Early in 1662, the Duke of Buckingham had been engaged in practices against the court:  he had disguised deep designs by affecting the mere man of pleasure.  Never was there such splendour as at Wallingford House—­such wit and gallantry; such perfect good breeding; such apparently openhanded hospitality.  At those splendid banquets, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ’a man whom the Muses were fond to inspire, but ashamed to avow,’ showed his ‘beautiful face,’ as it was called; and chimed in with that wit for which the age was famous.  The frequenters at Wallingford House gloried in their indelicacy.  ‘One is amazed,’ Horace Walpole observes, ’at hearing the age of Charles II. called polite.  The Puritans have affected to call everything by a Scripture’ name; the new comers affected to call everything by its right name;

    ’As if preposterously they would confess
     A forced hypocrisy in wickedness.’

Walpole compares the age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes—­’which called its own grossness polite.’  How bitterly he decries the stale poems of the time as ‘a heap of senseless ribaldry;’ how truly he shows that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment.  ’When Satyrs are brought to court,’ he observes, ’no wonder the Graces would not trust themselves there.’

The Cabal is said, however, to have been concocted, not at Wallingford House, but at Ham House, near Kingston-on-Thames.

In this stately old manor-house, the abode of the Tollemache family, the memory of Charles II. and of his court seems to linger still.  Ham House was intended for the residence of Henry, Prince of Wales, and was built in 1610.  It stands near the river Thames; and is flanked by noble avenues of elm and of chestnut trees, down which one may almost, as it were, hear the king’s talk with his courtiers; see Arlington approach with the well-known patch across his nose; or spy out the lovely, childish Miss Stuart and her future husband, the Duke of Richmond, slipping behind into the garden, lest the jealous mortified king should catch a sight of the ‘conscious lovers.’

This stately structure was given by Charles II., in 1672, to the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale:  she, the supposed mistress of Cromwell; he, the cruel, hateful Lauderdale of the Cabal.  This detestable couple, however, furnished with massive grandeur the apartments of Ham House.  They had the ceilings painted by Verrio; the furniture was rich, and even now the bellows and brushes in some of the rooms are of silver filigree.  One room is furnished with yellow damask, still rich, though faded; the very seats on which Charles, looking around him, saw Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley (the infamous Shaftesbury), and Lauderdale—­and knew not, good easy man, that he was looking on a band of traitors—­are still there.  Nay, he even sat to Sir Peter Lely for a portrait for this very place—­in which, schemes for the ruin of the kingdom were concocted.