There reft of health, of fortune, friends, And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends."

To my Lady Shrewsbury, as to her paramour, the condemnation of the Lords marked the setting of her sun of splendour. The slumbering rage of England against her long career of iniquity awoke to fresh life in this hour of her humiliation, and she was glad to escape from its fury to the haven of a convent in France, where she spent some time in mock penitence.

But the Countess was, by no means, resigned to end her days in the odour of a tardy and insincere piety. As soon as the sky had cleared a little across the Channel, she returned to England, and tried to repair her shattered fame by giving her hand to a son of Sir Thomas Bridges, of Keynsham, in Somerset, who was so enslaved by her charms that he was proud to lead the tarnished beauty to the altar. And with this mockery of wedding bells "Messalina's" history practically ended as far as the world, outside the Somersetshire village, where the remainder of her life was mostly spent, was concerned. The fires of her pa.s.sion had now died out, and the restless and still ambitious woman exchanged love for political intrigue. She became the most ardent of Jacobites, and plotted as unscrupulously for the restoration of the Stuarts, as in earlier years she had planned the capture and ruin of her lovers.

Not content with treading the shady and dangerous path of intrigue herself, she set to work to undermine the loyalty of her only son, the young Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most trusted ministers and friends of the Orange King; and such was her influence over the high-principled, if weak Earl that she infected him with her own treachery, until the man, whom William III. had called "the soul of honour," stood branded to the world as a spy, leagued with the King's enemies, and was compelled to leave England for ten years of exile and disgrace.

This corruption and ruin of her own son was the crowning infamy of one of the worst women who ever enlisted their beauty, of their own free will, in the service of the devil.

CHAPTER VII

A PROFLIGATE PRINCE

Of the sons of the profligate Frederick, Prince of Wales, Henry Frederick, Duke of c.u.mberland, was, by universal consent, the most abandoned, as his eldest brother, George III., of "revered memory," in spite of his intrigue with the fair Quakeress, was the least vicious.

Each brother had his amours--many of them highly discreditable; but for unrestrained and indiscriminate profligacy Henry Frederick took the unenviable palm.

Even the verdict of posterity is unable to credit this Princeling with a solitary virtue, unless a handsome face and a pa.s.sion for music can be placed to his credit. In his career of female conquest, which began as soon as he had emanc.i.p.ated himself from his mother's ap.r.o.n strings, he left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor, whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too pliant womanhood.

And yet, when his pa.s.sion was in full flame, no woman was ever wooed with apparently more sincere ardour and devotion.

"My dear Angel," he once wrote to her, "I got to bed about ten. I then prayed for you, my dearest love, kissed your dearest little hair, and lay down and dreamt of you, had you ten thousand times in my arms, kissing you and telling you how much I loved and adored you, and you seemed pleased.... I have your heart, and it is warm at my breast. I hope mine feels as easy to you. Thou joy of my life, adieu!"

In another letter he exclaims:

"Oh, my dearest soul ... your dear heart is so safe with me and feels every motion mine does. How happy will that day be to me that brings you back! I shall be unable to speak for joy. My dearest soul, I send you ten thousand kisses."

So irrepressible was his pa.s.sion that it burst the bounds of prose, and gushed forth in verses such as this:

"Hear, solemn Jove, and, conscious Venus, hear!

And thou, bright maid, believe me while I swear, No time, no change, no future flame shall move The well-placed basis of my lasting love."

When the fair and frail Countess, in a fit of alarm, took refuge at Eaton Hall, her Royal lover followed her in disguise, installed himself at a neighbouring inn, and continued his intrigue under the very nose of her jealous husband, who at last was driven to sue for divorce. He won an easy verdict, and with it 10,000 damages--a bill which George III.

himself had ultimately to pay. Within a few months the incorrigible Duke had another "dearest little angel" in his toils, and pursued his gallantries without a thought of the Countess he had left to her shame.

Such was this degenerate brother of the King when the most memorable of his victims crossed his blighting path one summer day in the year 1771, at Brighton--a radiantly beautiful young woman who had just discarded her widow's weeds, and was arrayed for fresh conquests.

Anne Luttrell, as the widow had been known in her maiden days, was one of the three lovely daughters of Lord Irnham, in later years Earl of Carhampton, and a member of a family noted for the beauty of its women, and the wild, lawless living of its men. Her brother, Colonel Luttrell, was the most reckless swashbuckler and the deadliest duellist of his time--a man whose morals were as low as his temper and courage were high.

