Part 11

Life, however, was to have others in store for her, and the Frenchman had not long departed when all thoughts of him--the tenderness of which we are inclined to attribute to Courtin's imagination rather than to Miss Jennings's heart--were obliterated by the arrival of a dazzling Irishman. "Dick" Talbot, as he was called, was about twenty years older than the lovely Jennings, and not far off forty when he first met her. Already his life contained, in romance and adventure, sufficient material to equip an incipient Dumas for a literary career. He was a sort of living serial with many a thrilling chapter yet to run before the finish. As he was destined to be the means by which the prophecy of the imaginary Wicked Fairy at Miss Jennings's christening was fulfilled, an epitome of Dick Talbot's romantic past is necessary before describing its still more romantic sequel. His family had been settled for centuries in Ireland--since its conquest by Henry II. Time, the great assimilator, had made them Celts to the core, and "Dick," the last of five sons of a younger branch, was the Irishman _par excellence_. He was a soldier from necessity and an adventurer from inclination. His birth and poverty made him the former, and the times in which he lived the latter. He was only a boy when Ireland rose against Cromwell, but he enlisted and served, if not with distinction, at least with the characteristic Irish intrepidity. During the bloody defence of Drogheda he was wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, but was succoured by one of Cromwell's officers, who being charged with the burial of the dead noticed signs of returning consciousness in the corpse. On his recovery he managed to escape from his prison disguised as a woman, and joining a relation, under whom he had served, followed him to Spain, whence, possibly as a volunteer in the Spanish army, he made his way to Flanders. Here he found many Royalist fugitives, among whom was his brother Peter, afterwards the Archbishop of Dublin, who introduced him to the Duke of York.

One may easily picture the temper of the exiled Cavaliers. As it is natural, if immoral, that the vanquished should hate their conquerors, it is not at all surprising or, to our mind, shocking that the Duke of York should have wished to have Cromwell assassinated, or that others should have conspired to this end, or that young Dick Talbot should have offered his services for the purpose. Much ignominy has been heaped on Talbot for the ready willingness with which he lent himself to this assassination scheme. But while we personally by no means advocate assassination, we confess we are unable to understand the reasoning that makes the thought of assassinating Cromwell so much more horrible than that of assassinating any other tyrant. When the People, of whom so much insincerity is talked and written, make tyranny impossible there will be no question as to the crime or virtue of assassination.

Young Talbot was sent to England on his terrible errand, where he was arrested, and examined by Cromwell himself at Whitehall. While detained in the palace to await the decision as to his fate, he made the Puritan servants drunk, and, slipping from a window into the Thames, hid on a ship in the river. Rumour had it that, being in reality a spy in his pay, Cromwell had aided him to escape. As Dick Talbot was an expert duellist, and "ready to fight on the smallest provocation or none at all," it is easy to guess how such a calumny, which he denied with oaths, got its quietus. Among the _spadassins_ who composed the Duke of York's regiment, of which, after the above adventure, he got the command in spite of great opposition, Talbot's sword, so quick to fly from its scabbard, gained him the discipline due to fear. With the Duke of York he was always a great favourite, and at the Restoration followed him to England as his gentleman of the bedchamber. None of the Cavaliers were more fortunate, for he had left his country a poor, insignificant lad, and returned at thirty possessed of royal favour which he knew well how to turn to his advantage.

If, as has been wittily said, William of Orange is the hero of the historical romance known as Macaulay's "History of England," the villain is unquestionably Dick Talbot. In those false, fascinating pages he is a consummate scoundrel, "a mere cringing courtier and a pimp." To refute the malevolent prejudices of Macaulay is easy, and he has been exposed over and over again. We know now that his brilliantly arresting portrait of Talbot was no more like him than was the Great Frederick to an equally haunting portrait by the same master. The Talbot of Macaulay's "History" is, as Jusserand says, a caricature. Perhaps, without placing any more confidence in Hamilton--who drew a very flattering picture of him--than in Macaulay, a certain little-known portrait by the Duke of Berwick comes nearest the truth. It utterly refutes the imputation that he lent himself to the scheme to take away the character of the Duchess of York in order that the Duke, who was tired of her, might divorce her. Likewise the charge that he used his influence to enrich himself at the expense of his fellow-countrymen, whose confiscated estates he got returned to them after deducting his commission, falls to the ground. His fellow-countrymen, whose popular representative he was at Whitehall, willingly gave him money for the purpose. "Though he had acquired great possessions," wrote the Duke of Berwick, "it could not be said that he had employed improper means."

