Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

Madame consequently departed, accompanied by a brilliant suite which included the Comte and Comtesse de Gramont and Anthony Hamilton. Charles and his whole Court went to Dover to meet her, and in his eagerness to see his sister again the King, like an impatient schoolboy, rowed out into the Channel to welcome her. The business transacted during this brief visit need not detain us here. On the ability she showed in negotiating the "Traité de Madame" her fame chiefly rests. When the articles of this treaty were made public she was censured as a traitress who had sold her country to France, and English historians generally have ever since accused her of an utter lack of principle. But considering that she was, in spite of her birth, far more French than English, the obloquy that attaches to her name seems to us to have been inspired more by a prejudice against the whole House of Stuart than by a love of fairness. At the time, however, her reception in England was not only brilliant but cordial, and proved that her popularity had not waned since her last visit. The ten or twelve days she passed at Dover were, perhaps, the brightest of her life. Certainly she never knew a happy day afterwards.

Whether she was as successful in the personal as she was in the political object of her mission is not known. All accounts on the subject are at variance; some declare that she came back from Dover radiant, others depressed. At any rate, the reception she met with from her husband was well calculated to damp the gayest spirits. Monsieur began at once to reproach her in regard to the Chevalier de Lorraine; "he told her plainly that he knew his favourite's banishment was her doing, that she should have no peace till she had him recalled, and even threatened her with worse if she did not comply with his wishes." As the recall of the Chevalier meant her humiliation, she refused to yield. The relations between them were at their worst when one morning, three weeks after her arrival at St. Cloud, as she finished drinking a glass of chicory-water she was seized with violent intestinal pains.

Her first exclamation was that she was poisoned. Every one in the palace was terrified, except Monsieur. He did not appear in the least put out. Word was despatched to Louis at Versailles, who immediately sent Vallot, his own physician, to St. Cloud. Shortly after he followed himself, accompanied by the Queen and La Grande Mademoiselle. When they arrived they were told, to their horror, that Madame was dying. They found her writhing on a couch, pale, dishevelled, and scarcely recognisable from the convulsive movements that distorted her features. No one, with the exception of her maids of honour who hung over her weeping, appeared the least alarmed. At the sight of the King she uttered a piercing cry and said she felt "a fire in her stomach." The doctors looked on in silence, without attempting to alleviate her sufferings.

"But," said Louis to them, "is it possible you will let a woman die like this without doing something?"

Vallot replied that the illness was not fatal. "It is," he explained, "a sort of colic which may last nine, ten, or even twenty-four hours at the most."

And people continued to go and come in the room, laugh and talk with an inhuman indifference that must have been heart-rending to the unhappy woman.

La Grande Mademoiselle was astonished that no one had thought of speaking to her of the state of her soul.

"At this moment," she writes, "Monsieur entered. I said to him, 'Madame is not in a fit state to die, and she should be confessed.'

"He answered that I was right, and told me that her confessor was a Capuchin who was good for nothing except to do her honour by appearing in public in her coach that people might see she had one.

"'A different sort of man,' he added, 'is needed to speak to her about death. Whom could we get that would sound well to put in the _Gazette_?'

"'At such a time,' I said, 'the best qualification that a confessor could have was to be a pious man.'

"'Ah, I have it!' he replied; 'the Abbé Bossuet is the man. He has just been nominated for the bishopric of Condom.'"

Hereupon Louis, disgusted at such callousness, and unable to support the sight of Madame's sufferings, took an affectionate leave of her and hastened back to Versailles.

Bossuet was sent for, but in the meantime the rumour "_Madame se meurt!_" had reached Paris, and a host of persons flocked to St. Cloud. Among them were the great Condé and the old Maréchal de Gramont, father of the Comte de Guiche, who went to her bathed in tears. "She told him pathetically that he was losing a good friend, that she was dying, and at first she thought she had been poisoned by mistake." Then turning to her sincerest friend, whose simple narrative of her death should have made all others superfluous, she said with something of her old gaiety--

"'Madame de La Fayette, my nose has shrunk already.'

"I answered by my tears, for what she said was only too true, and I had noticed it before. The hiccough seized her. She told Esprit (one of the doctors) that it was the death-hiccough. She had asked several times how soon she should die; she repeated the question, and although she was answered as a person not near death, we saw well that she had no hope. Her thoughts never rested on life; she never uttered a word of reflection on the destiny which was taking her off in the prime of life; never questioned the doctors as to whether it were possible to save her; showed no impatience for remedies, except in so far as the violence of her pains made her long for them; exhibited a calmness in the certainty of death, in the suspicion of poison; in short, a courage of which no example can be found, and which it is difficult even to represent."

When Montague, the English Ambassador, arrived, she said--

"You see the sad condition I am in. I am going to die. Ah! how I pity the King, my brother, for I am sure he loses the person in the world who loves him best."

"A little while later," says Montague in a letter he wrote to Charles, "she called me again, bidding me _be sure_ to say all the kind things in the world from her to her brother, and thank him for all his kindness and care of her.

"'Pray tell my brother I never persuaded him to join France out of my own interest, but because I thought it for his honour and advantage, for I always loved him above all things in the world.'

