ed herself at
the door of Westminster Abbey to demand admission, on the day of her
husband's coronation, to be received by the frigid words, "We have no
instructions to allow you to pass"; and we can see her as, "humiliated,
confounded, and with tears in her eyes," she returned sadly to her
carriage, the heart crushed within her. Less than three weeks later,
seized by a grave and mysterious illness, she laid down for ever the
burden of her sorrows, leaving instructions that her tomb should bear
the words:

CAROLINE
THE INJURED QUEEN OF ENGLAND.

As for Pergami, the idol with the feet of clay, who had clouded her last
years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours
and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a
Prince and called Caroline "mother," ended his days, while still a young
man, in a madhouse.

CHAPTER XX

THE LOVE-AFFAIRS OF A REGENT

When Louis XIV. laid down, one September day in the year 1715, the crown
which he had worn with such splendour for more than seventy years, his
sceptre fell into the hands of his nephew Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, who
for eight years ruled France as Regent, and as guardian of the
child-King, the fifteenth Louis.

Seldom in the world's history has a reign, so splendid as that of the
Sun-King, closed in such darkness and tragedy. The disastrous war of the
Spanish Succession had drained France of her strength and her gold. She
lay crushed under a mountain of debt--ten thousand million francs; she
was reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness, ruin, and disorder,
and it was at this crisis in her life as a nation that fate placed a
child of four on her throne, and gave the reins of power into the hands
of the most dissolute man in Europe.

Not that Philippe of Orleans lacked many of the qualities that go to the
making of a ruler and a man. He had proved himself, in Italy and in
Spain, one of the bravest of his country's soldiers, and an able,
far-seeing leader of armies; and he had, as his Regency proved, no mean
gifts of statesmanship. But his kingly qualities were marred by the
taint of birth and early environment.

Such good qualities as he had he no doubt drew from his mother, the
capable, austere, high-minded Elizabeth of Bavaria, who to her last day
was the one good influence in his life. To his father, Louis XIV.'s
younger brother, who is said to have been son of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne
of Austria's lover, and