Such was my Lady Shrewsbury’s successor to the aristocratic, high-minded brother of Lord Carlisle.  Killigrew’s father was a well-known man of his day, for he wore cap and bells at Charles’s Court, and was privileged to practise his clowning on King and courtier and maid-of-honour with no heavier penalty than a box on the ears.  The extreme licence he permitted himself is proved by that joke at the expense of Louis XIV., which might well have cost any other man his head.  Louis, who always unbended to a merry jester, was showing his pictures to Killigrew, when they came to a painting of the Crucifixion, placed between portraits of the Pope and the “Roi Soleil” himself.  “Ah, Sire,” said the Jester, as he struck an attitude before the trio of canvases, “I knew that our Lord was crucified between two thieves, but I never knew till now who they were.”

Such was Tom Killigrew who kept Charles’s Court alive by his pranks and jests, and who is better remembered in our day as the man to whose enterprise we owe Drury Lane Theatre and the Italian Opera; and it would have been better for the world of his day if his son had been as decent a man as himself.  His fun, at least, was harmless, and his life, so far as we know it, was reasonably clean.  His son, however, was notorious as the most foul-mouthed, evil-living man in London, whose very contact was a pollution.  Once Pepys, always eager for new experiences, was inveigled into his company and that of the “jolly blades,” who were his boon companions; “but Lord!” the diarist says ingenuously, “their talk did make my heart ache!”

That my Lady Shrewsbury should stoop to such a liaison astonished even those who knew how widely she cast her net, and how indiscriminating her passion was in its quest for novelty.  That such a man should boast of his conquest over the beautiful Countess was inevitable.  He published it in every low tavern in London, gloating in his cups over “his lady’s most secret charms, concerning which more than half the Court knew quite as much as he knew himself.”

Among those to whom Killigrew thus boasted was the dissolute second Duke of Buckingham, whose curiosity was so stimulated by what he heard that he entered the lists himself, and quickly succeeded in ousting Killigrew from his place in my lady’s favour.  To the tavern-sot thus succeeded the most splendid noble in England, a man who, in his record of gallantry, was no mean rival to the Countess herself.  To be thus displaced by the man to whom he had boasted his conquest was a bitter blow to the libertine’s vanity; to be cut dead by Lady Shrewsbury, who had no longer any use for him, roused him to a frenzy of rage in which he assailed her with the bitterest invectives; “painted a frightful picture of her conduct, and turned all her charms, which he had previously extolled, into defects.”  The Duke’s warnings were powerless to stop his vindictive tongue; even a severe thrashing, which resulted in Killigrew begging abjectly for his life from his successful rival, failed to teach him prudence.  His slanders grew more and more venomous until they brought on him a punishment which nearly cost him his life.