At seventeen Anne had become the wife of Christopher Horton, a hard-drinking, fast-living Derbyshire squire, who left her a widow at twenty-two, in the prime of her beauty, and eager, as soon as decency permitted, to enter the matrimonial lists again.

About this time Horace Walpole, who had a keen eye for female charms, describes her as

"extremely pretty, very well-made, with the most amorous eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long. Coquette beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely mistress of all her pa.s.sions and projects. Indeed, eyelashes three-quarters of a yard shorter would have served to conquer such a head as she has turned."

In another portrait Walpole says:

"There was something so bewitching in her languishing eyes, which she could animate to enchantment if she pleased, and her coquetry was so active, so varied, and yet so habitual, that it was difficult not to see through it, and yet as difficult to resist it. She danced divinely, and had a great deal of wit, but of the satiric kind."

Such were the charms and witchery of Mrs Horton when the lascivious young Prince, who was still a boy, was first dazzled by her beauty at Brighton; and when, in fact, she was on the eve of smiling on the suit of one of the legion of lovers who swelled her retinue, one General Smith, a handsome man with a seductive rent-roll to add to his attractions. But the moment the Prince began to cast admiring eyes at the young widow the General's fate was sealed. She had no fancy to go to her grave plain "Mrs Smith" when a d.u.c.h.ess's coronet (and a Royal one to boot) was dangled so alluringly before her eyes.

For from the first she had made up her mind that she would be the Prince's legal wife, and no light-o'-love to be petted and flung aside when he chose, b.u.t.terfly-like, to flit to some other flower; and this she made abundantly clear to Henry Frederick. Her favours--after a period of coquetry and coy reluctance--were at his disposal; but the price to be paid for them was a wedding-ring--nothing less. And such was the infatuation she had inspired that the Duke--flinging scruples and fears aside, consented. One October day they took boat to Calais, and were there made man and wife. The widow had caught her Prince and meant the world to know she was a Princess.

For a few indecisive weeks the Duke put off the evil day of announcing his marriage to his brother, the King, and to his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales, whose frowns he dreaded still more. But his d.u.c.h.ess was inexorable. She declined to play any longer the _role_ of "virtuous mistress" in an obscure French town, when she ought, as a Princess of the Blood Royal, to be circling in splendour and state around the throne.

Between his wife's tears and tantrums on one side of the Channel and the Royal anger on the other, the Duke was driven to the extremity of his exiguous Royal wits; until finally, in sheer desperation, he decided to make the plunge--to break the news to the King. Had he but known how inopportune the time was he would surely have taken the first boat back to Calais rather than face his brother's anger. George was distracted by trouble at home and abroad. His mother was dying; across the Atlantic the clouds of war were ma.s.sing; the political atmosphere was charged with danger and unrest. And when the quaking Duke presented himself before his brother as he was moodily walking in his palace garden, George was in no mood to accept quietly any addition to his burden of worries.

No sooner had the King read the ill-spelled, clumsily-worded note which the Duke shamefacedly placed in his hand than his anger blazed into flame. "You idiot! You blockhead! You villain!" he shouted, purple in face and hoa.r.s.e with pa.s.sion. "I tell you that woman shall never be a Royal d.u.c.h.ess--she shall never be anything." "What must I do, then?"

gasped the Duke, quailing before the Royal outburst. "Go abroad until I can decide what to do," thundered the King, waving his brother imperiously away.

It was a very crestfallen Duke who returned to Calais to face the upbraiding of d.u.c.h.ess Anne on his failure. But it took much more than this to cow a Luttrell. She at least was not afraid of any king. She would defy him to his face, and compel him to acknowledge her--before her child was born. And within a few weeks she was installed at c.u.mberland House, with all the state and more than the airs of a Royal Princess. The days of concealment were over; she stood avowed to the world, d.u.c.h.ess of c.u.mberland and sister-in-law to the King; and she only smiled when George, in his Royal wrath at such insolence, announced through his Chamberlain that "there was no road between c.u.mberland House and Windsor Castle--that the Castle doors would be closed against any who dared to visit his repudiated sister-in-law."

There were some, however, who dared to brave George's displeasure by paying court to the d.u.c.h.ess, whose beauty and grace surrounded her with a small body of admirers. The daughter of an Irish n.o.bleman played to perfection her new and exalted _role_ of Princess. "No woman of her time," says Lord Hervey, "performed the honours of her drawing-room with such grace, affability, and dignity." And, in spite of George's frowns, the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the d.u.c.h.ess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress, was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court all the greatest in the land.

