Love Romances of the Aristocracy Part 12

"MRS BRACEGIRDLE:--'Yes, they were. And when Mrs Browne came in and told me, I sent my brother and my maid and all the people we could out of the house to Mrs Montford to desire her to send, if she knew where her husband was, to tell him of it; and she did. And when they came indoors again I went to the door, and the doors were shut, and I listened to hear if they were there still; and my Lord Mohun and Mr Hill were walking up and down the street. By-and-bye the watch came up to them, and when the watch came they said, "Gentlemen, why do you walk with your swords drawn?" Says my Lord Mohun, "I am a peer of England--touch me if you dare!" Then the watch left them, and they went away; and a little after there was a cry of "murder." And that is all I know, my lord.'

When at the close of the case Lord Mohun was asked if he had anything to say in his defence, he answered:

"My lords, I hope it will be no disadvantage to me my not summing up my evidence like a lawyer. I think I have made it plainly appear that there never was any formal quarrel or malice between Mr Montford and me. I have also made appear the reason why we stayed so long in the street, which was for Mr Hill to speak with Mrs Bracegirdle and ask her pardon, and I stayed with him as my friend. So plainly appeareth I had no hand in killing Mr Montford, and upon the confidence of my own innocency I surrendered myself to this honourable house, where I know I shall have all the justice in the world."

The trial, which lasted five days, resulted in a verdict of acquittal--sixty-nine peers voting Lord Mohun "Not Guilty," and fourteen finding him "Guilty."

One would have thought that such a severe lesson and narrow escape would have given Mohun pause in his career of vice and crime. On the contrary, it seems merely to have whetted his appet.i.te for similar adventures. He plunged into still deeper dissipation; one mad revel succeeded another; duel followed duel, all without provocation on any part but his own. He killed in cold blood two more men who had innocently provoked his enmity, "as if increase of appet.i.te did grow by that it fed on," until he rightly became the most dreaded and hated man in all England, a man to whom a glance, a gesture, or a harmless word might mean death.

But his evil days were drawing to their end; and appropriately he died in a welter of innocent blood. When the Duke of Hamilton was appointed Amba.s.sador to the French Court, the Whigs were so alarmed by his known partiality for the Pretender that the more unscrupulous of them decided that, at any cost, he must be got rid of. What simpler plan could there be than by provoking him to a duel; what fitter tool than the fire-eating, bloodthirsty Mohun, the most skilled swordsman of his day?

Mohun jumped at the vile suggestion, and lost no time in seeking the Duke and insulting him in public. His Grace, however, who knew the man's reputation only too well, treated the insult with the silence and contempt it deserved; whereupon Mohun, roused to fury by this studied slight, changed his _role_ to that of challenger. Thrice he sent his second, one Major-General Macartney, almost as big a scoundrel as himself, to the Duke's house in St James's Square; the fourth time a meeting was arranged for the following morning at the Ring, in Hyde Park, a favourite duelling-ground of the time. The intervening night hours Mohun and his satellite spent in debauchery in a low house of pleasure.

In the cold, grey dawn of the following morning--the morning of 15th November 1712--the princ.i.p.als and seconds appeared almost simultaneously at the Ring--in the daytime the haunt of beauty and fashion, in the early morning hours a desolate part of the Park--and the preliminaries were quickly arranged. Turning to Macartney, the Duke said: "I am well a.s.sured, sir, that all this is by your contrivance, and therefore you shall have your share in the dance; my friend here, Colonel Hamilton, will entertain you." "I wish for no better partner," Macartney replied; "the Colonel may command me."

A few moments later the double fight began with infinite fury. Swords flashed and clattered; lunge and parry, parry and lunge followed in lightning succession; the laboured breaths went up in gusts of steam on the morning air. There was murder in two pairs of eyes, a resolve as grim as death itself in the stern set faces of their opponents. Soon the blood began to spurt and ooze from a dozen wounds; the Duke was wounded in both legs; his adversary in the groin and arm. Faces, swords, the very ground, became crimson. Colonel Hamilton had at last disarmed his opponent, but the others fought on--gasping, reeling, lunging, feinting, the strength ebbing with each thrust.

At last each made a desperate lunge at the other; the Duke's sword pa.s.sed clean through his adversary up to the very hilt; Mohun, reeling forward, with a last effort shortened his sword and plunged it deep into the Duke's breast. Colonel Hamilton rushed to his friend and raised him in his arms, when Macartney, s.n.a.t.c.hing up his fallen sword, drove it into the dying man's heart, then took to his heels and made his way as fast as horse and boat could carry him to Holland.

