It was always thus that
pretty Frances Stewart used him. She always knew how to elude him
and, always with that cursed air of artlessness, uttered seemingly
simple sentences that clung to his mind to tantalize him.
"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
prove a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to
queen before she would allow him to build a castle for her?
It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew
there was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon,
which, fearing the succession of the former, and, so, of the
grandchildren of the latter, as a result of Catherine of
Braganza's childlessness, strongly favoured the King's divorce.
It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be
largely responsible for the existence of that party. In her
hatred for Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would
slay the Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least
helped to give currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had
deliberately chosen for Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure
the ultimate succession of his own daughter's children. But she
had never thought to see that slander recoil upon her as it now
did; she had never thought that a party would come to rise up in
consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at the very
moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable,
artlessly artful Frances Stewart.
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