“by the thrust of a sword which pierced his neck and came out at the shoulder.  Before he could cry out he was flung from the chaise, and stabbed in three other places by the Countess’s assassins, while the lady herself looked on from her own coach and six, and cried out to the murderers, ‘Kill the villain!’ Nor did she drive off till he was thought dead.”

The man whose murder she thus witnessed and encouraged was not, however, Killigrew, as in the darkness she imagined, but his servant.  Killigrew himself, although severely wounded, was more fortunate in escaping with his life.  But the lesson he had received was so severe that for the rest of his days he gave the Countess and her lover the widest of berths, and retired into the obscurity in which alone he could feel safe from such a revengeful virago.  This second crime, like its predecessor, went unpunished, so powerful was Buckingham, and so deep in the King’s favour; and he and the Countess were left in the undisturbed enjoyment of their lust and their triumphs.

    “Gallant and gay, in Clieveden’s proud alcove,
     The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love,”

the infamous pair defied the world, and crowned their ignominy by standing together at the altar, where the Duke’s chaplain made them one, almost before the body of the Countess’s husband (who had survived his duel two months) was cold, and while the Duchess of Buckingham was, of course, still alive.  The Countess was not long before her brazen effrontery carried her back to Court, where she took the lead in the revels and at the gaming-tables, and made love to the “Merrie Monarch” himself.  Evelyn tells us that, during a visit to Newmarket, he

“found the jolly blades racing, dancing, feasting and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian country.  The Duke of Buckingham was in mighty favour, and had with him that impudent woman, the Countess of Shrewsbury, and his band of fiddlers.”

It was only with the downfall of the Stuarts that this shameless alliance came to an end, when Buckingham’s reign of power was over, and he was haled before the House of Lords to answer for his crimes.  He and the partner of his guilt were ordered to separate; and for this purpose to enter into security to the King in the sum of L10,000 apiece.  Thus ignominiously closed one of the most infamous intrigues in history.  Buckingham, buffeted by fortune, rapidly fell, as the world knows, from his pinnacle of power to the lowest depths of poverty, to end his days, friendless and destitute, in a Yorkshire inn.

    “No wit, to flatter, left of all his store! 
     No fool to laugh at, which he valued more. 
     There reft of health, of fortune, friends,
     And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.”

To my Lady Shrewsbury, as to her paramour, the condemnation of the Lords marked the setting of her sun of splendour.  The slumbering rage of England against her long career of iniquity awoke to fresh life in this hour of her humiliation, and she was glad to escape from its fury to the haven of a convent in France, where she spent some time in mock penitence.