Stuarts

208 THE STUARTS
well shown in the portrait of James III. and his sister by Largilliere ; —
now journeying to Richmond in a lumbering coach such as the Court
ladies of the time were wont to use, and now taking the air upon the
Thames in the huge gilded barge of the period. We hear of her visiting
her Royal grandmother, the unfortunate Henrietta Maria, in France, and
from Brussels she writes, when a girl of fifteen, describing a ball whereat
she is surprised to find a gentleman dancing as well if not better than
the Duke of Monmouth; and here, by the way, she notes "that the streets
of this great fine town," as she calls it, "are not so clean as in Holland,
yet they are not as dirty as ours. They are very well paved and very
easy, they onely have od smells." In 1683 she married the Prince of
Denmark, of whom Evelyn observes in his Diary : "he has the Danish
countenance, blonde, of few words, spoke French but ill, seems somewhat
heavy, but is reported to be valiant." A valiant trencherman he was, fond,
like his consort, of eating and drinking. They were married at Whitehall,
and here her uncle Charles gave them the " Cockpit " to live in. This
place was built as a play-house and stood adjoining the Treasury, not far
from the Holbein gate.
As all the world knows, the Whitehall of those days wore a very
different aspect to its present appearance. The fire of 1697 swept away a
congeries which had clustered round the Royal residence, and which had
made it, in the words of Mary of Modena, " one of the largest and most
uncomfortable houses in the world." There do not seem to have been any
very remarkable buildings, and in contemporary prints the Banqueting
House which Inigo Jones designed, and through the window of which
Charles passed to execution, was the most striking edifice of the whole.
As for the scenes which went on within the walls of Whitehall after the
Restoration, are they not written in the pages of Pepys and of Evelyn ?
But if "Mrs. Morley" and her husband were, as seems to have been
the case, dulness personified, there was one about them whose nature was
cast in a different mould indeed. " Mrs. Freeman " was born to rule and
practically held the helm of state for years. How she treated the smaller fry
with whom she was brought in contact may be gathered from a delightfully
characteristic passage from her own pen. " Painters, poets, and builders,"
she exclaims, "have very high flights, but they must be kept down." The
Duchess of Marlborough was without doubt not merely a remarkable woman,
but the most remarkable of her time in England. She was, as Pope satirically