There reft of health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends."

To my Lady Shrewsbury, as to her paramour, the condemnation of the Lords
marked the setting of her sun of splendour. The slumbering rage of
England against her long career of iniquity awoke to fresh life in this
hour of her humiliation, and she was glad to escape from its fury to the
haven of a convent in France, where she spent some time in mock
penitence.

But the Countess was, by no means, resigned to end her days in the odour
of a tardy and insincere piety. As soon as the sky had cleared a little
across the Channel, she returned to England, and tried to repair her
shattered fame by giving her hand to a son of Sir Thomas Bridges, of
Keynsham, in Somerset, who was so enslaved by her charms that he was
proud to lead the tarnished beauty to the altar. And with this mockery
of wedding bells "Messalina's" history practically ended as far as the
world, outside the Somersetshire village, where the remainder of her
life was mostly spent, was concerned. The fires of her passion had now
died out, and the restless and still ambitious woman exchanged love for
political intrigue. She became the most ardent of Jacobites, and plotted
as unscrupulously for the restoration of the Stuarts, as in earlier
years she had planned the capture and ruin of her lovers.

Not content with treading the shady and dangerous path of intrigue
herself, she set to work to undermine the loyalty of her only son, the
young Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most trusted ministers and friends
of the Orange King; and such was her influence over the high-principled,
if weak Earl that she infected him with her own treachery, until the
man, whom William III. had called "the soul of honour," stood branded to