"Join me at Pit Place to-morrow," said Lyttelton. "Then you shall see if I take it too seriously."

During the intervening two days he fluctuated between profound gloom and boisterous hilarity. One hour he was plunged into the depths of despair, the next he was the soul of gaiety, laughing hysterically at his fears, and exclaiming, "I shall cheat the lady yet!"

During dinner on the third and fatal day he was the maddest and merriest at the table, convulsing all by his sallies of wit and his infectious high spirits; and, when the cloth was removed, he exclaimed jubilantly, "Ah, Richard is himself again!" But his gaiety was short-lived. As the hours wore on his spirits deserted him; he lapsed into gloom and silence, from which all the efforts of his friends could not rouse him.

As the night advanced he began to grow restless. He could not sit still, but paced to and fro, with terror-haunted eyes, muttering incoherently to himself, and taking out his watch every few moments to note the pa.s.sage of time. At last, when his watch pointed to half-past eleven, he retired, without a word of farewell to his guests, to his bedroom, not knowing that not only his own watch, but every clock and watch in the house had been put forward half-an-hour by his anxious friends, "to deceive him into comfort."

Having undressed and gone to bed, he ordered his valet to draw the curtains at the foot, as if to screen him from a second sight of the mysterious lady, and, sitting up in bed, watch in hand, he awaited the fatal hour of midnight. As the minute hand slowly but surely drew near to twelve he asked to see his valet's watch, and was relieved to find that it marked the same time as his own. With beating heart and straining eyes he watched the hand draw nearer and nearer. A minute more to go--half a minute. Now it pointed to the fateful twelve--and nothing happened. It crept slowly past. The crisis was over. He put down the watch with a deep sigh of relief, and then broke into a peal of laughter--discordant, jubilant, defiant.

"This mysterious lady is not a true prophetess, I find," he said to his valet, after spending a few minutes in further mirthful waiting. "And now give me my medicine; I will wait no longer." The valet proceeded to mix his usual medicine, a dose of rhubarb, stirring it, as no spoon was at hand, with a tooth-brush lying on the table. "You dirty fellow!" his lordship exclaimed. "Go down and fetch a spoon."

When the servant returned a few minutes later he found, to his horror, his master lying back on the pillow, unconscious and breathing heavily.

He ran downstairs again, shouting, "Help! Help! My lord is dying!" The alarmed guests rushed frantically to the chamber, only to find their host almost at his last gasp. A few moments later he was dead, with the watch still clutched in his hand, pointing to half-past twelve. He had died at the very stroke of midnight, as foretold by his ghostly visitant of three nights previously.

Thus strangely and dramatically died Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, statesman, wit, and debauchee, precisely as he had been warned that he would die in a dream or vision of the night. How far his death was due to natural causes, to the effect of fear on a diseased heart, none can say with certainty. That his heart was diseased, that he had had many former seizures, during which his life seemed in danger, is beyond question; but if it was merely coincidence, it was surely the most remarkable coincidence on record, that his death should come at the exact moment foretold by the lady of his vision, as related by himself three days before the event.

Such a happening was strange and weird enough in all conscience; but it was no more inexplicable on natural grounds than what follows. Among Lord Lyttelton's boon companions was a Mr Andrews, with whom he had often discussed the possibilities of a future life. On one such occasion his lordship had said: "Well, if I die first, and am allowed, I will come and inform you."

The words were probably spoken more in jest than in earnest, and Mr Andrews no doubt little dreamt how the promise would be fulfilled. On the night of Lord Lyttelton's death Mr Andrews, who expected his lordship to pay him a visit on the following day, had retired to bed at his house at Dartford, in Kent.

When in bed, to quote from Mr Plumer Ward's "Ill.u.s.trations of Human Life," he fell into a sound sleep, but was waked between eleven and twelve o'clock by somebody opening his curtains. It was Lord Lyttelton, in a nightgown and cap which Andrews recognised. He also spoke plainly to him, saying that he was come to tell him all was over. It seems that Lord Lyttelton was fond of horseplay; and, as he had often made Andrews the subject of it, the latter had threatened his lordship with physical chastis.e.m.e.nt the very next time that it should occur. On the present occasion, thinking that the annoyance was being renewed, he threw at Lord Lyttelton's head the first thing that he could find--his slippers.

The figure retreated towards a dressing-room, which had no ingress or egress except through the bed-chamber; and Andrews, very angry, leaped out of bed in order to follow it into the dressing-room. It was not there, however.

Surprised and amazed, he returned at once to the bedroom, which he strictly searched. _The door was locked on the inside_, yet no Lord Lyttelton was to be found. In his perplexity, Mr Andrews rang for his servant, and asked if Lord Lyttelton had not arrived. The man answered: "No, sir." "You may depend upon it," said Mr Andrews, thoroughly mystified and out of humour, "that he is somewhere in the house. He was here just now, and he is playing some trick or other. However, you can tell him that he won't get a bed here; he can sleep in the stable or at the inn if he likes."