Before the Duke could be raised from the ground to which he had fallen, he had drawn his last breath. A few moments later Mohun, too, succ.u.mbed to his wounds--the "Dog Mohun," as Swift called him, lying in death but a few yards from his victim.

"I am infinitely concerned," Swift wrote the same day, "for the poor Duke, who was an honest, good-natured man.

I loved him very well, and I think he loved me better."

Thus, steeped in innocent blood, perished Charles Lord Mohun, who well earned his unenviable t.i.tle, "The wicked Baron."

CHAPTER XIV

A FAIR _INTRIGANTE_

The face of a baby, the heart of a courtesan, and the brain of a diplomatist. Such was Louise de Querouaille who, two centuries and a half ago, came to England to barter her charms for a King's dishonour, and, incidentally, to found a ducal house as a memorial to her allurements and her shame.

If she had been taken at her own estimate Louise was at least the equal in lineage of any of the proud beauties whose claim she thus challenged to Charles II.'s favour. She had behind her, she said, centuries of n.o.ble ancestors, among the greatest in France; and she was kin, near or remote, to every great name in the land of her birth. All, however, that is known of this Queen of _intrigantes_ is that she had for father a worthy, una.s.suming Breton merchant, who had made a sufficient fortune in the wool-trade to take his ease, as a country gentleman, for the latter part of his days, and whose only ambition was to bring up his son and two daughters respectably, and to dispense a modest hospitality among his neighbours. It was at Brest that Evelyn enjoyed this hospitality for a brief period; and the diarist has nothing but what is good to say of the retired tradesman.

But the worthy merchant had his hands full with one at least of his two daughters, who was developing dangerous fascinations, and with them a precocious knowledge of how to turn them to account. He was thankful to pack Louise off to a boarding-school, where she seems to have led her teachers such a dance that it became necessary to place her in stronger hands; and with this view the foolish father sent her to Paris, the last place in the world for such a charming and designing minx, and to the custody of a weak-willed aunt.

Nothing could have suited Louise better than this change of arena for the exercise of her wilfulness and witchery. Before she had been many days in the French capital she was able to twist her aunt round her little finger--indeed her power of captivating was, to the end of her life, her chief dower--and to obtain all the freedom she wanted. And it was not long before her allurements won the admiration of the dissolute Duc de Beaufort, High Admiral of France, a man skilled in all the arts of love. The girl's bourgeois head was completely turned by the splendour of her first captive; and, to make him secure, she counted no sacrifice too great. Not, indeed, that she ever regarded her virtue as anything but the princ.i.p.al piece she intended to play on the chessboard of life.

For a few years Louise revelled in the new life which the amorous Duc opened to her, and which only came to an end when the Admiral was despatched, in command of a fleet, against the Turks, an expedition from which he was fated never to return. Before he said good-bye, however, Louise took care to make the next step on her ladder of world-conquest secure. Through the Duc's influence she was appointed maid-of-honour to Madame, sister-in-law to Louis XIV., and sister to the second Charles of England, now restored to the throne of his fathers.

We can well imagine that the wool merchant's daughter wasted no sighs on the lover she had lost. She had now a much wider and more splendid field at the Court of France, for the exploiting of her dangerous gifts and the indulgence of her ambition. That the new maid had no lack of lovers we may be sure; for though she was not richly dowered with beauty she always seems to have had a magnetic power over the hearts of men. We know, too, that she singled out for special favour, the Comte de Sault, the handsomest n.o.ble in France, a man skilled above all his fellows in the then moribund knightly exercises; and that her _liaison_ with the Comte, in a court where such intimacies were the fashion, added to, rather than detracted from, her social prestige.

Such was the life of Louise de Querouaille up to the time when she made her first acquaintance with the land in which she was destined to crown her adventurous career, and to make herself at once the most dazzling and the most hated figure in England. At this time Louis' designs on Spain and Holland had received a rude check by the signing of an alliance between England, Sweden, and the United Provinces; and it became a matter of vital importance to detach England from a combination so fatal to his schemes. With this object he decided to send Henrietta, d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, on a visit, ostensibly of affection, to her brother Charles II., charged with a secret mission to induce him by every artifice in her power to withdraw from the alliance.

How Henrietta returned flushed with triumph from this iniquitous emba.s.sy, after ten days of high revelry at Dover, is well-known history.

