Use your best endeavours," wrote Charles, "to facilitate what I am sure
my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady
Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his
enemy so long as I live."

My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew
his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a variety of
conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All that
Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a contest
as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter, threatening line:
"Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do
promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live."

All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing unless
he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that
he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into
oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.

Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious
embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used
arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to
himself.

That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys,
tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk
of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in
the privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it
were plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers.

You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant whom he
dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-nature, turning
upon her, storming back, and finally threatening her with the greater
disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to Portugal, unless she would
submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon her here.

Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail, prevail
it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and submitted. And a
very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine was not only installed
as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon we find the Queen treating
her with a friendliness that provoked commen