"I asked her in English if she believed herself poisoned. Some confessor standing near catching the word _poison_, which is the same in French as in English, quickly interposed--

"'Madame, you must accuse nobody, but offer up your life as a sacrifice to God.'

"So she only shrugged her shoulders."

Perhaps the most touching incident of this leave-taking was associated with Tréville. This man was the Captain of Monsieur's Mousquetaires, and one of the wittiest and best-educated men at Court. "To talk like Tréville, to be as learned as Tréville, was the highest compliment you could pay a man." He was one of the chiefs of the Port-Royal coterie, which was the centre of intellectual life in France--and he loved Madame. It was a love that did them both honour--a chivalrous devotion that never overstepped the bounds of respect. To approach Madame at such a moment and take leave of her for ever before the envious eyes of that crowded, callous room was impossible to Tréville. But, notwithstanding her hectic excitement and intense suffering, Madame observed him standing in the background.

"Adieu, Tréville, adieu, mon ami!" she waved.

The simple farewell broke his heart. The next day he left the Court and the world for ever.

In these last terrible moments she forgot no one. Monsieur having left the room, she sent to call him back, and in bidding him farewell declared that "she had never been faithless to him." The solemnity of the occasion on which these words were uttered has inclined most of her biographers to acquit her of the adulteries with Louis and the Comte de Guiche of which she was suspected. There are other evidences, however, of Madame's virtue which might be cited quite as convincing as this; and in regard to the Comte de Guiche at all events, the various ladies for whom he sighed before he met Madame were all agreed in attributing a physical rather than a spiritual cause to the "Platonic" character of his amours.

Her strength now began to fail fast, and as a last resort the doctors decided to bleed her. The incision was made in her foot, but no blood flowed, and her exhaustion was so extreme that they thought she would die while her foot was still in the warm water. The doctors then declared that they would try one more remedy, but she begged them to give her the Extreme Unction before it was too late. It was given to her by a priest who was present, and who exhorted and rebuked her like a Scotch Calvinist. When he had finished she said meekly--

"At what o'clock did Jesus Christ die? At three o'clock?"

"Do not mind that, Madame," he replied, "you must endure life and wait for death with patience."

At this moment Bossuet arrived. He was so overcome at the sight of her that he nearly fainted.

"He spoke to her of God," says Madame de La Fayette, "in a manner suitable to her condition and with that eloquence which marks all his sermons. He made her perform such little acts as he thought necessary, and she entered into all that he told her with zeal. While he was speaking a maid of honour approached to give her something of which she had need. She said to her in English, in order that Bossuet might not hear, and preserving till death the politeness characteristic of her--

"'Remember to give M. Bossuet, when I am dead, the emerald ring that I have had made for him.'

"While he was praying with her he was nearly exhausted by the strain on his nature. Madame asked him gently if she might not take a few moments' rest; he told her that she might, and he would withdraw and pray for her. M. Feuillet" (the priest who had given her the Extreme Unction) "remained at her side, and almost at the same moment Madame begged him to recall M. Bossuet, for she felt she was about to die. M. Bossuet hurried back and gave her the crucifix. She took it and embraced it with ardour. M. Bossuet continued to speak to her, and she replied with the same clearness as if she had never been ill, keeping the crucifix pressed to her lips to the last. As her strength failed it fell from her hands, and she lost speech and life at the same time. Her agony lasted but a moment; and after two or three little convulsive movements of the mouth, she expired at half-past two in the morning, and nine hours after having been taken ill."

* * * * *

It is only natural that the suddenness and mystery of such an illness and death should have been fertile in historical speculation.

For about one hundred and fifty years the world generally took it for granted that Madame was poisoned--especially as some of the doctors privately expressed this opinion, which was contrary to their official statement at the post-mortem. But in the early part of the nineteenth century the world suddenly changed its mind and declared that Madame died "naturally" of cholera morbus or peritonitis. As far as we are concerned one theory is as good as another. Our object is not to emulate the latest authorities and perform, like them, a literary autopsy on remains we have never seen. At this late day it is of not the least consequence to the world whether Madame was poisoned or not. By all means let us take it for granted, with M. Anatole France and many another of equal distinction, that her untimely end was natural. But as the other theory is thoroughly in keeping with seventeenth-century customs, it is, if no longer worthy of credence--which, after all, is not proved--at least pregnant with possibility.

As a good "poison story" it will always be worth telling; and as no one has ever told it more graphically than Saint-Simon we will give his version.

He says that when the news that Madame had expired reached Versailles--

"The King, who had gone to bed, rose, sent for Brissac, who was the captain of the guards and close at hand, and commanded him to choose six body-guards, trusty and secret, to go and take up Simon Morel, Madame's _maître d'hôtel_, and to bring him to him in his cabinet. This was done before morning. When the King saw him he ordered Brissac and his valet de chambre to withdraw, and assuming a most alarming aspect and tone--

"'My friend,' said he, surveying him from head to foot, 'listen well to me. If you confess all and tell me the truth about what I want to know from you, whatever you may have done I pardon you; it shall never be mentioned again. But beware how you disguise the least thing, for if you do you are a dead man before you leave this place. Has not Madame been poisoned?'

