The affair soon came into the courts. Fielding, a few weeks after his union with Mistress Mary Wadsworth, had espoused _les beaux restes_ of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland. Till he began to beat the Duchess as well as the Dulcinea, he appears to have transferred his “green nightcap and slippers” by the hands of a servant from the bower of one beauty to the boudoir of another. The Duchess, at length, offered the first wife £200 down and £100 annually for fifteen years, if she succeeded in establishing the first marriage. Accordingly, the Beau was indicted for bigamy at the Old Bailey. He endeavoured to prove that his supposed widow had been married to one Brady, who was living at the time of her marriage with Fielding, and something like a forged certificate in the Fleet Register was produced to support it. But with Montague for opposing counsel (Fielding was his own) and Powell for a judge, the Beau could make nothing of a very bad case; and, being found guilty, he was sentenced to be burnt in the hand,—a sentence which he escaped by producing Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. He was accordingly set free; and the Duchess of Cleveland, being now also freed from him and his very heavy hand, the ex-beauty, but now be-rouged old flirt, lived unmolested by anything more unpleasant than a very gentle remorse for her _péchés mignons_. The Beau soon fell into dire distress; and a sketch of the complexion of this phasis of life will be found in Bulwer’s ‘Devereux.’ He is there described as “terribly fallen, as to fortune, since the day when he drove about in a car like a sea-shell, with a dozen tall fellows in the Austrian livery, black and yellow, running before and behind him. You know he claims relationship to the House of Hapsburg. As for the present, he writes poems, makes love, is still good-natured, humorous, and odd; is rather unhappily addicted to wine and borrowing, and rigidly keeps the oath of the Carthusians, which never suffers them to carry any money about them.”