Court Beauties of Old Whitehall Part 15

The French king, however, was not destined to drink deep of the wine of success; the cup he had so craftily fas.h.i.+oned was to be dashed from his lips by William of Orange, and his fair vineyard utterly devastated by the Duke of Marlborough. But who now would have thought, while under a cloudless sky Louis pressed the juice from his grapes, that at fifty-five Charles II.'s race was run? Or that in three short years "France's Poland" would have for ever freed herself from the Sun King?

Certainly not the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth, when one Sunday night in February, 1685, Death entered the Grand Gallery at Whitehall, and in a twinkling confounded all the deep and cunning intrigues of the subtlest brains in Europe.

Everybody remembers the justly celebrated pa.s.sage in which Macaulay has described the voluptuous scene Whitehall presented on that fatal night.

What a picture in the Gallery of History it is, this English tableau of the literary Delaroche! What wealth of colour and detail! Fancy that great gallery of Whitehall, "an admirable relic of the magnificence of the Tudors, crowded with revellers and gamblers," in which Charles sat "chatting and toying" with the d.u.c.h.esses of Cleveland, Mazarin, and Portsmouth, and listening to the clink of "gold heaped in mountains" at the ba.s.set-table while the Mazarin's "French page, a handsome boy, whose vocal performances were the delight of Whitehall, warbled some amorous verses." Then picture the consternation of all those revellers and gamblers in that splendid corridor when the King, suddenly stricken with apoplexy, tumbles into the arms of a courtier standing near! For lack of a lancet they opened his vein with a penknife; a hot warming-pan is placed on his head. "A loathesome volatile salt, extracted from human skulls, was forced into his mouth. He recovered his senses; but was evidently in a situation of extreme danger." For a week he lingers, begging the people who crowd his death-room pardon for the unconscionable time he takes in dying; polite, witty, good-natured to the end, and not forgetting to recommend his mistresses to the care of his successor!

No king that we can recall has ever died in such pomp of flippancy as Charles II. Louis XV. dismissing du Barry and making his _amende honorable_ to G.o.d; the Regent d'Orleans dropping dead in the arms of the d.u.c.h.esse de Falaris; and Louis XIV. solemnly setting out for the Plutonian kingdom with all the etiquette of Versailles, are historic death-scenes that strike the imagination. But to us they all seem to pale beside the studied, G.o.dless levity of Charles's. It was characteristic of the era which died with him, for in reality the death-bed of Charles II. was likewise that of the Restoration.

And how fared the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth in this catastrophe? "I found her," wrote Barillon to Louis, "in great grief. But instead of bemoaning her own sad and altered position she took me into a little room and said, 'Monsieur l'Amba.s.sadeur, I am now going to tell you a secret, although its public revelation would cost me my head. The King of England is at the bottom of his heart a Catholic, and there he is, surrounded with Protestant Bishops! There is n.o.body to tell him of his state or speak to him of G.o.d. I cannot decently enter his room. Besides, the Queen is now there constantly.'" (Poor little Catherine, who went into convulsions and sent to beg his pardon, at which Charles exclaimed, "Alas, poor lady! She beg my pardon! I beg hers with all my heart.") "The Duke of York is too busy with his own affairs to trouble himself about the King's conscience. Go and tell him that I have conjured you to warn him that the end is near, and that it is his duty to save without loss of time his brother's soul."

This forethought of the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth, who was religious _au fond_ like all Bretons, for the salvation of Charles's soul disarms criticism. To scold her for not conforming to our twentieth-century code of morals is preposterous in its presumption. And as we are quite unable to satisfy ourselves as to the exact standard of the morals of her own day, we had better not bother about her morals at all.

An hour after Charles's death King James paid her a visit of condolence.

James's object, no doubt, was to keep well with Louis through her. But his reign was short and stormy, and the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth was too clever not to foresee the disaster of 1688. After settling her affairs in England she returned to France. But her interests obliged her to be ever in close relations with the former country, which in the wars waged between the two for nearly twenty-five years exposed her to many humiliating suspicions. On one occasion Louis threatened to exile her; on another William of Orange refused to allow her to land in England.

Her worthless son ran away from her and compromised her politically. Her wealth took to itself wings and flew away. In the fire that destroyed the Palace of Whitehall she lost all her precious furniture. For years she was pursued by creditors and haunted by bailiffs. But Louis was grateful for her past services and protected her from the law as far as he could. He gave her a pension to make up for the loss of her English one, and this the Regent doubled. She who had had countless thousands a year was reduced to a paltry eight hundred. But she still had her t.i.tles, and till old age overtook her she frequently made use of her _right_ to sit on a _tabouret_ at Versailles, and as d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth and ex-mistress of Charles II. swelled the ranks of the Jacobites at St. Germain, much to the disgust of Queen Mary. The last years of her life were pa.s.sed at Aubigny in a strange mixture of miserliness and religious devotion, completely forgotten by the world in which she had played so great a part.

Fifty years after the death of Charles she died in the full possession of her faculties at the age of eighty-five, having seen all she had toiled for undone, the House of Stuart driven from England and even from its refuge in France. She had outlived Louis and all his splendour and all her contemporaries. It was time for this relic of a crumbling despotism to depart. The mills of G.o.d had begun to grind. Another fifty years and the Revolution was to sweep the _ancien regime_ away for ever.