Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
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| 2. | CHAPTER II.
MISTRESS ROSAMOND BELLARMYNE; A MAID-OF-HONOR OF THE
QUEEN'S. |
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 | CHAPTER II.
MISTRESS ROSAMOND BELLARMYNE; A MAID-OF-HONOR OF THE
QUEEN'S. Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
2. CHAPTER II.
MISTRESS ROSAMOND BELLARMYNE; A MAID-OF-HONOR OF THE
QUEEN'S.
It would have been a difficult thing, even in England, that
land of female loveliness, to find a brighter specimen of youthful
beauty than was presented by Rosamond Bellarmyne, when
she returned to her home, then in her sixteenth year, after witnessing
the joyful procession of the 29th of May, which terminated
in the installation of the son in that palace of Whitehall
from which his far worthier father had gone forth to die.
She was a perfect type, in a word, of the most purely English
type of insular beauty. A trifle above the middle height of
women, her shape was exquisitely formed, so fully yet so delicately
developed that it never occurred to the spectator to ask
himself whether she was taller or shorter, plumper or slenderer,
than the average of her sex. Her complexion was that of her
native isle, pure as the drifted snow, yet with a rich undertone of
warm health showing itself, like the light within an alabaster
lamp, in an equable and genial glow, not fitfully or in electric
flashes. Her large, well opened eyes were of the darkest shade of
blue, yet full of the quickest and most mirthful light; so that,
when her lips smiled, her eyes anticipating them appeared to overflow
their dark lashes with silent laughter. Features are not describable;
nor could any description give even a faint idea of the
varied expression of her rich beauty, or of the exceeding fascination
that lay the charm of Rosamond Bellarmyne; and those
who knew her the best asserted that her expression figured
forth, and that not darkly, the character of her mind and
genius.
When she arrived in England and took possession with her
father of the old abbey, one thing at least was evident to all beholders,
that neither a life spent abroad—for she could scarcely
lisp her native tongue when she left the land of her birth—nor
six years of convent discipline had availed anything to denationalize
her, whether in outward show or inward spirit.
She was from top to toe an English girl; English no less in
her faults and failings than in her solid and sterling excellences.
Frank and fearless, truthful and free-spoken, she would at times
push these brave qualities hard on towards the verge beyond
which they cease to be virtues. Conscious of no wrong thought,
and confident of her own strong will and pure intent, she gave
perhaps too little heed to the opinion of others, even when
such might have been worth consulting. Nor, speaking as she
was wont to do constantly on the first rightful impulse, did it
fail to occur frequently that she spoke thoughts aloud which
better had been left unspoken. And doing things unadvisedly,
or against advice, for she would listen to none whom she did not
both love and respect, she often did what she repented.
Such was the heiress of the broken fortunes of Bellarmyne,
when the restoration of the king to his own, restored her father,
with many another storm and battle-beaten cavalier, to the
possession of his old impoverished demesnes; and in the two
years which ensued previous to the marriage of Charles with
the Infanta, little occurred to alter, however the lapse of time
might tend to mature, her person and her mind.
Entirely deprived of female society of her own rank, and
personage who had been her mother's chamber-woman, and a
gay French girl from Provence, she had learned no conventional
lessons of etiquette, much less of courtliness or worldly prudence,
among the sequestered hills and dales of the West-Riding
of Yorkshire in which Bellarmyne abbey was situated;
but, on the contrary, had become more and more the child of
nature, high-souled, intelligent, affectionate, docile to gentle
spiritings, and easily amenable to reason, but quick of impulse,
firm of purpose, and utterly ungovernable by mere formulas and
maxims.
It is not strange that Sir Reginald, deprived of the means of
maintaining his own station, and associating with his own
equals in his county—a deprivation to which his habits of endurance
in the field, and with the foreigners, might in some sort
have inured himself—should have been liable to deep solicitude,
nay, even to dark despondency, when he looked upon this
creature, endowed with everything that should fit her to grace
the world, condemned to absolute seclusion, or, desperate alternative,
the worse than rude society of the Ghylls.
A lady of the highest and most delicate culture, of the most
refined tastes and accomplishments, who, in so much as she had
mingled yet in the great world, had been familiar with the first
personages of the first European court, that of the magnificent
Louis XIV., what could she have in common with the yeoman
farmers of the fells and dales, or with such simple-hearted untaught
hoydens as their wives or sisters? What could he do
for her, himself living—what should become of her, when, in
his season, he should have passed away and perished, like the
leaves of his own oak trees in November? Such thoughts,
far more than the gloom of gathering years, more than the
twilight of his waning fortunes, more than the imminence of
of the failing but yet unbroken veteran.
It was, therefore, with feelings near akin to delight, that,
within a few months after the marriage of the king to Catharine
of Portugal, the baronet received a grand and wordy epistle
from a remote kinswoman, the widow of a noble earl—his schoolboy
friend, fellow-Oxonian, fellow-soldier through the fierce
conflicts of civil war, dead by his side on the bloody field of
Naseby—who had never wholly forgotten her own distant cousin,
or the near friend of her lost lord.
