CATHERINE SEDLEY, COUNTESS OF DORCHESTER. Her Wit and Want of Beauty-Becomes the acknowledged Mistress of James II. Their temporary Separation-She wages a War of Wit with the Roman Catholic Priests-Lord Dorset's Ode to herMarries Sir David Colyear-Anecdotes-The Countess's Children by James II.-Her Death. CATHERINE SEDLEY, a lady of more wit than beauty, and more indelicacy than either, was the only daughter of Sir Charles Sedley, baronet, the celebrated poet and wit. She was for many years the acknowledged mistress of James. On his accession to the throne, the King, from conscientious motives, determined to break off the connexion. To soften, however, as much as possible the bitterness of separation and the unwelcomeness of disgrace, he created her (2nd of January, 1686) Baroness of Darlington, and Countess of Dorchester, for life. The fact of the King so publicly distinguishing his mistress, appears to have caused the greatest uneasiness, not only to the Queen, but to her troop of confessors. Evelyn, who about this period was present on two different occasions when the Queen dined in state, observes, that such was her indignation, that she could scarcely be prevailed upon to eat a morsel, and even refused to enter into conversation with her husband. About three weeks after her elevation to the peerage, Lady Dorchester removed from her apartments at Whitehall, to a house which had been taken for her in St. James's Square. Here she remained till the following month (February, 1686), when we find her journeying towards Ireland, which had been fixed upon by her royal lover as the scene of her exile. She had proceeded, however, only three miles beyond St. Alban's, when she was taken in labour, and suffered a miscarriage. A long illness, which nearly proved fatal to her, was the consequence. Whether her sufferings touched the heart of James; whether he was actuated by reviving attachment, or whether by the force of habit, certain it is that the unfortunate connection was again renewed. Accordingly, about the month of April following, we find Lady Dorchester was once more installed in her splendid mansion in St. James's Square. This renewed intimacy, however, was of short duration. The tears and entreaties of the Queen, as well as the denunciations of the father confessors, finally proved too powerful for Lady Dorchester's influence over her bigoted lover. She had for some time waged a war of wit with the holy fathers; amusing the Court by her open ridicule of their sanctity, and even showing her contempt of them to their faces. Her final expulsion, therefore, must have been as gratifying to the priests, as it was mortifying to the discomfited mistress. According to Reresby, the King settled on her a pension of four thousand a-year, on the express condition that she should retire to France. The fact is a significant one, that, after James had himself been driven into exile, he continued to correspond with his former mistress.* Lady Dorchester had little to boast of on the score of beauty; indeed her own remark on the subject is a sufficient proof of the fact. "I wonder," she said, "for * See Clarendon and Rochester Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 279. what qualities James chooses his mistresses. We are none of us handsome, and if we have wit, he has not enough himself to find it out." She is said to have endeavoured to make up for the want of personal advantages, by the extravagant costliness of her dress; a circumstance to which Lord Dorset alludes in the wellknown ode which he addressed to her in 1680:: TO DORINDA. "Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay, Why such embroidery, fringe, and lace? To stop the approaches of decay, And mend a ruined face? Wilt thou still sparkle in the box, And ogle in the ring? Canst thou forget thy age and p-? Can all that shines on shells and rocks So have I seen in larder dark Replete with many a brilliant spark, At once both stink and shine. Her wit, which was hereditary, as often shocked by its indelicacy as it diverted by its sprightliness. Neither time nor place, however unseasonable they might have been, could restrain the unhallowed license of her tongue. The first Earl of Dartmouth, who was probably well acquainted with her, observes," Her wit was rather surprising than pleasing, for there was no restraint in what she said of or to anybody: most of her remarkable sayings were what nobody else would in modesty or discretion have said." Her spirits seem to have been as high as her wit was exuberant. "Dr. Radcliffe and myself together," she said, "could cure a fever.”* According to Lord Dartmouth her mother died in a mad-house. Not improbably the affliction was partially inherited by her offspring. One would have thought that a woman who, even in her youth, had possessed few claims to beauty, and who had now passed the meridian of life-one, moreover, who had been for years the mistress of another man, and the mother of his children-would, on being discarded by her first lover, have found some difficulty in discovering a man sufficiently infatuated to make her his wife. Sir David Colyear, however, afterwards first Earl of Portmore, made her an offer of his hand, and was accepted. It was the victory of wit over beauty. The Earl of Dorset,-who appears to have entertained a natural and invincible abhorrence of Lady Dorchester's character, in another of his gay and scattered trifles, alludes to the projected alliance : "Proud with the spoils of royal cully, With false pretence to wit and parts; Though she appears as glittering fine, As gems and jests, and paint can make her, The devil and Sir David take her! By her husband, Lady Dorchester became the mother of two sons, of whom Charles, the only one who survived her, was the grandfather of the late Lord Portmore. When her two sons were taken from her to be sent to school;-" If anybody," she said, " call either of you a son of a -, you must bear it; for you are so but if they * Chesterfield's Letters, vol. i. p. 427. call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man's sons." Though received with a certain degree of coldness by Queen Mary, she presented herself at the court of William the Third, and even figured at the drawingrooms of the first George. In the latter reign, meeting the Duchess of Portsmouth, the French mistress of Charles the Second, and Lady Orkney, the favourite of William, at one of the assemblies at St. James's,-"By Jove," she said, "who would have thought that we three --s should have met here! According both to Burnet and Reresby, Lady Dor chester was the mother of several children by King James, of whom, however, only one daughter survived her. This person, to whom James gave the name of Catherine Darnley, was married first to James Annesley, third Earl of Anglesey. On being divorced from that nobleman, she became the wife of John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. Her likeness to Colonel Graham, a witty and fashionable hanger-on of the Courts of Charles and James, as well as her mother's well-known partiality for that person, caused a question to be raised whether she were in fact the daughter of King James.. Her mother is reported to have one day said to her :-" You need not be so vain, daughter, you are not the King's child, but Colonel Graham's." Graham was himself not unwilling to have the story believed. The Duchess of Buckingham, and Graham's legitimate daughter, the Countess of Berkshire, were thought to be extremely alike;" Well, well," said Graham, " Kings are all powerful, and one must not complain; but certainly the same man is the father of those two women." The following couplet, in Dr. Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes," would lead us to suppose, either that |