Earl of Rochester, the famous wit and rake, having by mistake handed
Charles II. a clever, filthy lampoon on himself for one on some one
else, had been banished the Court. In his temporary exile he had
conceived the idea of disguising himself so that his nearest friends
could not have known him, and had established himself near the Tower as
a German doctor possessed of "wonderful secrets and infallible
remedies." His success was astonishing, and the fame of him having
reached the Court, it occurred to Miss Price and Miss Jennings to
consult him; the former out of sheer wanton love of excitement, the
latter--as the German doctor was also a fortune-teller--to discover, if
possible, why Jermyn delayed to marry her. On their way to the
fortune-teller's they passed the theatre known as the Duke's House,
"where the Queen and the Duchess of York were seated in state." Hereupon
Miss Price, with the boldness characteristic of her, suggested to Miss
Jennings that they should hawk their oranges in the theatre under the
Royal box. Miss Jennings rather timidly consented, and as they were
crossing the lobby they encountered a man whom they knew, Killigrew, to
whom they offered their oranges. He, not recognising them, but struck
with the grace of Miss Jennings's figure, chucked her under the chin,
squeezed her, and asked her to come to his lodgings. The beauty was so
indignant and frightened that she very nearly betrayed herself, but the
more experienced Price got her away in safety.
This little _contretemps_ somewhat dashed their spirits, but they
proceeded nevertheless to the fortune-teller's in their cab. Within a
few doors of his house they ordered the driver to stop, and having
alighted and left their orange-baskets in the cab till their return,
they were proceeding on foot when the _roué_ Brounker stopped them. At
first "he had no doubt but that Miss Jennings was a young courtezan upon
the look-out, and that Miss Price was her business woman." But they,
knowing his reputation, no sooner beheld him than they gave themselves
up for lost. Their manner betrayed them, and Brounker immediately
recognised them, without, however, letting them know of his discovery.
"The old fox possessed wonderful self-command on such occasions, and
having teased them a little longer to remove all suspicions, he quitted
them, telling Price that she was a great fool to refuse his offers, and
that the little creature would not, perhaps, get so much in a year as
she might with him in one day; that the times were greatly changed since
the Queen's and the Duchess's maids of honour nowadays came to the same
market as the poor women of the town!"
Brounker, who would not have taken a thousand guineas for this meeting,
having passed on, the now thoroughly terrified girls, abandoning all
thought of the fortune-teller, returned to their cab, to find the
coachman engaged in a fight with some roughs who were trying to steal
their oranges. The honest fellow was with the greatest difficulty
pacified, and the orange girls, having left their wares to the mob that
had collected, drove back to the palace. But, owing to the malice of
Brounker, the story of their escapade was soon spread abroad with much
exaggeration. Lady Castlemaine, whose sins were seventy times seven,
made a taunting comment to the effect that the only one of her sex at
Court whose virtue could not be impugned was her infant daughter. But
fortunately for Miss Jennings her previous honourable reputation
prevented any stigma from attaching to her, and the favour she enjoyed
with the Duchess of York saved her from the disgrace and dismissal that
might otherwise have overtaken her.
Jermyn, however, already weary of a conquest from which he had gained
nothing but ridicule, took advantage of the scandal caused by the frolic
to release himself from his entanglement. The means he took were
malicious, but his malice recoiled on himself and made him ridiculous.
Having for some time pretended to be ill in order to delay his marriage,
he suddenly sought and obtained the King's consent to serve as a
volunteer in the expedition to Guinea that was fitting out under the
command of Prince Rupert. Whereupon he came himself to acquaint Miss
Jennings of his heroical project. She quickly realised that the husband
she had so cleverly angled for had for the third time escaped capture.
Nor did she have the satisfaction of knowing that her wiles could entice
back Talbot, whose ardour must have contrasted very unpleasantly now
with Jermyn's cold-blooded desertion. For Talbot in a fit of pique had
married another. The curse of the Wicked Fairy had begun to work, and
for the first time in her life the coquetry, malice, virtue, and
ambition bestowed on her by the other fairies were brought to nought.
