On hearing the news the King was beside himself with anger.  He forbade the runaways ever to show their faces near his Court—­he even dismissed his Chancellor Clarendon, whom he suspected of having a hand in the plot.

But all his wrath fell impotently on the new Duchess, who returned his presents and settled smilingly down to enjoy her new dignities and her honeymoon.  Within a year—­so powerless is anger against love—­Charles summoned the truants back to favour, and the Duchess, as Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen, was installed once more at Whitehall, more splendid and pre-eminent than ever.  During her brief exile, she had held a rival court of her own as near Whitehall as Somerset House, where, says Pepys,

“she was visited for her beauty’s sake by people, as the Queen is at nights.  And they say also she is likely to go to Court again, and there put my Lady Castlemaine’s nose out of joint.  God knows that would make a great turn.”

How far the Duke’s bride succeeded in putting Lady Castlemaine’s “nose out of joint” must remain a matter of speculation.  There seems little doubt that as a wife she proved more complaisant to Charles than as a maid.  She had carried her virtue unstained to the altar and a Duchess’s coronet, and this seems to have been the main concern of the beautiful prude.  That Charles was more infatuated even with the wife than with the maid-of-honour is incontestable.  He not only made open love to her at Court, but, especially after he had packed off her husband, the Duke, as Ambassador to Denmark, his pursuit took a clandestine and more dangerous shape.  Pepys throws a light on what looks like a secret amour, when he tells us, on the authority of Mr Pierce, that Charles once “did take a pair of oars or a sculler, and all alone, or but one with him, go to Somerset House (from Whitehall), and there, the garden-door not open, himself clamber over the wall to make a visit to the Duchess, which is a horrid shame.”

[Illustration:  FRANCES, DUCHESS OF RICHMOND]

But the Duchess’s new reign of conquest was destined to be brief.  To the consternation of her Royal lover she was struck down with small-pox,

“by which,” to quote Pepys again, “all do conclude she will be wholly spoiled, which is the greatest instance of the uncertainty of beauty that could be in this age; but then she hath had the benefit of it to be first married, and to have kept it so long, under the greatest temptations in the world from a King, and yet without the least imputation.”

That Pepys’s fears were realised we know from Ruvigny’s letters to Louis XIV., in which he says that “her matchless beauty was impaired beyond recognition, one of her brilliant eyes being nearly quenched for ever.”  During this tragic illness Charles, who was consumed with anxiety, visited her more than once, thus proving, at a terrible risk, the sincerity of his devotion.  And it is even said that his admiration of her was not diminished by the loss of her beauty.