[44] The Duchess of Lauderdale was one of the “busiest” women of the busy age in which she lived. Burnet insinuates, that during the life-time of her first husband “she had been in a correspondence with Lord Lauderdale that had given occasion for censure.” She succeeded in persuading him that he was indebted for his escape after “Worcester fight” to “her intrigues with Cromwell.” “She was a woman,” continues the Historian, “of great beauty, but of far greater parts. She had a wonderful quickness of apprehension, and an amazing vivacity in conversation. She had studied not only divinity and history, but mathematics and philosophy. She was violent in every thing she set about; a violent friend, but a much more violent enemy. She had a restless ambition, lived at a vast expense, and was ravenously covetous; and would have stuck at nothing by which she might compass her ends.” Upon the accession of her husband to political power, after the Restoration, “all applications were made to her; she took upon her to determine everything; she sold all places; and was wanting in no methods that could bring her money, which she lavished out in a most profuse vanity.” [45] Lysons, writing more than half a century ago, describes the furnishing of the Mansion in terms which suit exactly to describe its present state. “It is,” he says, “a curious specimen of a mansion of the age of Charles the Second. The ceilings are painted by Verrio, and the rooms are ornamented with that massy magnificence of decoration then in fashion. The furniture is very rich; even the bellows and brushes, in some of the apartments, are of solid silver, or of silver filigree. In the closet adjoining the bed-chamber, which was the Duchess of Lauderdale’s, still remains the great chair in which she used to sit and read; it has a small desk fixed to it, and her cane hangs by the side. The furniture of the whole room is such that one might almost fancy her Grace to be still an inhabitant of the house.”