But while Her Grace of Portsmouth was revelling in her splendour and her gold, her mission as Louis's Amba.s.sadress was making unsatisfactory progress. However disposed Charles may have been to change his faith to the advantage of his pocket, he was not prepared to risk his crown, possibly his head, for any Pope who ever lived; nor did the project of providing a French bride for his successor, the Duke of York, promise much better. Louis proposed the d.u.c.h.ess of Guise, his own cousin; but James had heard too much of this unamiable and unattractive Princess from his sister, Henrietta, to relish the venture. The d.u.c.h.ess herself suggested a Princess of Lorraine, as a suitable bride, but Louis, who had no love for the d'Elboeuf ladies, nipped this project in the bud.

After a long resistance, however, she had induced her Royal lover to declare war on Holland; and Louis professed himself so pleased with this concession to his schemes, that he dazzled her eyes with splendid promises if she would but carry out his programme to the full. It had become her crowning ambition to win the right to a _tabouret_ at the Court of Versailles--the highest privilege accorded to the old _n.o.blesse_, that of sitting on a stool in the presence of the King; and this proud distinction, which would raise her to the highest pinnacle in France, inferior only to the crown itself, could be hers if Louis would but grant her the d'Aubigny lands to accompany her t.i.tle, for the _tabouret_ went with the Duchy domains. Even this most coveted of all the gifts in his power Louis promised to the little adventuress if she would but carry out, not only all she had undertaken, but any future commands he might lay upon her.

His immediate object now was to take advantage of the distraction caused by the war between England and Holland to annex the Palatinate and the Franche Comte, on which he had long set covetous eyes; but he quickly discovered that for once his vaulting ambition had overleaped itself.

The whole of Europe took alarm; England to a man rose in angry protest, sworn enemies joining hands to resist such an outrageous aggression; and Charles, in a frenzy of fear for his crown, dismissed his hireling army paid with Louis's gold. The proud edifice which the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth had so carefully reared was threatened with a cataclysm of popular rage against the "painted French spy" who was regarded, and perhaps rightly, as a prime instigator of the mischief, and the worst enemy of the country that had given her such generous hospitality.

To add to the danger of her position she became seriously ill; sustained heavy money losses; and even her supremacy with the King was gravely imperilled by the arrival at Court of Mazarin's loveliest niece, Hortense de Mancini, with whom Charles had flirted in the days of his exile, and who now came to England in the full bloom of her peerless beauty to complete her conquest of the amorous Sovereign--"the last conquest of her conquering eyes," as Waller wrote in his fulsome greeting of the new divinity of the Whitehall seraglio.

For once Louise's indomitable courage showed signs of yielding. The whole armoury of fate seemed arrayed against her at this crisis in her life; even Louis, for whom she had striven so hard, began to distrust her powers and to show indifference to her. When Forneron paid her a visit at this time he found her in tears. "She opened her heart to him, in the presence of her two French maids, who stood by with downcast eyes. Tears rained down her cheeks; and her speech was broken with sobs and sighs." Never had this designing beauty been so near the verge of absolute ruin.

It is not necessary perhaps to follow the d.u.c.h.ess through the period of her eclipse; to watch the weak-kneed Charles sink deeper and deeper into the mora.s.s of his disloyalty until, in return for a subsidy of 4,000,000, he offered to dissolve parliament and to make England the bond-slave of Louis's designs on Europe; or to see Louise, the chief instrument of all this ignominy, reach the climax of her disgrace and her peril when mobs besieged Whitehall, and clamoured that the "Jezebel"

should be sent to the scaffold.

