Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I will
endeavour to be Margaret the First.

On 11 April 1667, Samuel Pepys made his first attempt to see
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She and her
husband had just arrived in London from the north yet already
the town did nothing but talk of her eccentricities. Pepys had
heard how she rigged herself out in an 'antique dress' and her
many footmen in velvet coats, and how at the end of a perform-
ance of her husband's comedy The Humorous Lovers she had
ostentatiously thanked the actors from her box. Wrongly
believing that she had written the play, Pepys had gone to see
it himself, and while dismissing it 'as the most silly thing that
ever come upon a stage', he had been glad of the opportunity it
had given him of better understanding her character. His
insatiable appetite for personalities and oddities whetted by the
gossip, he set out for Whitehall on 11 April to see the lady, whose
whole history was 'a romance', pay a visit to the Queen. ¹ He
was not alone in his curiosity. The Court was crowded with
people who had come specially to see her, and as Pepys remarked,
an appearance by the Queen of Sweden could not have made a
greater stir. ² But the spectators were badly disappointed;
Margaret Cavendish did not go to Court that night.

She did not go to Court until the night of 22 April, but her
arrival was worth waiting for. She drove up in a procession of
three coaches: in the first, of two horses, rode her gentlemen;
in the last, of four horses, her waiting-women; and in the

[The works of Margaret Cavendish are cited by shortened titles and unless
otherwise stated the edition is always the first.)

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