the man who had given her her first start in life. He had been banished from France, for what reason is not clear. Perhaps it was for the cowardice he had displayed in action, for he was an arrant coward and braggart. "He slipped out of a duel," says Forneron, "about the Duchesse de Ludre with M. de Vivonne by riding off to the country and out of the army on the eve of the battle in which Turenne was killed." Be this as it may, he had been obliged to quit France. Like most exiles in the seventeenth century, his personal knowledge of the various countries of Europe was extensive and intimate—especially of the "night-life" of Courts and capitals. Among his adventures was the partnership, terminable without notice, that he formed at Rome with his cousin, the Duchesse de Mazarin's daughter, the Marquise de Richelieu, "a wanderer like himself." If one may believe Saint-Simon, whose portraits of the Vendôme brothers are of the kind that one is inclined to consign to the flames with the tongs, the Grand Prieur "never went to bed sober during thirty years, but was always carried there dead drunk; was a liar, a swindler, and a thief; a rogue to the marrow of his bones, rotted with vile diseases, the most contemptible and yet most dangerous fellow in the world."

Saint-Simon made these agreeable remarks about the Grand Prieur many years after his visit to England. At the time the Duchess of Portsmouth "retained him in London with a tenderness so undisguised as to excite the raillery of the whole Court," he was a handsome and attractive rake of twenty-eight. At first mere love of notoriety made him pay his attentions to the Duchess, who, from some motive best known to herself, appeared to be flattered by them, whereupon King Charles did the Grand Prieur the honour to be jealous of him. As a scandal was the last thing the prematurely worn-out epicurean Charles wished, he dared not show his jealousy openly by ordering Vendôme out of the country. He preferred to apply to Barillon to help him get rid of his odious rival. Barillon, at once alarmed at the consequences the King's jealousy might have upon the Duchess of Portsmouth's position, expostulated with the Grand Prieur. But the grandson of Henri IV. and the charming Gabrielle, recognising from Charles's jealousy and Barillon's anxiety to what profit to himself he could put certain letters her Grace had had the imprudence to write him, refused to quit Whitehall. Tableau: Charles in a white-hot rage (very, very rare with him); the Duchess of Portsmouth in terror; Barillon in a state of stupefaction. Louis, however, helped her Grace out of her scrape by paying the blackmailing Grand Prieur his price, which was the privilege to return to France.

There is no proof whatever that the Duchess was guilty in this affair of anything more serious than the indiscretion of confiding to paper the fascination her dashing countryman had for her. And though her name was coupled wantonly with the Duke of Monmouth, Sunderland, and her favourite minister Danby, it is perhaps safe to say that the Duchess of Portsmouth was the most faithful to Charles of all his mistresses. Certainly, in spite of the ennui the security of her power might have induced, she never again ran the risk of dissipating it by flirtations with unprincipled Grand Prieurs.

Ennui, however, was not an emotion that even a Duchess of Portsmouth, sated with power, could long experience at such a Court as Whitehall. Shortly after her Vendôme fright came the Rye House Plot. This plot within a plot had for its object the guaranteeing of the Protestant Succession. It was really the backwash of the Popish Plot, and was the last vain effort of Shaftesbury to regain power by compelling Charles to summon a Parliament, in which he and his party intended by a coup d'état to humble or, if necessary, to banish the dynasty. By some fatality a group of fanatical Protestants were at the same time independently conspiring to bring about Shaftesbury's end by murdering both Charles and the Duke of York. One of their number proved a traitor. Charles was warned and the assassins captured. The Court, which was perfectly aware of the political aspirations of Shaftesbury and his party, unscrupulously but adroitly seized the opportunity to implicate the principal members of the Protestant or Whig party in the Assassination Plot of which they were wholly ignorant. Never was a triumph more remorseless and complete. With Shaftesbury fled and the others beheaded, the Catholics more than got their revenge for what they had suffered at the time of the Popish Plot. There was no longer any question but that the Duke of York would succeed his brother and France continue to direct the policy of England. Louis XIV. promptly seized Luxemburg. The Grand Siècle was now at its zenith.

The French king, however, was not destined to drink deep of the wine of success; the cup he had so craftily fashioned was to be dashed from his lips by William of Orange, and his fair vineyard utterly devastated by the Duke of Marlborough. But who now would have thought, while under a cloudless sky Louis pressed the juice from his grapes, that at fifty-five Charles II.'s race was run? Or that in three short years "France's Poland" would have for ever freed herself from the Sun King? Certainly not the Duchess of Portsmouth, when one Sunday night in February, 1685, Death entered the Grand Gallery at Whitehall, and in a twinkling confounded all the deep and cunning intrigues of the subtlest brains in Europe.

