The Wits and Beaux of Society Part 3

A scandalous intrigue soon proved the unsoundness of Flecknoe's tribute.

Amongst the most licentious beauties of the court was Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, the daughter of Robert Brudenel, Earl of Cardigan, and the wife of Francis, Earl of Shrewsbury: amongst many shameless women she was the most shameless, and her face seems to have well expressed her mind. In the round, fair visage, with its languis.h.i.+ng eyes, and full, pouting mouth, there is something voluptuous and bold.

The forehead is broad, but low; and the wavy hair, with its tendril curls, comes down almost to the fine arched eyebrows, and then, falling into ma.s.ses, sets off white shoulders which seem to designate an inelegant amount of _embonpoint_. There is nothing elevated in the whole countenance, as Lely has painted her, and her history is a disgrace to her age and time.

She had numerous lovers (not in the refined sense of the word), and, at last, took up with Thomas Killigrew. He had been, like Villiers, a royalist: first a page to Charles I., next a companion of Charles II., in exile. He married the fair Cecilia Croft; yet his morals were so vicious that even in the Court of Venice to which he was accredited, in order to borrow money from the merchants of that city, he was too profligate to remain. He came back with Charles II., and was Master of the Revels, or King's Jester, as the court considered him, though without any regular appointment, during his life: the b.u.t.t, at once, and the satirist of Whitehall.

It was Killigrew's wit and descriptive powers which, when heightened by wine, were inconceivably great, that induced Villiers to select Lady Shrewsbury for the object of his admiration. When Killigrew perceived that he was supplanted by Villiers, he became frantic with rage, and poured out the bitterest invectives against the countess. The result was that, one night, returning from the Duke of York's apartments at St.

James's, three pa.s.ses with a sword were made at him through his chair, and one of them pierced his arm. This, and other occurrences, at last aroused the attention of Lord Shrewsbury, who had hitherto never doubted his wife: he challenged the Duke of Buckingham; and his infamous wife, it is said, held her paramour's horse, disguised as a page. Lord Shrewsbury was killed,[6] and the scandalous intimacy went on as before.

No one but the queen, no one but the d.u.c.h.ess of Buckingham, appeared shocked at this tragedy, and no one minded their remarks, or joined in their indignation: all moral sense was suspended, or wholly stifled; and Villiers gloried in his depravity, more witty, more amusing, more fas.h.i.+onable than ever; and yet he seems, by the best-known and most extolled of his poems, to have had some conception of what a real and worthy attachment might be.

The following verses are to his 'Mistress':--

'What a dull fool was I To think so gross a lie, As that I ever was in love before!

I have, perhaps, known one or two, With whom I was content to be At that which they call keeping company.

But after all that they could do, I still could be with more.

Their absence never made me shed a tear; And I can truly swear, That, till my eyes first gazed on you, I ne'er beheld the thing I could adore.

'A world of things must curiously be sought: A world of things must be together brought To make up charms which have the power to make, Through a discerning eye, true love; That is a master-piece above What only looks and shape can do; There must be wit and judgment too, Greatness of thought, and worth, which draw, From the whole world, respect and awe.

'She that would raise a n.o.ble love must find Ways to beget a pa.s.sion for her mind; She must be that which she to be would seem, For all true love is grounded on esteem: Plainness and truth gain more a generous heart Than all the crooked subtleties of art.

She must be--what said I?--she must be _you_: None but yourself that miracle can do.

At least, I'm sure, thus much I plainly see, None but yourself e'er did it upon me.

'Tis you alone that can my heart subdue, To you alone it always shall be true.'

The next lines are also remarkable for the delicacy and happy turn of the expressions--

'Though Phillis, from prevailing charms, Have forc'd my Delia from my arms, Think not your conquest to maintain By rigour or unjust disdain.

In vain, fair nymph, in vain you strive, For Love doth seldom Hope survive.

My heart may languish for a time, As all beauties in their prime Have justified such cruelty, By the same fate that conquered me.

When age shall come, at whose command Those troops of beauty must disband-- A rival's strength once took away, What slave's so dull as to obey?

But if you'll learn a n.o.ble way To keep his empire from decay, And there for ever fix your throne, Be kind, but kind to me alone.'