It is sufficient for our purpose to know that through all this terrible time she steered her way with almost superhuman skill back to the sunshine of success and favour. Her life-long ambition was crowned when Louis gave her the d'Aubigny lands and, with them, the _tabouret_ which had so long dazzled her eyes and eluded her grasp. When the sky in England had at last cleared she paid a visit to her native land. For four ecstatic months the wool merchant's daughter made a triumphant progress through France, acclaimed and feted as a Queen. At her castle of d'Aubigny she held a splendid court and dispensed a regal hospitality to the greatest in the land, who had scarcely deigned to notice her in her days as maid-of-honour. When, according to St Simon, she paid a visit to the Capucines in Paris her approach was heralded by a procession of monks, scattering incense and bearing aloft the holy cross. "She was received," we are told, "as if she were a Queen, which quite overwhelmed her, as she was not prepared for such an honour." To such a pitch indeed did this popular idolatry reach that she was actually painted as a Madonna to grace the altar of the richest convent in France.

On her return to England from this tour of conquest she found a reception almost equally regal awaiting her. She was reinstated as chief favourite of the King, all his other mistresses--even the Queen herself being relegated to the background; and high statesmen and Amba.s.sadors did their homage to her before they sought audience with Charles himself. She was, in fact, as Louis's deputy, Vice-Queen of England--_plus roi que le Roi_.

Thus secure of her power the d.u.c.h.ess was not unwilling to indulge once more her old propensity for flirtation (to give it its mildest name).

The handsome and graceless Duke of Monmonth, Charles's favourite son, Danby and many another gallant, succeeded one another in her favours, which she dispensed without any care for concealment. But the only one of her lovers of this time who made any real impression on such heart as she had was the rakish Philippe de Vendome, grandson of Henri IV. and nephew of her first lover, the Admiral, Duc de Beaufort, who, as we have seen, gave her the first start on her career of infamy and conquest. She seems to have conducted an open and shameless intrigue with De Vendome--a man who, according to St Simon, had never gone sober to bed for a generation, who was a swindler, liar, and thief, and the most despicable and dangerous man living. When the d.u.c.h.ess, realising that her intrigue with this handsome scoundrel was going too far, sought to withdraw, he threatened to show certain incriminating letters she had written to him, to the King; and it was only when Louis intervened and, by bribes and commands, induced her lover to return to France, that she was able to breathe again.

Not content with setting such a shameless example to the Court, she was the arch-priestess of the gaming-tables at which Charles and his courtiers spent their nights to the c.h.i.n.k of gla.s.ses and gold. She made light, we learn, of losing 5,000 guineas at a sitting. No wonder Pepys was shocked at such scenes.

"I was told to-night," he writes, "that my Lady Castlemaine is so great a gamester as to have won 15,400 in one night, and lost 25,000 in another night at play, and has played 1000 and 1500 at a cast."

The d.u.c.h.esse de Mazarin, he tells us,

"won at ba.s.set, of Nell Gwynne 1400 guineas in one night, and of the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth above 8000, in doing which she exerted her utmost cunning and had the greatest satisfaction, because they were rivals in the Royal favour."

But the end of these saturnalia was at hand. The last glimpse we have of them was on the night of 1st February 1685--the last Sunday Charles was permitted to spend on earth.

"The great courtiers," says Evelyn, "and other dissolute persons were playing at ba.s.set round a large table, with a bank of at least 2000 before them. The King, though not engaged in the game, was to the full as scandalously occupied, sitting in open dalliance with three of the shameless women of the Court, the d.u.c.h.esses of Portsmouth, Morland, and Mazarin, and others of the same stamp, while a French boy was singing love-songs in that glorious gallery. Six days after," he adds, "all was in the dust."

As the end of that wasted Royal life drew near the d.u.c.h.ess's chief concern--for it was her last opportunity of redeeming one of her pledges to Louis, her paymaster--was that Charles should at least die an avowed Catholic.

"I found her," Barillon wrote to Louis, "overcome with grief. But, instead of bewailing her own unhappy and changed condition, she led me into an adjoining chamber and said: 'M. l'Amba.s.sadeur, I want to confide a secret to you, although if it were publicly known my head would pay the forfeit. The King is a Catholic at heart, and yet there he lies surrounded by Protestant bishops. I dare not enter the room, and there is no one to talk to him of his end and of G.o.d. The Duke of York is too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble about his brother's conscience. Pray go to him and tell him that the end is near, and that it is his duty to lose no time in saving his brother's soul.'"

