Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/440

426 return to Portugal. Clarendon and Ormond ventured to remonstrate with Charles on his cruelty, but Charles was especially indignant that they should "level the mistresses of kings and princes with other lewd women, it being his avowed doctrine that they ought to be looked upon as above other men's wives." However opposed such a doctrine may be to the more refined taste and purer morality of the present age, it was quite in harmony with the habits and feelings which regulated the social system of Europe at that period. Charles was at least no worse than Louis XIV., whose mistresses were admitted to the intimacy of married ladies of approved virtue and chastity. The same, too, may be said of the English court under the first two kings of the House of Brunswick.



The part which Clarendon played on this occasion is greatly at variance with that reputation for honour, wisdom, virtue, and true dignity with which his admirers invest him. It shows that however much he might recoil at it, however deeply disgraceful and degrading he might feel it, he was ready to stoop to this disgrace and degradation, rather than sacrifice his interest at court. Accordingly Charles let him know that he expected him not only to cease to object to his unmanly conduct to his wife, but to make himself the instrument of inducing her to submit to the ignominy; and the hoary moralist, the great minister and historian, showed himself humbly pliant, and set to work in earnest to bend the mind of this virtuous and outraged woman to the shame of receiving her husband's harlot as her daily companion and attendant. And this the great Clarendon did perseveringly, and at length successfully. When she talked of returning to Portugal, he bade her understand that she was utterly in the power of her husband; that so far from going