ece away on a visit
to the country-house of her cousin, Mr Merrill, at Lainston, where among
her fellow-guests was a dashing young naval lieutenant, the Hon.
Augustus Hervey, who was second heir to his father's Earldom of Bristol.

The lieutenant, as was inevitable, perhaps, fell promptly under the
spell of the maid-of-honour's charms, and made violent love to her,
with, of course, Mrs Hanmer's whole-hearted connivance. The girl,
blazing with resentment of the Duke's coldness, and his apparent
indifference to her beauty and his vows, lent a willing ear to his
pleadings, and within a few days had promised to be wife to a man whom,
as she confessed later, she "almost hated."

The wedding was, by mutual consent, to be secret, partly on account of
the bridegroom's lack of means to support a wife, and partly from fear
of giving offence to his family. In the dead of an August night, in
1744, the bridal party stole out of Mr Merrill's house, and made its
way to the neighbouring church, where the ceremony was performed by the
light of a taper concealed in the best man's hat. Thus, romantically and
mysteriously, Elizabeth Chudleigh took her first matrimonial step, which
was to lead to such dramatic developments.

Forty-eight hours later the bridegroom had joined his ship at
Portsmouth; and his bride's greatest joy, as she confessed, was when he
had departed. Such a marriage, the fruit of pique and anger, boded ill
for happiness. Frankly, the union was one long misery, broken by the
intervals when the husband was away at sea, and accentuated during his,
happily brief, visits to her. Two children were born to this
ill-assorted pair, but both died young; and Elizabeth Hervey had
abundant opportunity to follow her natural bent, by seeking
forgetfulness in dissipation.

In the full glow of her beauty, a wife who was no wife, she resumed her
broken career of conquest. She made a tour of Europe, leaving a train of
broken-hearted and languishing lovers behind her. At Berlin she brought
Frederick the Great to his knees, and made an abject slave of him; she
shocked the ladies of the Dresden Court by her laxity and the prodigal
display of her charms, and by the same arts bewitched the men. She led,
we are told, a life of shameless dissipation, which only her beauty and
intellectual gifts redeemed from vulgar depravity. She had lovers in
every capital she visited, and discarded them as lightly as so many
playthings.

On her return to