Charles, in response to his favourite sister's pleading and bribes, not only consented to desert his allies, but, as soon as he decently could, to follow in the steps of his brother, the Duke of York, to Rome; and in return for these evidences of friendship, Louis was gracious enough to promise him substantial aid and protection; and, further, to grant him a subsidy of 1,000,000 a year if he would take up arms with France against Holland.

It is more to our purpose to know that among the gay galaxy of courtiers who accompanied Madame to England was Louise de Querouaille, who thus first set eyes on the King, in whose life-drama she was to play so brilliant and baleful a _role_; and that before Charles, with streaming eyes, said "good-bye" to his scheming sister, she had made excellent use of her opportunities to enslave this English "King of Hearts." So much at least was reported to Louis on the return of the emba.s.sy, when he was a.s.sured by Madame that, of all the beautiful women in her train, the only one to make any impression on her Royal brother was Louise de Querouaille.

This information, no doubt, was in Louis' mind when, later, it became necessary to cement Charles's allegiance to his compact. Gold was always a potent lure to the "Merrie Monarch," whose purse was never deep enough for the demands made on it by his extravagance; but a still more seductive bait was a beautiful woman to add to his seraglio. The d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland had now lost her youth and good looks; the incomparable Stuart's beauty had been fatally marred by small-pox. Of all the fair and frail women who had held Charles in thrall there was none left to dispute the palm with the French maid-of-honour except Nell Gwynn, the Drury Lane orange-girl, whose sauciness and vulgarity gave to the jaded Sybarite a piquant relish to her charms.

Here was a splendid opportunity for Louis to complete the conquest of his vacillating cousin whose allegiance was so vital to his plans of aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. Louise should go to Whitehall to play the part of beautiful spy on Charles, and, by her favours, to make him a pliant tool in the hand of "le Roi Soleil."

Charles, who was by no means loth to renew his Dover acquaintance with the bewitching maid-of-honour, sent a yacht to Dieppe to bring her to England, and charged no less a personage than the Duke of Buckingham to be her escort to Whitehall. The Duke, however, who was probably too much occupied with his own affairs of the heart, "totally forgot both the lady and his promise; and, leaving the disconsolate nymph at Dieppe, to manage as best she could, pa.s.sed over to England by way of Calais,"--a slight which the indignant Louise never forgave.

Thus it was that the new favourite of the King made her journey across the Channel under the escort of the English Amba.s.sador, and was given by him into the charge of Buckingham's political rival, Lord Arlington.

"The Duke of Buckingham thus," to quote Bishop Burnet, "lost all merit he might have pretended to, and brought over a mistress whom his strange conduct threw into the hands of his enemies."

The arrival of the "French spy," whose mission was well understood, was hailed by the English nation with execration, modified only by a few stilted lines of greeting from Dryden, as laureate, and some indecent verses by St Evremond--efforts which the new beauty equally rewarded with gracious smiles and thanks. That the English frankly hated her without having even seen her was a matter of small concern--she was prepared for it. All she cared for was that Charles should give her a cordial welcome; and this he did with effusiveness and open arms. Apart from her character as amba.s.sadress to his "dear brother" of France, she was a new and piquant stimulus to his sated appet.i.te--a "dainty dish to set before a King."

She was installed at Whitehall to the flourish of trumpets; was appointed maid-of-honour to the Queen, who frankly disliked and dreaded this new rival in her husband's accommodating affection; and at once a.s.sumed her position as chief of those women the King delighted to honour. And with such restraint and discretion did she conduct herself during these early days at Whitehall that she disarmed the jealousy of the Court ladies, while receiving the homage of their gallants.

To Charles she was coyness itself--virtue personified. While smiling graciously on him she kept him at arm's length, thus adding to her attractions the allurement of an unexpected virtue. So jealously did she guard her favours that the French Amba.s.sador began to show alarm.

"I believe," he wrote at this time, "that she has so got round King Charles as to be of the greatest service to our Sovereign lord and master, _if_ she only does her duty."

That Louise was fully conscious of her duty and meant to do it, was never really in question--but the time to unbend was not yet. It was no part of her clever strategy to drop like a ripe plum into Charles's mouth. _Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter._ She would be accounted all the greater prize for proving difficult to win.