Like his father, who ruined himself by building, Villiers had a monomania for bricks and mortar, yet he found time to write 'The Rehearsal,' a play on which Mr. Reed in his 'Dramatic Biography' makes the following observation: 'It is so perfect a masterpiece in its way, and so truly original, that notwithstanding its prodigious success, even the task of imitation, which most kinds of excellence have invited inferior geniuses to undertake, has appeared as too arduous to be attempted with regard to this, which through a whole century stands alone, notwithstanding that the very plays it was written expressly to ridicule are forgotten, and the taste it was meant to expose totally exploded.'

The reverses of fortune which brought George Villiers to abject misery were therefore, in a very great measure, due to his own misconduct, his depravity, his waste of life, his perversion of n.o.ble mental powers: yet in many respects he was in advance of his age. He advocated, in the House of Lords, toleration to Dissenters. He wrote a 'Short Discourse on the Reasonableness of Men's having a Religion, or Wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d;' yet, such was his inconsistency, that in spite of these works, and of one styled a 'Demonstration of the Deity,' written a short time before his death, he a.s.sisted Lord Rochester in his atheistic poem upon 'Nothing.'

Butler, the author of Hudibras, too truly said of Villiers 'that he had studied _the whole body of vice_;' a most fearful censure--a most significant description of a bad man. 'His parts,' he adds, 'are disproportionate to the whole, and like a monster, he has more of some, and less of others, than he should have. He has pulled down all that nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a model of his own. He has dammed up all those lights that nature made into the n.o.blest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind loopholes backward by turning day into night, and night into day.'

The satiety and consequent misery produced by this terrible life are ably described by Butler. And it was perhaps partly this wearied, worn-out spirit that caused Villiers to rush madly into politics for excitement. In 1666 he asked for the office of Lord President of the North; it was refused: he became disaffected, raised mutinies, and, at last, excited the indignation of his too-indulgent sovereign. Charles dismissed him from his office, after keeping him for some time in confinement. After this epoch little is heard of Buckingham but what is disgraceful. He was again restored to Whitehall, and, according to Pepys, even closeted with Charles, whilst the Duke of York was excluded.

A certain acquaintance of the duke's remonstrated with him upon the course which Charles now took in Parliament. 'How often have you said to me,' this person remarked, 'that the king was a weak man, unable to govern, but to be governed, and that you could command him as you liked?

Why do you suffer him to do these things?'

'Why,' answered the duke, 'I do suffer him to do these things, that I may hereafter the better command him.' A reply which betrays the most depraved principle of action, whether towards a sovereign or a friend, that can be expressed. His influence was for some time supreme, yet he became the leader of the opposition, and invited to his table the discontented peers, to whom he satirized the court, and condemned the king's want of attention to business. Whilst the theatre was ringing with laughter at the inimitable character of Bayes in the 'Rehearsal,'

the House of Lords was listening with profound attention to the eloquence that entranced their faculties, making wrong seem right, for Buckingham was ever heard with attention.

Taking into account his mode of existence, 'which,' says Clarendon, 'was a life by night more than by day, in all the liberties that nature could desire and wit invent,' it was astonis.h.i.+ng how extensive an influence he had in both Houses of Parliament. 'His rank and condescension, the pleasantness of his humours and conversation, and the extravagance and keenness of his wit, unrestrained by modesty or religion, caused persons of all opinions and dispositions to be fond of his company, and to imagine that these levities and vanities would wear off with age, and that there would be enough of good left to make him useful to his country, for which he pretended a wonderful affection.'

But this brilliant career was soon checked. The varnish over the hollow character of this extraordinary man was eventually rubbed off. We find the first hint of that famous coalition styled the _Cabal_ in Pepys's Diary, and henceforth the duke must be regarded as a ruined man.

'He' (Sir H. Cholmly) 'tells me that the Duke of Buckingham his crimes, as far as he knows, are his being of a cabal with some discontented persons of the late House of Commons, and opposing the desires of the king in all his matters in that House; and endeavouring to become popular, and advising how the Commons' House should proceed, and how he would order the House of Lords. And he hath been endeavouring to have the king's nativity calculated; which was done, and the fellow now in the Tower about it.... This silly lord hath provoked, by his ill carriage, the Duke of York, my Lord Chancellor, and all the great persons, and therefore most likely will die.'

