Love Romances of the Aristocracy | Page 5

any gentleman of fifteen hundred a year that would have her in honour."
And never, perhaps, have the designs of a dissolute King been so cleverly and consistently baffled. Charles made no concealment of his passion for the beautiful maid-of-honour, and the more coldly she treated his advances, the more marked and ardent was his pursuit.
"Mr Pierce tells me," Pepys writes, "that my Lady Castlemaine is not at all set by by the King, but that he do doat upon Mrs Stuart only, and that to the leaving of all business in the world, and to the open slighting of the Queen. That he values not who sees him, or stands by while he dallies with her openly; and then privately in her chamber below, while the very sentrys observe him going in and out; and that so commonly that the Duke, or any of the Nobles, when they would ask where the King is, they will ordinarily say, 'Is the King above or below?' meaning with Mrs Stuart; that the King do not openly disown my Lady Castlemaine, but that she comes to Court."
Such was the spell which this enchantress cast over the King. Nor were her conquests by any means confined to the circle of the Court in which she moved a splendid, but unassailable Queen, for every man who came within the magic of her presence seems to have lost both head and heart. One of the most infatuated of all her victims was Phillipe Rotier, the youngest brother of the famous medallists whom Charles had invited to England, and whose first commission was to design a medal in celebration of the Peace of Breda. For the purposes of this medal Miss Stuart was asked by the King to pose as Britannia; and so captivated was Phillipe Rotier, to whom she gave sittings, by the exquisite perfection and grace of her figure, and so entranced by her beauty, that he fell madly in love with her, and narrowly escaped the loss of reason as well as of his heart. Since that day the figure of Britannia has appeared on millions of coins and medals to perpetuate through the centuries the faultless form of the woman who drove artist as well as King to the verge of despair by her beauty and her inaccessible prudery.
It was destined, however, that a prize which had so long eluded the handsomest gallants in England should fall at last to one of the most insignificant of all Charles's courtiers, a man who had neither good looks, intellect, nor character to commend him to a lady's favour. Such a gilded nonentity was Charles Stuart, Duke of Richmond and of Lennox, who, having buried two wives, now began to cast envious eyes on the maid-of-honour whom his Sovereign could not win.
Small in stature, deformed in figure--a caricature of a man, His Grace of Richmond was the last degenerate scion of the Stuarts of Richmond-d'Aubigny, a man of depraved tastes and besotted brain, the butt and the clown of Charles's Court. That this middle-aged buffoon should aspire to the hand of the loveliest and most elusive woman in England was only less amazing than that she should smile on his suit. The Court was struck with consternation--and convulsed with laughter. Nothing so utterly astonishing and so ludicrous had come within its experience. But there could be no doubt about it. La belle Stuart, who had so long resisted the King, and given the cold shoulder to such gallants as the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington, was not only smiling on her ill-favoured suitor, she was actually giving him midnight assignations in her own apartments, and risking for a clown the reputation a King had been powerless to sully.
Here, at last, was a fine weapon placed in the hands of the outraged and vindictive Castlemaine. Here was a splendid opportunity of paying off old scores, of showing to her Royal lover the kind of woman for whom he had supplanted her, and of reinstating herself in his good graces. One night, as he returned in an evil temper from a fruitless visit to Miss Stuart's apartments, from which he had been sent away on some frivolous pretext, he was accosted by my Lady Castlemaine, who, with ill-concealed triumph, told him that at the moment La belle Stuart turned him away from her door, she was actually dallying with his new and contemptible rival, the Duke of Richmond, at the other side of it.
Charles was incredulous, furious at the suggestion. "Come with me," Lady Castlemaine answered, "and I will prove that I am telling you the simple truth;" and taking his hand she led him exultantly down the gallery from his apartments to the threshold of Miss Stuart's door, where, with a sweeping curtsy and an invitation