"'Yes, Sire,' answered Morel.

"'And who has poisoned her and how?' said the King.

"He replied that it was the Chevalier de Lorraine, who had sent the poison from Italy to Beuvron and Effiat (two of Monsieur's equerries). Whereupon the King, redoubling his assurances of favour and threats of death, said--

"'And my brother, did he know of it?'

"'No, Sire. None of us three were fools enough to tell him. He never keeps a secret, he would have ruined us.'

"At this reply, the King uttered a long 'Ah!' like a man oppressed, who all at once breathes again.

"'Well,' said he, 'that is all I want to know.' And Brissac restored Morel to liberty."

Saint-Simon further declares that a few days before Monsieur married his second wife Louis took her aside and told her these circumstances, assuring her that Monsieur was innocent of any participation in this crime, and that were he not convinced of it he would not have permitted his remarriage. This second Madame, or La Palatine, as she was called, who by this marriage became the mother of the Regent d'Orléans, and was not the least original of the many strikingly original persons of "_le grand siècle_," tells the story in another fashion, in that remarkable correspondence of hers from which as much historical ore has been mined as from Saint-Simon's memoirs:--

"It is only too true," she writes in her blunt, vigorous way, "that Madame was poisoned, but without the knowledge of Monsieur. While the villains were arranging the plan of poisoning the poor woman, they deliberated whether they should tell Monsieur or not.

"The Chevalier de Lorraine said, 'No, don't tell him, for he cannot hold his tongue. If he does not tell the first year, he may have us all hanged ten years afterwards.'

"They therefore made Monsieur believe that Madame had taken poison in Holland (on her way back from England), which did not act until she arrived at St. Cloud. Nor was it Madame's chicory-water that Effiat had poisoned, but the goblet. A valet de chambre, who was with Madame and afterwards in my service, told me that in the morning while Monsieur and Madame were at Mass, Effiat went to the sideboard, and taking Madame's glass rubbed the inside of it with a paper, and that he, the valet, said to him--

"'Monsieur d'Effiat, what are you doing in this room, and why do you touch Madame's glass?'

"Effiat answered, 'I am dying with thirst, I wanted something to drink, and the glass being dirty I was cleaning it with some paper.'

"After dinner Madame asked for some chicory-water, and as soon as she had swallowed it she cried out, 'I am poisoned!'

"All that were present drank of the same chicory-water, but not from the same glass, so, of course, it did them no harm."

Such are the most authoritative "poison" theories which nineteenth-century investigation has very brilliantly but not altogether exploded.

* * * * *

Madame's death, as may be imagined, created a profound sensation throughout Europe. In London, considering how slight had been her connection with her native country, the indignation was remarkable. An infuriated mob rushed to the French Embassy, which but for the precautions taken by the Government to protect it they would have destroyed. Whitehall was utterly prostrated. Charles took to his bed for several days.

"Never," said Rochester, "was any one so regretted since dying was the fashion."

But for the good sense of the King, England would have declared war on France. Louis, whose grief was genuine, did all that he could to prove his regret--all but punish the suspected poisoners. On the contrary, Effiat was promoted and the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom he detested, to Monsieur's and his own delight, was recalled. Perhaps no other course was left open to him, if the report of foul play which threatened to plunge him into a war was not to be hushed up at all costs. But to prove to Charles II. and Europe that he was free from implication in this strange death, he at once ordered a post-mortem, at which English doctors and the English Ambassador were present. The verdict of the autopsy was "death from natural causes." It served to allay popular anger but not popular suspicion.

Louis also gave Madame such a funeral as few kings have ever had.

"I do not think," wrote Madame de Sévigné, who was present, "that there will be any better music in heaven."

Bossuet pronounced over the corpse his masterpiece, which is familiar to every schoolboy in France. On his finger, placed there by Louis himself, there glittered the emerald Madame had bequeathed him with her dying breath, and which he wore till his own death. The body was buried at St. Denis beside that of Henrietta Maria. It was the first that the mob dug up one hundred and twenty-three years later when the tombs of the kings were desecrated. It was flung into a pit behind the church along with Louis' and the rest of his dynasty's. By a curious coincidence it--or what was supposed to be it--was the first body restored to its original resting-place after Waterloo.

By a still more curious coincidence, Madame's daughter, Marie Louise, whom they married to the last King of Spain, of the House of Austria, died at the same age and in the same strange way as her mother. There is something decidedly uncanny in the fate that decreed that Effiat, as French Ambassador at Madrid, should be the medium through whom her husband corresponded with her; that the Chevalier de Lorraine should be the man appointed to lead her to the altar; and that the Comtesse de Soissons should be the one to poison her!

If happiness be the aim of prince and peasant alike, it was not, at all events, in the Armida-courts of the seventeenth century that it was to be found. It was of Madame, his friend and patron, that Molière was thinking when his Alceste sang--

"Si le roi me donnait,
Paris sa grande ville,
Et qu'il me fallut quitter
L'amour de ma mie,
Je dirais au roi Henri
Reprenez votre Paris,
J'aime mieux ma mie, ô gué,
J'aime mieux ma mie."

