his heart. Since that day the figure of Britannia has appeared on
millions of coins and medals to perpetuate through the centuries the
faultless form of the woman who drove artist as well as King to the
verge of despair by her beauty and her inaccessible prudery.

It was destined, however, that a prize which had so long eluded the
handsomest gallants in England should fall at last to one of the most
insignificant of all Charles's courtiers, a man who had neither good
looks, intellect, nor character to commend him to a lady's favour. Such
a gilded nonentity was Charles Stuart, Duke of Richmond and of Lennox,
who, having buried two wives, now began to cast envious eyes on the
maid-of-honour whom his Sovereign could not win.

Small in stature, deformed in figure--a caricature of a man, His Grace
of Richmond was the last degenerate scion of the Stuarts of
Richmond-d'Aubigny, a man of depraved tastes and besotted brain, the
butt and the clown of Charles's Court. That this middle-aged buffoon
should aspire to the hand of the loveliest and most elusive woman in
England was only less amazing than that she should smile on his suit.
The Court was struck with consternation--and convulsed with laughter.
Nothing so utterly astonishing and so ludicrous had come within its
experience. But there could be no doubt about it. _La belle Stuart_, who
had so long resisted the King, and given the cold shoulder to such
gallants as the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington, was not only
smiling on her ill-favoured suitor, she was actually giving him midnight
assignations in her own apartments, and risking for a clown the
reputation a King had been powerless to sully.

Here, at last, was a fine weapon placed in the hands of the outraged and
vindictive Castlemaine. Here was a splendid opportunity of paying off