One day, in the House of Lords, during a conference between the two Houses, Buckingham leaned rudely over the shoulder of Henry Pierrepont Marquis of Dorchester. Lord Dorchester merely removed his elbow. Then the duke asked him if he was uneasy. 'Yes,' the marquis replied, adding, 'the duke dared not do this if he were anywhere else.' Buckingham retorted, 'Yes, he would: and he was a better man than my lord marquis:'

on which Dorchester told him that he lied. On this Buckingham struck off Dorchester's hat, seized him by the periwig, pulled it aside, and held him. The Lord Chamberlain and others interposed and sent them both to the Tower. Nevertheless, not a month afterwards, Pepys speaks of seeing the duke's play of 'The Chances' acted at Whitehall. 'A good play,' he condescends to say, 'I find it, and the actors most good in it; and pretty to hear Knipp sing in the play very properly "All night I weepe,"

and sung it admirably. The whole play pleases me well: and most of all, the sight of many fine ladies, amongst others, my Lady Castlemaine and Mrs. Middleton.'

The whole management of public affairs was, at this period, intrusted to five persons, and hence the famous combination, the united letters of which formed the word 'Cabal:'--Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Their reprehensible schemes, their desperate characters, rendered them the opprobrium of their age, and the objects of censure to all posterity. Whilst matters were in this state a daring outrage, which spoke fearfully of the lawless state of the times, was ascribed, though wrongly, to Buckingham. The Duke of Ormond, the object of his inveterate hatred, was at that time Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Colonel Blood,--a disaffected disbanded officer of the Commonwealth, who had been attainted for a conspiracy in Ireland, but had escaped punishment,--came to England, and acted as a spy for the 'Cabal,' who did not hesitate to countenance this daring scoundrel.

His first exploit was to attack the Duke of Ormond's coach one night in St. James's Street: to secure his person, bind him, put him on horseback after one of his accomplices, and carry him to Tyburn, where he meant to hang his grace. On their way, however, Ormond, by a violent effort, threw himself on the ground; a scuffle ensued: the duke's servants came up, and after receiving the fire of Blood's pistols, the duke escaped.

Lord Ossory, the Duke of Ormond's son, on going afterward to court, met Buckingham, and addressed him in these words:--

'My lord, I know well that you are at the bottom of this late attempt on my father; but I give you warning, if he by any means come to a violent end, I shall not be at a loss to know the author. I shall consider you as an a.s.sa.s.sin, and shall treat you as such; and wherever I meet you I shall pistol you, though you stood behind the king's chair; and I tell it you in his majesty's presence, that you may be sure I shall not fail of performance.'

Blood's next feat was to carry off from the Tower the crown jewels. He was overtaken and arrested: and was then asked to name his accomplices.

'No,' he replied, 'the fear of danger shall never tempt me to deny guilt or to betray a friend.' Charles II., with undignified curiosity, wished to see the culprit. On inquiring of Blood how he dared to make so bold an attempt on the crown, the bravo answered, 'My father lost a good estate fighting for the crown, and I considered it no harm to recover it by the crown.' He then told his majesty how he had resolved to a.s.sa.s.sinate him: how he had stood among the reeds in Battersea-fields with this design; how then, a sudden awe had come over him: and Charles was weak enough to admire Blood's fearless bearing and to pardon his attempt. Well might the Earl of Rochester write of Charles--

'Here lies my sovereign lord the king, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one.'

Notwithstanding Blood's outrages--the slightest penalty for which in our days would have been penal servitude for life--Evelyn met him, not long afterwards, at Lord Clifford's, at dinner, when De Grammont and other French n.o.blemen were entertained. 'The man,' says Evelyn, 'had not only a daring, but a villanous, unmerciful look, a false countenance; but very well-spoken, and dangerously insinuating.'