_After Sir Godfrey Kneller._]

LOUISE DE KÉROUAL, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH

A SPY OF THE RESTORATION

If proof were required of anything so obvious as the cynicism of fame, one might cite the subject of this memoir as an example. Of European importance in her own day, and now--excepting Nell Gwynn--unquestionably the best remembered because the most odious of all the women of the Restoration, although "Madam Carwell," as the English people called her, has escaped oblivion, the mere spelling of her name has become a matter of indifference to history.

Kéroual, Kéroualle, Querouralles, Querouailles are some of the ways it is printed, and we only adopt the first as being the most frequent French mode.

A similar uncertainty attaches to her origin.

The Duchess of Portsmouth, however, had no doubt about it and was herself extremely proud of her ancestry, and boasted--when in England, be it understood--an ancient and distinguished lineage. It is characteristic of _parvenus_. Colbert, Louis XIV.'s famous Finance Minister, claimed a noble Scot, by name Cuthbert, who flourished in the reign of Macbeth or earlier, as the progenitor of his shopkeeper father. But there were many like Madame de Sévigné, whose opinions take precedence over those of most of her contemporaries, who had the greatest contempt for the Duchess of Portsmouth's family pretensions. Be the matter as it may, by Louise de Kéroual's first start in life there hangs a tale.

Her father, whether or not he could trace his ancestry back to the fourteenth century as his daughter declared--when there was a saying in Brittany: "The Kérouals for antiquity, the Kermans for riches, and the Kergournadecs for chivalry"--went to Paris as a boy to seek his fortune. Of this he appears to have amassed in the wool trade sufficient to enable him to retire in middle life to his native Brittany, where, being from all accounts an honest and unpretentious man, he devoted his leisure to the bringing up of his son and two daughters, and dispensing modest hospitality. It was at his house in Brest that Evelyn made his acquaintance, "and being used very civilly, was obliged to return it in London," when "Monsieur Querouaille and his lady, parents to the famous beauty," paid the Duchess of Portsmouth a visit. Her Grace was then, adds Evelyn, "in the height of favour, but he never made any use of it." The bringing-up of his children, however, would seem to have been beyond the abilities of the civil wool merchant, and owing to the dissension of his daughters he placed Louise, the elder and prettier of the two, at a boarding-school in a neighbouring town. Here she developed the insinuating manners that later on were "to tie England and France together with her silken girdle."

Having won the friendship of the head-mistress, she obtained certain social privileges, which, from the reports of the use she made of them, so alarmed the retired wool merchant that he sent her to Paris to the care of a widowed aunt. This lady, whose very name has long since been forgotten, owed in a great measure her means of subsistence to the generosity of the Duc de Beaufort, in whose service her husband had died. According to the author of the curious libel known as "The Secret History of the Duchess of Portsmouth," Louise got round her aunt as easily as she had got round the head-mistress of her boarding-school. For it was not long before she made the acquaintance of the Duc de Beaufort, and interested this powerful nobleman in her behalf. Whereby she was constrained to learn the rudiments of intrigue, a subject in which she was afterwards to become pre-eminently proficient.

It is easy to censure a girl who deliberately prefers to seek her happiness in immorality. It is done every day. But there are few girls of the alert, ambitious nature of Louise de Kéroual, who if placed in her position would not follow her example. What were her prospects? On the one hand she had the choice between returning home and marrying some petty, humdrum _bourgeois_, or immuring herself for the rest of her life in a convent. On the other, by prudently selling her virtue, she might have the riches, gaiety, and pleasure she craved, and still remain respectable. Of these two prospects, the first was impossible to Louise. But the second was an opportunity--one of those opportunities that Shakespeare says, "if taken at the flood, lead on to fortune"--the great opportunity of life that most of us sigh for and fail to recognise till too late. To Louise de Kéroual it came in the guise of a Duc de Beaufort, High Admiral of France. Her mind never suffered the slightest misgiving, her conscience the least qualm. Like all persons destined for success, she knew what she wanted and took it. A woman so _rusée_ as Louise was not such a fool as to be found out. Her _liaison_ with the Duc de Beaufort was never suspected.

How long it lasted it is impossible to say, but it was brought to an abrupt end in the summer of 1669, when the Duc de Beaufort was given the command of the naval expedition which had for its object the relief of the Venetians who for twenty-four years had been besieged by the Turks in Crete. From this expedition he never returned, but before he sailed Louise took care to provide for her future by obtaining through his influence one of the posts of maid of honour to Madame which had just fallen vacant. This was the beginning of her fortune. The report that she accompanied Beaufort to Crete disguised as a page is a mere fabrication of her libeller. The Kéroual who accompanied the Duc de Beaufort to Crete was her younger brother, Sebastien, whom, no doubt, she now tried to provide for, as she did on a later occasion in England for her sister, Henriette. Sebastien, however, did not long enjoy the fruits of his sister's patronage; he died a few days after his return from Crete.

It was probably through this event that Louise became acquainted with the Comte de Sault, who on Beaufort's death appears to have taken Sebastien into his service, in which he was at the time of his death. This Comte de Sault was the eldest son of the Duc de Lesdiguières, and one of the best-known men at Court. He had won the chief prize a few years before in the famous jousts in front of the Tuileries, which gave their name to the Place du Carrousel. The Comte de Sault soon occupied more or less publicly the same place in the maid of honour's affections that had previously been held by the Duc de Beaufort. In fact, there was so little privacy about their relations that Madame de Sévigné and Louvois did not hesitate to put the worst construction on them, while several years later in England "a great peer taunted her insultingly with the recollection of this old scandal."

