had been immoral. When he first entertained the idea of a marriage with his cousin Mary, he was careful to inquire whether she was one who would seriously resent his infidelities. When he came to England to see his bride, he disgraced himself, as Sir John Reresby records. After his marriage, and when he was well aware of his wife's devoted attachment, he treated her without the least consideration. Hooper and Ken, in turn domestic chaplains at the Hague, found the tone of the court unbearable; and Ken felt bound to remonstrate with the Prince on his own life. The enormous revenue bestowed on Elizabeth Villiers made the King's weakness well known to his English subjects, and what was condoned in his own time has been excused by distinguished apologists in our own day.
"Lord Macaulay," says Mr. Paget,[1] with the happy wit which turns the laugh against vice, "records the highly criminal passions of James for Isabella Churchill and for Catherine Sedley, sneering contemptuously at the plain features of the one, and the lean form and haggard countenance of the other, but forgetting the charms recorded in the Memoirs of Grammont as those to which the Prince owed his power; and whilst admitting the talents which the latter inherited from her father, denying capacity in the King to appreciate them. William, on the other hand, married to a young, beautiful, and faithful wife, to whose devotion he owed a crown, in return for which she only asked the affection which he had
- ↑ "Paradoxes and Puzzles."
