Part 5

To enumerate her lovers, the number of whom exceeded the King's, would not only be impossible but scarcely amusing. Of this legion devoted to the worship of Priapus there are a few, however, that may be cited. As Lady Castlemaine consumed money irrespective of the source from which it was derived, so she never gave a thought to the rank from which her lovers were recruited. My Lady Castlemaine's taste in men was thoroughly catholic. From Barkeley and Hamilton her fancy flitted to her cousin, Buckingham, one of the most extraordinary men of an extraordinary age, of whom more later. From this great Duke what she termed her affections roamed through the various grades of society, and finally rested on a "compound of Hercules and Adonis," who supplemented his living on the tight-rope. With this man, Jacob Hall, she was, as Pepys would say, so "besotted" for a time that she gave him a salary, diverting the money for this purpose from a sum voted by Parliament for the National Defence. From the rope-dancer, who is said to have treated her after her own vituperative fashion, she probably suffered less than from the polished villainy of Buckingham.

Nor, when the ice of the trough on which we are skating is cracking under our feet, should we fail to mention the actor, Hart, a great-nephew of Shakespeare. Her _liaison_ with this handsome and justly celebrated tragic actor had apparently a less voluptuous motive than such amours usually had with her. Pepys, gossiping with Mrs. Knipp, the actress, in his customary prurient curiosity to glean news from any source, learns that "my Lady Castlemaine is mightily in love with Hart, of their house; and he is much with her in private, and she goes to him and do give him many presents; and that the thing is most certain, and by this means she is _even with_ the King's love to Mrs. Davis." (Moll Davis, an "impertinent slut" of an actress, and as beautiful and brazen as my Lady Castlemaine herself.) As one of many instances of the bond, of which history does not afford a parallel, between a king and a _maîtresse en titre_ this attempt of Lady Castlemaine to get "even with" Charles is striking.

How the ice cracks under us!

It is not always on dukes and rope-dancers, actors and dandies that my Lady Castlemaine casts her hungry glance. No one, provided he be fair and shapely to the eye, escapes her attention. History does not relate the number of times Chiffinch let her through that little gate at Whitehall by which the crowd of duchesses, actresses, and meaner beauties passed secretly to and from the private closet of Majesty. But on one of these masked assignations, as my Lady Castlemaine scuttled down the back-stairs, she spied with her observant eyes a page loitering there. The page passed after that meeting with the King's mistress from the back-stairs of Whitehall to the stage, assassination plots, and many a questionable adventure, but for nigh on twenty years my Lady Castlemaine was "interested" in him. His shallow, handsome head being turned, Goodman boasted openly of the patronage he enjoyed. Once at the theatre--it was in William and Mary's time--the audience being seated, the Queen in her box, and the curtain ready to rise, he shouted from behind the scenes to inquire "whether his duchess had come," and forbade the raising of the curtain till she should appear. Fortunately at that moment her Grace of Cleveland arrived and Queen Mary was spared the insult of having to wait an actor's pleasure. Such was her passion for this scoundrel that she was content to share his affections with his wife and another woman of the town. But this was at a later period when her money and rank rather than her charms attracted.

Perhaps no better instance of the morals of the Restoration could be cited than the manner in which this female Don Juan commenced her notorious acquaintance with Wycherley. He was at the time a good-looking young man, in the bud of his dramatic career, and she was a middle-aged woman with such a past! He had, with design to secure her patronage, flattered her in his play, "Love in a Wood, or a Night in St. James's Park" (!), just then running to crowded houses, when she passed him one morning in her carriage in Pall Mall. With the gross humour of Restoration manners she shouted at him a low epithet that might with perfect justice and much more fittingly have been applied to her own sons. He at once turned, and the following dialogue, according to Dennis, Pope, and others, took place:--

"Madam," said Wycherley, "you have been pleased to bestow on me a title which generally belongs to the fortunate. Will your ladyship be at the play to-night?"

"Well," she replied, "what if I am there?"

"Why, then, I shall be there to wait on your ladyship, though to do so I disappoint a very fine woman."

"So you are sure to disappoint a woman who has favoured you for one who has not?"

"Yes," was the gallant reply, "if she who has not is the finer woman of the two. But he who will be constant to your ladyship till he can find a finer woman, is sure to die your captive."

It is stated that hereupon the lady blushed! But she was at the theatre that night and sat with him in his box.

After this episode, which if it caused talk did not cause scandal, we need no longer wonder at the tone of Wycherley's comedies.

