Shrewsbury: A Romance

This being so, it remains only to speak of Matthew Smith and his accomplice. Had my lord chosen to move in the matter, there can be no doubt that Smith would have been whipped and pilloried, and in this way would have come by a short road to his deserts. But the Duke held himself too high, and the men who had injured him too low, for revenge; and Smith, after lying some months in prison, gave useful information, and was released without prosecution. He then tried to raise a fresh charge against the Duke, but gained no credence; and rapidly sinking lower and lower, was to be seen two years later skulking in rags in the darkest part of the old Savoy. In London I must have walked in hourly dread of him; at Eyford I was safe; and after the winter of '99, in which year he came to my lord's house to beg, looking broken and diseased, I never saw him.

I was told that he expected to receive a rich reward in the event of the Duke's disgrace, and on this account was indifferent to the loss of his situation in my lady's family. It seems probable, however, that he still hoped to retain his influence in that quarter by means of his wife, and thwarted in this by that evil woman's dismissal, was no better disposed to her than she was to him. They separated; but before he went the ruffian revenged himself by beating her so severely that she long lay ill in her apartments, was robbed by her landlady, and finally was put to the door penniless, and with no trace of the beauty which had once chained my heart. In this plight, reduced to be the drudge of a tradesman's wife, and sunk to the very position in which I had found her at Mr. D-'s, she made a last desperate appeal to the Duke for assistance.

He answered by the grant of a pension, small but sufficient, on which she might have ended her days in a degree of comfort. But, having acquired in her former circumstances an unfortunate craving for drink, which she had now the power to gratify, she lived but a little while, and that in great squalor and misery, dying, if I remember rightly, in a public-house in Spitalfields in the year 1703.