: him I will put myself into a large hamper, and so be carried into his apartment.' She sent him immediately for a hamper; and one of her gentlemen taking hold of it, and Mr. Porter of the other end, he told her a thousand pretty things as they went along, which she replied to with great vivacity. In this manner she passed her time pleasantly enough in the hamper, till Mr. Porter, presenting it to the King, told him he had the good fortune to take the butterfly alive; which was so beautiful, that had he killed it he should never have outlived it himself. His Majesty, eager to see it, opened the hamper, when the young Countess, clasping her arms about his neck, furnished matter for a most agreeable surprise. We must not wonder that she embraced the King in so familiar a way, for everybody knows they were bred up together, and that he looked upon her no otherwise than his own sister. Ever since that time she has been known by the name of butterfly, and in several Courts of Europe, that name is oftener given her than her own title." Madame Dunois speaks of her in after life as having been "extremely beautiful, and of a mien and presence noble and majestic." She was still extremely young when the King married her to his own relation, James Stuart Duke of Lennox, created, 8th of March, 1641, Duke of Richmond, and a Knight of the Garter. "August 3rd, 1637," writes Archbishop Laud in his Diary, "I married James Duke of Lennox to the Lady Mary Villiers, sole daughter to the Lord Duke of Buckingham: the marriage was in my chapel at Lambeth, the day rainy, the King present.' The Duke is well known from the prominent share which he took, and from the services which he performed for his royal kinsman, during the civil troubles. "He was a man," says Clarendon, "of very good parts and an excellent understanding; yet, which is no common infirmity, so diffident of himself, that he was sometimes led by men who judged much worse: he was of a great and haughty spirit, and so punctual in point of honour, that he never swerved a tittle." Dying in 1655, in middle age, he was denied the satisfaction of beholding the Restoration. His Duchess bore him one son, Esme Duke of Richmond, who died unmarried in 1660. They had also a daughter, Mary, who married Richard Butler, Earl of Arran. The third and last husband of the Duchess of Richmond was a person who made no inconsiderable figure at the Court of Charles the Second. This was Thomas Howard, fourth son of Sir William Howard, and brother of Charles, first Earl of Carlisle. De Grammont says, "There was not a braver, nor a better-bred man in England: though he was of a modest demeanour, and his manners appeared gentle and pacific, no person was more spirited or more passionate." The discovery of his high spirit, unfortunately for his antagonist, was made by the famous lady-killer, Henry Jermyn. The latter had been fool enough to interfere in an intrigue, in which Howard had entangled himself with Lady Shrewsbury. Howard instantly challenged him, and, having wounded him in three places, left him on the field with little hopes of recovery.* The Duchess lost her third husband in 1678. At the Restoration, the Duchess of Richmond had somewhat passed the meridian of youth and beauty. * There was a Thomas Howard, Master of the Horse to the Princess of Orange, daughter of Charles I., who figures in Thurloe's correspondence as a spy to Cromwell, and who was a successful lover of Lucy Walters this person, however, would rather seem to have been a son of Theophilus Earl of Suffolk, though the identity is far from clear. VOL. III. N 178 MARY VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF RICHMOND. Those charms, which ought to have dazzled the voluptuous Court of Charles the Second, and whose bloom should have been handed down to us on the canvass of Lely, had been ignominiously wasted during the gloomy dominion of Cromwell. Her name, consequently, but seldom figures in the gay annals of the time, and it was not till the Duchess of Portsmouth became the reigning sultana, that we find her implicated in its discreditable intrigues. In whatever circumstance her quarrel with that meddling beauty may have originated, it is certain that she endeavoured to undermine her in the affections of Charles. She not only sided with Nell Gwynn, the sworn enemy of the Duchess of Portsmouth, but even introduced to the King a niece of her last husband's, a lovely and bashful girl, Miss Lawson, in hopes she would alienate the affections of the King from her adversary. If we are to attach any credit to some contemporary verses, attributed to Lord Rochester, the closing years of "old Richmond"-for thus the once beautiful and fascinating Mary Villiers is familiarly designated-were anything but respectable. The following lines occur in an abusive lampoon on Charles :— "Old Richmond, making thee a glorious punk, Shall twice a day with brandy now be drunk : The blank in the fourth line should probably be filled up with Lawson. The person meant seems to have been Sir John Lawson, Bart., of Brough, in Yorkshire, the father of the attractive beauty who had so recently been presented at the dangerous Court of the "merry Monarch." The Duchess of Richmond died in 1685, in the sixtythird year of her age; but of the particulars of her dissolution and burial we have no record. 179 MARY FAIRFAX, DUCHESS OF BUCKINGHAM. A Follower of her Father's Camp when only Five years old - Her Marriage with the reprobate Duke of Buckingham-Her Character -Mixes in the Intrigues of the Court-Description of her Person -Her Death and Burial. THIS spiritless but amiable lady was the only daughter of Thomas Lord Fairfax, the celebrated Parliamentary general. She was born in 1639. When only five years old, she was a follower of her father's camp in the civil wars, a circumstance which is fondly dwelt upon by Fairfax in his Memoirs. At his retreat from Bradford, she underwent a journey of incredible length, seated the whole time before a maid-servant on horseback. According to the interesting account bequeathed us by her father, she fainted frequently during the retreat, and on one occasion he even hung in agony over his child, in the belief that she was on the point of death. Painful as it was to the fond father to part from his darling, he was compelled to leave her in a house by the road-side, under the care of her maid," with little hopes," he says, "of my ever seeing her again." On the 6th of September, 1657, she had the misfortune to become the wife of George Villiers, the witty and reprobate Duke of Buckingham. Brian Fairfax, in his life of her husband, styles her a virtuous and pious lady in a vicious court, and adds, that she lived "lovingly and decently" with her profligate lord. She certainly loved him, and was submissive enough to bear patiently with his repeated desertions and adulteries. "The Duchess of Buckingham," says Madame Dunois, "has merit and virtue. She is little, brown, and lean; but had she been the most beautiful of her sex, the being his wife would have been alone sufficient to have inspired him with dislike. Though she knew he was always intriguing, yet she never spoke of it, and had complaisance enough to entertain his mistresses, and even to lodge them in her house and all this she suffered because she loved him." We have elsewhere mentioned that, in 1666, when a proclamation was issued for apprehending Buckingham on account of his conspiracy against the Government, she contrived to out-ride the Serjeant-at-arms, and, by a timely warning, afforded an opportunity to her husband to escape. Buckingham, though he disliked her person, appears to have availed himself of her services whenever he had the slightest occasion to make use of them. : As the Duchess willingly mingled in all the gay parties of the Court of Charles, her father's Presbyterian principles were probably anything but acceptable to her. On the other hand, scandal never tampered with her name. And yet, notwithstanding her admitted purity, she seems to have taken a singular, and not very creditable, interest in the disgraceful amatory, as well as political intrigues of the period. Pepys mentions her being one of the "committee" for inflaming the King's attachment to Miss Stewart, and James the Second in his Diary records a further instance of her taste for intrigue. The latter writes, 18th April, 1669: "About this time Buckingham went to Newhall, to persuade the general [the Duke of Albemarle] to the breaking of Parliament; and to resign his post and accept that of the Admiralty. But Albemarle refused to consent to either. The Duchess |