One would think that such flagrant infidelities would have snapped the mysterious spell Lady Castlemaine had cast upon the King. But perhaps there was safety in the openness of her amours, and it was not often that Charles was jealous; he was too cynical, and gave his mistresses the same license he took himself. There were, however, times when his pride was hurt, and two of these are worth citing: one as an incident in the life of the great Marlborough, the other as the means through which Lady Castlemaine finally lost the King.

No light has been shed on the character of Marlborough clearer than that in which it is exposed by the story of his start in life. John Churchill came up to London to seek his fortune with empty pockets, no influence, and a face of such beauty as few young men have ever been endowed with. He was an obscure youth of seventeen, with ambition already unbridled, when the eyes of my Lady Castlemaine first fell upon him. At the first exchange of glances desire was born in both of them. The courtezan saw in him a new emotion to be gratified; he saw in the King's mistress a stepping-stone to fortune. But the game to both was full of danger; detection, in this instance, was thought by Lady Castlemaine to spell her ruin. For she was shrewd enough to perceive that her sway over Charles had begun to wane; and in her falling it was to her interest to fall softly. To bind young Churchill to secrecy was easy; he was naturally cunning, and the prize he sought was slippery. Careful, however, as they both were, they could not escape the alert, vindictive suspicion of his Grace of Buckingham. Five years before this nobleman and his "cousin Barbara" were on the best of terms; she had saved him from the Tower and paved the way for him to the Ministry, but they had now fallen out, over what is not related, and Buckingham, as usual, flung all his ability into his hate. Being informed by his spies of the visits John Churchill paid the courtezan, he laid a trap in which the King might catch the culprits _in flagrante delicto_. Doubtless every one remembers how the handsome young guardsman--who had already got out of his mistress enormous sums of money as well as his commission in the army--hearing the sound of the King's voice as he lay in her arms, leapt out of the window to escape recognition, while Charles, with his consummate cynicism, cried after him, "I forgive you, for you do it for your bread."

Charles had one great virtue which seems to us at times to cancel most of his vices--a fine sense of humour. May we suggest that the kingly hand may be seen in the fate of the child whom, after this episode, the Duchess of Cleveland bore to Churchill? Surely, it could only be his sense of humour that made a "nun at Pontoise" of the issue of this _liaison_? For Barbara Villiers, who never had a sense of humour at all, was not religiously inclined, though she once made a bishop and liked to be painted as a madonna; nor was John Churchill the man to give a second thought to liabilities he had helped others to incur--a statement that reminds us of a story of a game of basset at which the Duke of Marlborough refused to lend the Duchess of Cleveland half-a-crown, when he was keeping the bank, and had a thousand pounds lying on the table before him!

The other instance in which Charles was recalcitrant was my Lady Castlemaine's fondness for the "invincible Jermyn," with his big head and little legs and forced wit. As the records of the period quite fail to convey the charm this vain, shallow dandy exercised on all the women of the Court, we are inclined to agree with the King that he was a creature to be despised. But Lady Castlemaine, like the rest of her sex, thought differently. This was one of the rare occasions when the termagant was strangely chary about giving offence. To cover up one's tracks at Whitehall was very difficult, and Lady Castlemaine was only partially successful. The arrival of Frances Stuart at Court gave her an opportunity to practise her powers of dissimulation. Lady Castlemaine professed a great friendship for the beauty and had her to sleep in the same bed, not so much as a compliment on the part of my lady as a ruse to throw Charles off the scent. For when the King came, as was his habit, every morning and nearly every night, to visit Lady Castlemaine he found La Belle Stuart in bed beside her ladyship. But while this friendship tended to extinguish Charles's jealousy of Jermyn, it finished by firing my Lady Castlemaine's of Miss Stuart. It is not here that we shall relate in full the amusing particulars of the game of cross-purposes, of which the prize was sexual emotion, that to the ribald delight of the town and the more decorous gratification of Mr. Pepys now took place. The shrew had to fight the prude for her position, her plunder, and her royal paramour. From being friends the rival beauties became deadly enemies. The quarrel was taken up by their servants; the nurses of the mistress's bastards assaulted the maids of the prude; once the King had to leave the Council of State to make peace!

All her powers of coarse vituperation, all her powers of intrigue, all her knowledge of the King's character were brought into play by Lady Castlemaine. She dished her rival, but it is a marvel, with the strange means she employed, that she was not utterly ruined. The secret of her success is to be found, we think, in that she was fighting not for possession of the King's affections, she cared nothing about them, but for the possession of his influence.

