De Grammont--when she threatened to burn down Whitehall, and tear her
children in pieces--are too disgraceful for insertion. She forced the
reprobate monarch to consent to all her extortionate demands: rifled the
nation's pockets as well as his own; and at every fresh difference,
forced Charles to give her some new pension. An intrigue with Jermyn,
discovered and objected to by the King, brought on a fresh and more
serious difference, which was only patched up by a patent of the Duchy
of Cleveland. The Duchess of Cleveland was even worse than the Countess
of Castlemaine. Abandoned in time by Charles, and detested by all people
of any decent feeling, she consoled herself for the loss of a real king
by taking up with a stage one. Hart and Goodman, the actors, were
successively her cavalieri; the former had been a captain in the army;
the latter a student at Cambridge. Both were men of the coarsest minds
and most depraved lives. Goodman, in after-years was so reduced that,
finding, as Sheridan advised his son to do, a pair of pistols handy, a
horse saddled, and Hounslow Heath not a hundred miles distance, he took
to the pleasant and profitable pastime of which Dick Turpin is the
patron saint. He was all but hanged for his daring robberies, but
unfortunately not quite so. He lived to suffer such indigence, that he
and another rascal had but one under-garment between them, and entered
into a compact that one should lie in bed while the other wore the
article in question. Naturally enough the two fell out in time, and the
end of Goodman--sad misnomer--was worse than his beginning: such was the
gallant whom the imperious Duchess of Cleveland vouchsafed to honour.

The life of the once beautiful Barbara Villiers grew daily more and more
depraved: at the age of thirty she retired to Paris, shunned and
disgraced. After numerous intrigues abroad and at home, she put the
crowning point to her follies by falling in love with the handsome
Fielding, when she herself numbered sixty-five summers.