After a further vain search of the bed-chamber and the dressing-room, Mr Andrews returned to bed and to sleep, having no doubt whatever that his too jocular friend was in hiding somewhere near. On the afternoon of the following day news came to him that Lord Lyttelton had died the previous night at the very time that he (Mr Andrews) was searching for his midnight visitant, and abusing him roundly for what he considered his ill-timed practical joke. On hearing the news, we are told, Mr Andrews swooned away, and such was its effect on him that, to use his own words, "he was not himself or a man again for three years."

CHAPTER VI

A MESSALINA OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

There have been bad women in all ages, from Messalina, who waded recklessly through blood to the gratification of her pa.s.sions, to that Royal mountebank, Queen Christina of Sweden, whose laughter rang out while her lover Monaldeschi was being foully done to death at her bidding by Count Sentinelli, his successor in her affections; and in this baleful company the notorious Lady Shrewsbury won for herself a dishonourable place by a l.u.s.t for cruelty as great as that of Christina or Messalina, and by a Judas-like treachery which even they, who at least flaunted their crimes openly, would have blushed to practise.

No woman could have had smaller excuse for straying from the path of virtue, much less for making foul crimes the minister to her l.u.s.t than Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury. The descendant of a long line of honourable Brudenells, daughter of an Earl of Cardigan, there was nothing in the history of her family to account for the taint in her blood. She had been dowered with beauty and charms which made conquest easy, inevitable; and she was honourably wedded to a n.o.ble husband, the eleventh Earl of Shrewsbury, who, although a man of no great character or attainments, was an indulgent and faithful husband. Nor does she, until she had reached the haven of married life, appear to have shown any trace of the wickedness that must have been slumbering in her.

And yet, before she had worn her Countess's coronet a year, she had made herself notorious, even in Charles II.'s abandoned Court, for pa.s.sions which would ruthlessly crush any obstacle in the way of their indulgence. Lover after lover, high-placed and base-born indifferently, succeeded one another in her fickle favour, as Catherine the Great's favourites trod one on the heels of the other, each in turn to be flung contemptuously aside to make room for a more favoured rival.

Even Gramont, seasoned man of the world and far removed from a saint as he was, was frankly horrified at the carryings-on of this English Messalina, compared with whom the most lax ladies of the English Court were veritable prudes. "I would lay a wager," he says, "that if she had a man killed for her every day she would only carry her head the higher.

I suppose she must have plenary indulgence for her conduct." The only indulgence she had or needed was that of her own imperious will and her elastic conscience.

As we glance down the list of her victims, we see some of the most honourable names, and also some of the most despicable characters in the England of the Restoration. The Duke of Ormond's heir caught her capricious fancy for awhile; but, though his love for her drove him to the verge of suicide, she wearied of him and trampled him under foot to seek a fresh conquest.

To my Lord Arran succeeded Captain Thomas Howard, brother of the Earl of Carlisle, a shy, proud young man of irreproachable character, whose love for the fascinating Countess was as free from dishonour as a weakness for another man's wife could be. She caught him securely in the net of her charms, ensnared him with her _beaute de diable_, and then, satisfied with her ign.o.ble triumph, proceeded to make a fool of him.

Nothing pleased this Countess more than to bring her lovers together, to watch with gloating eyes their rivalries, their jealousies, and their quarrels, which frequently led to her crowning enjoyment--the shedding of blood. And it was with this object that one day she induced Howard to join her at a _pet.i.t souper_ at Spring Gardens, a favourite pleasure-haunt of the day, near Charing Cross. The supper had scarcely commenced when the _tete-a-tete_ was interrupted by the appearance of none other than the "invincible Jermyn," one of the handsomest and most notorious _roues_ of the day, a famous duellist, and one of my lady's most ardent lovers.

Here was a prospect of amus.e.m.e.nt such as was dear to the heart of the Countess, who, needless to say, had arranged the plot. Jermyn needed no invitation to make a third at the feast of love. That was precisely what he had come for; and although Howard played the host with admirable dignity to the unwelcome intruder, Jermyn ignored his courtesy and brought all his skill to bear on fanning the flames of his jealousy. He flirted outrageously with the Countess, kept her in peals of laughter by his sallies of wit and scarcely-veiled gibes at her companion, until Howard was roused to such a pitch of silent fury that only the presence of a lady restrained him from running the insolent intruder through with his sword. Nothing would have delighted her ladyship more than such a climax to the little play she was enjoying so much; but Howard, with marvellous self-restraint, kept his temper within bounds and his sword in its sheath.