It is to be borne in mind that this Stuart-Castlemaine-Jermyn affair continued for nearly five years. Once during this time, on some slighting words from the King, Lady Castlemaine packed her boxes and trunks and, swearing she had shaken the dust of the Court from her feet, quitted the palace for Richmond. But in spite of Miss Stuart, or perhaps on account of her prudery, Charles, after a couple of days, missed the termagant, and went a-hunting in her neighbourhood, to the amusement of the Court. The next day my Lady Castlemaine was back at Whitehall, but before she came she made the King implore her on his knees! The reconciliation was, however, of short duration. The talk of the town was of nothing but the wrangling that went on in the royal palace between the mistresses. Pepys's diary is for the time a thermometer registering the rise and fall of the temperature of a mercurial royal favour and its effect on my Lady Castlemaine's looks and moods.

Had her beautiful prudish rival possessed less virtue and more wit Lady Castlemaine's star would have set long before it did. But she finally ruined La Belle Stuart in the same contemptible, unprincipled fashion as Buckingham later ruined herself. Warned by the pimps of the back-stairs, whom she took care to secure to her interest, she was able to notify Charles in time for him to surprise Miss Stuart in a situation which deprived her of his regard. With the prude's elopement from Whitehall the day after this adventure, Lady Castlemaine's position was more secure than ever, and her reign continued as before, punctuated with infidelities and Billingsgate quarrels.

In the morning of the Restoration decency was not wholly flung to the winds. Then when my Lady Castlemaine presented her lord with a son, the new-born babe was smuggled out of her bed secretly, and "carried off by a coachman under his cloak," to be publicly acknowledged by the King years later when the sun of the Restoration was at its zenith. It is said that several dukes came into the world in this mysterious fashion. But as time passed the coming of a bastard was noised about the Court and the coffee-houses long before he arrived. During the Great Plague, when the Court was at Oxford, Pepys states that "every boy in the streets openly cries, 'The King can't go away till my Lady Castlemaine be ready to come along with him.'" On this occasion the poor Queen, who, under the mask of friendship which she wore even in private, studied revenge for the insults she received from this brazen courtezan, called upon her lady of the bedchamber to fulfil her duties, and my Lady Castlemaine, scarcely able to leave her bed, had to mount and ride in Catherine's suite.

Another time she contented herself with laughing at Lady Castlemaine's jealousy of La Belle Stuart. Yet another, the King himself revenged her. Overhearing his mistress one day making a slighting remark of the Queen, Charles burst into one of his rare fits of anger and ordered the woman to leave Whitehall forthwith. Lady Castlemaine went off imperiously enough, but took the precaution to leave her baggage behind her. At the end of three days, hearing nothing from him, she became alarmed and wrote him submissively to ask for permission to send for her things. He told her she might come in person and fetch them if she wished them, and the quarrel ended as usual in a reconciliation. Her hold over him seemed magical--a hold the secret of which, one would say, was the fearlessness of her abuse. Under that terrible lash Charles cowered to the end like a whipped dog.

During her struggle for supremacy with the Stuart, when even the most witless of frailties would have cunningly manoeuvred the whole artillery of flattery, kisses, smiles, sighs, and tears, Lady Castlemaine exploded her vituperative bombs in the royal presence, and taunted the King like a _poissarde_. Nor, what is perhaps more remarkable, in the duel of these Restoration Brunhildas and Fredregondes for Charles's heart, did either one or the other subject her private inclinations to interest.

When the Queen was supposed to be dying and the gamesters of the Court were backing Miss Stuart for her place, Lady Castlemaine continued her intrigue half-openly, half-secretly with Jermyn. On the authority of a Mr. Cooling, from whom Pepys was in the habit of pumping the gossip of the Court when that gentleman was primed with wine, history learns that Charles, venturing a little cynical raillery on the subject of Jermyn, whom he considered more despicable a rival than Goodman or Hall, remarked that though always willing to oblige the ladies, he could hardly be expected to father _all_ the babes about to be born at Whitehall. To which Lady Castlemaine, who saw an allusion to herself in the remark, "made a slight puh at him with her mouth." In this instance, however, Charles proved very inconsiderate of my Lady Castlemaine's state of health. Whereupon with curses and tears of rage she rushed from the palace to a friend's house in Pall Mall, swearing that "she will have it christened in the Chapel at Whitehall and owned for the King's; or she will bring it into Whitehall gallery and dash the brains of it out before the King's face!"

