was "ready to marry any gentleman of
fifteen hundred a year that would have her in honour."

And never, perhaps, have the designs of a dissolute King been so
cleverly and consistently baffled. Charles made no concealment of his
passion for the beautiful maid-of-honour, and the more coldly she
treated his advances, the more marked and ardent was his pursuit.

"Mr Pierce tells me," Pepys writes, "that my Lady
Castlemaine is not at all set by by the King, but that he
do doat upon Mrs Stuart only, and that to the leaving of
all business in the world, and to the open slighting of
the Queen. That he values not who sees him, or stands by
while he dallies with her openly; and then privately in
her chamber below, while the very sentrys observe him
going in and out; and that so commonly that the Duke, or
any of the Nobles, when they would ask where the King is,
they will ordinarily say, 'Is the King above or below?'
meaning with Mrs Stuart; that the King do not openly
disown my Lady Castlemaine, but that she comes to Court."

Such was the spell which this enchantress cast over the King. Nor were
her conquests by any means confined to the circle of the Court in which
she moved a splendid, but unassailable Queen, for every man who came
within the magic of her presence seems to have lost both head and heart.
One of the most infatuated of all her victims was Phillipe Rotier, the
youngest brother of the famous medallists whom Charles had invited to
England, and whose first commission was to design a medal in celebration
of the Peace of Breda. For the purposes of this medal Miss Stuart was
asked by the King to pose as Britannia; and so captivated was Phillipe
Rotier, to whom she gave sittings, by the exquisite perfection and grace
of her figure, and so entranced by her beauty, that he fell madly in
love with her, and narrowly escaped the loss of reason as well as of
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 h