and insidiously to work upon the public mind, which is to say the
public ignorance--most fruitful soil for scandal against the
great. Who shall say how far my lady and the Court were
responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to my Lord
Clarendon's gatepost:

Three sights to be seen:
Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.

Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as
stable as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was,
it follows that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious
jealousies to mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her
how insecure is the tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the
mercy of the very caprice to existence.

And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for
her, a day when she found herself bereft of her influence with
her royal lover, when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway
him. In part she owed it to an indiscretion of her own, but in
far greater measure to a child of sixteen, of a golden-headed,
fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature that still found
pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of a quick and
lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either by
the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was
become the toast of the day.

This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre,
newly come to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How