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 passed 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 grâce_ to the _maîtresse en titre_, though
it was left to others to provide her successor. Just why or how Charles
ceased to crave the society of this woman whose coarse 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
passion 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 _congé_ 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.
[Illustration: 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 '_petite 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 _petite 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 Duchess 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 titles, as he
was in the habit of gaming every day at basset 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 Duchess 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 passed 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 assume that
_rôle_. 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 Duchess, 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 Sussex (the Duchesse de Mazarin's _friend_)
and Barbara, her youngest, and young John Churchill's receipt for the
big sums he had got from her. The Duchess 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 Lumière, she succeeded in fascinating Montague,
the English Ambassador, 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 passion for her Grace to her
daughter, Lady Sussex. Whereupon the Duchess, 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 circumspect 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 ignoble retirement, the Duchess passed 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 hell our ancestors believed in, may possibly derive some
satisfaction from the fact that the Duchess 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 passions of a
prostitute, and the conscience of an embezzler, there was a seeming
retribution as terrible as it was deserved. If Buckingham's end was
sinister, the Duchess of Cleveland's was grotesque and brutal--a scene
fit for a Latin comedy.
In the summer of 1705 her husband, the unlucky Earl of Castlemaine,
died, and a little while later, in her sixty-third year, she married a
man sixteen years her junior. In his youth he had been called Handsome
Feilding and the name was still given him in ridicule, which, however,
his blustering vanity prevented him from feeling. Once, when walking in
the Mall with a companion, he inquired if his sword touched his right
heel and whether the ladies ogled him. "Yes," was the reply. "Well,
then," he swaggered, "let them die of love and be d----d!" The anecdote
is characteristic of him. But of his original charms he possessed
nothing now save the belief in their continued existence--a belief with
which he had managed to inspire her Grace. Everybody but the doting old
Duchess knew him to be a bully, a coward, and a knave. Fortune, never
very kind to him, had completely deserted him; he kept up a certain
appearance and out of gaol by gambling. On the wedding-day "he hired a
coach and two footmen, who, that they might know to what fop they
belonged, were clothed in yellow, and as foppishly wore black sashes,
which he bought at a cheap rate as being only old mourning hatbands
bought of such as cry about the street 'Old clothes.'" In such fashion
did her Grace of Cleveland, who had been in the habit of drawing _ad
libitum_ on the purse of the nation, enter upon what she hoped was the
late St. Martin's summer of her life.
Her dream was short. In those days a wife and her property were the
chattels of her husband. Handsome Feilding at once proceeded to
materialise his bargain, and at last the termagant was tamed. Terrible
was the life he led his aged bride. He took her money from her
violently, and when she could not, or would not, give him more, he was
in the habit of "drawing his sword and threatening to kill her, swearing
it was no more sin to kill her than a dog." At last the terrified old
woman, in deadly fear of her life, who had never before been afraid of
any one, plucked up the courage to implore the protection of her
children.
[Illustration: "HANDSOME FEILDING."
_After Wissing._]
"Just as I came down here," wrote Lady Wentworth from Twickenham to her
son, "I heard that the Duchess of Cleveland's Feilding was dead, and she
in great grief for him; but it was no such thing, for instead of that
she has got him sent to Newgate for threatening to kill her two sons for
taking her part when he beat her and broke open her closet and took £400
out. He beat her sadly, and she cried out 'Murder!' in the street out of
her window, and he shot a blunderbuss at the people."
During the legal proceedings which followed she was too terrified to
testify against him, and the case was dismissed. But immediately
afterwards he was arrested on a charge of bigamy, lodged against him by
one Mary Wadsworth, "a jilt of the town," whom it was proved he had
married three weeks before the Duchess.
His trial was a _cause célèbre_. Few have ever lent themselves so
conspicuously to the venomous humour of the press. Court and
coffee-house alike roared over the satires and lampoons that flooded
the town at the expense of these two surviving relics of the rakes of
the Restoration. Before the idea of marrying the Duchess had occurred to
him, Feilding had promised a Mrs. Villars five hundred pounds if she
would help him to marry a Mrs. Deleau, a rich City widow, of whom he had
heard but never seen. Mrs. Villars, who was Mrs. Deleau's hairdresser,
being anxious to get the bribe, passed off the prostitute, Mary
Wadsworth, in her name. At the second meeting they were married by a
priest from one of the embassies. Dupe of his dupes, Feilding gave a
supper on the occasion, at which, to the delight of the lampooners, he
gave the supposed rich Mrs. Feilding a ring inscribed with the words
_Tibi Soli_, as a mark of his passion, offering this sentimental token
in a song "from the Greek," addressed to "Ianthe the lovely." By the
light of Wycherley's comedies one may imagine the Restoration saturnalia
of this wedding feast! When Handsome Feilding discovered the joke played
upon him we are not told what he thought, but Mrs. Villars in open court
assures us what he did. Having tried to persuade Mary Wadsworth that the
marriage was a mere pretence, with sufficient success to enable him to
marry the Duchess of Cleveland three weeks later, "it is duly set out
that he, the said Robert Feilding, did lock five Locks upon the said
Charlotte Henrietta Villars, and did beat and abuse her in a most
Barbarous and Cruel manner, and did hold up to her head an Instrument
or Weapon being a Hatchet on one side and a Hammer on the other, and
did say to the said Charlotte Henrietta Villars that he the said Robert
Feilding would slit her skull and nose if she should dare say to the
Duchess of Cleveland anything of the marriage."
