The mother’s natural pang at losing this poor little child must have been increased when she thought of her rival Frank Esmond’s wife, who was a favorite of the whole Court, where my poor Lady Castlewood was neglected, and who had one child, a daughter, flourishing and beautiful, and was about to become a mother once more.

The Court, as I have heard, only laughed the more because the poor lady, who had pretty well passed the age when ladies are accustomed to have children, nevertheless determined not to give hope up, and even when she came to live at Castlewood, was constantly sending over to Hexton for the doctor, and announcing to her friends the arrival of an heir.  This absurdity of hers was one amongst many others which the wags used to play upon.  Indeed, to the last days of her life, my Lady Viscountess had the comfort of fancying herself beautiful, and persisted in blooming up to the very midst of winter, painting roses on her cheeks long after their natural season, and attiring herself like summer though her head was covered with snow.

Gentlemen who were about the Court of King Charles, and King James, have told the present writer a number of stories about this queer old lady, with which it’s not necessary that posterity should be entertained.  She is said to have had great powers of invective and, if she fought with all her rivals in King James’s favor, ’tis certain she must have had a vast number of quarrels on her hands.  She was a woman of an intrepid spirit, and, it appears, pursued and rather fatigued his Majesty with her rights and her wrongs.  Some say that the cause of her leaving Court was jealousy of Frank Esmond’s wife:  others, that she was forced to retreat after a great battle which took place at Whitehall, between her ladyship and Lady Dorchester, Tom Killigrew’s daughter, whom the King delighted to honor, and in which that ill-favored Esther got the better of our elderly Vashti.  But her ladyship, for her part, always averred that it was her husband’s quarrel, and not her own, which occasioned the banishment of the two into the country; and the cruel ingratitude of the Sovereign in giving away, out of the family, that place of Warden of the Butteries and Groom of the King’s Posset, which the two last Lords Castlewood had held so honorably, and which was now conferred upon a fellow of yesterday, and a hanger-on of that odious Dorchester creature, my Lord Bergamot;* “I never,” said my lady, “could have come to see his Majesty’s posset carried by any other hand than an Esmond.  I should have dashed the salver out of Lord Bergamot’s hand, had I met him.”  And those who knew her ladyship are aware that she was a person quite capable of performing this feat, had she not wisely kept out of the way.