Such an outrage, however, could not be pa.s.sed over with impunity; and before Jermyn had eaten his breakfast on the following morning, Howard's friend and second, Colonel Dillon, was announced with a demand for satisfaction--a demand which met with a prompt acquiescence from Jermyn, who vowed he would "wipe the young puppy out." The duel took place in the "Long Alley near St James's, called Pall Mall," and proved to be of as sanguinary a nature as even the grossly-insulted Howard could have desired.

On the 19th of August 1662, Pepys writes:--

"Mr Coventry did tell us of the duel between Mr Jermyn, nephew to my Lord of St Alban's, and Colonel Giles Rawlins, the latter of whom is killed, and the first mortally wounded as it is thought. They fought against Captain Thomas Howard, my Lord Carlisle's brother, and another unknown; who, they say, had armour on that they could not be hurt, so that one of their swords went up to the hilt against it. They had horses ready and are fled.

But what is most strange, Howard sent one challenge before, but they could not meet till yesterday at the old Pall Mall at St James's; and he would not till the last tell Jermyn what the quarrel was; nor do anybody know."

If no one else knew of the cause of the quarrel, certainly Jermyn did; and never did man pay a more deserved penalty for dastardly behaviour.

Lady Shrewsbury's delight at thus ridding herself of two lovers, of both of whom she seems to have grown weary, may be better imagined than described. Although Jermyn was carried off the field of battle, to all appearance a dead man, he survived until 1708 when he died, full of years and wickedness, Baron Jermyn of Dover.

The Court, as Pepys records, was "much concerned in this fray"; but it was long before Lady Shrewsbury's part in it came to light, to add to the infamy which she had by that time heaped on herself. Her wayward fancy next settled on a man of a different stamp to either Howard or Jermyn. It seemed, indeed, to be her ambition to make her conquests as varied as humanity itself. Her next victim was Harry Killigrew, one of the most notorious profligates in London, a man of low birth and lower tastes, a haunter of taverns, the terror of all decent women, and a roystering swashbuckler, with a sword as ready to leap at a word as his lips to s.n.a.t.c.h a kiss from a pretty mouth.

Such was my Lady Shrewsbury's successor to the aristocratic, high-minded brother of Lord Carlisle. Killigrew's father was a well-known man of his day, for he wore cap and bells at Charles's Court, and was privileged to practise his clowning on King and courtier and maid-of-honour with no heavier penalty than a box on the ears. The extreme licence he permitted himself is proved by that joke at the expense of Louis XIV., which might well have cost any other man his head. Louis, who always unbended to a merry jester, was showing his pictures to Killigrew, when they came to a painting of the Crucifixion, placed between portraits of the Pope and the "Roi Soleil" himself. "Ah, Sire," said the Jester, as he struck an att.i.tude before the trio of canvases, "I knew that our Lord was crucified between two thieves, but I never knew till now who they were."

Such was Tom Killigrew who kept Charles's Court alive by his pranks and jests, and who is better remembered in our day as the man to whose enterprise we owe Drury Lane Theatre and the Italian Opera; and it would have been better for the world of his day if his son had been as decent a man as himself. His fun, at least, was harmless, and his life, so far as we know it, was reasonably clean. His son, however, was notorious as the most foul-mouthed, evil-living man in London, whose very contact was a pollution. Once Pepys, always eager for new experiences, was inveigled into his company and that of the "jolly blades," who were his boon companions; "but Lord!" the diarist says ingenuously, "their talk did make my heart ache!"

That my Lady Shrewsbury should stoop to such a _liaison_ astonished even those who knew how widely she cast her net, and how indiscriminating her pa.s.sion was in its quest for novelty. That such a man should boast of his conquest over the beautiful Countess was inevitable. He published it in every low tavern in London, gloating in his cups over "his lady's most secret charms, concerning which more than half the Court knew quite as much as he knew himself."

Among those to whom Killigrew thus boasted was the dissolute second Duke of Buckingham, whose curiosity was so stimulated by what he heard that he entered the lists himself, and quickly succeeded in ousting Killigrew from his place in my lady's favour. To the tavern-sot thus succeeded the most splendid n.o.ble in England, a man who, in his record of gallantry, was no mean rival to the Countess herself. To be thus displaced by the man to whom he had boasted his conquest was a bitter blow to the libertine's vanity; to be cut dead by Lady Shrewsbury, who had no longer any use for him, roused him to a frenzy of rage in which he a.s.sailed her with the bitterest invectives; "painted a frightful picture of her conduct, and turned all her charms, which he had previously extolled, into defects." The Duke's warnings were powerless to stop his vindictive tongue; even a severe thrashing, which resulted in Killigrew begging abjectly for his life from his successful rival, failed to teach him prudence. His slanders grew more and more venomous until they brought on him a punishment which nearly cost him his life.

