Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

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HAMPTON COURT
had been immoral. When he first entertained the idea
of a marriage with his cousin Mary, he was careful
to inquire whether she was one who would seriously
resent his infidelities. When he came to England to
see his bride, he disgraced himself, as Sir John Reresby
records. After his marriage, and when he was well
aware of his wife's devoted attachment, he treated her
without the least consideration. Hooper and Ken, in
turn domestic chaplains at the Hague, found the tone
of the court unbearable; and Ken felt bound to
remonstrate with the Prince on his own life. The
enormous revenue bestowed on Elizabeth Villiers made
the King's weakness well known to his English subjects,
and what was condoned in his own time has
been excused by distinguished apologists in our own
day. "Lord Macaulay," says Mr. Paget,1 with the
happy wit which turns the laugh against vice,
" records the highly criminal passions of James for
Isabella Churchill and for Catherine Sedley, sneering
contemptuously at the plain features of the one, and
the lean form and haggard countenance of the other,
but forgetting the charms recorded in the Memoirs of
Grammont as those to which the Prince owed his
power;and whilst admitting the talents which the
latter inherited from her father, denying capacity in
the King to appreciate them. William, on the other
hand, married to a young, beautiful, and faithful wife,
to whose devotion he owed a crown, in return for
which she only asked the affection which he had
1" Paradoxes and Puzzles."