child should be christened by a Protestant clergyman, while his lordship insisted on the ceremony being performed by a Romish priest, brought about a separation, and from that time Lady Castlemaine, lodged in Whitehall, began her empire over the king of England.  That man, ’who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one,’ was the slave of this imperious and most impudent of women.  She forced him to settle on her an immense fortune, much of which she squandered at the basset-table, often staking a thousand pounds at a time, and sometimes losing fifteen thousand pounds a-night.

Nor did her wickedness end here.  We have some pity for one, who, like La Valliere, could be attracted by the attentions of a handsome, fascinating prince:  we pity though we blame.  But Lady Castlemaine was vicious to the very marrow:  not content with a king’s favour, she courted herself the young gallant of the town.  Quarrels ensued between Charles and his mistress, in which the latter invariably came off victorious, owing to her indomitable temper; and the scenes recorded by De Grammont—­when she threatened to burn down Whitehall, and tear her children in pieces—­are too disgraceful for insertion.  She forced the reprobate monarch to consent to all her extortionate demands:  rifled the nation’s pockets as well as his own; and at every fresh difference, forced Charles to give her some new pension.  An intrigue with Jermyn, discovered and objected to by the King, brought on a fresh and more serious difference, which was only patched up by a patent of the Duchy of Cleveland.  The Duchess of Cleveland was even worse than the Countess of Castlemaine.  Abandoned in time by Charles, and detested by all people of any decent feeling, she consoled herself for the loss of a real king by taking up with a stage one.  Hart and Goodman, the actors, were successively her cavalieri; the former had been a captain in the army; the latter a student at Cambridge.  Both were men of the coarsest minds and most depraved lives.  Goodman, in after-years was so reduced that, finding, as Sheridan advised his son to do, a pair of pistols handy, a horse saddled, and Hounslow Heath not a hundred miles distance, he took to the pleasant and profitable pastime of which Dick Turpin is the patron saint.  He was all but hanged for his daring robberies, but unfortunately not quite so.  He lived to suffer such indigence, that he and another rascal had but one under-garment between them, and entered into a compact that one should lie in bed while the other wore the article in question.  Naturally enough the two fell out in time, and the end of Goodman—­sad misnomer—­was worse than his beginning:  such was the gallant whom the imperious Duchess of Cleveland vouchsafed to honour.

The life of the once beautiful Barbara Villiers grew daily more and more depraved:  at the age of thirty she retired to Paris, shunned and disgraced.  After numerous intrigues abroad and at home, she put the crowning point to her follies by falling in love with the handsome Fielding, when she herself numbered sixty-five summers.