cousin and his own friend. Hamilton, however, though ostensibly in love with Lady Castlemaine, had long been an admirer of Lady Chesterfield, and a rival with the Duke of York for her favours. Accordingly, when her husband disclosed to him the tale of her impropriety, and the evidences of her having conferred kindness on another, he listened with feelings of jealousy scarcely less acute than those of the unsuspecting Chesterfield, and was even cruel enough to propose her banishment into Derbyshire. Lady Chesterfield afterwards sufficiently retaliated on her barbarous lover. The manner in which she avenged herself is fully detailed in the "Mémoires de Grammont," and forms not the least agreeable portion of that delightful work.

Lady Chesterfield never again returned to the gay scenes which she had so unwillingly quitted. Whether she became reconciled to her seclusion, or repented of her indiscretions, we have no record. Shortly, however, after her leaving London she gave birth to a daughter, Lady Elizabeth Stanhope, who became the wife of John Lyon, fourth Earl of Strathmore. Lady Chesterfield survived the event but three years, and is reported to have died under circumstances of peculiar horror. The Earl, it was asserted, insisted on her taking the sacrament as a pledge of her innocence with respect to the Duke of York, on which some poison is said to have been inserted by the Duke's chaplain in the sacramental wine, of the effects of which she died. The story was, at least partially, credited by Lord Chesterfield's family. His son, Lord Stanhope, had married Lady Gertrude Saville, a daughter of the Marquis of Halifax. This lady was on bad terms with her father-in-law, and accordingly, whenever she happened to sit at the same table with him, she was invariably furnished with her own cup, a bottle of wine,

280 ELIZABETH BUTLER, COUNTESS OF CHESTERFIELD.

and another of water, out of which alone she could be persuaded to drink, and then only from the hands of her own servant.

On the other hand, Lord Chesterfield attributed his wife's death to the plague, which was then raging. “It being the great plague year," he says, "she fell ill of the spotted fever and died; whereupon I returned to my own house at Bretby, where I also fell sick of the spotted fever or plague." In his letters he refers to her dissolution without a trace of regret.*

Lady Chesterfield expired at Wellinborough (where she was residing for the benefit of the waters), in July, 1665, in her twenty-fifth year.

* Letters of Phillip, second Earl of Chesterfield, p. 26, &c.

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281

ELIZABETH BAGOT,

COUNTESS OF FALMOUTH AND DORSET.

Lineage of this Lady-Her Beauty-Her Marriage (with the Earl of Falmouth)—Her Husband killed in an Action with the DutchGrief of the King and the Duke of York at his Loss-Dryden's Satire on Lady Falmouth-Her second Marriage (with the Earl of Dorset)-Her Death.

LITTLE is known of this pretty lady, beyond the graceful touches of De Grammont, the charming portrait of her by Lely, and the rude lines of Dryden. She was the daughter of Colonel Hervey Bagot, of Pipe Hall, in Warwickshire, second son of Sir Hervey Bagot, Baronet, of Blythfield in the county of Stafford. Her father, having distinguished himself by his gallantry during the civil troubles, had the post of Gentleman Pensioner conferred on him at the Restoration; while his daughter received the appointment of Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York, a situation, at that period, at least of questionable respectability.

66

The praises of De Grammont are valuable from their rarity. In his libertine observations on the new Court, and the merits of the fair faces which surrounded him, "Miss Bagot," he says, was the only one who was really possessed of virtue and beauty among these maids of honour she had beautiful and regular features, and that sort of brown complexion, which, when in perfection, is so particularly fascinating, and more especially in England, where it is uncommon. There was an involuntary blush almost continually upon her cheek, without

having any thing to blush for." De Grammont, like most libertines, could admire modesty in a woman, though he ridiculed it in a man.

About the year 1663 Miss Bagot became the wife of Charles Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth, a gallant and handsome profligate, whose society was as agreeable as his principles were indifferent. Their union was but short-lived. In 1665, Lord Falmouth volunteered on board the fleet which was sent against the Dutch. the heat of the great action of the 3rd of June, he was standing by the side of his friend and master the Duke of York, when his head was carried off by a cannon-ball, giving, as Sir John Denham says on the occasion,

-"the first last proof that he had brains."+

In

The Duke, who was covered with his blood, had the misfortune to see Lord Muskerry, and Robert Boyle, a son of the Earl of Burlington, killed by the same shot.

Lord Falmouth must have been possessed of some engaging qualities, to have occasioned, as he did, among his own circle, the sorrow which followed his loss. The King was much affected. "Those who knew him best," says Lord Clarendon, were amazed at the floods of

tears which he shed upon this occasion." The Duke of York even, cold as was his nature, is said to have felt his loss deeply, and to have regretted the laurels he had gained, since they had been purchased by the loss of his friend.

* Second son of Sir Charles Berkeley, of Bruton in Gloucestershire. He was created by Charles II. Baron Berkeley and Viscount Fitzhardinge in Ireland, and, on the 17th of March, 1664, Baron Botetourt and Earl of Falmouth in England. He died June 3rd, 1665, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

"Directions to a painter concerning the Dutch War."

From this period till her second marriage with Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, the celebrated poet and wit, we know little of the history of the young widow. Considering that the slight knowledge which we possess of her character is far from being unfavourable, the following gross and unfeeling lines of Dryden are the more startling and unwelcome. The point of the satire being unknown, it is impossible to canvass its justice.

"Thus Dorset, purring like a thoughtful cat,

Married, but wiser puss ne'er thought of that.
And first he worried her with railing rhyme,
Like Pembroke's mastiffs, at his kindest time;
Then, for one night, sold all his slavish life,
A teeming widow but a barren wife;
Swelled by contact of such a fulsome toad,
He lugged about a matrimonial load;
Till fortune, blindly kind as well as he,
Has ill restored him to his liberty;
Which he would use in his old sneaking way,
Drinking all night, and dozing all the day;
Dull as Ned Howard, whom his brisker times
Had famed for dulness in malicious rhymes."*

The Countess of Dorset died in 1684. By Lord Falmouth she was the mother of one child, Mary, who became the wife of Gilbert Cosyn Gerrard, Esquire, (son of Sir Gilbert Gerrard, Baronet, of Feskerton in Lincolnshire,) from whom she was divorced in 1684. By her second husband, Lady Dorset had no children; but whether Dryden be at all justified in his expression of the "teeming widow," we have no evidence to decide. It was perhaps no compliment to her memory, that the Earl of Dorset married another wife, Lady Mary Compton, within a year after her death. At Althorpe there is a picture of Miss Bagot by Lely.

* Essay on Satire.