22 The Greatest Ornament of Whitchall. As Cowley and his friend passed the weary hours indurance, many an old tale could the poet tell the peer of stirring times; for Cowley had accompanied Charles I. in many a perilous journey, and had protected Queen Henrietta Maria in her escape to France: through Cowley had the correspondence of the royal pair, when separated, been carried on. The poet had before suffered imprisonment for his loyalty; and, to disguise his actual occupation, had obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and assumed the character of a physician, on the strength of knowing the virtues of a few plants. Many a laugh, doubtless, had Buckingham at the expense of Dr. Cowley: however, in later days, the duke proved a true friend to the poet, in helping to procure for him the lease of a farm at Chertsey from the queen, and here Cowley, rich upon £300 a year, ended his days. For some time after Buckingham's release, he lived quietly and respectably at Nun-Appleton, with General Fairfax and the vapid Mary. But the Restoration-the first dawnings of which have been referred to in the commencement of this biography-ruined him, body and mind. He was made a Lord of the Bedchamber, a Member of the Privy Council, and afterwards Master of the Horse,* and Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire. He lived in great magnificence at Wallingford House, a tenement next to York House, intended to be the habitable and useful appendage to that palace. He was henceforth, until he proved treacherous to his sovereign, the brightest ornament of Whitehall. Beauty of person was hereditary: his father was styled the 'handsomest-bodied man in England,' and George Villiers the younger equalled George Villiers the elder in all personal accomplishments. When he entered the Presence-Chamber all eyes followed him; every movement was graceful and stately. Sir John Reresby pronounced him to be the finest gentleman he ever saw.' He was born,' Madame Dunois declared, 'for gallantry and magnificence.' His wit was faultless, but his manners engaging; yet his sallies often descended into buffoonery, and The duke became Master of the Horse in 1688: he paid £20,000 to the of Albemarle for the post. Duke Buckingham's Wit and Beauty. 23 he spared no one in his merry moods. One evening a play of Dryden's was represented. An actress had to spout forth this line My wound is great because it is so small!' She gave it out with pathos, paused, and was theatrically distressed. Buckingham was seated in one of the boxes. He rose, all eyes were fixed upon a face well known in all gay assemblies, in a tone of burlesque he answered Then 'twould be greater were it none at all.' Instantly the audience laughed at the Duke's tone of ridicule, and the poor woman was hissed off the stage. The king himself did not escape Buckingham's shafts; whilst Lord Chancellor Clarendon fell a victim to his ridicule : nothing could withstand it. There, not in that iniquitous gallery at Whitehall, but in the king's privy chambers, Villiers might be seen, in all the radiance of his matured beauty. His face was long and oval, with sleepy, yet glistening eyes, over which large arched eyebrows seemed to contract a brow or. which the curls of a massive wig (which fell almost to his shoulders) hung low. His nose was long, well formed, and flexible; his lips thin and compressed, and defined, as the custom was, by two very short, fine, black patches of hair, looking more like strips of sticking-plaster than a moustache. As he made his reverence, his rich robes fell over a faultless form. He was a beau to the very fold of the cambric band round his throat; with long ends of the richest, closest point that was ever rummaged out from a foreign nunnery to be placed on the person of this sacrilegious sinner. Behold, now, how he changes. Villiers is Villiers no longer. He is Clarendon, walking solemnly to the Court of the Star Chamber: a pair of bellows is hanging before him for the purse; Colonel Titus is walking with a fire shovel on his shoulder, to represent a mace; the king, himself a capital mimic, is splitting his sides with laughter; the courtiers are fairly in a roar. Then how he was wont to divert the king with his descriptions! Ipswich, for instance,' he said, was a town without inhabitants—a river it had without water— 6 24 Flesknoe's Opinion of Him. streets without names; and it was a place where asses wore boots alluding to the asses, when employed in rolling Lord Hereford's bowling-green, having boots on their feet to prevent their injuring the turf. Flecknoe, the poet, describes the duke at this period, in 'Euterpe Revived' The gallant'st person, and the noblest minde, In all the world his prince could