But in this hour of humiliation she bore herself with all the
haughtiness and disdain for which she was afterwards to be noted. "There
appeared," says Hamilton, "so much indifference and ease in the raillery
with which she complimented Jermyn on his voyage, that he was entirely
disconcerted, and so much the more so as he had prepared all the
arguments he thought capable of consoling her, upon announcing to her
the fatal news of his departure." She told him "that nothing could be
more glorious for him, who had triumphed over the liberty of so many
persons in Europe, than to go and extend his conquests in other parts of
the world; and she advised him to bring home with him all the female
captives he might make in Africa, in order to replace those beauties
whom his absence would bring to the grave." Her resentment did not,
however, stop here, for shortly afterward, the expedition to Guinea
being abandoned, she wrote a clever lampoon on Jermyn, which was
circulated all over London and covered him with ridicule.
At this juncture, attracted, so to speak, by the blaze of all this,
George Hamilton, a moth drawn to every pretty face that smiled on him,
fluttered round her. Pique made her encourage him, for though he was
good-looking and well-born and fascinating, it was hardly likely that an
ambitious girl who had set her cap for Talbots and Jermyns would
otherwise have contented herself with an impecunious younger son.
Enchanted by his friendly reception, Hamilton quickly forgot La Belle
Stuart, Lady Chesterfield, and the others for whom he had sighed in
vain, and imagining, as he always did, that his heart was made of the
wood with which the fire of _a grande passion_ is kindled, he besought
the Lovely Jennings to be his wife. They were married almost
immediately, and Hamilton, having been knighted by Charles II., who did
not evince an inclination to bestow on him further and more substantial
honours, crossed to France with his wife and offered his services to
Louis XIV.
Judging from what we know of Lady Hamilton's character, it seems
justifiable to attribute to her energy his rapid advancement in the
French army. For though George Hamilton was brave, he could hardly be
called brilliant, and in order to account for the honours Louis XIV.
gave him it must have been due in no small degree to his clever wife
that the powerful interest of the Gramonts, to whom he was so closely
related, was exerted.
Of the life of the Countess Hamilton, to give her her French title, in
France we know nothing. But it did not last long, for a few years after
her marriage her husband was killed in Flanders. Once again, with every
prospect of winning a brilliant station in life her schemes were upset,
and she was left a widow with three little daughters and a petty pension
from the French Government on which to eke out a miserable existence.
But her courage was not broken; she still had youth, beauty, and
ambition--three qualifications with which a clever woman may make a
successful bid for fortune. She returned to England, and it was not long
before her star was again in the ascendant. Evelyn recorded in his Diary
that on the occasion when he went as far as Dover with the new English
Ambassador to Paris "there was in the company of my Lady Ambassadress my
Lady Hamilton, a sprightly young lady much in the good graces of the
family."
It was now when travelling in the suite of these exalted persons that
the charming widow met her old lover Dick Talbot, who had been obliged
to leave England on account of his supposed implication in the Popish
Plot. It was nearly fifteen years since they had met: he was now close
on fifty, but still the same handsome, passionate, generous Talbot of
the old days, and she was nearly thirty, with the glamour of misfortune
to excite sympathy for her beauty. Talbot, whose wife had recently died,
at once fell under the old spell, and this time he was not refused. If
she could not love him as he loved her, she knew how to satisfy him, and
gave him the full benefit of her cunning and ambition in the stormy days
in store for them. Just before the death of Charles II. they managed to
return to England. The Duke of York, with whom Talbot was always a
favourite, at once reinstated him in his old post of groom of the
bedchamber, while the new Duchess of York (Mary of Modena) made as much
of his beautiful wife as the late one had done of the Lovely Jennings.
