The Duchess of Buckingham made frequent journeys to Paris and Rome to intrigue in favour of the Stuarts, of whom she considered herself one; she paid visits to Cardinal Fleury at Versailles, but according to a contemporary[57] she got nothing from the cardinal but compliments and civil excuses, and was laughed at both in Paris and Rome for her pompous manner of travelling, in which she affected the state of a princess of the blood royal. On her visits to Paris she always made a pilgrimage to the church in which the unburied body of James the Second lay, and prayed and wept over it. Horace Walpole says, with a characteristic touch of malice, that despite this outward show of grief she allowed the royal pall to rot itself threadbare through her parsimony. It is more likely that sentiment prevented her from having it repaired. To Sir Robert Walpole, who knew all her intrigues almost before she embarked upon them, and who treated her as a person of no importance, she made extraordinary overtures to induce him to join with her in effecting the restoration of the Stuarts. She knew that Walpole was very fond of his daughter by Maria Skerrett, and she hinted to him that it might be possible to wed her to Prince Charles Edward if he would embrace the Stuart cause. She asked him if he remembered what Lord Clarendon’s reward had been for helping to restore the royal family; Sir Robert affected not to understand, and she said: “Was he not allowed to match his daughter to the Duke of York?” Walpole smiled and changed the subject. The King had not the same patience with the Duchess of Buckingham’s eccentricities as his Prime Minister, and would probably have taken some action against her had not Caroline counselled the wiser policy of ignoring her Grace’s quixotic proceedings; but on one occasion the duchess was really frightened lest the King should discover her little plots. She had quitted England without having obtained the requisite permission, and she wrote to Walpole from Boulogne: “I know there is a usual form, as I take it only to be esteemed, of any peer’s asking permission of the King (or Queen in the present circumstance) to go out of the kingdom, but even that ceremony I thought reached not to women, whose being in and out of their country seemed never to be of the least consequence”. In the same letter she alludes to her intrigues, and speaks of them as “nonsensical stories” not worthy of credence. Walpole took her letter to the Queen, who was then Regent, and they laughed over it together, but they let “Princess” Buckingham, as they called her, alone. [Illustration: THE PRINCESS CLEMENTINA (CONSORT OF PRINCE JAMES FRANCIS EDWARD STUART). _From the Painting in the National Portrait Gallery_]