The remainder of the d.u.c.h.ess's life-story is soon told. The days of her queendom and glory were at an end. She was glad to escape to France before James's tempestuous reign ended in tragedy. Here trouble and loss were largely her portion. She lost favour with Louis to such an extent that, at one time, he seriously thought of exiling her; her son deserted and disgraced her; her ill-gotten riches took wings, until only a pension of 800, wrung from Louis, saved her from absolute dest.i.tution.

True, she was still able to claim her _tabouret_ at the Court of Versailles, and, for a few hours occasionally, to revive the glories of the past; but apart from these ironical spasms of splendour she spent her last years in loneliness and sadness, turning to a tardy piety as a refuge from the coldness of the world, and as a solace for its lost vanities. She saw all the great figures, among whom she had moved, pa.s.s one by one behind the veil before she died, a wrinkled hag of eighty-five, shorn of the last vestige of the charms which had wrought such havoc in the world.

CHAPTER XV

THE MERRY d.u.c.h.eSS

When Elizabeth Chudleigh first opened her eyes on the world, nearly two centuries ago, at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, of which her father was Deputy-Governor, we may be sure that her parents little antic.i.p.ated the romantic and adventurous _role_ Fate had a.s.signed to her on the stage of life. A member of an ancient family, whose women had ever been distinguished for their virtue as its men for their valour, the Chelsea infant was destined to shock Society by the laxity of her morals as she dazzled it by her beauty and charm, and to make herself conspicuous, in an age none too strait-laced, as an adventuress of rare skill and daring, and as a profligate in petticoats.

As a child she amused all who knew her by the airs she a.s.sumed. Before she was long out of the nursery she vowed that "she would be a d.u.c.h.ess,"

and a d.u.c.h.ess she was before she died. She was quick to learn the power of beauty and of a clever tongue; and before she was emanc.i.p.ated from short frocks she was a finished coquette.

Such was Elizabeth Chudleigh when, at fifteen, she blossomed into precocious womanhood. Her father, the Colonel, had long been dead, and his widow had made her home in the neighbourhood of Leicester House, where the Prince and Princess of Wales held their Court. Here she made the acquaintance of Mr Pulteney, later Earl of Bath, a great favourite of the weak and dissolute Prince; and through his interest, Elizabeth, now a radiantly lovely and supremely fascinating young woman, was appointed a maid-of-honour to the Princess.

In the environment of a Court, surrounded by gallants, and with women almost as lovely as herself to pit her charms against, Colonel Chudleigh's daughter, eager to drink the cup of pleasure and of conquest, was in her element. She was the merriest madcap in a Court where licence was unrestrained; and she soon had high-placed lovers at her dainty feet, including, so they say, none other than Frederick himself. Coronets galore dazzled her eyes with their rival allurements; but while, with tantalising coquetry, she kept them all dangling, one alone tempted her--that which was laid at her feet by the Duke of Hamilton, a gallant whose high rank was rivalled by his handsome face and figure, and his many courtly accomplishments.

When the Duke asked her to be his wife she graciously consented, and her d.u.c.h.ess's coronet seemed a.s.sured thus early, with a prospect of happiness that does not always accompany it; for in this case she seems to have given her heart where she gave her hand. For a time the course of true love ran smoothly, and the maid-of-honour became a model of decorum as the affianced wife of the man she loved.

But her dream of happiness was destined to be short-lived. An intriguing aunt, Mrs Hanmer, who had no love for the Hamiltons, set to work to dash the cup of happiness from her niece's lips. She intercepted the Duke's letters, poured into Elizabeth's ears poisonous stories of his infidelities and entanglements to account for his silence, and, when the poison began to show signs of working, whisked her niece away on a visit to the country-house of her cousin, Mr Merrill, at Lainston, where among her fellow-guests was a dashing young naval lieutenant, the Hon.

Augustus Hervey, who was second heir to his father's Earldom of Bristol.