The accession of James II. gave the Talbots their opportunity. The
favourite was created Earl of Tyrconnel, and sent to Ireland in command
of the army. His wife accompanied him, and now there began for them the
culminating and most critical period of their lives. Already the shadow
of the ruin of the Stuart dynasty could be discerned outlined in the
ferment of the times. The spirit of the approaching Revolution of 1688,
which cost James II. his crown, was more religious than political; and
it was in Catholic Ireland, which had groaned under the iron heel of the
Puritans, that the struggle for which all were preparing was to be
decided. In that distracted kingdom, with the passionate Papist Talbot
in command of the military, and the sleek Protestant Clarendon (the
great Chancellor's son) in command of the civil power, the very
difference in temper, character, and politics of the two men was enough
to lash the factions they represented to fury. The tactics by which
Talbot crushed his rival and set the Catholics, eager for revenge, at
the throat of the Protestants caused his name to be execrated in
England. But terrible as they were, it should be remembered that the
revered Cromwell's were not a whit less ruthless. Talbot was the _enfant
perdu_ of a doomed faith and a doomed nation; his name has been covered
with infamy because he failed, and Macaulay, in making him the villain
of his romantic "History," was merely expressing the opinion of
triumphant Protestant England.
[Illustration: RICHARD TALBOT, DUKE OF TYRCONNEL.]
When James II. fled from Whitehall his hopes turned naturally to Ireland
and Talbot. The exiled King at once created him Duke of Tyrconnel and
Viceroy. There never has reigned at Dublin Castle a more striking
figure. Nor was the Vicereine unequal to the position of power,
splendour, and intrigue to which she had climbed with such difficulty.
Destiny ruled that her magnificent reign should be short and her ruin an
arresting contrast to the success of her equally ambitious and clever
sister, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. She took advantage of her
temporary fortune to marry her three daughters by her former husband,
Hamilton, to rich and influential Irish noblemen. Of one of these "three
viscountesses," as they were popularly known in their day, there is,
says Mrs. Jameson, a picturesque legend still current among the Irish
peasantry. Laughlen Castle was left to the Viscountess Dillon on the
death of her husband with the proviso that she should reside in it
during her life. In her widowhood, falling in love with a young
Englishman, and being unable to detain him in Ireland or follow him to
England while her castle existed, she ordered a banquet to be prepared
in her garden and, having set fire to the castle and feasted by the
light of the blazing pile, went off to England after supper with her
lover!
It is not surprising to learn that the mother of such a daughter had a
commanding spirit and temper. "She is said to have ruled her husband
without much effort, but as all her prejudices and passions held in the
same direction, she on many occasions only added the fuel of her
feminine impatience to his headlong self-will." Her influence over
Talbot was, in fact, supreme. Struggling, as she did with all her force,
to maintain her husband and herself at the summit they had scaled, it
was but natural that she should have made enemies among the distracted
and desperate Jacobites who surrounded her contemptible master, James.
All sorts of efforts were made at St. Germain to induce the fallen King
to supersede the Viceroy, or at least banish his wife from Ireland.
Lord Melfort, foiled by her intrigues, declared that she had "l'âme la
plus noire qui se puisse concevoir."
The Talbot influence was, however, too strong to be easily broken, and
James, having decided to fight for his crown in Ireland, trusted
implicitly to the Duke of Tyrconnel, who had refused to go over to
William of Orange in spite of heavy bribes. From the coming of James and
his French army to Ireland in March 1689, to the fatal Battle of the
Boyne, the struggle between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism entered
upon its final and most distracted phase. In these months of peril the
Jacobite camp was honeycombed with anarchy. Round the Viceroy and his
wife envy and malice coiled like a hydra. It required all their skill to
baffle the intrigues and treachery in their own party. At the same time
the terror and hatred of the English vented themselves on the frenzied
Duke of Tyrconnel, who, still sure of the support of his weak King, was
ruthless in his vengeance and desperate in his measures to out-manoeuvre
William of Orange, that master of strategy. Of the lampoons that rained
upon him the following is a sample:--
"There is an old prophecy found in a bog,
That Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog;
And now this prophecy is come to pass,
For Talbot's a dog and James is an ass!"
