Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a rashness beyond pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most circumspect of women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and for the King's ears, a tale that must hopelessly compromise the Queen. For that, Buckingham, in his self-sufficiency and arrogance, appears to have cared nothing. One suspects that it would have pleased his vanity to have his name linked with the Queen's by the lips of scandal.
She found her tongue at last.
"Monsieur le Duc," she said in her confusion, "it was not necessary, it was not worth while, to have asked audience of me for this. You have leave to go."
He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it perhaps to the presence of that third party to which himself he had been so indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled to his feet, and reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming glance of his bold eyes, and hand on heart—
"Adieu, madame!" said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of what had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself had taken place under such conditions was enough to set the tongue of gossip wagging. An echo of it reached the King, together with the story of that other business in the garden, and he was glad to know that the Duke of Buckingham was back in London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against the Queen, sought to feed the King's suspicions.
"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de Buckingham do to make her cry out?"
"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since she did cry out."
Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he desired of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's movements, and the fullest particulars of his private life.
Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful agents of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green with the Queen. For he intended to return upon one pretext or another before very long, and complete the conquest. Those agents of his were Lord Holland and the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is to be presumed that they served the Duke's interests well, and it is no less to be presumed from that which followed that they found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that amazingly romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey life, touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in which pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was away, overseas; she might never see him again; therefore there could be little harm in indulging the romantic tenderness he had inspired.
So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier—as La Rochefoucauld tells us—to journey to London and bear the Duke a trifling memento of her—a set of diamond studs. That love-token—for it amounted to no less—Gerbier conveyed to England, and delivered to the Duke.
Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his desire to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so overmastering, that he at once communicated to France that he was coming over as the ambassador of the King of England to treat of certain masters connected with Spain. But Richelieu had heard from the French ambassador in London that portraits of the Queen of France were excessively abundant at York House, the Duke's residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform the King. Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride too deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an expression of Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition, a form of vain, empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.
As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke of Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be agreeable as Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty. Upon learning this, the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in proclaiming the reason ("well known to himself") and in protesting that he would go to France to see the Queen with the French King's consent or without it. This was duly reported to Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most Christian Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on the part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King who was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him, that when considered in addition to his undying rancour against Anne of Austria, it is easily believed he spared no pains to obtain something in the nature of a proof that the Queen was not as innocent as Louis insisted upon believing.
Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among other matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had a bitter and secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between whom and himself there had been a passage of some tenderness too abruptly ended by the Duke. Richelieu, acting upon this information, contrived to enter into correspondence with Lady Carlisle, and in the course of this correspondence he managed her so craftily—says La Rochefoucauld—that very soon she was, whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most valuable spy near Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was mainly concerned with information that would throw light upon the real relations of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her that nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment the more bitter for being stifled—since for her reputation's sake she dared not have given it expression—made her a very ready instrument in Richelieu's hands, and there was no scrap of gossip she did not carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But all was naught until one day at last she was able to tell him something that set his pulses beating more quickly than their habit.
She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the Queen of France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her own. Here, indeed, was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen might be destroyed. Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain possession of the studs, the rest would be easy. There would be an end—and such an end!—to the King's obstinate, indolent faith in his wife's indifference to that boastful, flamboyant English upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the time being, and wrote to the Countess.
Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at York House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young French Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the evening Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful, accomplished and ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found her charms so alluring that he was almost disposed to blame himself for having perhaps treated her too lightly. Yet she seemed at pains to show him that it was his to take up again the affair at the point at which it had been dropped. She was gay, arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that presently, yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the foot of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo Jones had just completed for him. My lady languished at his side, permitted him to encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a moment lay heavily against him. He caught her violently to him, and now her ladyship, hitherto so yielding, with true feminine contrariness set herself to resist him. A scuffle ensued between them. She broke from him at last, and sped swift as a doe across the lawn towards the lights of the great house, his Grace in pursuit between vexation and amusement.