She was merciless to any of her lady friends who lapsed from virtue, or in any way, however slight, offended the proprieties.  But the vials of her fiercest anger were reserved for her mother-in-law, the Dowager-Countess, whose shameless intrigue with the Prince Regent scandalised the world in an age of lax morals; and the outraged Princess Caroline had no more valiant champion.  She not only declined to have anything to say to her husband’s mother, she carried her disapproval to the extent of refusing point blank to appear at Court.  So furious was the Regent at this slight that “the dotard with corrupted eye and withered heart,” as Byron calls him, had her portrait removed from the Palace Gallery of Beauties, and returned to its owner.

A few days later, however, the Countess had her revenge.  At a party in Cavendish Square she was walking along a corridor with Samuel Rogers when she saw the Regent coming towards them.  As he approached he drew himself to his full height, and passed with an insolent and disdainful stare, which Lady Jersey returned with a look even more cold and contemptuous.  Then, with a toss of her proud head, she turned to Rogers and laughingly said, “I did that well, didn’t I?”

It was, perhaps, as Queen and Autocrat of “Almack’s” that Lady Jersey won her chief fame—­Almack’s, that most exclusive and aristocratic club in Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, the membership of which was the supreme hall-mark of the world of fashion.  No rank, however exalted, no riches, however great, were a passport to this innermost social circle, over which Lady Jersey reigned like a beautiful despot.

Scores of the smartest officers of the Guards, men of rank and fashion, and pets of West End drawing-rooms, clamoured or cajoled for admission to this jealously-guarded temple, but its doors only opened to receive, at the most, half a dozen of them.  Even such social autocrats as Her Grace of Bedford and Lady Harrington were coldly turned away from the doors by the male members of the club; while the ladies shut them in the face of Lord March and Brook Boothby, to the amazed disgust of these men of fashion and conquest—­for, by the rules of the club, male members were selected by the ladies, and vice versa.  But beyond all doubt the destinies of candidates were in the hands of the half dozen Lady Patronesses who formed the Committee of the club—­Princess Esterhazy, Princess von Lieven, Ladies Jersey, Sefton and Cowper, and Mrs Drummond Burrell; and of these my Lady Jersey was the only one who really counted.

“Three-fourths even of the nobility,” says a writer in the New Monthly Magazine, “knock in vain for admission.  Into this sanctum sanctorum, of course, the sons of commerce never think of intruding; and yet into the very ‘blue chamber,’ in the absence of the six necromancers, have the votaries of trade contrived to intrude themselves.”

“Many diplomatic arts,”