230 DUCHESS OF ALBEMARLE. October 30, 1674, and was ancestor to the baronets of his name." It does not appear on which of these accounts the jury found a verdict for the defendant, whether because Ratford was dead, or because nothing had been heard of him; so that the duchess, after all, might have been no duchess. However, she carried it with as high a hand as if she had never been anything else, and Monk had been a blacksmith. There are some amusing notices of her in Pepys. "8th (March, 1661-2). At noon, Sir W. Batten, Col. Slingsby, and I, by coach to the Tower, to Sir John Robinson's, to dinner, where great good cheer. High company, and among others the Duchess of Albemarle, who is ever a plain homely dowdy." + "9th (Dec. 1665). My Lord Brouncker and I dined with the Duke of Albemarle At table, the duchess, a very ill-looked woman, complaining of her lord's going to sea next year, said these cursed words :-'If my lord had been a coward, he had gone to sea no more; it may be then he might have been excused, and made an ambassador,' (meaning my Lord Sandwich). This made me mad, and I believe she perceived my countenance change, and blushed herself very much. I was in hopes others had not minded it, but my Lord Brouncker, after we came away, took notice of the words to me with displeasure."+ Lord Sandwich, the famous admiral, who has such light repute with posterity, was a relation of Pepys, and much connected with him in affairs. There does not appear to have been the least foundation for the duchess's charge; except, perhaps, that Sandwich had brains enough * Gentleman's Magazine for 1793, p. 88. + Memoirs and Correspondence, as above, vol. i. p. 182. Vol. ii. p. 348. DUCHESS OF ALBEMARLE. 231 to know the danger which he braved, while Monk knew nothing but how to fight and lie. "4th (Nov. 1666). Pepys says, that Mr. Cooling tells him, "the Duke of Albemarle is grown a drunken sot, and drinks with nobody but Troutbecke, whom nobody else will keep company with. Of whom he told me this story; that once the Duke of Albemarle in his drink taking notice, as of a wonder, that Nan Hide should ever come to be Duchess of York: 'Nay,' says Troutbecke, 'ne'er wonder at that, for if you will give me another bottle of wine, I will tell you as great, if not greater, miracle.' And what was that, but that our dirty Besse (meaning his duchess) should come to be Duchess of Albemarle." “4th (April, 1667). I find the Duke of Albemarle at dinner with sorry company, some of his officers of the army; dirty dishes and a nasty wife at table, and bad meat, of which I made but an ill dinner. Colonel Howard asking how the Prince (Rupert) did (in the last fight), the Duke of Albemarle answering, 'Pretty well,' the other replied, 'But not so well as to go to sea again.'—' How!' says the duchess, 'what should he go for, if he were well, for there are no ships for him to command ? And so you have brought your hogs to a fair market,' said she."† "29th (March 1667-8). I do hear by several, that Sir W. Pen's going to sea do dislike the Parliament mightily, and that they have revived the Committee of Miscarriages, to find something to prevent it; and that he being the other day with the Duke of Albemarle, to ask his opinion touching his going to sea, the duchess overheard and came into him; and asked W. Pen how he durst have the confidence to go to sea again to the endangering of the nation, when he knew himself such a coward as he was; which, if true, is very severe."‡ The habit of charging cowardice against the first officers of the time, which was not confined to the duchess, is characteristic of the grossness of that period, the refine * Vol. iii. p. 75. † Id. p. 185. Vol. iv. p. 81. 232 DUCHESS OF ALBEMARLE. ments of which were entirely artificial and modish. No people talked or acted more grossly than the finest gentlemen of the day, or believed more ill of one another; and it was not to be expected that the uneducated should be behindhand with them. The Duchess of Albemarle is supposed to have had a considerable hand in the Restoration. She was a great loyalist, and Monk was afraid of her; so that it is likely enough she influenced his gross understanding, when it did not exactly know what to be at. Aubrey says, that her mother was one of the "five women barbers." How these awful personages came up, we know not, but he has quoted a ballad upon them: 'Did you ever hear the like, Or ever hear the fame, Of five women barbers, That lived in Drury Lane ?'