SAN DIEGO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 3 1822 02656 8964 Social Sciences & Humanities Library University of California, San Diego Please Note: This item is subject to recall. Date Due >- > LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 2>A h 7 LOUISE DE KEROUALLE. 'U^f-ey o M^u.- ^/.'^.^ THE Court of Charles ll. 1649-1734 BY H. FORNERON With a Preface by Mrs. G. M. CRAWFORD IVif/i Portraits^ Facsimile Letter^ etc. LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. LTD. PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1897 First Edition— Sept., 1886 ; Second Edition— Sept., 1887 ; Third Edition— Feb., 1888 ; Fourth Edition— Oct., 1891 ; Fifth Edition—March, 1897. PREFACE BY MRS G. M CRAWFORD. On the stormy 3rd of September, 1658, the soul of that master man Cromwell, which had so often undergone gloomy eclipses, lay in deep darkness. The throes of death were on the Protector, and black presentiments took hold of his mind. One of the causes of his anguish was leaving behind him an unfin- ished work. This, to a man of his genius and disposition, was like leaving in hard times an infant child to buffet alone with the troubles of life. Limp and gritless, Richard Cromwell was no meet guardian for such a ward as the young Commonwealth of England ; and which of the Major- Generals could better assume the office ? In the broken phrases the Protector uttered, he showed a foreboding of the deca- dence into which his nation was to fall, and of the moral crisis through which, like a drunken Bacchante, she was to reel and stagger with vi PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. a merry monarch at her head, and a crew of greedy and sensual nobles—arrant knaves and rascals for the most part— at his heels. Cromwell, it being no use to take thought for the morrow and the days after, did what it was best under the circumstances to do. He ended by leaving the whole matter for his dis- quietude to God. Oppressed with the feeling that he was a " miserable worm " and " a poor, foolish creature," he took his stand on the Covenant of Grace, and in his quaint Puritan speech, supplicated on behalf of the people he had led, for higher guidance. He was an affectionate kinsman, and his heart habitually went out to his children. But on that stormy September day, which brought back memories of his greatest victories, and placed him face to face with death, he was so absorbed in patriotic anxiousness that, said one who watched beside him, " He forgot to entreat God for his own family." " However, Lord," cried the dying hero, " Thou do dispose of me, do good for Thy people. Give them consistency of judgment, and go to deliver them with the work of refor- mation." PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. vii " " With the work of reformation ! Think of that, all honest Britons, whether Tory or Primrose Leaguer, for this book is not intended to point a moral for the teaching of the dis- honest, they being unteachable. If God's mill grinds fine, the grinding pro- cess is —when men and women do not keep up a good supply of grist —so slow as to be im- perceptible, unless we look to the work it does in the long course of generations. Cromwell's prayer was answered, but in a way that neither he himsielf nor those around him could have looked forward to. The tale this volume fur- nishes, of a French harlot's progress at White- hall, and of the solid anchorage (^19,000 a year for ever!) which a supine nation allowed to her offspring, would not on the first blush seem to justify this view. What would any old Ironside have thought of the power of a good man's prayer, were Harvey, at the time of the Rye- House Plot convictions and executions, to have told him what he overheard Cromwell utter when the shadow of death was upon him ? It would not have occurred to him that the slow grinding mill was orrindinof at all. Nor was it, in a general way in England, where the viii PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. supply of çrist was too miserably stinted for t?ie millstones not to grind each other out, if they did long and strong spells of work. Here and there, there was a soul in touch with Heaven. But persecution was the lot of such. One of them, the tinker Bunyan, escaped from a jail-bird's noisome sufferings by a flight into Dreamland. He dreamed day-dreams, in which the vulgar facts of life —the heart-wringings that sprang from inability to protect his dear blind litde child—the slips, the falls, and the hindrances to moral growth, were transmuted into the circumstances of an epic poem. We find in his Dream counterparts of Louise de Keroualle and her Court of Whitehall rivals, h Madam Bubble, Mrs. Lechery, Mrs. Bats- eyes, and Mrs. Filth. Fashion travelled slowly in those times—but it travelled. The titled demi-reps who formed the cortege of the Merry Monarch had, we may rest assured, their copy- ists in the low-lying social strata which the tinker was only able to observe. Among the phenomena of nervous diseases there are none more curious than susceptibility to ** suo-ofestion " and anesthesia or transfer of vital force from one member of the body to another. PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. ix In the one case a human being can be directed by the expressed—or, what is more noteworthy, the verbally unuttered— will of a strong-minded person in full health. Hypnotic patients of Doctor Charcot have afforded instances of this strange susceptibility. In the lives of nations we often see collective maladies similar to those which trouble individuals. England, after Cromwell's death, was like a machine going at full speed, when it loses the fly-wheel. She fell into a state of nervous unbalancement and then moral inertia. There were times when, acting under—as it is shown by the author of " Louise de Keroualle,"—the " suggestions " of a French faction, secretly organized in London to work her ruin, she was as one demented. This faction, was managed dexterously by French ambassadors, and through Louise de Keroualle it held the Crown. Indeed, all the disposing and directing powers of the nation were exer- cised according to orders or suggestions from Versailles. England had no more volition of her own than an hypnotic patient of Doctor Charcot. Her condition was closely watched and reported on by the agents of Louis to that monarch, and worked upon for the furtherance of a great X PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. political scheme, which was a feasible one. This plan of policy broke down chiefly because the legitimate offspring of the Grand Monarch had all bad constitutions, and died early. In con- sequence, the French crown passed, at the begin- ning of the eighteenth century, to a child of no natural political ability and of vicious instincts, who was placed under the tutelage of a volup- tuary. England had under Charles become so deranged in mind as to justify a French diplo- matist writing to his King that if a thing was irrational and absurd, it was the more certain for that reason to succeed amouQ- the EnMish. Yet there was no lack of cleverness, and fine talents cropped up in literature and science. But these various gifts and capacities did not make for the general weal. The aristocracy were profligate and knavish, and, according to their degree, their leading men as much the pensioners of Louis as their monarch. In their orgies, they kept their eyes v.'ell fixed on the main chances of their class. Their wits were success- fully employed in throwing off the military burdens with which their broad estates were charged, and shifting them to the shoulders of mercantile lacklands. So far as the middle and PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. xi lower middle class went, there was a clear case of anesthesia, as shown in the transfer of re- forming power and self-governing will to New England. When Louise de Keroualle was above the crowned Queen at Whitehall, that New Eng- land territory was the sparsely colonized fringe of the wildest and biofaest wilderness in the world. Its colonists were " the people," to whom by early associations and Puritan breed- ing Cromwell belonged and gave his last thouo;hts. God's mill was then orindino- fast and fine among them, because the supply of grist was plentiful. But New England was out of the sight and mind of old England, which was supine and inert, when she was not either carousing, attacked with nervous convulsions, or a prey to wild panics, got up by agents of the Prince of Orange and limbs of the French faction. These scares are known to us as the Papist and the Rye- House Plots. Hitherto their causes have remained in semi- obscurity. In " Louise de Keroualle " they are brought into a light, full and clear to fierceness. It has been a subject of anxiety to the translator, whether he should tone down what xii PREFACE BY MRS. G. M. CRAWFORD. might appear to many well-meaning persons the too crisp scandals of the Court of White- hall, which fill so large a place in the letters of French ambassadors to their kins: and his secretary for foreign affairs. Happily he has been induced not to Bowdlerize. This book is for the information of men and women who like to see the facts of history divested of con- ventional forms, and allowed to speak for them- selves, in their own way.