She even made overtures to her rival and enemy, and proposed that they should appear together in the same box at the opera--an overture to which the d.u.c.h.ess of Gloucester retorted contemptuously: "Never! I would not smell at the same nosegay with her in public!"

By sheer effrontery d.u.c.h.ess Anne at last forced her way into the Royal Court and public recognition as a member of George's family; and the fact that both the King and the Queen snubbed her mercilessly for her pains, detracted little from her triumph and gratification. What her Grace of Gloucester had won by submission and ingratiating arts, she had won by brazen defiance and importunity. But the goal, though so differently reached, was the same. Her triumph was complete.

To her last day, however, she never forgave the King and Queen. While they had smiled on the sempstress's daughter, who had been guilty of precisely the same offence as herself--that of wedding a Royal Prince without the King's sanction--they had scorned her, a Luttrell, the daughter of a n.o.ble house; and terrible was the revenge she took. She deliberately set herself to debase the Prince of Wales--a youth whose natural tendencies made him a pliant tool in her hands. She enmeshed him in the web of her beauty and charms; she pandered to his vanity and his pa.s.sions; while her husband initiated him into the vices of which he himself was a past-master--drinking, gambling, and l.u.s.t. Notorious profligate as George IV. became, there is little doubt that he would have been a much better man if he had not fallen thus early into the hands of a revengeful and unprincipled woman. Thus infamously the d.u.c.h.ess of c.u.mberland repaid George and his Consort for their slights; and her shameless reward was when she witnessed their grief at the moral degradation of their eldest son.

But even in the hour of her greatest triumph and splendour Anne Luttrell was an unhappy woman. She had climbed to the dizziest heights of the social ladder; her pride was more than satisfied; but her heart was empty and desolate. Her fickle husband soon wearied of her charms, and flaunted his fresh conquests before her face. In the royal family circle, into which she had forced her way, she was an unwelcome stranger; and such homage as she received was conceded to her rank and not to herself. "Of all princesses," she once wrote to a friend, "I really think I am the most miserable."

Her husband died at the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses, regretted by none, execrated by many. Of his father it had been written by way of epitaph:--

"He was alive and is dead, And, as it is only Fred, Why, there's no more to be said."

Henry Frederick's epitaph, if it had been written by the same hand, would have been much more scathing. His d.u.c.h.ess survived him a score of years--unhappy years of solitude and neglect, a Princess only in name--hara.s.sed and shamed by her eldest sister, Elizabeth, a woman of coa.r.s.e tastes and language, a confirmed gambler and cheat, whose failings, which she tried in vain to conceal, brought shame on the d.u.c.h.ess.

The fate of Elizabeth--one of the "three beautiful Luttrells"--is among the most tragic stories of the British Peerage. When her d.u.c.h.ess-sister died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her liberty. On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower depths--was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set her free from her fetters.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GORGEOUS COUNTESS

If, a century ago, Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, in County Tipperary, had been told that his second daughter, Marguerite, would one day blossom into a Countess, and live in history as one of the "most gorgeous"

figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic, and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was one of his most amiable characteristics.

The Irish squire was a proud man--proud of his pretty and shiftless wife, with her eternal talk of her Desmond ancestors; proud of two of his three daughters, whose budding beauty was to win for them t.i.tled husbands--one an English Viscount, the other a Comte de St Marsante; and proudest of all of his own handsome figure and his local dignities. But he was frankly ashamed to own himself father of his second daughter, Marguerite, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, and with no gifts or promise to qualify her plainness.

But the squireen was probably too full of his own self-importance to waste much thought or regret on an insignificant, unattractive girl, though she was his own child. He loved to strut about among his humble neighbours in all the unprovincial glory of ruffles and lace, buck-skins and top-boots, and snowy, wide-spreading cravat. He was the king of Tipperary dandies, known far beyond his own county as "Buck Power" and "Shiver-the-Frills"; and what pleased his vanity still more, he was a Justice of the Peace, with authority to scour the country at the head of a company of dragoons, tracking down rebels and spreading terror wherever he went. That he was laughed at for his c.o.xcombry and hated for his petty tyranny only seemed to add to the zest of his enjoyment of life; and he saw, at least, a knighthood as the prospective recognition of his importance, and his services to the King and the peace.

Such was the father and such the home of Marguerite Power, who was one day to dazzle the world as the "most gorgeous Lady Blessington."