This estimable lady, who, unhappily gifted with a son too
well adapted to the court, and too well liked by the facile king,
had never descended to the frivolities of the restored monarchy,
but resided afar off in her jointure house, in Cornwall, possessed
yet some influence, both of herself, and through her son the
favorite, within the precincts of Whitehall.
The time had not yet arrived when to possess such influence
was in itself almost a brand of infamy.
Cognizant of the extremity to which were reduced the fortunes
of Bellarmyne, and expecting, with all the English world,
that the marriage of the monarch would establish decorum at
least and decency in the court of England's king, the Countess
of Throckmorton had exerted her influence, and that successfully,
in procuring for the beautiful Rosamond an appointment
as one of the queen's maids-of-honor; securing to her, in
addition to a small salary and apartments in the palace, an
introduction into the first society of the realm, and an establishment
on the most unquestionable footing, as it should seem, both
of propriety and honor.
Still it may be thought that the lady doubted, though it did
not so strike the sturdy old loyalist Sir Reginald—who would as
soon have thought of doubting the moral integrity of the king
long, verbose, involved, and not altogether so unquestioning or
hilarious in its tone as was the response of the old cavalier.
Since it had pleased heaven, it ran, that in lieu of a son to
the house of Bellarmyne, whom it would have been an easy
matter to help to advancement in aid of his own honorable
efforts, to give her cousin a weak girl only, who so far from
helping to restore the fortunes of the house, could not even be
expected to help, in any considerable degree, herself—and
whereas she, the countess, feared, and was sore grieved to think,
that Sir Reginald could scarce have the means—without even
looking forward to advancing her young cousin Rosamond, or
settling her in due season in marriage in her proper station—
wherewithal to bring up the child conformably to her degree, it
might not be amiss to bestow her for a time in the servitude of
her most gracious majesty, who was esteemed to be a most
gentle and kind-hearted lady, and withal, of the true church.
And, thereafter, the various privileges, immunities, and advantages
of the position being duly and appreciatingly recorded,
many sage points of advice were intermingled; many hints as
to the dangers, the temptations, the insidiœ to honor and virtue
incidental to court life were not obscurely added; the principal
reliance of the countess appeared to rest on the character, not
merely for sagesse in the French meaning of the term, but for
candor, stability, and persistency which she had learned—by what
means it was not stated—that Rosamond possessed, and not on
any safeguards she must expect to find in her new situation.
She advised her cousin Reginald to weigh the matter well
within himself, and to consult with Mistress Rosamond, concealing
from her nothing of the frivolities, and baseness, and
wickedness of the court, and of her own especial liability to
perils and temptations, before accepting the offer.
Nor did he perceive anything, in the prospective of circumstances
and the reasonable chances of life, as eligible, or even
less eligible, so it were honorable and secure, did she counsel
him to be in haste to accept the offer.
For the rest, should he judge it for the best to do so, she
prayed humbly and hopefully that it should turn out for the
best here and hereafter; and so, with kind recollections to pretty
Mistress Rosamond—who, she heard, was in truth pretty Mistress
Rosamond—and begging her to wear the carcanet, inclosed
herewith, in memory of her loving kinswoman and godmother,
she remained ever, until death, his dutiful and regardful cousin
and friend, not forgetful of the past,
But save the news itself, all was thrown away on the stout
Yorkshire baronet. The promotion was, to his honest, trustful
soul, as honorable as it was in a worldly view acceptable—less
an advantage than a distinction. An advancement, in short, so
splendid, as far to exceed his wildest wishes.
Educated from his childhood to a belief in the divine right of
kings, and in the impossibility of a son of the royal martyr
doing wrong, as entire as his faith in the infallibility of his
church, he would have regarded it no less treason to doubt the
one, than sacrilege to question the other.
Accepting, therefore, joyously all that there was acceptable
in the tidings, and pshawing, in his secret heart, at the cautions
which he regarded as old womanish scruples, he wrote
gratefully and with a full heart to his kinswoman, at her Cornish
manor with the unpronounceable name; and, proudly communicating
to Rosamond the news of her glorious prospects,
set about making such preparations as the narrowness of his
means permitted for sending, or conducting rather, his daughter
royalty.
Many of the herd of Bellarmyne cattle were driven to Ripon
markets, many of the ancestral oaks of Bellarmyne chase came
lumbering to the earth with all their leafy honors, destined
thereafter to ride, under England's red-cross flag, the briny
waves, scarce salter than the tears shed by their stalwart owner,
as he saw their old places vacant, and the green park dismantled
of its noblest ornaments.