* After all, the father, John Clarges, must have been a man of substance in his trade, to be enabled to set up the enormous May-pole which we see in the picture. But this did not prevent the daughter from growing up vulgar and foul-mouthed, and a very different person from the Belles Ferronières of old. The Savoy, on the one side, with its Gothic gate and flint wall, and the splendid mansion called Exeter House on the other, appear in former times to have narrowed the highway hereabouts, as much as Exeter 'Change did lately. At the corner of Beaufort Buildings flourished Mr. Lillie, the perfumer so often mentioned in the Tatler. He was secretary to Mr. Bickerstaff's Court of Honour, in Shire Lane, where people had actions brought against them for pulling out their watches while their superiors * Granger's Biographical History of England, 1824, vol. v. p. 356. were talking; and for brushing feathers off a gentleman's coat, with a cane "value fivepence." Lillie published two volumes of Contributions, of which the Tatler had made no use. We believe they had no merit. In Beaufort Buildings lived Aaron Hill, and at one time Fielding. Southampton Street, a little to the west, on the other side of the way, has been much inhabited by wits and theatrical people. Congreve once lived there, Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Garrick. It was called Southampton Street from the noble family of that title, who are allied to the Bedford family, the proprietors. On the ground of Cecil and Salisbury Streets, opposite Southampton Street, stood the mansion of Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, the cunning son of a wise father. It was he who, contriving to keep up to the last his interest with the Queen Elizabeth, and to oust his rivals, Essex and others, was the first to make secret terms with her successor James, and to prepare the way for his reception in England: of which, perhaps, Elizabeth was aware, when she lay moaning on the ground. Where the Adelphi now stands, was Durham Place, originally a palace of the Bishops of Durham, who resigned it to Henry VIII. Henry made it the scene of magnificent tournaments. The Lord High Admiral Seymour caused the Mint to be established in this house, with a view to coin money for his designs on the throne. It was afterwards inhabited by Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, who here married his son to Lady Jane Grey. But its most illustrious tenant was Raleigh, to whom it was lent by Queen Elizabeth, and who lived in it during the attempt made at Essex House. The four turrets of the mansion, under the roof of which lived and speculated that romantic but equivocal person, have been marked out in an engraving from Hollar. Durham Place, though it got into royal hands during the fluctuation of religious opinions, never seems to have been reckoned out of the pale of the bishopric of Durham; for Lord Pembroke bought it of that see in 1640, and pulled it down for the erection of houses on its site. "Be it known," says the lively Pennant, speaking of the word 'place,' as applied to great mansions, and interpreted by him to mean palace, "that the word is only applicable to the habitations of princes, or princely persons, and that it is with all the impropriety of vanity bestowed on the houses of those who have luckily acquired money enough to pile on one another a greater quantity of stones or bricks than their neighbours. How many imaginary parks have been formed within precincts where deer where never seen! And how many houses misnamed halls, which never had attached to them the privilege of a manor. This is true; but unless the words palazzo and piazza are traceable to the same root, palatium, (as perhaps they are), place does not of necessity mean palace; and palace certainly does not mean exclusively the habitation of princes or princely persons, (that is to say, supposing princeliness to exclude riches,) for in Italy, whence it comes, any large mansion may be called a palace; and many old palaces there were built by merchants. Palatium, it is true, with the old Romans, though it may have originally meant any house on Mount Palatine, yet in consequence of that place becoming the court end of the city, and containing the imperial palace, may have come ultimately to mean only a princely residence. Ovid uses it in that sense in his Metamorphoses. † But * Pennant, ut supra, p. 144. Where he likens Jupiter's house in the Milky Way to the palace of Augustus: "Hic locus es, quem, si verbis audacia detur, Lib. i. v. 175. Which Sandys, by a felicitous conceit in the taste of his age (and of |