the matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came one cold night
towards the end of February of that year 1667. Charles, going below at
a late hour to visit Miss Stewart, when he judged that she would be
alone, was informed by her maid that Miss was not receiving, a headache
compelling her to keep her room.
His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine. Chiffinch had
introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles stiffened at sight
of her.
“I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage,” says she, on a note of
irony, “although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me at my own
house. I come to condole with you upon the affliction and grief into
which the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman Stewart has reduced
your Majesty.”
“You are pleased to be amused, ma’am,” says Charles frostily.
“I will not,” she returned him, “make use of reproaches which would
disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse frailties in
myself which nothing can justify, since your constancy for me deprives
me of all defence.” Her ladyship, you see, had a considerable gift of
sarcasm.
“In that case, may I ask you why you have come?”
“To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made the
jest of your own Court.”
“Madam!”
“Ah! You didn’t know, of course, that you are being laughed at for the
gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the Stewart’s
affectations, any more than you know that whilst you are denied
admittance to her apartments, under the presence of some indisposition,
the Duke of Richmond is with her now.”
“That is false,” he was beginning, very indignantly.
“I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow me, you
will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes you act so
ridiculous a part.”
She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence led
him, despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately come.
Outside her rival’s door she left him, but she paused at the end of the
gallery to make sure that he had entered.
Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart’s
chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them informing
him scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been very ill since
his Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she was, God be thanked,
in a very fine sleep.
“That I must see,” said the King. And, since one of the women placed
herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty unceremoniously
took her by the shoulders and put her aside.
He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony into the
well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the handsome, canopied bed.
But far from being as he had been told, in “a very fine sleep,” she was
sitting up; and far from presenting an ailing appearance, she looked
radiantly well and very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with
golden ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her
pillow sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved
upon scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.
The King’s swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid eyes
lost all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might have
expected that he would now deliver himself with that sneering sarcasm,
that indolent cynicism, which he used upon occasion. But he was too
deeply stirred for acting. His self-control deserted him entirely.
Exactly what he said has not been preserved for us. All that we are
told is that he signified his resentment in such terms as he had never
before used; and that his Grace, almost petrified by the King’s most
royal rage, uttered never a word in answer. The windows of the room
overlooked the Thames. The King’s eyes strayed towards them. Richmond
was slight of build, Charles vigorous and athletic. His Grace took the
door betimes lest the window should occur to his Majesty, and so he
left the lady alone with the outraged monarch.
Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss Stewart
faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own, and she was very
far from attempting any such justification of herself, or her conduct,
as he may have expected.
“Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your
complaint?” she invited him challengingly.
That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn. His jaw
fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this she took the
fullest advantage.
“If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
Richmond’s rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am a
slave in a free country. I know of no engagement that should prevent me
from disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this is not permitted
me in your Majesty’s dominions, I do not believe there is any power on
earth can prevent me going back to France, and throwing myself into a
convent, there to enjoy the peace denied me at this Court.”
With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was complete. On
his knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury he had done her. But
Miss was not in a forgiving humour.
“If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in peace,”
said she, “you would avoid offending by a longer visit those who
accompanied or conducted you to my apartments.”
She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went home.
Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak to her
again, he stalked out.
Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he must
also have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and that in
his conduct in Miss Stewart’s room he had been entirely ridiculous. She
was rightly resolved against being lightly worn by any man. If
anything, the reflection must have fanned his passion. It was
impossible, he thought, that she should love that knock-kneed fellow,
Richmond, who had no graces either of body or of mind, and if she
suffered the man’s suit, it must be, as she had all but said, so that
she might be delivered from the persecution to which his Majesty had
submitted her. The thought of her marrying Richmond, or, indeed,
anybody, was unbearable to Charles, and it may have stifled his last
scruple in the matter of the divorce.
His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the Court.
But Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The King’s messenger
found him gone already.
Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor.
Clarendon’s habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke to
the King—taking the fullest advantage of the tutelary position in which
for the last twenty-five years he had stood to him—much as he had
spoken when Charles had proposed to make Barbara Palmer a Lady of the
Queen’s Bedchamber, saving that he was now even more uncompromising.
The King was not pleased with him. But just as he had had his way,
despite the Chancellor, in that other matter, so he would have his way
despite him now. This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He
feared too much the consequences for Charles, and he determined to
spare no effort to avoid a scandal, and to save the already
deeply-injured Queen. So he went secretly to work to outwit the King.
He made himself the protector of those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and
Miss Stewart, with the result that one dark night, a week or two later,
the lady stole away from the Palace of Whitehall, and made her way to
the Bear Tavern, at the Bridge-foot, Westminster, where Richmond
awaited her with a coach. And so, by the secret favour of the Lord
Chancellor, they stole away to Kent and matrimony.
That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of things in
his mortification. But it was not until some six weeks later that he
learnt by whose agency the thing had been accomplished. He learnt it,
not a doubt, from my Lady Castlemaine.
