: Love Romances of the Aristocracy by Hall Thornton - Nobility Great Britain

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LOVE ROMANCES OF THE ARISTOCRACY.

A PRINCESS OF PRUDES

When Barbara Villiers was enslaving Charles by her opulent charms, the queen of his many mistresses, Frances Stuart was growing to beautiful girlhood, an exile at the French Court, with no dream or care of her future conquest of a king. Her father, a son of Lord Blantyre, had carried his death-dealing sword through many a fight for the first Charles, a distant kinsman of his own; and, when the Stuart sun set in blood, had made good his escape to the friendly shores of France, where he had found a fresh field for his valour.

Meanwhile his daughter was happy in the charge of the widowed Queen Henrietta Maria, who although, as Cardinal de Retz tells us, she frequently "lacked a faggot to leave her bed in the Louvre," and even a crust to stay the pangs of hunger, proved a tender foster-mother to brave Walter Stuart's child, and watched her growth to beauty with a mother's pride.

But Madame Stuart had other designs for her pretty daughter; and when Henrietta Maria took boat to England to shine again at the Court of Whitehall, under her son's reign, Frances Stuart joined her retinue, and found herself transported from the schoolroom to the most brilliant and dangerous court in Europe. When this transformation came in her life Walter Stuart's daughter was just blossoming into as sweet and fragrant a flower as ever bloomed in woman's guise. Fair and graceful as a lily, with luxuriant brown hair, eyes of violet, and a proud, dainty little head, she had a figure which, although yet not fully formed, was faultless in its modelling and its exquisite grace. And these physical charms were allied to an unspoiled freshness, which combined the artless fascinations of the child with the allurements of the woman.

And all her other Whitehall lovers--a legion of them, from the Duke of Buckingham to the youngest page at Court, she treated in precisely the same way. Was it innocence or artfulness, this assumption of childish prudery? "She was a child," says Count Hamilton, "in all respects save playing with dolls"--a child who refused to grow into a woman, and yet, one shrewdly suspects that behind her childishness was a motive deeper than is usually associated with so much simplicity.

She infected the whole Court with her exuberant youthfulness. Basset-tables and boudoir intrigues were alike deserted to enjoy the new era of nursery games which she inaugurated. Jaded gallants and sedate Ladies of the Bedchamber mingled their shrieks of laughter in blind-man's buff and hunt-the-slipper with the Stuart maid as Lady of Misrule and arch-spirit of jollity. Pepys was shocked--or affected to be--one day by seeing all the great and fair ones of the Court squatting on the floor in the Whitehall gallery playing at "I love my love with an A because he is Amorous"; "I hate him with a B because he is Boring," and so on; and no doubt rocking with glee at some sally of wit, for, Pepys says, "some of them were very witty."

The little madcap even carried her games and toys into the sacred environment of the Audience Chamber. Seated on the floor, innocently exposing the prettiest pair of ankles in England, and surrounded by her big playfellows, she would challenge them to a competition in castle-building with cards; and when her carefully-reared edifice toppled to the ground she would break into a silvery peal of laughter, and clap her hands for the King to come and help her to rebuild it, for no less distinguished assistant would she allow to touch her cards. And Charles never failed to respond to the summons, though he were hobnobbing with chancellor or archbishop, and would be sent away happy, with a kiss for his pains. No wonder poor Pepys was horrified at such unseemly goings-on.

And equally small wonder that the King's mistresses and the great ladies of the Court cast many a jealous and vindictive glance on the child, who had power to lure away their slaves to her nursery shrine. The Duke of Buckingham, himself, was prouder to be her favourite playfellow than of all his conquests in the field of love. He wrote songs, and sang them for her pleasure; he kept her in a ripple of laughter for hours together by his stories and clever mimicry, and rushed to her side whenever she summoned him to build card-castles or to join in a romp--until what was "play to the child" began to prove a serious matter to the man of the world. He found that, while he was building castles or chasing the elusive fairy blindfolded, she had stolen his heart away; but when he ventured to tell his love to her she boxed his ears, and told him to run away and not be so naughty again.

Was there ever so tantalising and inscrutable a maid? And as she had treated the King and his chief favourite, she treated all her other playfellows. The Earl of Arlington, a grave, dignified Lord of the Bedchamber, so far unbended as to make love to the little witch, who stood so well in the favour of his Sovereign; and never did man exert himself more to win the favour of a maid.

"Having provided himself," says Hamilton, "with a great number of maxims and some historical anecdotes, he obtained an audience of Miss Stuart, in order to display them; at the same time offering her his most humble services in the situation to which it had pleased God and her virtue to raise her. But he was only in the preface of his speech, when he reminded her so ludicrously of Buckingham's mimicry of him that she burst into a peal of laughter in his very face, and rushed stifling from the room. Thus ignominiously was sounded the death-knell of Arlington's hopes!"

Such a feat was an efficient passport to her favour. Rollicking George was at once installed as playmate-in-chief to the spoiled child, and was privileged with a greater intimacy than any of her other favourites had ever enjoyed.

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