ever finde, Or to participate his private cares, Or bear the public weight of his affairs, Like well-built arches, stronger with their weight, And well-built minds, the steadier with their height; O' the noble and the gallant Buckingham.' The praise, however, even in the duke's best days, was overcharged. Villiers was no well-built arch,' nor could Charles trust to the fidelity of one so versatile for an hour. Besides, the moral character of Villiers must have prevented him, even in those days, from bearing 'the public weight of affairs.' A scandalous intrigue soon proved the unsoundness of Flecknoe's tribute. Amongst the most licentious beauties of the court was Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, the daughter of Robert Brudenel, Earl of Cardigan, and the wife of Francis, Earl of Shrewsbury amongst many shameless women she was the most shameless, and her face seems to have well expressed her mind. In the round, fair visage, with its languishing eyes, and full, pouting mouth, there is something voluptuous and bold. The forehead is broad, but low; and the wavy hair, with its tendril curls, comes down almost to the fine arched eyebrows, and then, falling into masses, sets off white shoulders which seem to designate an inelegant amount of embonpoint. There is nothing elevated in the whole countenance, as Lely has painted her, and her history is a disgrace to her age and time. She had numerous lovers (not in the refined sense of the word), and, at last, took up with Thomas Killigrew. He had been, like Villiers, a royalist: first a page to Charles I., next a companion of Charles II., in exile. He married the fair Cecilia Croft; yet his morals were so vicious that even in the Court of Venice to which he was accredited, in order to borrow His Duel with the Earl of Shrewsbury. 25 money from the merchants of that city, he was too profligate to remain. He came back with Charles II., and was Master of the Revels, or King's Jester, as the court considered him, though without any regular appointment, during his life: the butt, at once, and the satirist of Whitehall. It was Killigrew's wit and descriptive powers which, when heightened by wine, were inconceivably great, that induced Villiers to select Lady Shrewsbury for the object of his admiration. When Killigrew perceived that he was supplanted by Villiers, he became frantic with rage, and poured out the bitterest invectives against the countess. The result was that, one night, returning from the Duke of York's apartments at St. James's, three passes with a sword were made at him through his chair, and one of them pierced his arm. This, and other occurrences, at last aroused the attention of Lord Shrewsbury, who had hitherto never doubted his wife: he challenged the Duke of Buckingham; and his infamous wife, it is said, held her paramour's horse, disguised as a page. Lord Shrewsbury was killed,* and the scandalous intimacy went on as before. No one but the queen, no one but the Duchess of Buckingham, appeared shocked at this tragedy, and no one minded their remarks, or joined in their indignation: all moral sense was suspended, or wholly stifled; and Villiers gloried in his depravity, more witty, more amusing, more fashionable than ever; and yet he seems, by the best-known and most extolled of his poems, to have had some conception of what a real and worthy attachment might be. The duel with the Earl of Shrewsbury took place 17th January, 1667-8. 'A world of things must curiously be sought: That is a master-piece above What only looks and shape can do ; Greatness of thought, and worth, which draw, She that would raise a noble love must find She must be what said I ?-she must be you: Το you alone it always shall be true.' The next lines are also remarkable for the delicacy and happy turn of the expressions Though Phillis, from prevailing charms, Have forc'd my Delia from my arms, Think not your conquest to maintain In vain, fair nymph, in vain you strive, Have justified such cruelty, By the same fate that conquered me. When age shall come, at whose command Those troops of beauty must disband- A rival's strength once took away, What slave's so dull as to obey? But if you'll learn a noble way Like his father, who ruined himself by building, Villiers had a monomania for bricks and mortar, yet he found time to write The Rehearsal,' a play on which Mr. Reed in his 'Dramatic Biography' makes the following observation: 'It is so perfect a masterpiece in its way, and so truly original, that notwithstanding its prodigious success, even the task of imitation, which most kinds of excellence have invited inferior geniuses to undertake, has appeared as too arduous to be attempted with regard to this, which through a whole century |