Page:Diary of the times of Charles II Vol. I.djvu/184

68 your court oftener for my sake, for no man can be more obliged to another than I am to her on all occasions, and tell her I say so, and, as my Lord Berkeley says, give her a pat from me. If you keep your word to come in June, I fancy you will come together, and I shall not be ill pleased to see the two people in the world of both sexes I love and esteem the most." She did return to Paris in June, and found him engaged in a new intrigue with her own daughter. Lady Sussex. Furious at this, she betrayed a secret political intrigue of his to the King, which lost him for ever the favour of his master. Burnet gives this account of it. "The King had ordered Montague, his late Ambassador at Paris, in the year 1678, to find out an astrologer, of whom it was no wonder he had a good opinion, for he had long before his restoration foretold that he should enter London on the 29th of May, 1660. He was yet alive, and Montague found him out, and saw that he was capable of being corrupted, so he resolved to prompt him to send the King such hints as could serve his own ends; and he was so bewitched with the Duchess of Cleveland, that he trusted her with this secret. She, growing jealous of a new amour, took all the ways she could to ruin him, reserving this of the astrologer for her last shift; and by it she compassed her ends. For Montague was entirely lost upon it with the King, and came over without being recalled." Among other passages in the letter which the Duchess of Cleveland wrote to Charles, and which is full of specimens of the "furens quid fœmina possit," is this:—"He (Montague) has neither conscience nor honour, and has several times told me that in his heart he despised you and your brother, and for his part he wished with all his heart, that the parliament would send you both to travel, for you were a dull governable fool, and the Duke a wilful fool. So that it were Windsor, cannot be of much use to you. My wife is well brought to bed of a son, and I am going into the country to be chosen if I can of the new