My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He
knew his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a
variety of conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter
draught. All that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon.
Yet in such a contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen
that bitter, threatening line: "Whosoever I find to be my Lady
Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to
be his enemy so long as I live."

All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing
unless he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded.
All that he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be
swept into oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.

Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that
odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of
sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious
to the Queen than to himself.

That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr.
Pepys, tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following
day the talk of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between
the royal couple in the privacy of their own apartments, so
stormy that the sounds of it were plainly to be heard in the
neighbouring chambers.

You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of