Freed from this horrible nightmare, a foretaste, perhaps, of what
awaited her in the next world, her Grace, with the ribald laughter of
the world in her ears, shut herself up, a broken old woman, in her house
at Chiswick, and soon died there of "a dropsy which swelled her to an
enormous bulk."
Her heirs proved her will the day after her death in greedy haste to
secure her supposed wealth. But of the vast sums she had plundered from
the State nothing remained; they had vanished like the Restoration. As
for Handsome Feilding, he was lucky to escape with a light sentence and
have the shelter of the attic of his "Ianthe the lovely" to die in.
It is the commonplace habit of the Duchess of Cleveland's historians to
sign their portraits of her with a moral. But such hackneyed reflections
on the career of a glorified courtezan of yesterday are not apt. An
angry moralist, like a schoolmaster with a birch, is an incapable
instructor; his stripes are resented by dissimulation. For our part, in
passing by the Duchess of Cleveland, as she hangs, whether one likes it
or not, for ever in the Gallery of English History, we feel neither
indignation nor sympathy. Perhaps the chief impression we have carried
away, with which the reader may also agree, is the arresting contrast
between the ribald ha-ha of her dropsical and lonely end and Leigh
Hunt's portrait of my Lady Castlemaine at twenty. As it is quite as
captivating as any of Lely's it is worth reproducing.
"Lady Castlemaine was dressed in white and green, with an open bodice of
pink, looped with diamonds. Her sleeves were green, looped up full on
the shoulders with jewelry, and showing the white shift beneath richly
trimmed with lace. The bodice was long and close with a very low tucker.
The petticoat fell in ample folds, but not so long as to keep the ankles
unexposed; and it was relieved from an affluence of too much weight by
the very weightiness of the hanging sleeves, which counterpoising its
magnitude, and looking flowery with lace and ribbons, left the arms free
at the elbows and fell down behind on either side. The hair was dressed
wide with ringlets at the cheeks, and the fair vision held a fan in one
hand, while the Duke led her by the other. When she had crossed the
steps and came walking up the terrace, the looseness of her dress in the
bosom, the visibility of her trim ankles, and the flourishing
massiveness of the rest of her apparel, produced the effect, not of a
woman overdressed, but of a dress displaying a woman; and she came on
breathing rosy perfection like the queen of the gardens."
[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OF RICHMOND.
_From the Medal by Rotier._
_Reproduced by the courtesy of the "Strand Magazine."_]
"LA BELLE STUART," DUCHESS OF RICHMOND
A PRUDE OF THE RESTORATION
La Belle Stuart! The glamour of the Restoration is in that romantic
name. At the sound of it our thoughts at once rush back to childhood,
when we learnt English History out of story-books and picture-books; and
old, half-forgotten tales of the Merry Monarch, and the gay doings of
cavaliers with periwigs and swords, of maids of honour all lace and
perfume, crowd upon the memory. La Belle Stuart! To the very children of
the Board Schools--if Imagination be a faculty looked upon with favour
at those practical seats of municipal learning--must come visions of a
far-off romantic time. And even now in maturer life, when the naughty
gossip of Mr. Pepys and Hamilton's wit have torn off the magic veil that
hid the truth from us, the name still fascinates, and our fancy delights
to be lured back from the utilitarian virtues and Philistine vices of
to-day to the _joie de vivre_ of the Restoration. No, we have not the
heart to scold La Belle Stuart; for childhood's sake she is still dear
to us.
But enough of reflection. To the story, and as the giant Moulineau said
on a similar occasion, "_Bélier, mon ami, commencez au commencement_."
