cited than the manner in which this female Don Juan commenced her
notorious acquaintance with Wycherley. He was at the time a good-looking
young man, in the bud of his dramatic career, and she was a middle-aged
woman with such a past! He had, with design to secure her patronage,
flattered her in his play, "Love in a Wood, or a Night in St. James's
Park" (!), just then running to crowded houses, when she passed him one
morning in her carriage in Pall Mall. With the gross humour of
Restoration manners she shouted at him a low epithet that might with
perfect justice and much more fittingly have been applied to her own
sons. He at once turned, and the following dialogue, according to
Dennis, Pope, and others, took place:--
"Madam," said Wycherley, "you have been pleased to bestow on me a title
which generally belongs to the fortunate. Will your ladyship be at the
play to-night?"
"Well," she replied, "what if I am there?"
"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 nobleman
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
Duchess 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 basset at which the Duke of
Marlborough refused to lend the Duchess of Cleveland half-a-crown, when
he was keeping the bank, and had a thousand pounds lying on the table
before him!
[Illustration: M.^R DE MARLEBOROUGH.
As he was in 1668 when ensign in the Gardes Françaises.
_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
sex, 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 sexual 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 bastards assaulted the maids of
the prude; once the King had to leave the Council of State to make
peace!
All her powers of coarse 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 amusement 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 passed the coming of a bastard 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 prostitution, 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."
[Illustration: 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 duchesses 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 Duchess 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 Duchess 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 coarse-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 assailed her as she was taking a walk and
frightened her into a fit by swearing she should die in a ditch like
Jane Shore. And his splendid gift of Berkshire House was the means he
took of consoling her after a quarrel for the famous "Poor Whores'
Petition to the Illustrious 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 _rôle_ 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 nobleman, 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 noblest prospects of the world and
opened other little blind loopholes backward by turning day into night
and night into day. His appetite 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 passing 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 noble father, and she was
Barbara Villiers, the subject of lewd jests alike in the ante-rooms of
Whitehall and the coffee-houses of the town. The contrast between them,
with the unuttered reproach, pity, and scorn it implied, was sufficient
cause for hatred. But Clarendon was tactless; a statesman himself, he
laughed at the idea of a woman of her lack of ability attempting to rule
the State. Nothing whetted her hatred for him like her powerlessness to
hurt him; he seemed to stand out of the reach of her coarse 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 nobleman, 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."