The Princess and the Poet: a Romance or All-pride and Naughty Nan: a Comedy
This is an account of what came to pass one summer, when the Court with all its pomp and gaiety took its leave of that noisome, dusty town where it usually resided, and came joyfully to the verdant woods and sweet air of Windsor. There was then at Court a Princess of the Blood, a girl of seventeen, and if she was neither among the most beautiful nor the wittiest of the maidens who graced the castle that summer, still she was not without a certain plumpish, rosy comeliness of her own, and not so lacking in wit that she was unable to appreciate it in others; she had besides a voice of quite singular charm, that the King himself had often had occasion to remark. She was destined, as princesses are, for a Marriage of State, to a prince of another realm – and, indeed, there were some who said, at seventeen, that it was somewhat irregular, and not a little unsatisfactory, that she had not been brought to such a condition long since – but, owing to a certain recent instability in the government of the Kingdom, and consequently in its relations to other Kingdoms, it was still by no means certain to which prince, of which realm, she was to be allied.
This question, of which prince, was a contentious one: her cousin Louis, King of France, was of one opinion; her cousin (and brother-inlaw) William, the Dutch Stadtholder, was of another; each seeking, through her alliance, to enhance his own interests, and thereby to damage his opponent’s. Her father, the Duke, tended rather towards the French King’s view of the matter; her uncle, the King, although properly wary of Cousin Louis’s imperial ambitions, and sensible of the fear and hatred which his people felt for that Papist Despot, had been for some years, secretly, in receipt of certain monies from the French King, which had at times been all that stood between him and ruin, and knew that Louis was waiting for some sign of gratitude in return, and would not wait for ever; at the same time, he could not ignore his Protestant nephew, against whose well-drilled Dutch fleet his own had a habit of coming off worst – though, if truth be told, he had long since wearied of William’s ill-tempered letters to him, and of his interference, overt and covert, in the affairs of his own Kingdom, and itched to disoblige the impertinent whelp.
The Princess, meanwhile, wished only to be married: she had had her fill of being a maid, and had no ambition to become an old one. With great longing and some jealousy, she watched young ladies of lesser degree as they were courted, wooed and won, and burned to be in their place. Whenever she could, she would retire to her closet with the dearest companion of her bosom, one Mary Cornwallis, to peruse love poetry, and romances, and certain other works of a bawdier kind – which, regrettably, this Mrs Cornwallis often had about her person, on purpose to show her royal mistress – indeed, anything which treated of that subject, of what passes between men and women when they are amorously inclined. Mrs Cornwallis was also able to oblige the Princess with tales of her own adventures, of which, since she was a very well-favoured maiden, and none too nice in her conduct, there were a great many (and if she was inclined, now and then, to exaggerate their number or their significance, given her great and sincere desire to please her audience, she can hardly be blamed).
When these two ladies were apart – even for so short a space of time as an afternoon – to prevent their passions cooling, they were wont to write each other letters in language so heated and overripe, and in every way so unfit for maidens to employ, that any scribe would blush to set it down. All the same, it might fairly have been said that the whole fervid business represented nothing more than the silly games of a pair of foolish chits barely out of the nursery, and was perfectly harmless sport, were it not for the appearance in the tale and in the game of a third player, this one a gentleman – and whether he is the villain of this tale, its hero, or merely a buffoon, I will leave the reader to decide.
The Earl of Mulgrave, having come into his inheritance at a very tender age, had, at the age of four-and-thirty, long been used to all the advantages provided by a great title and a great estate; nature had, besides this, blessed him with a handsome face and a quick wit; he was a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, and – thanks to the good offices of a certain lady who was at the time great with both men – Knight of the Garter; he was a noted soldier, and had commanded an expedition for the relief of Tangier; he was a poet, too, the author of many satires. Haughty, arrogant and quarrelsome, he was the object of many others. The Earl of Rochester himself had dubbed him ‘All-Pride’. These faults of character, however, did little to prevent his being the perfect object of a young maiden’s fancy. And such, for the Princess, he was.
It could be that she blushed a little deeper than usual when he made his bow to her; perhaps, when she stood up to dance with him, her eyes shone especially bright. Whatever the cause, the following facts soon became apparent to this quick-witted and gamesome gentleman: firstly, that the Princess was a charming innocent, as yet un-wooed; secondly, that her eager eye had fallen on him (as well, he thought, it might); thirdly, that in Mrs Cornwallis he would find an able and most willing go-between. What his ultimate intentions might have been remains the subject of much dispute, but it is certain that it must, at the very least, have amused him to respond to the entreaties he read in the Princess’s bright eyes and flushed cheeks, for he wasted little time in slipping the first of many little notes, along with a most generous gratuity, into Mrs Cornwallis’s hand.