But enough of historical recriminations over this almost forgotten man. Hero or villain, he was when Frances Jennings first beheld him one of the tallest and handsomest men in England. Macaulay at least did justice to his looks when he spoke of "that form which had once been the model for statuaries." With his striking appearance and fascinating manners were combined reckless courage, an emotional, passionate temperament, and the Irishman's ready wit. There is an anecdote of the latter which, as an example of thrust and parry in _double entente_, is hardly to be matched. Once Louis XIV., struck with the handsome Irishman's likeness to himself, on which many had remarked, asked him with a subtle insolence if his mother had not been at the Court of the late King (Louis' father).

"Non, Sire," was Dick Talbot's instant reply; "mais mon _père_ y était."

A man, one would say, with a wit as quick and dangerous as his sword, for which he was noted.

His reputation had been still further increased by a _liaison_ with the notorious Countess of Shrewsbury, and when Miss Jennings met him he had just come back from Ireland, whither he had gone to forget La Belle Hamilton, who had refused him. He was, in fact, very susceptible where the fair sex was concerned, and the ambitious Miss Jennings, having cast a shrewd glance at his two thousand a year in landed property and the valuable royal favour he enjoyed, was not long in bringing him to her feet. The match having been approved by the Duchess of York, Talbot and the beauty were as good as betrothed. This engagement, however, did not last long. Miss Jennings's intimacy with Miss Price occasioned the chivalrous Talbot much concern. Believing his lady-love to be above reproach, and wishing her to remain so, he talked to her with more affection than tact as to the impropriety of making a friend of one who, having been dismissed by the Queen for misconduct, now enjoyed the doubtful distinction of companion to my Lady Castlemaine.

Miss Jennings, who was not the least in love with Talbot, whom she regarded from a purely mercenary point of view as being more eligible than any other of her admirers, objected to be lectured on her choice of friends; and as the society of Miss Price, whatever her reputation, was most amusing company, she haughtily bade her lover mind his own business. This quarrel under ordinary circumstances, owing to the impulsive and generous nature of Talbot, would not have been of long duration. But it chanced to occur just at the time that the "invincible" Jermyn returned to Court after a long absence in the country. Having heard sufficient of the Lovely Jennings to excite his curiosity, he at once paid her court with his customary dishonourable motive. The beauty, however, without adding another to this frivolous coxcomb's many triumphs, nevertheless encouraged his attentions with a shrewd and mercenary eye to his twenty thousand a year. Poor Talbot, who would have forgiven the siren that had bewitched him anything, made several attempts to win back the heart of his fair, but the coquette only laughed at him, and used the quarrel as a means of exchanging one suitor for another more eligible.

The Duchess of York, whose esteem Miss Jennings had cleverly won, was persuaded by the designing maid of honour to sound Jermyn as to his intentions, and succeeded in drawing from him the most satisfactory assurances. The jilting of Talbot and conquest of Jermyn were soon the chief topics of the Court, and the artful beauty flattered herself on the aptitude she showed for intrigue. But Jermyn though hooked was not caught. The irony in the compliments he received on being snared by a girl he had tried to snare cooled his infatuation. He delayed to become a Benedict, and the steps that Miss Jennings took to hasten him constitute one of the best-known episodes in the "Mémoires de Gramont."

One of the customs much in vogue at the time was that of going about the streets masked. "Both the King and Queen and all the Court," says Burnet, "went about masked, and came into houses unknown, and danced there, with a great deal of wild frolic. In all this people were so disguised that, without being in the secret, none could distinguish them." The same form of amusement was popular at the French Court, whence no doubt it had been imported into England. It was, therefore, not surprising that a fast Miss Price or a circumspect Miss Jennings, in the desire to pass a weary hour or two, should have found many a precedent to excuse a frolic to which the risk of discovery gave an additional zest. "Having well considered the matter," said Hamilton, "the best disguise they could think of was to dress themselves like the girls who sell oranges in the theatres and public promenades. This was soon managed; they attired themselves alike, each taking a basket of oranges, and having embarked in a hackney coach, they committed themselves to fortune without any other escort than their own caprice and indiscretion."

Their objective was the motive which had inspired the frolic. Wilmot, 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.

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."