Forty-eight hours later the bridegroom had joined his ship at Portsmouth; and his bride’s greatest joy, as she confessed, was when he had departed.  Such a marriage, the fruit of pique and anger, boded ill for happiness.  Frankly, the union was one long misery, broken by the intervals when the husband was away at sea, and accentuated during his, happily brief, visits to her.  Two children were born to this ill-assorted pair, but both died young; and Elizabeth Hervey had abundant opportunity to follow her natural bent, by seeking forgetfulness in dissipation.

In the full glow of her beauty, a wife who was no wife, she resumed her broken career of conquest.  She made a tour of Europe, leaving a train of broken-hearted and languishing lovers behind her.  At Berlin she brought Frederick the Great to his knees, and made an abject slave of him; she shocked the ladies of the Dresden Court by her laxity and the prodigal display of her charms, and by the same arts bewitched the men.  She led, we are told, a life of shameless dissipation, which only her beauty and intellectual gifts redeemed from vulgar depravity.  She had lovers in every capital she visited, and discarded them as lightly as so many playthings.

On her return to England, so anxious was she to obliterate that fatal episode in the dark church, she made a journey with certain friends to Lainston, and, while the vicar’s back was turned, tore the fatal page out of the marriage register.

Meanwhile, the naval lieutenant had blossomed into an Earl, on his father’s death; and when the new Earl, her husband, showed signs of failing health, and there was an early prospect of graduating as a wealthy dowager Countess, she saw the wisdom of making another journey to Lainston to replace the record of her marriage.  Alas, for her scheming; the moribund Earl took a new lease of life, and the gilded dowagerhood became nebulous and remote again.

But Elizabeth Chudleigh was not to be long baulked in her ambitious designs.  Though her charms had grown too opulent and were faded—­for she was now near her fiftieth birthday—­she was able to count among her slaves the aged Duke of Kingston, an amiable and weak old gentleman of enormous wealth, and with one accommodating foot already “in the grave.”

Wife, or no wife, she now made up her mind to be a Duchess at last.  She appealed to Lord Bristol, the husband from whom she had so long been estranged, to divorce her, even going so far as to offer to qualify for the divorce by an open and flagrant act of infidelity; but his lordship only shrugged a scornful shoulder.  Still, not to be thwarted, she brought a suit of jactitation of marriage, and, by a lavish use of bribes and cajolery, got a sentence from the Ecclesiastical Court which at last set her free.  Within a month she had blossomed into “the most high and puissante Princess, the Duchess of Kingston,” thus realising her childish ambition.