Early in July Pepys noted that the king had ‘become besotted with Miss Stewart, and will be with her half an hour together kissing her.’ ‘With her hat cocked and a red plume, sweet eye, little Roman nose and excellent taile,’ she appeared to Pepys the greatest beauty he had ever seen, and he ‘fancied himself sporting with her with great pleasure’ (Pepys, ed. Wheatley, iii. 209). The French ambassador was amazed at the artlessness of her prattle to the king. Her character was summarised by Hamilton: ‘It was hardly possible for a woman to have less wit and more beauty.’ Her favourite amusements were blindman's buff, hunt the slipper, and card-building. Buckingham was an ardent admirer; but her ‘simplicity’ proved more than a match for all his artifices. Another aspirant was Anthony Hamilton [q. v.], who won her favour by holding two lighted tapers within his mouth longer than any other cavalier could manage to retain one. He was finally diverted from his dangerous passion by Gramont. More hopeless was the case of Francis Digby, younger son of George Digby, second earl of Bristol [q. v.], whom her ‘cruelty’ drove to despair. Upon his death in a sea-fight with the Dutch, Dryden penned his once famous ‘Farewell, fair Armida’ (first included in ‘Covent Garden Drollery,’ 1672, and parodied in some verses put into Armida's mouth by Buckingham in the ‘Rehearsal,’ act iii. sc. 1). Hopeless passions are also rumoured to have been cherished by John Roettiers, the medallist, and by Nathaniel Lee.
The king's feeling for Miss Stewart approached nearer to what may be called love than any other of his libertine attachments. As early as November 1663, when the queen was so ill that extreme unction was administered, gossip was current that Charles was determined to marry the favourite (Jusserand, A French Ambassador, p. 88). It is certain that from this date his jealousy was acute and ever on the alert. The lady refused titles, but was smothered with trinkets. The king was her valentine in 1664, and the Duke of York in 1665. Yet Miss Stewart exasperated Charles by her unwillingness to yield to his importunities. Her obduracy, according to Hamilton, was overcome by the arrival at court of a calèche from France. The honour of the first drive was eagerly contested by the ladies of the court, including even the queen. A bargain was struck, and Miss Stewart was the first to be seen in the new vehicle.
In January 1667 Miss Stewart's hand was sought in marriage by Charles Stuart, third duke of Richmond and sixth duke of Lennox [q. v.] His second wife was buried on 6 Jan. 1667, and a fortnight later he preferred his suit to the hand of his ‘fair cousin.’ Charles, fearing to lose his mistress, offered to create Miss Stewart a duchess, and even undertook, it is said, ‘to rearrange his seraglio.’ More than this, he asked Archbishop Sheldon in January 1667 if the church of England would allow of a divorce where both parties were consenting and one lay under a natural incapacity for having children (cf. Burnet, Own Time, i. 453–4; Clarendon, Continuation, ii. 478; Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 407). Sheldon asked time for consideration. In the meantime, about 21 March 1667, a rumour circulated at court that the duke and Miss Stewart had been betrothed (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1667, p. 576). A few days later, on a dark and stormy night, Miss Stewart eloped from her rooms in Whitehall, joined the duke at the ‘Beare by London Bridge,’ and escaped into Kent, where the couple were privately married (cf. Lauderdale Papers, iii. 131, 140). Charles, when he learned the news, was beside himself with rage. He suspected that Clarendon (‘that old Volpone’) had got wind of his project of divorce through Sheldon, and had incited the Duke of Richmond to frustrate it by a prompt elopement. The suspicions thus engendered led, says Burnet, to the king's resolve to take the seals from Clarendon. The story helps to explain the deep resentment, foreign to Charles's nature, which he nursed against the chancellor (Burnet's account is confirmed in great measure by Clarendon's letter of 16 Nov. 1667 to the king in the ‘Life;’ cf. Christie, Shaftesbury, ii. 8, 41; Ludlow, ii. 503).
The duchess returned the king the jewels he had given her; but the queen seems to have acted as mediator (greatly preferring ‘La Belle Stuart’ to any other of the royal favourites), and she soon returned to court. On 6 July 1668 she was sworn of Catherine's bedchamber, and next month she and her husband were settled at the Bowling Green, Whitehall. In the same year she was badly disfigured by small-pox. Charles visited her during her illness, and was soon more assiduous than ever. The duke was sent out of the way—in 1670 to Scotland, and in 1671 as ambassador to Denmark. In May 1670 the duchess attended the queen to Calais to meet the Duchess of Orleans, and in the following October on a visit to Audley End, where she and her royal mistress, dressed up in red petticoats, went to a country fair and were mobbed (see letter to R. Paston, ap. John Ives, Select Papers, p. 39). The duke, her husband, died in Denmark, at