Early in 1662, the Duke of Buckingham had been engaged in practices against the court: he had disguised deep designs by affecting the mere man of pleasure. Never was there such splendour as at Wallingford House--such wit and gallantry; such perfect good breeding; such apparently openhanded hospitality. At those splendid banquets, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, 'a man whom the Muses were fond to inspire, but ashamed to avow,' showed his 'beautiful face,' as it was called; and chimed in with that wit for which the age was famous. The frequenters at Wallingford House gloried in their indelicacy. 'One is amazed,' Horace Walpole observes, 'at hearing the age of Charles II. called polite. The Puritans have affected to call everything by a Scripture' name; the new comers affected to call everything by its right name;

'As if preposterously they would confess A forced hypocrisy in wickedness.'

Walpole compares the age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes--'which called its own grossness polite.' How bitterly he decries the stale poems of the time as 'a heap of senseless ribaldry;' how truly he shows that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment. 'When Satyrs are brought to court,' he observes, 'no wonder the Graces would not trust themselves there.'

The Cabal is said, however, to have been concocted, not at Wallingford House, but at Ham House, near Kingston-on-Thames.

In this stately old manor-house, the abode of the Tollemache family, the memory of Charles II. and of his court seems to linger still. Ham House was intended for the residence of Henry, Prince of Wales, and was built in 1610. It stands near the river Thames; and is flanked by n.o.ble avenues of elm and of chestnut trees, down which one may almost, as it were, hear the king's talk with his courtiers; see Arlington approach with the well-known patch across his nose; or spy out the lovely, childish Miss Stuart and her future husband, the Duke of Richmond, slipping behind into the garden, lest the jealous mortified king should catch a sight of the 'conscious lovers.'

This stately structure was given by Charles II., in 1672, to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Lauderdale: she, the supposed mistress of Cromwell; he, the cruel, hateful Lauderdale of the Cabal. This detestable couple, however, furnished with ma.s.sive grandeur the apartments of Ham House.

They had the ceilings painted by Verrio; the furniture was rich, and even now the bellows and brushes in some of the rooms are of silver filigree. One room is furnished with yellow damask, still rich, though faded; the very seats on which Charles, looking around him, saw Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley (the infamous Shaftesbury), and Lauderdale--and knew not, good easy man, that he was looking on a band of traitors--are still there. Nay, he even sat to Sir Peter Lely for a portrait for this very place--in which, schemes for the ruin of the kingdom were concocted. All, probably, was smooth and pleasing to the monarch as he ranged down the fine gallery, ninety-two feet long; or sat at dinner amid his foes in that hall, surrounded with an open bal.u.s.trade; or disported himself on the river's green brink. Nay, one may even fancy Nell Gwynn taking a day's pleasure in this then lone and ever sweet locality. We hear her swearing, as she was wont to do, perchance at the dim looking-gla.s.ses, her own house in Pall Mall, given her by the king, having been filled up, for the comedian, entirely, ceiling and all, with looking-gla.s.s. How bold and pretty she looked in her undress! Even Pepys--no very sound moralist, though a vast hypocrite--tells us: Nelly, 'all unready' was 'very pretty, prettier far than he thought.' But to see how she was 'painted,' would, he thought, 'make a man mad.'

'Madame Ellen,' as after her _elevation_, as it was termed, she was called, might, since she held long a great sway over Charles's fancy, be suffered to scamper about Ham House--where her merry laugh perhaps scandalised the now Saintly d.u.c.h.ess of Lauderdale,--just to impose on the world; for Nell was regarded as the Protestant champion of the court, in opposition to her French rival, the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth.

Let us suppose that she has been at Ham House, and is gone off to Pall Mall again, where she can see her painted face in every turn. The king has departed, and Killigrew, who, at all events, is loyal, and the true-hearted Duke of Richmond, all are away to London. In yon sanctimonious-looking closet, next to the d.u.c.h.ess's bed-chamber, with her psalter and her prayer-book on her desk, which is fixed to her great chair, and that very cane which still hangs there serving as her support when she comes forth from that closet, murmur and wrangle the component parts of that which was never mentioned without fear--the Cabal. The conspirators dare not trust themselves in the gallery: there is tapestry there, and we all know what coverts there are for eaves-droppers and spiders in tapestried walls: then the great Cardinal spiders do so click there, are so like the death-watch, that Villiers, who is inveterately superst.i.tious, will not abide there. The hall, with its enclosing galleries, and the b.u.t.tery near, are manifestly unsafe. So they heard, nay crouch, mutter, and concoct that fearful treachery which, as far as their country is concerned, has been a thing apart in our annals, in 'my Lady's' closet. Englishmen are turbulent, ambitious, unscrupulous; but the craft of Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale--the subtlety of Ashley, seem hardly conceivable either in a Scot or Southron.

