But indeed his majesty's
speech was not more free than his conduct was licentious. He
could not think, he gravely told Bishop Burnet, "God would make a
man miserable for taking a little pleasure out of the way."
Accordingly he followed the free bent of his desires, and his
whole life was soon devoted to voluptuousness; a vice which an
ingenious courtier obligingly describes as a "warmth and
sweetness of the blood that would not be confined in the
communicating itself--an overflowing of good nature, of which he
had such a stream that it would not be restrained within the
banks of a crabbed and unsociable virtue."
The ease and freedom of his continental life had no doubt
fostered this lamentable depravity; for his misfortunes as an
exiled king by no means prevented him following his inclinations
as an ardent lover. Accordingly, his intrigues at that time were
numerous, as may be judged from the fact of Lady Byron being
described as "his seventeenth mistress abroad." The offspring of
one of his continental mistresses was destined to plunge the
English nation into civil warfare, and to suffer a traitor's
death on Tower Hill in the succeeding reign.
"The profligacy which Charles practised abroad not being
discontinued at home, he resumed in England an intrigue commenced
at Brussels a short time before the restoration. The object of
this amour was the beautiful Barbara Palmer, afterwards, by
reason of her lack of virtue, raised to the peerage under the
titles of Countess of Castlemaine, and Duchess of Cleveland.
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