This first note made the Princess quite giddy: she kissed it a hundred times, and then by the same hand sent her artless, rapturous reply. Always inclined more to love than to be wise, and forgetting in a moment the counsel and warning of governesses, preceptors, chaplains, step-mother and sister, she gave herself over to a correspondence which, had it fallen into malicious hands, might well have been enough to ruin her. Over the course of that hot Windsor summer, some dozen quires-worth of love-notes were exchanged, and countless more amorous looks; that most accomplished gentleman sent besides this settings for songs, which he had composed himself – he said – and which the delighted Princess spent many hours playing over and over on guitar and harpsichord until she had them by heart and had quite driven her ladies to distraction with the tedium of hearing them; and of course, he sent poems, poems in praise of her charms and virtues, poems declaring his adoration, poems lamenting the many obstacles that lay in the way of his making love to her, and, on at least one occasion, a poem to excuse his faults:
Inconstancy Excused
I must confess I am untrue
To Gloriana’s eyes;
But he that’s smiled upon by you
Must all the world despise.
In winter, fires of little worth
Excite our dull desire;
But when the sun breaks kindly forth,
Those fainter flames expire.
Then blame me not for slighting now
What I did once adore;
Oh, do but this one change allow,
And I can change no more:
Fixt by your never-failing charms,
Till I with age decay,
Till languishing within your arms
I sigh my soul away.
Alas for Gloriana and her Inconstant Admirer, this delightful scene was never to be realised beyond the page. The lovers and their go-between were betrayed: there were about the Princess a tight group of ladies, and among them were several with heads considerably cooler, and judgement considerably keener, than that of Mrs Cornwallis, and one of these, perhaps perceiving dangers that her mistress could not, and also perhaps seeking a means of removing from her household a lady whose company she believed could do the Princess no good, and whose foolish gabbling she feared would drown out her own, better counsel, took it upon herself to retrieve certain of the Princess’s letters from her closet, and to discover them to the Duke and Duchess.
The Duke’s rage, on perusal of these letters, might easily be imagined. A couple he tore at once to shreds, the rest he threw to the ground, first demanding his daughter, her so-called friend and her would-be lover be sent for at once, then changing his mind and declaring that they all be banished from his sight for he could not bear to run but the slightest danger of ever laying eyes on any one of them ever again. He lamented that the Earl, whom he had himself loved and trusted, should do him such a shabby turn as to seek to make love to his daughter – his own daughter – for no child of his would be married to a commoner, nor would any son-in-law of his be served a buttered bun on his wedding night. The Duchess, observing his condition, suggested that perhaps she had better talk to the Princess alone, and the Duke – once he had satisfied himself by kicking the discarded correspondence across the floor – agreed that this course would probably be the wisest.
The Princess was duly summoned to her step-mother’s closet, where a most uncomfortable interview took place, which quite mortified both ladies, and left each with such a disagreeable impression of the other, that there could thereafter never be more than the pretence of familiarity between them. The Duchess informed her step-daughter that her Mrs Cornwallis was to be sent at once from Court, never to return, and would not, despite entreaties, discover to the Princess the name of her betrayer, only maintaining, that this nameless lady – whoever she was – had already proved herself a truer friend than that other, who had sought only to urge her mistress on to folly, and thereby to gain from it herself.
And as if all this were not trouble enough for the Princess, she was further discomforted, first by a letter from her sister in Holland, who showed, in her disapproval, that the news of her near-disgrace had travelled overseas, and then by the revelation that the story of thwarted love had also been spread about nearer to home, about the Court, and thence to the populace at large, to whom it had been represented in the crudest terms, in verses quite different from those with which she had been wooed:
Come all ye youths that yet are free
From Hymen’s deadly snare;
Come listen all and learn of me,
And keep my words with care.
For all of you it much concerns,
That would lead quiet lives,
And have no mind to purchase horns,
Take heed of London wives.
For it’s full true, though it’s full sad,
There’s ne’er a lass in town
But some or other lusty lad
Has blown her up and down.
And first and foremost Princely Nan
Heirs both her parents’ lust,
And Mulgrave is the happy man
by whom our breed is crossed.
This happy man, meanwhile, made his submission to the King, protesting that he had been ‘only ogling’, but the monarch (who might well have had sympathy, in his secret heart, for any adventurous gentleman) did what he was only duty-bound to do when the virtue of his royal niece had been threatened, by stripping the hapless Mulgrave of all his Court offices, and sending him back to Tangiers, on a frigate less than seaworthy. The Earl, if truth be told, was not too sorry to have to leave Court for a while, if only because he no longer had to endure the taunts and satires of his fellow wits, who had dubbed him ‘King John’ for his supposed ambition, and for his foolishness, ‘Numps’.
With the Earl and Mrs Cornwallis thus safely disposed of, the attention of the King and his brother turned to the fate of the Princess. They faced the difficult task of finding for her a prince who would be both Protestant and acceptable to Cousin Louis, but happily for them all, there was one prince – perhaps only one – suitable for the purpose. This was the younger brother of Louis’s ally, the King of Denmark, one Prince George, a noted soldier, and twelve years’ the Princess’s senior. He was a large, fair man, good-natured if somewhat shy, and the Princess was delighted with him – even more so, when she was told that he would reside with her at her uncle’s Court, so she need not, as her sister had, lose home and friends in exchange for a husband. The Duke was pleased to see his daughter happily settled at last; both he and the King were greatly relieved at having found a way, through her alliance, to placate Cousin Louis; Louis rejoiced to have disobliged William; William, for his part, was incensed.