The French authorities quoted by Macaulay are probably quite correct in
stating that the Duke of Tyrconnel had arranged with James to make
Ireland a French protectorate, in case the English crown should again be
on the head of a Protestant king. The thought that he was just the
Irishman to entertain such a design was sufficient to make him execrable
to the Englishmen of his own day, and no less infamous to Macaulay, that
strict respecter of conventions, who ferreted his forgotten name out of
the oubliettes of history to depict him as the traitor _par excellence_.
But it was certainly not England that Talbot would have betrayed had his
schemes succeeded. To him the yoke that crushed his race and creed was
foreign. Nor would Ireland have altogether resented his handing her over
to France, all bleeding as she was from Protestant and English wounds.
Of the two yokes the French would assuredly have been the easier for
Ireland--at least so Irishmen have declared on many occasions.
Be all this as it may, perhaps no other but Talbot could have maintained
himself against the calumnies and intrigues that began slowly to break
down his iron frame. It must have been with something of relief,
something of despair, that the high-spirited Duchess of Tyrconnel learnt
that the factious Franco-Irish army was finally to meet the common foe.
She knew well enough, when on the night of the 30th of June a courier
brought her the news that a battle would be fought on the morrow, that
on its issue hung all her future. The agony of suspense in which she
passed the day of the Battle of the Boyne found her at evening no less
exhausted than the conquered and fugitive James when he reached Dublin
Castle. Nevertheless, in this hour of her deepest humiliation she rose
proudly above despair. As soon as the worst was told her she bore
herself with as high a spirit as when years before she had faced Jermyn.
When the fleeing King arrived, faint and covered with mud so as to be
hardly recognisable, the Duchess of Tyrconnel assembled her household in
state, and dressing herself magnificently received him with all the
splendour of Court etiquette. Never has Dublin Castle witnessed a
function more dramatic than this of Dick Talbot's Vicereine on the night
of the Battle of the Boyne. Having on one knee congratulated James on
his safety, she invited him to partake of refreshment. His answer is
celebrated. Shaking his head sadly, he replied that his breakfast that
morning had spoiled his appetite, and ironically complimented her on the
swiftness of her husband's countrymen's heels. "At least your Majesty
has had the advantage of them," she could not help retorting, stung by
the ruin of her hopes and ambitions. When Lauzun, the French general,
told her that fifteen Talbots and half as many Hamiltons had been slain,
and that her husband had fought like a hero of romance, she might have
been acquitted of disloyalty had she cried, as she must have felt, with
the Irish soldiers, "Change kings, and we will fight the battle over
again!"
At the Council held on the following day it was decided that James
should return to France, and the Duchess of Tyrconnel either went with
him or followed shortly afterwards. It was no doubt necessary for the
Viceroy to have his clever wife to intrigue in his behalf at St.
Germain, where his enemies were the most dangerous. She did her best for
him in that plot-laden atmosphere, but Tyrconnel and the cause he
represented were hopelessly broken, and the doom of the wicked fairy had
fallen on the Duchess. Her star had set, never to rise again.
In the following year the patriotic Viceroy died suddenly at Limerick,
whither he had gone in brave despair to give battle to the fatal William
of Orange once more. Before he died his enemies at St. Germain had
triumphed over his wife, and the weak, ungrateful James had at last
allowed himself to be persuaded to deprive him of all authority in
Ireland. But, so loved as well as feared was he, the despatch which
disgraced him was kept a profound secret. His death was generally
attributed to poison, but the real cause, according to a more
trustworthy opinion, was apoplexy. So exciting were the times, that his
end scarcely caused a thrill. Death must have been welcome, for his
passionate heart was broken.
Thus perished this questionable hero, whose virtues and abilities have
been covered with infamy by failure and the unbounded popular passions
of the times in which he lived. Two voices only have ever been lifted
in his defence: one was Berwick's, his contemporary, who, when the
opportunity was offered, nobly refused to supplant him; the other was
Lady Morgan's, a sympathetic critic of a later day. "Of Richard Talbot,
Duke of Tyrconnel," she said, "much ill has been written and more
believed; but his history, like that of his unfortunate country, has
only been written by the pen of party, steeped in gall, and copied
servilely from the pages of prejudice by the tame historians of modern
times more anxious for authority than authenticity."
