You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to
bribe her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or
any title she coveted, offering her these things at the nation's
expense as freely and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into
her lap, or the collar of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he
had put about her neck. The offers were ineffectual, and Charles,
driven almost to distraction by such invulnerable virtue, might
now have yielded to the insidious whispers of divorce and re-
marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a hand in the game.
Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of
a neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered
with bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the
Chancellor had recoiled upon herself.
In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost
dead, she made a discovery--or, rather, the King's page, the
ineffable Chiffinch, Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-
Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio, who was her ladyship's friend, made
it and communicated it to her There had been one ardent
respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that proclamation of Miss
Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred
pounds a year.
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