A scandalous intrigue soon proved the unsoundness of Flecknoe’s tribute.  Amongst the most licentious beauties of the court was Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, the daughter of Robert Brudenel, Earl of Cardigan, and the wife of Francis, Earl of Shrewsbury:  amongst many shameless women she was the most shameless, and her face seems to have well expressed her mind.  In the round, fair visage, with its languishing eyes, and full, pouting mouth, there is something voluptuous and bold.  The forehead is broad, but low; and the wavy hair, with its tendril curls, comes down almost to the fine arched eyebrows, and then, falling into masses, sets off white shoulders which seem to designate an inelegant amount of embonpoint.  There is nothing elevated in the whole countenance, as Lely has painted her, and her history is a disgrace to her age and time.

She had numerous lovers (not in the refined sense of the word), and, at last, took up with Thomas Killigrew.  He had been, like Villiers, a royalist:  first a page to Charles I., next a companion of Charles II., in exile.  He married the fair Cecilia Croft; yet his morals were so vicious that even in the Court of Venice to which he was accredited, in order to borrow money from the merchants of that city, he was too profligate to remain.  He came back with Charles II., and was Master of the Revels, or King’s Jester, as the court considered him, though without any regular appointment, during his life:  the butt, at once, and the satirist of Whitehall.

It was Killigrew’s wit and descriptive powers which, when heightened by wine, were inconceivably great, that induced Villiers to select Lady Shrewsbury for the object of his admiration.  When Killigrew perceived that he was supplanted by Villiers, he became frantic with rage, and poured out the bitterest invectives against the countess.  The result was that, one night, returning from the Duke of York’s apartments at St. James’s, three passes with a sword were made at him through his chair, and one of them pierced his arm.  This, and other occurrences, at last aroused the attention of Lord Shrewsbury, who had hitherto never doubted his wife:  he challenged the Duke of Buckingham; and his infamous wife, it is said, held her paramour’s horse, disguised as a page.  Lord Shrewsbury was killed,[6] and the scandalous intimacy went on as before.  No one but the queen, no one but the Duchess of Buckingham, appeared shocked at this tragedy, and no one minded their remarks, or joined in their indignation:  all moral sense was suspended, or wholly stifled; and Villiers gloried in his depravity, more witty, more amusing, more fashionable than ever; and yet he seems, by the best-known and most extolled of his poems, to have had some conception of what a real and worthy attachment might be.

The following verses are to his ’Mistress’:—­