But whether it was because he was afraid that this woman, unique in the annals of palace prostitution, was capable of putting her Medea-like vengeance into effect, or from the more likely fear of her threat to publish his letters, Charles followed her and prayed her on his knees to return. From one of his Povys, or Fenns, or Coolings the prurient Mr. Pepys learns that my Lady Castlemaine allowed herself to be persuaded to yield, but "not as a mistress, for she scorned him, but as a tyrant to command him! And so she is come to-day, when one would think his mind should be full of some other cares, having this morning broken up such a Parliament with so much discontent, and so many wants upon him, and but yesterday heard such a sermon against adultery."

It has been said that the English take their pleasures sadly; it might have been added with more reason that they take their vices grossly. Never was this latter sardonic reproach more applicable than at the Restoration. The contrast between Whitehall and Versailles is striking in this respect. At the former the very duchesses were demi-reps; at the latter even the termagant Montespan never forgot the dignity and breeding due to her position. In England, in our respectable age, the language of a Nell Gwynn or a Duchess of Cleveland are alike impossible of printed quotation. In France, after more than two centuries, the attic wit of a Ninon de Lenclos or a Madame de Maintenon has lost none of its savour. But if we have lacked the refinement of the French we have had compensation. We paid for our gross vices on the spot, cash down, so to speak. We settled our little Restoration bill, with a discount of course, at the Revolution of 1688. A Duchess of Cleveland has, after all, only cost us a couple of dukedoms. France's bill for a similar article was presented in the Reign of Terror, with another for interest in the Commune. In a word, if a nation wishes such luxuries, as nations have done before and may do again, we should recommend on the whole a coarse-mouthed Cleveland to a _spirituelle_ Pompadour. They both wear equally well in the public memory, and the price paid in pounds sterling for the former is incalculably less than that paid in human blood for the latter.

But it must not be supposed that Charles and his favourite were always quarrelling and making up, or that he, in the intervals between one rupture and another, regarded her with indifference while cynically permitting her to plunder the State and enjoy the liberties which he took himself. On the contrary, he treated as personal affronts the many insults offered to her. Overhearing Lady Gerard maligning Lady Castlemaine behind her back, he ordered her to quit the Court. For an obscene jest at her expense he likewise banished Killigrew, the wit, whom personally he liked. On one occasion he ordered the gates of St. James's Park to be shut and everybody found within to be arrested because three masked men assailed her as she was taking a walk and frightened her into a fit by swearing she should die in a ditch like Jane Shore. And his splendid gift of Berkshire House was the means he took of consoling her after a quarrel for the famous "Poor Whores' Petition to the Illustrious Lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine," which was followed a few days later by "A Gracious Answer" to the same. But perhaps Charles showed as much defiance as pity in this act; for these lampoons were levelled at the favourite at the time of the riot of London apprentices, who, fired with religious zeal, pulled down the brothels in the city, and when suppressed with bloodshed declared that "they had only done ill in not pulling down in place of the little ones the big one at Whitehall."

The security of her position, which neither her vituperation nor her infidelities, nor the King's, seemed able to shake, naturally caused her to be regarded as a political factor of the greatest importance. Early in her reign Lady Castlemaine became the centre of the cunningest, most dangerous, and most profligate ambitions in the nation. In her apartments the famous Cabal was formed which had the fall of the honest Clarendon for its immediate and the plunder of the State for its ulterior object. She had no political ability, no inclination for political affairs, but she was at once the tool and guiding genius of the Cabal. She was willing to essay the _rôle_ of stateswoman with no other principle than revenge and no other policy than plunder. Never before or since in English history has a conspiracy had baser motives than that which made the nation the slave, dupe, and plaything of Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington, and Lauderdale. Never, perhaps, in any country were talents so nearly akin to genius so corrupted. To call these men statesmen is to debase the name, but they ruled the State, thanks to my Lady Castlemaine. Of this crew of brigands Buckingham was the most notorious. As the stately Ormond represents, we think, the highest type of nobleman, so Buckingham represents the lowest. He was one of the most extraordinary men of the century; with the power, had he wished, of rising to the summit of human virtue, he sank to the lowest depths of animal vice. In few men have the possibilities of the good and evil in human nature been so apparent. That such a character had the power to charm the stern Puritan Fairfax, whose daughter and Cromwell's niece he married, and at the same time to appeal to the dissolute Charles, would alone make him remarkable. As the chief ornament of the Court, the lover and foe alike of Barbara Villiers, and her male counterpart, the following striking portrait by the author of "Hudibras" strikes us as worthy of attention. It breathes more than anything else we remember to have read the very atmosphere of the Restoration, and explains all that seems incomprehensible in the characters of Charles, Lady Castlemaine, and the rest of the monstrous anomalies of Whitehall.