Thus secure of her power the Duchess was not unwilling to indulge once more her old propensity for flirtation (to give it its mildest name).  The handsome and graceless Duke of Monmonth, Charles’s favourite son, Danby and many another gallant, succeeded one another in her favours, which she dispensed without any care for concealment.  But the only one of her lovers of this time who made any real impression on such heart as she had was the rakish Philippe de Vendome, grandson of Henri IV. and nephew of her first lover, the Admiral, Duc de Beaufort, who, as we have seen, gave her the first start on her career of infamy and conquest.  She seems to have conducted an open and shameless intrigue with De Vendome—­a man who, according to St Simon, had never gone sober to bed for a generation, who was a swindler, liar, and thief, and the most despicable and dangerous man living.  When the Duchess, realising that her intrigue with this handsome scoundrel was going too far, sought to withdraw, he threatened to show certain incriminating letters she had written to him, to the King; and it was only when Louis intervened and, by bribes and commands, induced her lover to return to France, that she was able to breathe again.

Not content with setting such a shameless example to the Court, she was the arch-priestess of the gaming-tables at which Charles and his courtiers spent their nights to the chink of glasses and gold.  She made light, we learn, of losing 5,000 guineas at a sitting.  No wonder Pepys was shocked at such scenes.

“I was told to-night,” he writes, “that my Lady Castlemaine is so great a gamester as to have won L15,400 in one night, and lost L25,000 in another night at play, and has played L1000 and L1500 at a cast.”

The Duchesse de Mazarin, he tells us,

“won at basset, of Nell Gwynne 1400 guineas in one night, and of the Duchess of Portsmouth above L8000, in doing which she exerted her utmost cunning and had the greatest satisfaction, because they were rivals in the Royal favour.”

But the end of these saturnalia was at hand.  The last glimpse we have of them was on the night of 1st February 1685—­the last Sunday Charles was permitted to spend on earth.

“The great courtiers,” says Evelyn, “and other dissolute persons were playing at basset round a large table, with a bank of at least L2000 before them.  The King, though not engaged in the game, was to the full as scandalously occupied, sitting in open dalliance with three of the shameless women of the Court, the Duchesses of Portsmouth, Morland, and Mazarin, and others of the same stamp, while a French boy was singing love-songs in that glorious gallery.  Six days after,” he adds, “all was in the dust.”

As the end of that wasted Royal life drew near the Duchess’s chief concern—­for it was her last opportunity of redeeming one of her pledges to Louis, her paymaster—­was that Charles should at least die an avowed Catholic.