"STEENIE,--I have received your letter by Dic Greame, (Sir
Richard Graham.) This is my answer: I command you to send all
the French away to-morrow out of the towne, if you can by fair
means, (but stike not long in disputing,) otherways force them
away, dryving them away lyke so manie wilde beastes, until ye
have shipped them, and so the devil goe with them. Let me heare
no answer, but of the performance of my command. So I rest your
faithful, constant, loving friend, C. R."
Thereupon the debts of the obnoxious French were paid, their claims,
both just and unjust, satisfied, presents given to some of them,
and they set out for Dover, nearly forty coaches full. "As Madame
St George, whose vivacity is always described as extremely French,
was stepping into the boat, one of the mob could not resist the
satisfaction of flinging a stone at her French cap. An English
courtier, who was conducting her, instantly quitted his charge, ran
the fellow through the body, and quietly returned to the boat. The
man died on the spot, but no further notice appears to have been
taken of the inconsiderate gallantry of the English courtier."
The Stuarts were commonly plagued with the foreign attendants
of their wives. When Charles the Second's spouse, Catherine of
Braganza, arrived in England, she was escorted by a train of
Portuguese ladies, who highly disgusted the king and his court,
less, however, by their Papistry and greediness, than by their
surpassing ugliness and obstinate adherence to the fashions of
their country. "Six frights," says Anthony Hamilton in his memoirs
of Count Grammont, "who called themselves maids of honour, and a
duenna, another monster, who took the title of governess to these
extraordinary beauties. Among the men were Francisco de Melo, and
one Tauravedez, who called himself Don Pedro Francisco Correo
de Silva, extremely handsome, but a greater fool than all the
Portuguese put together; he was more vain of his names than his
person; but the Duke of Buckingham, a still greater fool than he,
though more addicted to raillery, gave him the name of Peter of
the Wood. He was so enraged at this, that, after many fruitless
complaints and ineffectual menaces, poor Pedro de Silva was
obliged to leave England; while the happy duke kept possession of
a Portuguese nymph more hideous than the queen's maids of honour,
whom he had taken from him, as well as two of his names. Besides
these, there were six chaplains, four bakers, a Jew perfumer, and a
certain officer, probably without an office, who called himself her
highness's barber." Evelyn also tells us, that "the queen arrived
with a train of Portuguese ladies in their monstrous fardingals
or guard-infantas, their complexions olivader, and sufficiently
unagreeable;" and Lord Clarendon talks of "a numerous family of men
and women, that were sent from Portugal"--the women "old and ugly
and proud, incapable of any conversation with persons of quality and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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