This affair was, however, decently conducted, as such things were in France, and Mademoiselle de Kéroual's social standing did not suffer. Perhaps she may have hoped to arrest the notice of the King himself, but if so she was disappointed. During the short time that she was in Madame's service the monarch's attention was too much absorbed by the beautiful Mademoiselle de la Vallière to be diverted by Mademoiselle de Kéroual. From all accounts Louis was scarcely aware of her existence till she was recommended to him as an agent likely to be of use in binding Charles II. hand and foot in the toils of French diplomacy.

As the Imperial policy of Louis XIV. was never so successful as when Louise de Kéroual queened it at Whitehall, some account of the obstacles opposed to it is necessary in order to understand the nature of the game she was unexpectedly called upon to play.

The "hereditary enmity" which until quite recent times so long estranged France and England might be compared to the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. From time to time, however, this ancient feud was patched up, so to speak, by romantic Romeo and Juliet _ententes_, which, unfortunately, owing to national incompatibility of temper, always ended, as such love-affairs only too often do in real life, in mutual mistrust and animosity. In no instance was the cause of estrangement ever the same. In the age of Louis XIV. the bone of contention was Religion. It is impossible in this day of religious indifference to realise the force of the passions that tormented these two foolish nations then. England was passionately Protestant, and the Civil War and ten years of Cromwell had made her democratic. For the first time in her history England had found an ideal. France, on the other hand, never found hers till the Revolution, but as the "eldest daughter of the Church" she was bigotedly Catholic, and Richelieu and Mazarin had converted her to despotism. The temper of the two neighbours being such, strife was only a question of time, and the political interests of each only served to whet animosity. By the middle of the seventeenth century it was evident that the great House of Austria was slowly dying in Spain, and France, governed by a vigorous and ambitious king who was surrounded with the ablest brains in Europe, determined by fair means or foul to be its heir. Louis XIV. cast a covetous eye on Flanders, and at the bare thought of having such a virile neighbour in the place of this old decrepit one Protestant Holland turned uneasily towards England. The plunder of Spain did not at that time tempt England. Nor was there any particular reason why she should fight Holland's battles, especially as Holland had come out of the recent Thirty Years' War her commercial rival. On the contrary, it would have been to England's interest to see Holland weakened. But a nation with an ideal has "principles," and England made hers the excuse to defy Catholic and despotic France to plunder Spain at the expense of Protestant and democratic Holland. Consequently England joined the Triple League.

To break this formidable barrier, which prevented him from achieving his ambition, was the object of Louis XIV. It was for this purpose that he had sent Madame to England, and when she returned with the treaty she had coaxed out of her brother it not unnaturally seemed to him that his end was in sight. But within three weeks of leaving Dover Madame had died under circumstances that suggested foul play, and Charles all but tore up the "Traité de Madame." Louis instantly despatched the tactful Marécha de Bellefonds to Whitehall to assure Charles of his sincere grief at the untimely end of his sister and to save the treaty if possible. But the King of England was in no mood to be beguiled by expressions of friendship.

"When do they intend to let the Chevalier de Lorraine back to Court?" he asked rudely of the Marécha when that envoy arrived.

It was evident that Louis' road to Flanders and Madrid was blocked again. Madame's death had aroused to a fever heat the hatred of Protestant England for Catholic France. The people were crying out for vengeance on the murderers of their king's sister. Charles, had he wished for war, would have had the support of the nation.

"Must we abandon the great affair?" wrote the French Ambassador in London to his master at Versailles. "It is feared that the grief of the King of England, which is deeper than can be imagined, and the malevolent talk and rumours of our enemies will spoil everything."

But Charles on this occasion was cooler than his people. He contented himself with coldly accepting Louis' sympathy. The Court of Versailles, which dreaded nothing so much at that moment as a war, breathed freely again, and immediately set to work to restore Charles to the good-humour in which he was before Madame's death. French money poured into England, ministers and mistresses fattened on it. For ten thousand livres a year "wanton Shrewsbury" guaranteed "to make Buckingham do whatever the French King wished." Corruption was everywhere. The French Ambassador was prepared to buy both Houses of Parliament and the "principles" of the nation as well. Even Algernon Sidney, who in the eyes of English Liberalism is surrounded with the nimbus of martyrdom, took five hundred pounds every Parliamentary session from Louis. Charles had as great a weakness for French gold as any of his subjects, but though he willingly sold himself, he never gave full value in return if he could possibly avoid it.