The lieutenant, as was inevitable, perhaps, fell promptly under the spell of the maid-of-honour's charms, and made violent love to her, with, of course, Mrs Hanmer's whole-hearted connivance. The girl, blazing with resentment of the Duke's coldness, and his apparent indifference to her beauty and his vows, lent a willing ear to his pleadings, and within a few days had promised to be wife to a man whom, as she confessed later, she "almost hated."

The wedding was, by mutual consent, to be secret, partly on account of the bridegroom's lack of means to support a wife, and partly from fear of giving offence to his family. In the dead of an August night, in 1744, the bridal party stole out of Mr Merrill's house, and made its way to the neighbouring church, where the ceremony was performed by the light of a taper concealed in the best man's hat. Thus, romantically and mysteriously, Elizabeth Chudleigh took her first matrimonial step, which was to lead to such dramatic developments.

Forty-eight hours later the bridegroom had joined his ship at Portsmouth; and his bride's greatest joy, as she confessed, was when he had departed. Such a marriage, the fruit of pique and anger, boded ill for happiness. Frankly, the union was one long misery, broken by the intervals when the husband was away at sea, and accentuated during his, happily brief, visits to her. Two children were born to this ill-a.s.sorted pair, but both died young; and Elizabeth Hervey had abundant opportunity to follow her natural bent, by seeking forgetfulness in dissipation.

In the full glow of her beauty, a wife who was no wife, she resumed her broken career of conquest. She made a tour of Europe, leaving a train of broken-hearted and languishing lovers behind her. At Berlin she brought Frederick the Great to his knees, and made an abject slave of him; she shocked the ladies of the Dresden Court by her laxity and the prodigal display of her charms, and by the same arts bewitched the men. She led, we are told, a life of shameless dissipation, which only her beauty and intellectual gifts redeemed from vulgar depravity. She had lovers in every capital she visited, and discarded them as lightly as so many playthings.

On her return to England, so anxious was she to obliterate that fatal episode in the dark church, she made a journey with certain friends to Lainston, and, while the vicar's back was turned, tore the fatal page out of the marriage register.

Meanwhile, the naval lieutenant had blossomed into an Earl, on his father's death; and when the new Earl, her husband, showed signs of failing health, and there was an early prospect of graduating as a wealthy dowager Countess, she saw the wisdom of making another journey to Lainston to replace the record of her marriage. Alas, for her scheming; the moribund Earl took a new lease of life, and the gilded dowagerhood became nebulous and remote again.

But Elizabeth Chudleigh was not to be long baulked in her ambitious designs. Though her charms had grown too opulent and were faded--for she was now near her fiftieth birthday--she was able to count among her slaves the aged Duke of Kingston, an amiable and weak old gentleman of enormous wealth, and with one accommodating foot already "in the grave."

Wife, or no wife, she now made up her mind to be a d.u.c.h.ess at last. She appealed to Lord Bristol, the husband from whom she had so long been estranged, to divorce her, even going so far as to offer to qualify for the divorce by an open and flagrant act of infidelity; but his lordship only shrugged a scornful shoulder. Still, not to be thwarted, she brought a suit of jact.i.tation of marriage, and, by a lavish use of bribes and cajolery, got a sentence from the Ecclesiastical Court which at last set her free. Within a month she had blossomed into "the most high and _puissante_ Princess, the d.u.c.h.ess of Kingston," thus realising her childish ambition.

For four and a half years the d.u.c.h.ess was a dignified pattern of all the virtues. The pa.s.sions of youth had lost their fires; the scenes of revelry and coa.r.s.e dissipation to which they had given birth were only a memory. She would yet die in the odour of sanct.i.ty, however tardy. But storms were brewing, and the Duke's death, in 1746, precipitated them, though not before she had had another fling with the riches he left to her.

Throwing aside her widow's weeds, she flung herself again--old, obese, and faded as she was--into a round of dissipation which shocked and disgusted even London, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of the "quality," until she was glad to escape from the storm of censure she had brought on her head.