Everybody remembers the justly celebrated passage in which Macaulay has described the voluptuous scene Whitehall presented on that fatal night. What a picture in the Gallery of History it is, this English tableau of the literary Delaroche! What wealth of colour and detail! Fancy that great gallery of Whitehall, "an admirable relic of the magnificence of the Tudors, crowded with revellers and gamblers," in which Charles sat "chatting and toying" with the Duchesses of Cleveland, Mazarin, and Portsmouth, and listening to the clink of "gold heaped in mountains" at the basset-table while the Mazarin's "French page, a handsome boy, whose vocal performances were the delight of Whitehall, warbled some amorous verses." Then picture the consternation of all those revellers and gamblers in that splendid corridor when the King, suddenly stricken with apoplexy, tumbles into the arms of a courtier standing near! For lack of a lancet they opened his vein with a penknife; a hot warming-pan is placed on his head. "A loathesome volatile salt, extracted from human skulls, was forced into his mouth. He recovered his senses; but was evidently in a situation of extreme danger." For a week he lingers, begging the people who crowd his death-room pardon for the unconscionable time he takes in dying; polite, witty, good-natured to the end, and not forgetting to recommend his mistresses to the care of his successor!

No king that we can recall has ever died in such pomp of flippancy as Charles II. Louis XV. dismissing du Barry and making his amende honorable to God; the Regent d'Orléans dropping dead in the arms of the Duchesse de Falaris; and Louis XIV. solemnly setting out for the Plutonian kingdom with all the etiquette of Versailles, are historic death-scenes that strike the imagination. But to us they all seem to pale beside the studied, godless levity of Charles's. It was characteristic of the era which died with him, for in reality the death-bed of Charles II. was likewise that of the Restoration.

And how fared the Duchess of Portsmouth in this catastrophe? "I found her," wrote Barillon to Louis, "in great grief. But instead of bemoaning her own sad and altered position she took me into a little room and said, 'Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, I am now going to tell you a secret, although its public revelation would cost me my head. The King of England is at the bottom of his heart a Catholic, and there he is, surrounded with Protestant Bishops! There is nobody to tell him of his state or speak to him of God. I cannot decently enter his room. Besides, the Queen is now there constantly.'" (Poor little Catherine, who went into convulsions and sent to beg his pardon, at which Charles exclaimed, "Alas, poor lady! She beg my pardon! I beg hers with all my heart.") "The Duke of York is too busy with his own affairs to trouble himself about the King's conscience. Go and tell him that I have conjured you to warn him that the end is near, and that it is his duty to save without loss of time his brother's soul."

This forethought of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who was religious au fond like all Bretons, for the salvation of Charles's soul disarms criticism. To scold her for not conforming to our twentieth-century code of morals is preposterous in its presumption. And as we are quite unable to satisfy ourselves as to the exact standard of the morals of her own day, we had better not bother about her morals at all.

An hour after Charles's death King James paid her a visit of condolence. James's object, no doubt, was to keep well with Louis through her. But his reign was short and stormy, and the Duchess of Portsmouth was too clever not to foresee the disaster of 1688. After settling her affairs in England she returned to France. But her interests obliged her to be ever in close relations with the former country, which in the wars waged between the two for nearly twenty-five years exposed her to many humiliating suspicions. On one occasion Louis threatened to exile her; on another William of Orange refused to allow her to land in England. Her worthless son ran away from her and compromised her politically. Her wealth took to itself wings and flew away. In the fire that destroyed the Palace of Whitehall she lost all her precious furniture. For years she was pursued by creditors and haunted by bailiffs. But Louis was grateful for her past services and protected her from the law as far as he could. He gave her a pension to make up for the loss of her English one, and this the Regent doubled. She who had had countless thousands a year was reduced to a paltry eight hundred. But she still had her titles, and till old age overtook her she frequently made use of her right to sit on a tabouret at Versailles, and as Duchess of Portsmouth and ex-mistress of Charles II. swelled the ranks of the Jacobites at St. Germain, much to the disgust of Queen Mary. The last years of her life were passed at Aubigny in a strange mixture of miserliness and religious devotion, completely forgotten by the world in which she had played so great a part.

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.

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