and maid-of-honour with no
heavier penalty than a box on the ears. The extreme licence he permitted
himself is proved by that joke at the expense of Louis XIV., which might
well have cost any other man his head. Louis, who always unbended to a
merry jester, was showing his pictures to Killigrew, when they came to a
painting of the Crucifixion, placed between portraits of the Pope and
the "Roi Soleil" himself. "Ah, Sire," said the Jester, as he struck an
attitude before the trio of canvases, "I knew that our Lord was
crucified between two thieves, but I never knew till now who they were."

Such was Tom Killigrew who kept Charles's Court alive by his pranks and
jests, and who is better remembered in our day as the man to whose
enterprise we owe Drury Lane Theatre and the Italian Opera; and it would
have been better for the world of his day if his son had been as decent
a man as himself. His fun, at least, was harmless, and his life, so far
as we know it, was reasonably clean. His son, however, was notorious as
the most foul-mouthed, evil-living man in London, whose very contact
was a pollution. Once Pepys, always eager for new experiences, was
inveigled into his company and that of the "jolly blades," who were his
boon companions; "but Lord!" the diarist says ingenuously, "their talk
did make my heart ache!"

That my Lady Shrewsbury should stoop to such a _liaison_ astonished even
those who knew how widely she cast her net, and how indiscriminating her
passion was in its quest for novelty. That such a man should boast of
his conquest over the beautiful Countess was inevitable. He published it
in every low tavern in London, gloating in his cups over "his lady's
most secret charms, concerning which more than half the Court knew quite
as much as he knew himself."

Among those to whom Killigrew thus boasted was the dissolute second Duke
of Buckingham, whose curiosity was so stimulated by what he heard that
he entered the lists himself, and quickly succeeded in ousting Killigrew
from his place in my lady's favour. To the tavern-sot thus succeeded the
most splendid noble in England, a man who, in his record of gallantry,
was no mean rival to the Countess herself. To be thus displaced by the
man to whom he had boasted his conquest was a bitter blow to the
libertine's vanity; to be cut dead by Lady Shrewsbury, who had no longer
any use for him, roused him to a frenzy of rage in which he assailed her
with the bitterest invectiv