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 honour,
and in which that ill-favoured 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
honourably, and which was now conferred upon a fellow of yesterday, and a
hanger-on of that odious Dorchester creature, my Lord Bergamot(6); "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.

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 pretty new house she
bought there; and brought her establishment, her maids, lap-dogs, and
gentlewomen, her priest, and his lordship, her husband, to Castlewood
Hall, that she had never seen since she quitted it as a child with her
father during the troubles of King Charles the First's reign. The walls
were still open in the old house as they had been left by the shot of the
Commonwealth men. A part of the mansion was restored and furnished up with
the plate, hangings, and furniture, brought from the house in London. My
lady meant to have a triumphal entry into Castlewood village, and expected
the people to cheer as she drove over the Green in her great coach, my
lord beside her, her gentlewomen, lap-dogs, and cockatoos on the opposite
seat, six horses to her carriage, and servants armed and mounted,
following it and preceding it. But 'twas in the height of t