Protestant England was not long in discovering this slippery trait in its own dealings with its sovereign. It is a mistake to imagine that Monk jockeyed Charles on to the throne. The crown of his ancestors was enthusiastically restored to him by an overwhelming majority of the nation. The Restoration of Charles II. was the result of, perhaps, the must honest _plebiscite_ in history. Monk was merely the means the English people employed to notify Charles they wanted him. But in their ardour the foolish people forgot to demand security for the power they gave him; they merely contented themselves with an implied understanding that he was to be, so to speak, the junior partner in the national business. Alas for human credulity! Who would have thought that the amiable, charming King, whose frivolity and sensuality seemed to guarantee a weak and pliable nature, would prove to be more than a match for his people? The versatile and shifty monarch made his power felt from the start, and clearly let it be understood that in the firm of Charles Stuart, England and Company, it was he who furnished the brains and England the capital. In such partnerships as a rule the capitalist buys experience dearly. And so it was in this case. Under that good-natured, happy-go-lucky manner of Charles there lurked the cunning of a Mazarin. Totally devoid of "principles" himself, he secretly despised his people for having them, and perhaps, also, for having given him power, such as no sovereign since Elizabeth had possessed, without a guarantee as to how he would use it. What wonder that with such a king and such a people Charles II. should have sat on the English throne, till he tumbled from it in apoplexy, as securely as a cowboy on a broncho? The comparison is apt; for, spurred by Exclusion Bills, Popish Plots, French harlots, and French gold, England, aglow with its new-found ideal of faith and freedom, bucked furiously and in vain with the subtle and ever-popular (!) Charles on its back. To put the bit into this man's mouth as he had put it into that of his country was one of the chief objects of the reign of Louis XIV.

_After Charles le Brun_]

In the nineteenth century it was customary to treat the Grand Monarque and his Grand Siècle with contempt. It was one of those momentary fits of rage into which Progress falls when it beholds its father's ghost in history. The rage has passed--in France at all events--and Louis XIV. and his famous century are receiving more flattery now than even Voltaire bestowed on them. They have become national monuments. Every schoolboy has parsed one of Bossuet's _oraisons funèbres_; every soldier has heard of Condé, every woman remembers the romance of Mademoiselle La Beaume Le Blanc de la Vallière. And there isn't a Socialist workman who goes with his wife and children on a Sunday to see the fountains play at Versailles but has some difficulty in choking the "_Vive la France!_" that sneaks in his throat as he strolls through the historic pile dedicated to All the Glories. For everybody has been taught that Louis XIV. in his long reign of seventy-two years--the longest, by the way, in history--did something more than powder his hair with gold-dust, wear high-heeled shoes, and tamely submit to Madame de Maintenon. Among his many shining endowments he possessed the royal faculty of recognising and appreciating talent in others. As in the earlier part of his reign, at all events, there happened to be a profusion of ability in France, he was served as only the very great are ever served. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the agents he sent to England. They were first-rate diplomatists. Their despatches were sprinkled with all sorts of gossip, _on dits_, and trivial details, which were awaited with impatience and devoured with avidity at Versailles. An English despatch was not unlike a brilliant society novel. Thus it happened that the _personnel_ of Whitehall was as familiar to Louis as that of Versailles; the English people and their "principles" as well known as the condition of his own country; and the life, character, and habits of Charles II. better understood than, perhaps, those of any other person in Europe.

To one so well informed as Louis the key to the riddle, "How is the slippery Charles to be held?" was "Woman." At the time of the death of Madame there was no sultana in the seraglio at Whitehall. This was Louis' chance. His Ambassador and his creatures, the English Ministers, assured him that the Duchess of Cleveland had ceased to be worth her price, that Charles had appeared much smitten with Mademoiselle de Kéroual when she came to England with Madame, and that in their opinion French interests could not better be served than by sending the aforesaid maid of honour to England as soon as possible. Louis and his Council gave the matter their due consideration, and Louise de Kéroual, only too willingly, as her fortunes were now at a very low ebb, started for Whitehall. She was clearly given to understand the capacity in which she was going, the influence that sent her, and the duties expected of her. Buckingham engaged to take her back with him after Madame's funeral, but "he totally forgot both the lady and his promise, and leaving the disconsolate nymph at Dieppe to manage as she could, passed over to England by way of Calais." The English Ambassador in Paris, who was not a "Buckingham man" but an "Arlington" one, never gave Buckingham the time to atone for his forgetfulness. He at once sent Mademoiselle de Kéroual over to Lord Arlington at his own expense, whereby he adroitly made a friend of the future _maîtresse en titre_ for himself and Arlington. For, says Bishop Burnet, "the Duke of Buckingham lost all the merit he might have pretended to, and brought over a mistress whom his own strange conduct threw into the hands of his enemies."

The purpose of this visit was pretty well known to the public, to whom "Madam Carwell" at once became an object of detestation. She was, however, favourably received at Whitehall. Dryden, the laureate at the time, and St. Evremond welcomed her in verse, of which the former is too dull and the latter too indecent to quote. At the sight of her Charles at once brightened up, and appointed her to be one of the maids of honour to Queen Catherine, giving as his excuse that it was out of a "decent tenderness" for his sister's memory. Poor Catherine, knowing the purpose for which her new maid of honour had been appointed, disliked her from the first. But Catherine had learnt wisdom in the course of her married life, and though she hated the new favourite as much as she had ever hated the Castlemaine, she accepted her without a protest.

