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:—
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 immoral; 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'œuvre 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.
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.