The Duchess, in reply to my aunt’s eager clamor, said haughtily, that she had done her best for the legitimate branch of the Esmonds, and could not be expected to provide for the bastard brats of the family.
“Bastards!” says the Viscountess, in a fury. “There are bastards among the Churchills, as your Grace knows, and the Duke of Berwick is provided for well enough.”
“Madam,” says the Duchess, “you know whose fault it is that there are no such dukes in the Esmond family too, and how that little scheme of a certain lady miscarried.”
Esmond’s friend, Dick Steele, who was in waiting on the Prince, heard the controversy between the ladies at court. “And faith,” says Dick, “I think, Harry, thy kinswoman had the worst of it.”
He could not keep the story quiet; ’twas all over the coffeehouses ere night; it was printed in a News Letter before a month was over, and “The reply of her Grace the Duchess of M‑rlb‑r‑gh to a Popish Lady of the Court, once a favorite of the late K⸺ J‑m‑s,” was printed in half a dozen places, with a note stating that “this duchess, when the head of this lady’s family came by his death lately in a fatal duel, never rested until she got a pension for the orphan heir, and widow, from her Majesty’s bounty.” The squabble did not advance poor Esmond’s promotion much, and indeed made him so ashamed of himself that he dared not show his face at the Commander-in-Chief’s levees again.
During those eighteen months which had passed since Esmond saw his dear mistress, her good father, the old Dean, quitted this life, firm in his principles to the very last, and enjoining his family always to remember that the Queen’s brother, King James the Third, was their rightful sovereign. He made a very edifying end, as his daughter told Esmond, and not a little to her surprise, after his death (for he had lived always very poorly) my lady found that her father had left no less a sum than £3,000 behind him, which he bequeathed to her.
With this little fortune Lady Castlewood was enabled, when her daughter’s turn at Court came, to come to London, where she took a small genteel house at Kensington, in the neighborhood of the Court, bringing her children with her, and here it was that Esmond found his friends.
As for the young lord, his university career had ended rather abruptly. Honest Tusher, his governor, had found my young gentleman quite ungovernable. My lord worried his life away with tricks; and broke out, as home-bred lads will, into a hundred youthful extravagances, so that Dr. Bentley, the new master of Trinity, thought fit to write to the Viscountess Castlewood, my lord’s mother, and beg her to remove the young nobleman from a college where he declined to learn, and where he only did harm by his riotous example. Indeed, I believe he nearly set fire to Nevil’s Court, that beautiful new quadrangle of our college, which Sir Christopher Wren had lately built. He knocked down a proctor’s man that wanted to arrest him in a midnight prank; he gave a dinner-party on the Prince of Wales’s birthday, which was within a fortnight of his own, and the twenty young gentlemen then present sallied out after their wine, having toasted King James’s health with open windows, and sung cavalier songs, and shouted “God save the King!” in the great court, so that the master came out of his lodge at midnight, and dissipated the riotous assembly.
This was my lord’s crowning freak, and the Rev. Thomas Tusher, domestic chaplain to the Right Honorable the Lord Viscount Castlewood, finding his prayers and sermons of no earthly avail to his lordship, gave up his duties of governor; went and married his brewer’s widow at Southampton, and took her and her money to his parsonage house at Castlewood.
My lady could not be angry with her son for drinking King James’s health, being herself a loyal Tory, as all the Castlewood family were, and acquiesced with a sigh, knowing, perhaps, that her refusal would be of no avail to the young lord’s desire for a military life. She would have liked him to be in Mr. Esmond’s regiment, hoping that Harry might act as a guardian and adviser to his wayward young kinsman; but my young lord would hear of nothing but the Guards, and a commission was got for him in the Duke of Ormond’s regiment; so Esmond found my lord, ensign and lieutenant, when he returned from Germany after the Blenheim campaign.
The effect produced by both Lady Castlewood’s children when they appeared in public was extraordinary, and the whole town speedily rang with their fame: such a beautiful couple, it was declared, never had been seen; the young maid of honor was toasted at every table and tavern, and as for my young lord, his good looks were even more admired than his sister’s. A hundred songs were written about the pair, and as the fashion of that day was, my young lord was praised in these Anacreontics as warmly as Bathyllus. You may be sure that he accepted very complacently the town’s opinion of him, and acquiesced with that frankness and charming good-humor he always showed in the idea that he was the prettiest fellow in all London.
The old Dowager at Chelsey, though she could never be got to acknowledge that Mistress Beatrix was any beauty at all, (in which opinion, as it may be imagined, a vast number of the ladies agreed with her), yet, on the very first sight of young Castlewood, she owned she fell in love with him: and Henry Esmond, on his return to Chelsey, found himself quite superseded in her favor by her younger kinsman. The