Not so her Grace of Cleveland. She fought with her characteristic fury to retain her threatened power, and owing to the subtle coyness of Louise appeared to keep her ascendency over the King. For the cunning Breton girl understood that to yield to Charles at the first assault was not the way to keep him, so she adopted the tactics of La Belle Stuart and played the prude. But it was some time before this strategy was appreciated by Louis and his creatures at Whitehall. The French Ambassador became alarmed. "I think it safe," he wrote to Louis, "while undermining the Duchess of Cleveland to keep her on our side by appearing to be with her."

The correspondence that passed between the French Ambassador and the French Court on this subject gives a more vivid impression of the way the game of politics was played by the Great Powers at the time of the Restoration than any history on the subject.

At length the Ambassador was able to write to Louvois, "I believe I can assure you that she has so got round King Charles as to be of the greatest service to our sovereign and master, if she only does her duty."

This news revived the drooping spirits of the Court of France, but it was still impatient for some proof of her power. Arlington, one of the Cabal Ministers, who was as much interested in her success as Louis himself, therefore decided to bring about the long-anticipated _dénouement_ by inviting the Court to Euston, his palatial country seat, where by a counter-strategy it was hoped the cautious Louise would be forced to yield. The Ambassador, in imparting this information to Louvois, wrote:--

"Milord Arlington told me to advise Mademoiselle de Kéroual to cultivate the King's good graces, and so to manage that he should only find in her society enjoyment, peace, and quiet. He added that if Lady Arlington took his advice she would urge the new favourite to yield unreservedly to the King or to retire to a French convent.... The King did me the honour yesterday to sup at the Embassy, when he proved to me, by indulging in a gay and unfettered debauch, that he does not mistrust us."

The satisfaction this news gave to Louis may be judged from the following extract from Louvois' reply:--

"His Majesty was vastly amused with all that was in your letter about Mademoiselle de Kéroual, and will have pleasure in hearing the progress she makes in the King's favour. He even jested on the subject, and says there must either be small love felt for the mistress or great confidence felt in you to suffer you to go to Euston in such jolly company."

As may be imagined, the house party at Euston produced the result expected of it, and the way in which this result was effected is as illuminating as the above correspondence. It was quite in keeping with the total absence of morality which characterised all who were engaged in the intrigue. "Lady Arlington," says Forneron, "under the pretext of killing the tedium of October evenings in a country house, got up a burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Kéroual 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 her nuptial chamber."

As this book is not conceived in a prurient spirit we shall forbear to give the reader a description of the "ceremonies" connected with this mock-marriage. Suffice it to say that the French Ambassador's report of the "nights at Euston" reads like an account of a Palais Royal farce. In an age of such unashamed publicity as the Restoration, no attempt was made to keep the doings of the Arlingtons' house party out of the press; consequently the pamphlets of the day revelled in reporting the spicy details of this Euston saturnalia with as much zest and in the same spirit of hypocrisy as the press of the present takes in a smart society lawsuit. While the coffee-houses, which corresponded to our modern clubs, rung with gossip of the new French mistress of the King, who was reported to have protested to some noble lord against the scurrility to which she was subjected by the public: "Me no bad woman. If me taut me was one bad woman, me would cut mine own trote."

Of course, what happened at Euston was much exaggerated. Evelyn, who was a guest of the Arlingtons, declares that he never witnessed any of the things the newspapers and lampoons reported. Nevertheless, he admits that he was only twice admitted to the royal circle. At any rate, the sequel that occurred nine months later afforded Louis XIV. and "Madam Carwell" the greatest satisfaction. It is well known that next to a mistress Charles loved nothing so much as a child.

After the visit at Euston Louise de Kéroual was the acknowledged _maîtresse en titre_ in place of the termagant Cleveland, retired. Charles appointed her lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, the duties of which post she had the delicacy to abandon to a deputy, and created her Duchess of Portsmouth. At the same time, as there was every prospect that she would hold long what she had conquered, and as a reward for her services, Louis paid her in advance, so to speak, by giving her the title of Duchesse d'Aubigny. As she played the _rôle_ of _maîtresse en titre_ as it was played in France there is nothing in her story henceforth to shock the most modest susceptibilities. All the _grossièretés_ with which the Duchess of Cleveland, whom she supplanted, embellished the post were by her Grace of Portsmouth refined into political intrigues.

Among the many services she was expected to render to her "master," the French King, the principal were:--

1. To induce Charles to declare war against Holland (!)

2. To convert Charles to Roman Catholicism (!!)

3. To persuade the Duke of York, the King's brother and heir to the throne, to marry a French princess.

For Charles to have plunged his newly restored kingdom into a war with Holland, considering the "principles" of the English nation on the subject, would seem incredible. It was, however, the easiest of the Duchess of Portsmouth's tasks. The "principles" were circumvented, reasoned, excused, explained away, conscientiously, be it understood--oh, very conscientiously!--as is always the way with a brave "principle" when confronted with an interest. At the bottom England was jealous of Holland's naval and commercial supremacy. Charles, like the cowboy, knew his broncho; he declared war on Holland to please his mistress and win his French subsidy, and England bucked, and bucked--and fought.