Frances Theresa Stuart was one of the daughters of a Scotch cavalier,
whose capital consisted of a sword broken in the royal cause and a
pedigree dipped in royal blood. After the capture or execution of King
Charles, England being clearly no longer a country in which any one
bearing the name of Stuart could live in safety, Stuart of Blantyre fled
with his family to France. Broken swords and pedigrees were capital of a
sort in those days across the Channel, and the starving cavalier applied
for the interest on his to Queen Henrietta Maria. Her exiled Majesty,
who was so poor herself that but for the pity of Cardinal de Retz she
would have passed a winter without a fire in her apartment at the
Louvre, could not do much for the ruined loyalist, but she did what she
could. Stuart of Blantyre, like many another, was provided with a new
sword by Condé or Turenne, and his year-old daughter, Frances, was
adopted by the ex-Queen.
Much water was to flow under the bridge before the Stuarts and their
followers were to come to their own again, and it was more French than
English that La Belle Stuart arrived at Whitehall in her sixteenth year.
As the _protégée_ of Henrietta Maria she had enjoyed superior
advantages, and it is not surprising that, brought up at the Louvre in
constant intercourse with the best society of France, she should have
spoken French as if it were her native tongue, and acquired that
breeding and _air de parure_ which in that day of French pre-eminence
gave the possessor a peculiar distinction. Perfect manners and a perfect
taste in dress have of themselves been known to redeem the looks of many
a plain woman, but to these attractions Nature had bestowed on Frances
Stuart the most perishable but most highly prized of all her
gifts--beauty; beauty in its perfection, exquisite, statuesque,
_éblouissante_. There was but one flaw in this _chef d'oeuvre_,
according to the critics, and that was the lack of sense. "It was hardly
possible," said Hamilton, "for a woman to have less wit or more beauty."
The opinion of this judge, who was capable of twisting, exaggerating, or
suppressing the truth if by so doing he could polish a period, has
passed unchallenged, presumably because many of La Belle Stuart's
actions seem to confirm it. Yet nothing would be easier than to prove
the contrary. It is quite true that she lacked the gift of saying smart,
witty things, and the ambition to grasp at dazzling shadows, like the
majority of her contemporaries. But she never lost sight of the main
chance, and as she had the patience to wait for it, the courage to seize
it, and the skill to take advantage of it, there is no exaggeration in
saying that no more artful and calculating woman stepped at Whitehall
than this canny Scot, whose mother, said Pepys, "is one of the most
cunning women in the world."
It is quite useless to predict what would have been her fate had there
been no Restoration; but from her apparently witless refusal of Louis
XIV.'s splendid offer to provide for her suitably if she would remain
and adorn his Court instead of returning to England with the Stuarts, it
may be taken for granted that the inducement was not as attractive as it
seemed. In spite of Louis XIV. and his promises, no one knew better than
Frances Stuart and her "cunning mother" that it required something more
than a pretty face, a taste in dress, and a _bel air_ to induce a French
lord worth having to marry a penniless girl. But in England men were
less fastidious, and if she played her cards cleverly there was no
reason why her attractions should not secure her the husband she wanted.
The Restoration was Frances Stuart's first opportunity, so, gracefully
declining Louis' offer and accepting his valuable present, she went to
England in the train of Henrietta Maria. Shortly afterward, through her
protectress's influence, her own beauty, and her family's claims, she
was appointed maid of honour to Queen Catherine. At the Court of Charles
II. such an appointment was equivalent to that filled by the houris who
luxuriate behind the ivory and ebony lattices of the Imperial seraglio
at Stamboul.
Frances Stuart assumed her post at Whitehall with the firm intention of
winning a husband; the supreme object of her life was marriage. She did
not ask for love, or even great wealth, but rank, prestige. To have
lovers galore, or even to be a king's mistress, made no appeal to her.
Any woman with a pretty face could have the former and the To-morrows
of the latter----!
"I shall be a duchess," decided La Belle Stuart.
Every carnal inclination, if one of so cold and passionless a
temperament was capable of being tempted, was subjected to her end. A
girl of sixteen who can reason like this may be a coquette, immodest in
her actions, impure in her thoughts, and open to slanderous imputations,
but she must of necessity be a prude. La Belle Stuart was one _par
excellence_; in her the hypocrisy of prudery was double-distilled. The
situation in which she found herself was the only possible one open to
her. The road to her goal was a filthy and dangerous quagmire; she took
it fearlessly, never once lost her presence of mind, and by trusting in
a remarkable degree to herself, arrived safely at her destination.
Frivolous, shallow, brainless, childish are some of the epithets that
have been applied to her; but to us she seems to have possessed an
exceptionally subtle intelligence and power of calculation which, as
Clarendon declared, she "used for the convenience of her own fortune."
No; whatever she was, La Belle Stuart was not a fool.