s covered with snow.

Gentlemen who were about the Court of King Charles, and King James, have
told the present writer a number of stories about this queer old lady,
with which it's not necessary that posterity should be entertained. She
is said to have had great powers of invective and, if she fought with
all her rivals in King James's favor, 'tis certain she must have had
a vast number of quarrels on her hands. She was a woman of an intrepid
spirit, and, it appears, pursued and rather fatigued his Majesty with
her rights and her wrongs. Some say that the cause of her leaving Court
was jealousy of Frank Esmond's wife: others, that she was forced to
retreat after a great battle which took place at Whitehall, between her
ladyship and Lady Dorchester, Tom Killigrew's daughter, whom the King
delighted to honor, and in which that ill-favored Esther got the better
of our elderly Vashti. But her ladyship, for her part, always averred
that it was her husband's quarrel, and not her own, which occasioned the
banishment of the two into the country; and the cruel ingratitude of the
Sovereign in giving away, out of the family, that place of Warden of
the Butteries and Groom of the King's Posset, which the two last Lords
Castlewood had held so honorably, and which was now conferred upon a
fellow of yesterday, and a hanger-on of that odious Dorchester creature,
my Lord Bergamot;* "I never," said my lady, "could have come to see his
Majesty's posset carried by any other hand than an Esmond. I should have
dashed the salver out of Lord Bergamot's hand, had I met him." And those
who knew her ladyship are aware that she was a person quite capable of
performing this feat, had she not wisely kept out of the way.

* Lionel Tipton, created Baron Bergamot, ann. 1686,
Gentleman Usher of the Back Stairs, and afterwards appointed
Warden of the Butteries and Groom of the King's Posset (on
the decease of George, second Viscount Castlewood),
accompanied his Majesty to St. Germain's, where he died
without issue. No Groom of the Posset was appointed by the
Prince of Orange, nor hath there been such an officer in any
succeeding reign.

Holding the purse-strings in her own control, to which, indeed, she
liked to bring most persons who came near her, Lady Castlewood could
command her husband's obedience, and so broke up her establishment
at London; she had removed from Lincoln's-Inn-Fields to Chelsey, to a
pret