On the other hand, Charles, being no fool, and knowing his broncho thoroughly, was not to be induced to change the form of faith he professed. He had too vivid a recollection of his exile to play any practical jokes on Fortune. If, as is extremely doubtful, he was a Catholic at bottom, it was certainly not from religious conviction. His Huguenot grandfather, Henri Quatre, had said that "Paris was well worth a Mass." Precisely in the same way he reasoned that the throne of England was well worth a confirmation. The Duchess of Portsmouth was far too indifferent herself on this subject to disagree with Charles, and far too cunning to risk her position in England in order to help Louis XIV. weaken the country with another civil war. She therefore made up her mind, says Forneron, "that there was but a single course to follow. It was by slow degrees to habituate the English to a revival of Catholic ideas, rites, and ceremonies." This was but a polite way of telling Louis that if the conversion of England to Catholicism depended on her it would never be converted. Also, knowing the displeasure such a declaration coming from her would create at the French Court, she made it on purpose to show Louis that she was no mere contemptible spy to be ordered about and scolded, but the Duchess of Portsmouth, _maîtresse en titre_ to His Britannic Majesty. This show of independence was based, no doubt, on the certainty of her hold on Charles. For at this time the French Ambassador wrote angrily to Louvois of her Grace: "She has got the notion 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."

Scarcely less inferior in importance to Louis than making Charles declare war on Holland and converting him to Popery was the subjection of his heir, the Duke of York. Louis XIV. thought of the future as much as the present. It was above all things necessary to him that if Charles should be unexpectedly carried off his successor should be the friend of France. The surest way of securing this appeared to be by making a match between James, whose wife, Anne Hyde, the daughter of Clarendon, had just died, and a princess of France. Louis, knowing James as well as he did Charles, was aware that he was one of those men who would be governed entirely by his wife. Consequently he proposed a member of his own family, the Duchesse de Guise, the sister of La Grande Mademoiselle and daughter of his uncle, Gaston d'Orléans. But Madame, before her death, had given her brother such an unfavourable account of this widowed princess, who was exceedingly plain, and had "laid in thrice in two years," that James positively refused to consider her. The French Court hereupon got angry at being defied by a stupid Duke of York, and ordered the Duchess of Portsmouth to put on the screw. But here again she was wiser than her employers. For under the pressure of being urged to do what he disliked there was danger that James might suddenly show resentment and marry an enemy of France.

The Duchess of Portsmouth, therefore, suggested that the distinction it was proposed to confer on the Duchesse de Guise should lapse in favour of her own nominee. This was one of the Mesdemoiselles d'Elboeuf, of the princely family of Lorraine. There was no doubt an _arrière pensée_ in this suggestion by which "little Kéroual," as they scornfully called her at Versailles, wished the world to see that she had risen to a height in which she could patronise princesses of Lorraine. Louis, however, had a grudge of some sort against the d'Elboeufs, and Mary of Modena was chosen instead. But the Duchess of Portsmouth refused to give up the cause of her _protégées_ without a struggle, if only to show Louis what a power his spy had become, and quarrelled with the French Ambassador, the Arlingtons, and the French faction generally. It is true peace was made again between the spy and her employers, but she had gained one thing of the greatest importance to her by the quarrel, and that was the recognition by Louis that "little Kéroual" for the future was to be treated with the respect due so great a personage as the Duchess of Portsmouth.

The independence she displayed in this intrigue was made not from any disloyalty to Louis, but from the necessity of enhancing the value of her services--of making hay, as the saying is, while the sun was shining. No one understood better than she the extreme precariousness of her position. Mistrusted and unpopular at Whitehall, and cordially hated by the people, there was nothing between her and ruin but the slippery, fickle King. It was not enough to be Duchess of Portsmouth with ten thousand pounds a year paid out of the wine licenses; if Charles discarded her she would be forced to return to France as poor as she left it, and it was not from the Court of France that she would get protection then. She had to provide against this emergency, and she did it with a cunning and determination for which no one, judging from her "childish, simple, and baby face," as Evelyn described it, would have given her credit. To bleed Louis as well as Charles was her object, and she pursued it with a rapacity that rivalled that of her Grace of Cleveland.

It was comparatively easy to get what she wanted out of Charles. Nell Gwynn had declared that she would be content with five hundred a year, but she managed to mulct the Treasury of sixty thousand pounds in one year and get her son created Duke of St. Albans, with suitable revenues to maintain the dignity. But the spoils of Nell were modest compared with those of the Duchess of Portsmouth. She was never addicted to gambling to the same extent as the Mazarin and the Cleveland, but she could afford to lose five thousand pounds at one sitting, as she once did. The drafts she made on the national exchequer were enormous. Her allowance of ten thousand pounds was generally swollen to forty thousand, and one year she succeeded in drawing the huge sum of £136,668. Like the Duchess of Cleveland, she sold every office that fell vacant; but she went a step further than her Grace, and took commissions on the bribes with which Louis bought his creatures in England, trafficked in royal pardons, and did a good business in selling convicts to West Indian planters. This rapacity never flagged during her reign. Immediately after Charles's death she put in a claim for ten thousand pounds of her pension, which was in arrears, and his successor did not hesitate to pay it.

The furniture that she accumulated in her apartments at Whitehall represented a fortune far greater than her father had amassed in the wool trade.