A serjeant-at-arms, accompanied by other officers of justice and their men, proceeded to the house in which Lady Purbeck was concealed, and at once guarded every door into the street; but admittance was refused, and the Countess of Buckingham sent “a gentleman” to the “Ambassador of Savoy,” whose garden adjoined that of the house in which Lady Purbeck was staying, to beg the Ambassador that he would allow the officers to pass through his house and garden into the garden of Lady Purbeck’s house of refuge “for her more easy apprehension and arrest that way.”

The Ambassador refused, considering it an indignity to be asked to allow men of such a type a free passage through his house, and feeling horrified at the idea of lending assistance to “the surprise and arrest of a fair lady, his neighbour.”  After many protests, however, he consented to the entrance of one constable into his garden, and the man was to avail himself of an opportunity which, said the Ambassador, would occur at dinner-time, of passing into the garden of the next house and arresting Lady Purbeck.

In the meantime the Ambassador called his page, “a handsome fair boy,” and, with the help of his attendants, dressed him in women’s clothes.  He then ordered his coach to be brought round, and when it came, his attendants, ostentatiously, but with a show of great hurry and fear of discovery, ran out of the house with the sham-lady and “thrust her suddenly into” the carriage, which immediately drove off.

The constable, congratulating himself upon his sharpness in discovering, as he thought, the escape of Lady Purbeck, at once gave the alarm to his followers outside.  The coach “drove fast down the Strand, followed by a multitude of people, and those officers, not without danger to the coachman, from their violence, but with ease to the Ambassador, that had his house by this device cleaned of the constable.”

While all this turmoil was going on in the Strand, Lady Purbeck went quietly away to another place of hiding; but her escape got the gallant and kind-hearted Ambassador into great trouble.  Buckingham was enraged when he heard of the trick.  Sir John Finett shall himself tell us what followed.  Buckingham, he says, declared that “all this was done of designe for the ladies escape, (which in that hubbub she made), to his no small prejudice and scorn, in a business that so nearly he said concerned him, (she being wife to his brother), and bringing him children of anothers begetting; yet such as by the law (because begotten and born while her husband was in the land) must be of his fathering.