All, probably, was smooth and pleasing to the monarch as he ranged down the fine gallery, ninety-two feet long; or sat at dinner amid his foes in that hall, surrounded with an open balustrade; or disported himself on the river’s green brink.  Nay, one may even fancy Nell Gwynn taking a day’s pleasure in this then lone and ever sweet locality.  We hear her swearing, as she was wont to do, perchance at the dim looking-glasses, her own house in Pall Mall, given her by the king, having been filled up, for the comedian, entirely, ceiling and all, with looking-glass.  How bold and pretty she looked in her undress!  Even Pepys—­no very sound moralist, though a vast hypocrite—­tells us:  Nelly, ‘all unready’ was ’very pretty, prettier far than he thought.’  But to see how she was ‘painted,’ would, he thought, ‘make a man mad.’

‘Madame Ellen,’ as after her elevation, as it was termed, she was called, might, since she held long a great sway over Charles’s fancy, be suffered to scamper about Ham House—­where her merry laugh perhaps scandalised the now Saintly Duchess of Lauderdale,—­just to impose on the world; for Nell was regarded as the Protestant champion of the court, in opposition to her French rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth.

Let us suppose that she has been at Ham House, and is gone off to Pall Mall again, where she can see her painted face in every turn.  The king has departed, and Killigrew, who, at all events, is loyal, and the true-hearted Duke of Richmond, all are away to London.  In yon sanctimonious-looking closet, next to the duchess’s bed-chamber, with her psalter and her prayer-book on her desk, which is fixed to her great chair, and that very cane which still hangs there serving as her support when she comes forth from that closet, murmur and wrangle the component parts of that which was never mentioned without fear—­the Cabal.  The conspirators dare not trust themselves in the gallery:  there is tapestry there, and we all know what coverts there are for eaves-droppers and spiders in tapestried walls:  then the great Cardinal spiders do so click there, are so like the death-watch, that Villiers, who is inveterately superstitious, will not abide there.  The hall, with its enclosing galleries, and the buttery near, are manifestly unsafe.  So they heard, nay crouch, mutter, and concoct that fearful treachery which, as far as their country is concerned, has been a thing apart in our annals, in ’my Lady’s’ closet.  Englishmen are turbulent, ambitious, unscrupulous; but the craft of Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale—­the subtlety of Ashley, seem hardly conceivable either in a Scot or Southron.