Upon her breast a sparkling cross she wore
    Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore.

And this devotion—­idolatry almost—­lasted as long as life itself, reaching its climax in his will, in which he left his actress-wife every penny of his enormous fortune, amounting to L900,000, “for her sole use and benefit, and at her absolute disposal, without the deduction of a single legacy to any other person.”

That a widow so richly dowered with beauty and gold should have a world of lovers in her train is not to be wondered at.  For five years she retained her new freedom, and then yielded to the wooing of William Aubrey de Vere, ninth Duke of St Albans (whose remote ancestor was Nell Gwynn, the Drury Lane orange-girl and actress), who made a Duchess of her one June day in 1827.

For ten short years Harriet Mellon queened it as a Duchess, retaining her vast fortune in her own hands and dispensing it with a large-hearted charity and regal hospitality, moving among Royalties and cottagers alike with equal dignity and graciousness.  At her beautiful Highgate home she played the hostess many a time to two English Kings and their Queens.

“The inhabitants of Highgate still bear in memory,” Mr Howitt records, “her splendid fetes to Royalty, in some of which, they say, she hired all the birds of the bird-dealers in London, and fixing their cages in the trees, made her grounds one great orchestra of Nature’s music.”

When her Grace died, universally beloved and regretted, in 1837, she proved her gratitude and loyalty to her banker-husband by leaving all she possessed, a fortune now swollen to L1,800,000, to Miss Angela Coutts (grand-daughter of Thomas Coutts and his first wife, Eliza Stark, a domestic servant) who, as the Baroness Burdett-Coutts of later years, proved by her large munificence a worthy trustee and dispenser of such vast wealth.

Such are but a few of the romantic alliances between the peerage and the stage, of which, during the last score of years, since Miss Connie Gilchrist blossomed into the Countess of Orkney and Miss Belle Bilton into my Lady Clancarty, there has been such an epidemic.

CHAPTER XX

A PEASANT COUNTESS

In the dusk of a July evening in the year 1791 a dust-covered footsore traveller entered the pretty little Shropshire village of Bolas Magna, which nestles, in its setting of green fields and orchards, almost in the shadow of the Wrekin.  The traveller had tramped many a long league under a burning sun, and was too weary to fare farther.  Moreover, night was closing in fast, and a few hissing raindrops and the distant rumble of thunder warned him that a storm was about to break.

He must find some sort of shelter for the night; and among the few thatch-covered cottages in whose windows lights were beginning to twinkle, his steps led him to a modest farmhouse behind the small village church.  In answer to his knock, the door was opened by a burly, pleasant-faced farmer, of whom the stranger craved a refuge from the storm until the morning, and a little food for which he offered to pay handsomely.  “I shall be grateful for even a chair to sit on,” added the weary traveller, when the farmer protested that he had no accommodation to offer him.