Even by dint of these sacrifices, little of splendor was effected
in the outfit of the queen's young maid-of-honor, and when the
aged baronet, presented himself at court by his old colonel the
noble Duke of Ormond, had delivered up his fair child to the
royal circle, and left her as a member of the household under
the care—nominal care—of the mother-of-the-maids, and the real
guardianship of her own delicacy and virtue, he returned alone
to the ancient abbey, which was now more solitary, sadder,
stiller, than ever before, to pass his old days alone, in increasing
poverty, increasing infirmities, increasing despondency, and,
alas! decreasing vigor and elasticity whereby to endure them.
His out-door enjoyments were now limited to an occasional
day's coursing in the park, with his still choicely nurtured greyhounds,
which he followed on a stout, gentle hackney; falconry
and the chase had become enterprises of too much pith and
moment for the war-worn cavalier; while his fireside relaxations
were limited to the study of his two books, the Bible and William
Shakspeare, with an occasional game of chess and a cool
tankard with the vicar, and—greatest delight of all—the perusal
of a letter from Rosamond, when three or four times a year
the tardy and irregular post brought down the stirring news of
the loud and licentious city to the quiet hills and pastoral dales
of Yorkshire.
These letters for some time, until above a year had passed,
were all bright and sparkling. Everything seemed to wear
the couleur de rose veritable; his majesty's wit, his majesty's
courtesy and frank kindness; the affectionate and genial graces
of the pretty, interesting, foreign queen, the loveliness of the
maids-of-honor, the belle Jennings, and the belle Hamilton, and
the lovely Miss Stewart, and the merry, witty, gipsy Miss Price;
and the graces and accomplishments of the unrivalled courtiers
of the day, the admirable De Grammont, and the unapproachable
Anthony Hamilton, and Sedley and Etherege, and the
gallant Buckhurst, and the princely Buckingham—these were
the subjects of her first epistles, and their burden, that all and
every one were so good-natured and so kind to her, little Rosamond
Bellarmyne, that she felt herself there, in that splendid
court of Whitehall, or in those merry-makings under the superb
elms of Hampton court, or in those rantipole junketings at Tonbridge
Wells, or in those grand hunting matches at Newmarket,
or races on Epsom Downs, every bit as much at home, every bit as
safe, and almost—but no, not quite—as happy as she used to be
with her birds and flowers, her pigeons and her pheasants, and
her ponies, and her poor pensioners, at dear old Bellarmyne.
And the old man rejoiced and exulted as he read them; and
formed strange fancies and high hopes, hardly admitted even
to himself, as he conned them over in his own mind; and then
rehearsed, in the intervals of their peaceful chess, to his good
old friend Dr. Fairfax, how his little girl had been chosen to fill
such or such a place in such a masque or revel; and how the
young Marquis of Ossory, or this or that more illustrious countier,
had sought her hand in some figure dance, which had been
performed with such good fortune as to elicit royal approbation
—and above all, how the same little girl's head was entirely
proof against all the flatteries and frivolities of the great world;
and frank and candid; and how, in a word, the admired and
toasted, and already famous belle, Mistress Rosamond Bellarmyne,
the queen's maid-of-honor, was still the same, the very
same good little Rosamond, who had been the life of the old
abbey, and with whose departure so much of that life had departed.
By and bye, however, the letters were changed, though the
writer still seemed to be unchanged—what was said was, beyond
doubt, said truly; but much appeared to be left unsaid. There
were no more praises of the maids-of-honor, no more eulogies
of king and courtiers; but much pity for the queen.
At length came mention of annoyances, almost of insults, by
a person not named. It was evident even to Sir Reginald, not
usually too acute, that she was unhappy, ill at ease. Sometimes
he fancied that she felt herself in danger; but he never
dreamed that she concealed half her grievances, from her
knowledge of his inability to aid her, and fear of his hot temper
and violent resentments.
After a protracted silence, came a wild, sad, anxious letter,
containing a dark tale, darkly told, of imminent peril from the
same unnamed person; of timely rescue by a young gentleman,
likewise nameless—rather than a letter, it was an earnest imploring
cry, to be removed from that accursed place, or ere it
should be too late. And, therewith, the old man's eyes were
opened, and all his dreams vanished. He would have set forth
that day, that hour, to fetch her home at all risks; but his infirmity,
rendered more acute by the excitement of his mind,
forbade locomotion.
So he sat in his old hall alone, as we have seen him, and
chafed and fretted himself almost into madness, from consciousness
of his own impotence to assist the jewel of his old heart,
One wise measure he took promptly. He wrote at length,
inclosing his child's innocent appeal, to their good kinswoman
of Throckmorton, praying her aid and counsel in this their extremity.
Rosamond he advised of what he had done; commended
her courage; praised her; and promised, as soon as
his distemper would permit, to be with her in person.
A second measure, wiser yet, he took some days later; for
it cost his pride many a pang, and to do it at all was a great
self-conquest. He wrote to Nicholas Bellarmyne, in the city,
stating the whole case—asking nothing. That done, he could
no more; he waited, in darkness, for the dawn.
| CHAPTER II.
MISTRESS ROSAMOND BELLARMYNE; A MAID-OF-HONOR OF THE
QUEEN'S. Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England | |