But before Killigrew's tongue was thus silenced, the wooing of the Duke and the Countess was marred by a tragedy, to which our history happily furnishes no parallel. The Countess's husband had hitherto looked on with seeming indifference, while lover after lover succeeded each other in his wife's favour. But even the Earl's long forbearance had its limits; and these were reached when he saw the insolent c.o.xcomb, Buckingham, a man whom he had always detested, usurp his place. He screwed up his laggard manhood to the pitch of challenging the Duke to a duel, which took place one January morning in 1667, and of which Pepys tells the following story:

"Much discourse of the duel yesterday between the Duke of Buckingham, Holmes and one Jenkins, on one side, and my Lord Shrewsbury, Sir John Talbot and one Bernard Howard, on the other side; and all about my Lady Shrewsbury, who is at this time, and hath for a great while, been a mistress to the Duke of Buckingham. And so her husband challenged him, and they met yesterday in a close near Barne-Elmes, and there fought; and my Lord Shrewsbury is run through the body, from the right breast through the shoulder; and Sir John Talbot all along up one of his armes; and Jenkins killed upon the place, and the rest all, in a little measure, wounded. This will make the world think that the King hath good Councillors about him, when the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest man about him, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a mistress."

It is said that the Countess, in the guise of a page, accompanied her lover to the scene of this bloodthirsty duel; held his horse as, with sparkling eyes, she saw her husband receive his death-blow; and, when the foul deed was done, flung her arms around the a.s.sa.s.sin's neck in a transport of grat.i.tude and affection. Never surely since Judas sent his Master to his death with a kiss has the world witnessed such an infamous betrayal.

From the scene of this tragedy the Duke escorted the Countess-page to his own home, where he installed her as his avowed mistress in the eyes of the world, at the same time ordering the carriage which was to take his outraged wife back to her father's house. Even in such an abandoned and profligate Court as that of Charles II., the news of this dastardly crime and Lady Shrewsbury's callous treachery was received with execration, while a thrill of horror and fierce indignation ran through the whole of England. But the Countess and her paramour smiled at the storm they had brought on their heads, and with brazen insolence flaunted their amour in the face of the world.

Now that the Countess's husband had been removed from their path the shameless pair had time to attend to Killigrew, whose malicious tongue must be silenced once for all. They hired bravos to track his footsteps, and at a convenient moment to remove him from their path. The opportunity came one day when it was learnt that Killigrew, who seemed to know that his life was in danger and for a long time had evaded his enemies successfully, intended to travel from town to his house at Turnham Green late at night. His chaise was followed at a discreet distance by my Lady Shrewsbury, who arrived on the scene just in time to witness the prepared tragedy which was to crown her revenge. Killigrew, who was sleeping in his chaise, awoke, to quote a contemporary account,

"by the thrust of a sword which pierced his neck and came out at the shoulder. Before he could cry out he was flung from the chaise, and stabbed in three other places by the Countess's a.s.sa.s.sins, while the lady herself looked on from her own coach and six, and cried out to the murderers, 'Kill the villain!' Nor did she drive off till he was thought dead."

The man whose murder she thus witnessed and encouraged was not, however, Killigrew, as in the darkness she imagined, but his servant. Killigrew himself, although severely wounded, was more fortunate in escaping with his life. But the lesson he had received was so severe that for the rest of his days he gave the Countess and her lover the widest of berths, and retired into the obscurity in which alone he could feel safe from such a revengeful virago. This second crime, like its predecessor, went unpunished, so powerful was Buckingham, and so deep in the King's favour; and he and the Countess were left in the undisturbed enjoyment of their l.u.s.t and their triumphs.

"Gallant and gay, in Clieveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love,"

the infamous pair defied the world, and crowned their ignominy by standing together at the altar, where the Duke's chaplain made them one, almost before the body of the Countess's husband (who had survived his duel two months) was cold, and while the d.u.c.h.ess of Buckingham was, of course, still alive. The Countess was not long before her brazen effrontery carried her back to Court, where she took the lead in the revels and at the gaming-tables, and made love to the "Merrie Monarch"

himself. Evelyn tells us that, during a visit to Newmarket, he

"found the jolly blades racing, dancing, feasting and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian country. The Duke of Buckingham was in mighty favour, and had with him that impudent woman, the Countess of Shrewsbury, and his band of fiddlers."

It was only with the downfall of the Stuarts that this shameless alliance came to an end, when Buckingham's reign of power was over, and he was haled before the House of Lords to answer for his crimes. He and the partner of his guilt were ordered to separate; and for this purpose to enter into security to the King in the sum of 10,000 apiece. Thus ignominiously closed one of the most infamous intrigues in history.

Buckingham, buffeted by fortune, rapidly fell, as the world knows, from his pinnacle of power to the lowest depths of poverty, to end his days, friendless and dest.i.tute, in a Yorkshire inn.

"No wit, to flatter, left of all his store!

No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.