The psychical moment, she decided, had come when Lord Arlington invited Charles and his Court to his palatial country-seat, Euston, where, removed from censorious eyes and in the abandon of country-house freedom, she could exhibit her true colours to full advantage. Over the revels of which Euston was 183 the scene during a few intoxicating weeks, it is but decent to draw the curtain. With such guests as the merry and dissolute Charles, his boon-companions, experts in gallantry, and his ladies, with most of whom an acquaintance with virtue was but a faded memory, it is no difficult matter to raise a corner of the curtain in imagination. One typical scene Forneron records thus:

"Lady Arlington, under the pretext of killing the tedium of October evenings in a country-house, got up a burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Querouaille was the bride and the King the bridegroom, with all the immodest ceremonies which marked, in the good old times, the retirement of the former into the nuptial chamber."

It was precisely such a ceremony in which, a few years earlier, Charles had figured with _La belle Stuart_, while Lady Castlemaine looked on with laughter and applause.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOUISE, d.u.c.h.eSS OF PORTSMOUTH]

Such was the revolution that resulted from this country visit that Louise de Querouaille returned to Whitehall, the avowed _maitresse en t.i.tre_ to the King. The French maid-of-honour had justified the confidence Louis reposed in her; and as reward she was appointed Lady of the Bedchamber to Catherine, and wore a coronet as d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth. More than this, the delighted Louis raised the wool merchant's daughter to the proud rank of d.u.c.h.esse d'Aubigny, in exchange for which dignity she pledged herself to induce Charles to go to war with Holland; to avow himself a Catholic; and to persuade his brother and successor, the Duke of York, to take to wife a Princess of France.

Louise de Querouaille had now reached a dizzier height than, in the wildest dreams of her girlhood, she had ever hoped to climb. She was a double-d.u.c.h.ess, of England and of France, the mistress and counsellor of a puppet-King, and an arbiter of the destinies of nations. Well might her humble father, when he paid his d.u.c.h.ess-daughter a visit in London, throw up his hands in amazement at the splendours with which his "pet.i.te Louise" had surrounded herself! So high had she climbed that it seemed at one time that even the Crown of England was within her reach; for when Catherine was brought to the verge of death the d.u.c.h.ess was probably not alone in thinking that she might be her successor on the throne.

"She has got the notion," wrote the French Amba.s.sador, "that it is possible she may yet be Queen of England. She talks from morning till night of the Queen's ailments as if they were mortal."

But at least, if the crown was not to be hers, there was as much gold to be had as she cared to garner. Not content with her allowance, which, nominally 10,000 a year, in one year reached the enormous sum of 136,000, she heaped fortune on fortune by trafficking in a wide range of commodities, from peerages and Court appointments to Royal pardons and slaves. A few years of such rich harvesting made her incomparably the richest woman in England, although she squandered her ill-gotten gold with a prodigal hand. Her apartments at Whitehall were crowded with the costliest furnishings and objects of art that money could buy. When Evelyn paid a visit to the Court he records:

"But that which engaged my curiosity was the rich and splendid furniture of this woman's apartment, now twice or thrice pulled down to satisfy her prodigality and expensive pleasures; while her Majesty's does not exceed some gentlemen's wives in furniture and accommodation.

"Here I saw the new fabrics of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I ever beheld. Some pieces had Versailles, St Germain's, and other palaces of the French King, with huntings, figures, and landscapes, exotic flowers and all to the life, rarely done. Then for j.a.pan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table-stands, sconces, branches, braseras, etc., all of ma.s.sive silver and out of number, besides some of his Majesty's best paintings!"

Probably at this time of her illicit queendom the only thorn in Louise de Querouaille's bed of roses was that vulgar, "gutter-rival" of hers, Nell Gwynn, with whom she suffered the indignity of sharing Charles's affection. To the high-born, blue-blooded daughter of centuries of French n.o.bles (of whom her tradesman-father always affected a disconcerting ignorance) the very sight of her saucy and successful rival, the ex-orange-wench, was a contamination. She pretended to stifle in breathing the same air, and with high-tossed head sailed past Madame Nell (the mother of a duke), in the Court _salons_ and corridors, as if she were carrion.

And to all these grand, disdainful airs Madame Nell only retorted with a Drury Lane peal of silvery laughter. She, who was accustomed to "chuck Charles's royal chin," and to call him her "Charles the third," in unflattering reference to his two predecessors of the name in her favour, could afford to snap her fingers at the French madame who, after all, was no better than herself.

"The d.u.c.h.ess," she would say, "pretends to be a person of quality. She says she is related to the best families in France; and when any great person dies she puts herself in mourning. If she be a lady of such quality, why does she demean herself to be what she is? As for me, it's my profession; I don't profess to be anything better. And the King is just as fond of me as he is of his French miss."