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!”

George Hamilton, one of the most handsome and fascinating men in England, fared better, but retired from the pursuit of so seductive and tantalising a maid.  Still Hamilton was the most congenial playfellow of them all.  He was a madcap like herself, always ripe for fun and frolic; and for a time she revelled