At this time rumours of poisoning were easily put into circulation, and some supposed that Lady Denham was murdered by her husband. Others whispered that the Duchess of York had poisoned her with powder of diamonds, but when her body was opened after death, as she had desired it should be, no sign of poison was found.[268]
One of the most brilliant of the maids of honour, and, to her credit be it said, one of the few virtuous ladies at court, was Frances Jennings, the eldest sister of Sarah, afterwards Duchess of Marlborough. The Duke made advances to her, which she repulsed coolly. He could not believe in his defeat, and plied her with love-letters. It was not etiquette for her to return them to him, so she affected unconsciousness, and carelessly drawing out her handkerchief allowed these royal effusions to fall upon the floor for anyone who chose to pick up. The King now laid siege to the beauty, but was equally unsuccessful as his brother had been. In the Grammont “Memoirs” there is a full account of the lady’s freaks, and Pepys managed to hear of one of them:--“Mrs. Jennings, one of the Duchess’s maids, the other day dressed herself like an orange wench, and went up and down, and cried oranges; till falling down, or by some accident, her fine shoes were discerned, and she put to a great deal of shame.”[269] This is but a bald account of the adventure so graphically described by Hamilton, who makes the object of Miss Jennings’s disguise to be a visit to the famous German doctor and astrologer in Tower Street. Rochester assumed this character and the name of Alexander Bendo at the same time, issuing a bill in which he detailed his cures, and announced his powers of prophecy. This was on the occasion of one of the wild young Lord’s escapes from court, but we are not told its date. Hamilton is silent on this point, but Pepys’s corroboration of one part of the adventure helps to date the other.
Frances Jennings was loved by the dashing Dick Talbot, who was accounted the finest figure and the tallest man in the kingdom, but she offended him by her partiality for the lady-killer Jermyn. She was soon disgusted by this empty coxcomb, and in 1665 was married to George Hamilton, brother of the author of the Grammont “Memoirs.” After the death of Hamilton, the widow married her first lover Talbot, afterwards created Duke of Tyrconnel. Subsequent to the death of her second husband, she visited London, and hired a stall at the New Exchange in the Strand, where, dressed in a white robe and masked with a white domino, she maintained herself for a time by the sale of small articles of haberdashery. Thus her second and more notorious adventure caused her to be known as the “White Milliner.”