Love Romances of the Aristocracy | Page 5

of hay, she adhered to this high resolve. Probably no maid ever
found her way with such a sure step through the iniquitous mazes of
Charles II.'s Court to an honourable marriage as _La belle Stuart;_
though at one time she so despaired of realising her ambition "to be a
Duchess" that she declared she was "ready to marry 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