These meetings had their natural consequence. One leaves Lauderdale, Arlington, Ashley, and Clifford, to their fate. But the career of Villiers inspires more interest. He seemed born for better things. Like many men of genius, he was so credulous that the faith he pinned on one Heydon, an astrologer, at this time, perhaps buoyed him up with false hopes. Be it as it may, his plots now tended to open insurrection. In 1666, a proclamation had been issued for his apprehension--he having then absconded. On this occasion he was saved by the act of one whom he had injured grossly--his wife. She managed to outride the serjeant-at-arms, and to warn him of his danger. She had borne his infidelities, after the fas.h.i.+on of the day, as a matter of course: jealousy was then an impertinence--constancy, a chimera; and her husband, whatever his conduct, had ever treated her with kindness of manner; he had that charm, that attribute of his family, in perfection, and it had fascinated Mary Fairfax.

He fled, and played for a year successfully the pranks of his youth. At last, worn out, he talked of giving himself up to justice. 'Mr. Fenn, at the table, says that he hath been taken by the watch two or three times of late, at unseasonable hours, but so disguised they did not know him; and when I come home, by and by, Mr. Lowther tells me that the Duke of Buckingham do dine publickly this day at Wadlow's, at the Sun Tavern; and is mighty merry, and sent word to the Lieutenant of the Tower, that he would come to him as soon as he dined.' So Pepys states.

Whilst in the Tower--to which he was again committed--Buckingham's pardon was solicited by Lady Castlemaine; on which account the king was very angry with her; called her a meddling 'jade;' she calling him 'fool,' and saying if he was not a fool he never would suffer his best subjects to be imprisoned--referring to Buckingham. And not only did she ask his liberty, but the rest.i.tution of his places. No wonder there was discontent when such things were done, and public affairs were in such a state. We must again quote the graphic, terse language of Pepys:--'It was computed that the Parliament had given the king for this war only, besides all prizes, and besides the 200,000 which he was to spend of his own revenue, to guard the sea, above 5,000,000, and odd 100,000; which is a most prodigious sum. Sir H. Cholmly, as a true English gentleman, do decry the king's expenses of his privy purse, which in King James's time did not rise to above 5,000 a year, and in King Charles's to 10,000, do now cost us above 100,000, besides the great charge of the monarchy, as the Duke of York has 100,000 of it, and other limbs of the royal family.'

In consequence of Lady Castlemaine's intervention, Villiers was restored to liberty--a strange instance, as Pepys remarks, of the 'fool's play'

of the age. Buckingham was now as presuming as ever: he had a theatre of his own, and he soon showed his usual arrogance by beating Henry Killigrew on the stage, and taking away his coat and sword; all very 'innocently' done, according to Pepys. In July he appeared in his place in the House of Lords, as 'brisk as ever,' and sat in his robes, 'which,' says Pepys, 'is a monstrous thing that a man should be proclaimed against, and put in the Tower, and released without any trial, and yet not restored to his places.'

We next find the duke intrusted with a mission to France, in concert with Halifax and Arlington. In the year 1680, he was threatened with an impeachment, in which, with his usual skill, he managed to exculpate himself by blaming Lord Arlington. The House of Commons pa.s.sed a vote for his removal; and he entered the ranks of the opposition.

But this career of public meanness and private profligacy was drawing to a close. Alcibiades no longer--his frame wasted by vice--his spirits broken by pecuniary difficulties--Buckingham's importance visibly sank away. 'He remained, at last,' to borrow the words of Hume, 'as incapable of doing hurt as he had ever been little desirous of doing good to mankind.' His fortune had now dwindled down to 300 a year in land; he sold Wallingford House, and removed into the City.