His brilliant wife, whom his death reduced to poverty, paid his memory
such honour as she could. At her entreaty Anselme, the most popular
preacher of the day, pronounced his _oraison funèbre_ in Paris, and the
Courts of Versailles and St. Germain assembled to hear it. The obscurity
in which the rest of her long life was spent has only been fitfully
illuminated. Neglected in the distracted Court of the exiled Stuarts,
she was so poor that she was often in want of the necessaries of life.
On one occasion temporary relief was afforded her by the gift of four
hundred pounds from the pension the Pope gave to James II. Her proud
spirit having been embittered by misfortune, she quarrelled with nearly
all her relations, living on especially bad terms with her "three
viscountesses;" her only child by Talbot that survived, and whom she had
married to the Prince of Vintimiglia; and her luckier but no cleverer
sister, the Duchess of Marlborough. Many years later, in the reign of
Queen Anne, when her famous brother-in-law was at the height of his
power and playing his double game between the Whigs and the Jacobites,
she was employed for a time in his secret negotiations. But the
proceedings are wrapped in mystery. There is a story said to be
apocryphal, though Horace Walpole and others believed it, that she was
in England in 1705, and sold haberdashery at the Royal Exchange, which
was at that time let out in stalls.
"Above stairs," said Walpole, "sat, in the character of a milliner, the
reduced Duchess of Tyrconnel, wife of Richard Talbot, Lord Deputy of
Ireland under James II. This female, suspected to be his duchess after
his death, supported herself for a few days, till she was known and
otherwise provided for, by the little trade of the place. She had
delicacy enough to wish not to be detected; she sat in a white mask and
a white dress, and was known by the name of the White Milliner."
It is certain that three years later she was at Brussels, where she had
a meeting of a political nature with the Duke of Marlborough. In
describing it to his wife he wrote that he found her grown very old and
hoarse, and so much changed as to be hardly recognisable. Through his
influence some of her confiscated property in Ireland was restored to
her, and she went to Dublin, where she remained for the rest of her
life, with what thoughts one would like to know! She lived for nearly
thirty years in a most devout and lonely retirement, and, her funds
being now more than sufficient for her wants, founded a nunnery for the
Order of Poor Clares. "Her death," says Walpole, "was occasioned by
falling out of her bed on the floor in a winter's night, and being too
feeble to rise or to call out, she was found in the morning so perished
with cold that she died in a few hours." Her age was eighty-three, and
she had survived the fatal Battle of the Boyne forty years!
Of the beauty for which "the Lovely Jennings" had been so celebrated at
Whitehall, when she scattered the Duke of York's love-billets "like
hailstones around her," there had long ceased to remain the slightest
trace.
[Illustration: "WANTON SHREWSBURY."
(ANNA MARIA, COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY.)
_From the portrait by Mary Beale in the possession of Earl Spencer._]
"WANTON SHREWSBURY"--LADY ANNA MARIA BRUDENELL, COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY
A MESSALINA OF THE RESTORATION
In all ages there are persons of whom it may be said that they have been
born out of their proper era. The manner in which such beings are
received by the times in which they find themselves depends entirely on
the standard of public opinion then existing. The Countess of Shrewsbury
was one of these strange individuals. She should have flourished in
France under the Valois and the great Dumas should have been her
historian. In times like our own, for instance--for whether in or out of
her proper period her individuality was too striking to have permitted
her to pass unnoticed--she would undoubtedly have proved the truth of
the verse that declares--
"Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows' need."
It was certainly fortunate for her that Fate did not retard her
appearance until after the Stuarts had vanished. As it was, even the
Restoration looked askance at her; and it was only to her rank that she
owed the immunity she enjoyed. There was a magic in rank in those days
that secured liberty for its crimes. And no name appeared grander to the
popular imagination than that of Talbot.