The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated back to
the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was at last made
up; and once again we see her ladyship triumphant, and firmly
established in the amorous King’s affections. She had cause to be
grateful to the Chancellor for this. But her vindictive nature
remembered only the earlier injury still unavenged. Here at last was
her chance to pay off that score. Clarendon, beset by enemies on every
hand, yet trusting in the King whom he had served so well, stood his
ground unintimidated and unmoved—an oak that had weathered mightier
storms than this. He did not dream that he was in the power of an evil
woman. And that woman used her power. When all else failed, she told
the King of Clarendon’s part in the flight of Miss Stewart, and lest
the King should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out of
consideration for his motives, represented him as a self-seeker, and
charged him with having acted thus so as to make sure of keeping his
daughter’s children by the Duke of York in the succession.
That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw Clarendon to
the wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him with a command that he
should surrender his seals of office. The proud old man refused to
yield his seals to any but the King himself. He may have hoped that the
memory of all that lay between them would rise up once more when they
were face to face. So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender.
He walked deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the
hostile throng of courtiers—“especially the buffoones and ladys of
pleasure,” as Evelyn says.
Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has left
us a vivid picture:
“When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine was
in bed (though about twelve o’clock), and ran out in her smock into her
aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither her woman brought
her her nightgown; and she stood, blessing herself at the old man’s
going away; and several of the gallants of Whitehall—of which there
were many staying to see the Chancellor’s return—did talk to her in her
birdcage; among others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of
passage.”
Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine house in
Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered Strafford’s
fate, and set out to tread once more and for the remainder of his days
the path of exile.
Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters—Mary and Anne—reigned
successively as queens in England.
X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
Count Philip Königsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
particularly in England, where he had been associated with his brother
in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century did not look
for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of fortune; and so it
condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip Christof Königsmark for the
sake of his personal beauty, his elegance, his ready wit, and his
magnificent address. The court of Hanover made him warmly welcome,
counting itself the richer for his presence; whilst he, on his side,
was retained there by the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he
had been appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who later
was to reign in England as King George I.
His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had been
playmates at her father’s ducal court of Zell, where Königsmark had
been brought up. With adolescence he had gone out into the world to
seek the broader education which it offered to men of quality and
spirit. He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the infidel overseas; he had
wooed adventure wherever it was to be met, until romance hung about him
like an aura. Thus Sophia met him again, a dazzling personality, whose
effulgence shone the more brightly against the dull background of that
gross Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of
the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a different
kind. The sweet child he had known—she had been married in 1682, at the
age of sixteen—had come in her ten years of wedded life to the
fulfilment of the handsome promise of her maidenhood. But her beauty
was spiritualized by a certain wistfulness that had not been there
before, that should not have been there now had all been well. The
sprightliness inherent in her had not abated, but it had assumed a
certain warp of bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given
place in her to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and
a little reckless of how or where it offended.
Königsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and knew
enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her thwarted love
for her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted for the sake of
dynastic ambition, to the end that by marrying her to the Electoral
Prince George the whole of the Duchy of Luneberg might be united. Thus,
for political reasons, she had been thrust into a union that was
mutually loveless; for Prince George had as little affection to bring
to it as herself. Yet for a prince the door to compensations is ever
open. Prince George’s taste, as is notorious, was ever for ugly women,
and this taste he indulged so freely, openly, and grossly that the
coldness towards him with which Sophia had entered the alliance was
eventually converted into disgust and contempt.
Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on her
side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by his
father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the latter by
the Countess von Platen.
Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector’s chief minister of state,
was—with the connivance of her despicable husband, who saw therein the
means to his own advancement—the acknowledged mistress of Ernest
Augustus. She was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and ill-favoured woman.
Malevolence sat in the creases of her painted face, and peered from her
mean eyes. Yet, such as she was, the Elector Ernest loved her. His
son’s taste for ugly women would appear to have been hereditary.
Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The princess
had mortally offended her father-in-law’s favourite. Not only had she
never troubled to dissemble the loathing which that detestable woman
inspired in her, but she had actually given it such free and stinging
expression as had provoked against Madame von Platen the derision of
the court, a derision so ill-concealed that echoes of it had reached
its object, and made her aware of the source from whence it sprang.
It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the
elegant, romantic Königsmark took place. He found the stage set for
comedy of a grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by his
recklessness, to convert into tragedy.
It began by the Countess von Platen’s falling in love with him. It was
some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he did not lack
for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-esteem that blinded him
here to the appalling truth. Yet in the end understanding came to him.
When the precise significance of the fond leer of that painted
harridan’s repellent coquetry was borne in upon him he felt the skin of
his body creep and roughen But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal
scamp, after all, and in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to
employ his gifts and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as
to win to eminence. He saw that the Elector’s favourite could be of use
to him; and it is not your adventurer’s way to look too closely into
the nature of the ladder by which he has the chance to climb.
Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so long as
her fondness for him might be useful, her hostility detrimental. But
once the Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was firmly in his grasp, and
an intimate friendship had ripened between himself and Prince
Charles—the Elector’s younger son—sufficiently to ensure his future, he
plucked off the mask and allied himself with Sophia in her hostility
towards Madame von Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter,
whilst on a visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups
a droll story of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at
Madame von Platen’s hands.
It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But there was
one present who afterwards sent a report of it to the Countess, and you
conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused in her. Her rage was the
greater for being stifled. It was obviously impossible for her to
appeal to her lover, the Elector, to avenge her. From the Elector,
above all others, must the matter be kept concealed. But not on that
account would she forgo the vengeance due. She would present a
reckoning in full ere all was done, and bitterly should the
presumptuous young adventurer who had flouted her be made to pay.
The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more or less
directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite against Sophia.
This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into the arms of the
Electoral Prince. Melusina, who was years afterwards to be created
Duchess of Kendal, had not yet attained to that completeness of lank,
bony hideousness that was later to distinguish her in England. But even
in youth she could boast of little attraction. Prince George, however,
was easily attracted. A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to
over-eating, heavy drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina
von Schulemberg an ideal mate. Her installation as _maîtresse en-titre_
took place publicly at a ball given by Prince George at Herrenhausen, a
ball at which the Princess Sophia was present.
Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her dullard
husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her contempt of him now
left her, yet in the affront thus publicly offered her, she felt that
the limit of endurance had been reached. Next day it was found that she
had disappeared from Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father’s court
at Zell.
But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom and
levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the dignity of
her rank; recommended her to use in future greater prudence, and a
proper, wifely submission; and, the homily delivered, packed her back
to her husband at Herrenhausen.
George’s reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She had
been guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of respect
for him. She must learn what was due to her station, and to her
husband. He would thank her to instruct herself in these matters
against his return from Berlin, whither he was about to journey, and he
warned her that he would suffer no more tantrums of that kind.
Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.
Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him, and
leaving hate and despair behind.
It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a true
friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to rescue her from
her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her elbow, against this
dreadful need, Destiny had placed her sometime playmate, her most
devoted friend—as she accounted him, and as, indeed, he was—the
elegant, reckless Königsmark, with his beautiful face, his golden mane,
and his unfathomable blue eyes.
Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the formal
gardens of Herrenhausen—that palace as squat and ungraceful as those
who had built and who inhabited it—she opened her heart to him very
fully, allowed him, in her overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things
which for very shame she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She
kept nothing back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish
husband, told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain
she had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had
beaten her upon occasion.
Königsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of his
emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when she came at
last to the culminating horror of blows endured.
“It is enough, madame,” he cried. “I swear to you, as Heaven hears me,
that he shall be punished.”
“Punished?” she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him with
a smile of sad incredulity. “It is not his punishment I seek, my
friend, but my own salvation.”
“The one can be accomplished with the other,” he answered hotly, and
struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. “You shall be rid of this lout
as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to Berlin to-night.”
The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell apart, as
she looked at him aghast.
“Why, what would you do? What do you mean?” she asked him.
“I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of you,
madame.”
She shook her head. “Princes do not fight,” she said, on a note of
contempt.
“I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative—unless, indeed,
he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put an affront on
him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have made him valiant
enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even that will not answer,
and he still shields himself behind his rank—why, there are other ways
to serve him.” He was thinking, perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.
The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed the
poor lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy, and
starved of love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.
“My friend, my friend!” she cried, on a note that quivered and broke.
“You are mad—wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What would become of
you if you did this?”
He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry
gesture. “Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become of
you. I was born for your service, my princess, and the service being
rendered...” He shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands and let them
fall again to his sides in an eloquent gesture. He was the complete
courtier, the knight-errant, the romantic _preux-chevalier_ all in one.
She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat in
her white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful face. If
ever she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss Königsmark in
that moment, but as she might have kissed a loving brother, in token of
her deep gratitude for his devotion to her who had known so little true
devotion.
“If you knew,” she said, “what balsam this proof of your friendship has
poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would understand my utter lack
of words in which to thank you. You dumbfound me, my friend; I can find
no expression for my gratitude.”
“I ask no gratitude,” quoth he. “I am all gratitude myself that you
should have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask your leave
to serve you in my own way.”
She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.
He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. “Serve me if you
will—God knows I need the service of a loyal friend—but serve me as I
shall myself decide—no other way.”
“But what alternative service can exist?” he asked, almost impatiently.
“I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place—to quit Hanover,
never to return.”
“But to go whither?”
“Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this
hateful life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find shelter at
Zell, as I had hoped. Had it not been for the thought of my children, I
should have fled long ago. For the sake of those two little ones I have
suffered patiently through all these years. But the limit of endurance
has been reached and passed. Take me away. Königsmark!” She was
clutching his lapels again. “If you would really serve me, help me to
escape.”
His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his
breast. A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden kindling
of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones. These
sensitive, romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion, ever ready
to yield to the adventure of it.