She bought a magnificent yacht and sailed away to Rome, where Pope and Cardinal alike conspired to do her honour; and was only saved from eloping with a t.i.tled swindler by his arrest and later suicide in prison. It was while in Rome that news came to her that her late husband's heirs were planning a charge of bigamy against her, with a view to setting aside his will in her favour.

Her exchequer was empty for the time; but, presenting herself before her banker, pistol in hand, she compelled him to provide her with funds to enable her to return to London--to find all arrangements already made for her trial in Westminster Hall on a charge of bigamy. Public opinion was arrayed against her; she was received with abuse, jeers, and lampoons. Foote made her the object of universal ridicule by a comedy ent.i.tled, "A Trip to Calais." But the d.u.c.h.ess metaphorically snapped her fingers at them all. She was no woman to bow before the storm of ridicule and censure. She openly defied it to do its worst. Her splendid equipage was to be seen everywhere, with the autocratic d.u.c.h.ess, serene, smiling, contemptuous.

It was of this period of her life that the following story is told. One day when driving in London her gorgeous carriage was brought to a halt by a coal-cart which was being unloaded in a narrow street. The d.u.c.h.ess was furious at the delay, and protruding her head and shoulders from the carriage and leaning her arms on the door, she cried out to the offending carter: "How dare you, sirrah, to stop a woman of quality in the street?" "Woman of quality!" sneered the man. "Yes, fellow,"

rejoined her Grace, "don't you see my arms upon my carriage?" "Indeed I do," he answered, "and a pair of d---- coa.r.s.e arms they are, too!"

Seldom has a trial excited such widespread excitement and interest.

"Everybody," Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Sir Horace Mann, "is on the quest for tickets for her Grace of Kingston's trial. I am persuaded that her impudence will operate in some singular manner; probably she will appear in weeds, with a train to reach across Westminster Hall, with mourning maids-of-honour to support her when she swoons at the dear Duke's name, and in a black veil to conceal her blushing or not blushing. To this farce, novel and curious as it will be, I shall not go. I think cripples have no business in crowds, but at the Pool of Bethesda; and, to be sure, this is no angel that troubles the waters."

But if Walpole resisted the temptation to witness a scene so piquant and remarkable, hundreds of the highest in the land, including Queen Charlotte herself, the Prince of Wales and many another Royal personage, amba.s.sadors and statesmen, flocked to Westminster to see the notorious d.u.c.h.ess on her trial on the charge of bigamy. And the vast Hall was packed with a curious and expectant crowd when her Grace made her stately entry with a retinue of _femmes de chambre_, her doctor, apothecary, and secretary, and proceeded to her seat, in front of her six bewigged Counsel, with the dignified step and haughty mien of an Empress.

Hannah More, who was present at the trial, says that hardly a trace of her once enchanting beauty was visible; and that, had it not been for her white face, "she might easily have been taken for a bundle of bombasin."

The trial lasted several days, during the whole of which the d.u.c.h.ess conducted herself with remarkable dignity and composure, in face of the d.a.m.ning array of evidence that was brought against her--the evidence of a maid who had witnessed her midnight marriage in Lainston Church; of the widow of the parson who officiated at the nuptials; and of Serjeant Hawkins, who authenticated the birth of her first child by Augustus Hervey.

"The scene opened on Wednesday with all its pomp," wrote Walpole, who although not present seems to have followed the trial with the keenest interest, "and the doubly-n.o.ble prisoner went through her part with universal admiration. Instead of her usual ostentatious folly and clumsy pretensions to cunning, all her conduct was decent, and even seemed natural. Her dress was entirely black and plain; her attendants not too numerous; her dismay at first perfectly unaffected. A few tears balanced cheerfulness enough, and her presence of mind and attention never deserted her. This rational behaviour and the pleadings of her Counsel, who contended for the finality of her Ecclesiastical Court's sentence against a second trial, carried her triumphantly through the first day, and turned the stream much in her favour."