“Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument,” said Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from the latter’s boyhood. “Yourself, sire, at a time when your own wishes did not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing that now you are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your cousin, King Louis, for thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon his queen. You will not have forgotten the things you said then of King Louis.” Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting himself in check. But anon—no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my Lady Castlemaine—he returned to the attack, and sent the Chancellor his orders in a letter demanding unquestioning obedience. “Use your best endeavours,” wrote Charles, “to facilitate what I am sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live.” My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew his world from froth to dregs—having studied it under a variety of conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter, threatening line: “Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live.” All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing unless he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton. Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to himself. That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys, tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in the privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it were plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers. You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of Charles’s proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant whom he dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-nature, turning upon her, storming back, and finally threatening her with the greater disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to Portugal, unless she would submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon her here.