CHAPTER VIII.

Release of Marlborough from prison—Confession of Young—Altercations between Anne and Mary—Illness of Anne—of Mary—Death of the latter—Reconciliation of King William to the Princess. 1694.

The pretended association and audacious forgery of Young were discovered immediately upon his being confronted with the Bishop of Rochester. The Earl of Marlborough was consequently released, but not until the 15th of June, that being the last day of Term. He was then admitted to bail, the Marquis of Halifax and the Duke of Shrewsbury being his sureties; an act of kindness for which they were, however, erased shortly afterwards from the list of privy counsellors.[267]

Some time afterwards, when Young was on the point of suffering the penalty of death for another offence, he confessed, with pretended contrition, that he had obtained the Earl of Marlborough’s seal and signature by addressing him under the character of a country gentleman, inquiring the character of a domestic. This avowal completely exonerated Marlborough, who had been himself startled at the similarity of the signature, subscribed to the association, to his own handwriting.

Conscious, perhaps, of deserving disgrace, Lord Marlborough remained during the latter years of Williams reign chiefly at Sandridge, sometimes exchanging his residence for apartments at Berkeley-House, which Lady Marlborough, in virtue of her office about Queen Anne, inhabited on the removal of the Princess thither from Sion House. The Countess of Marlborough meantime devoted herself to the care of the Princess, who was confined, at Sion House, of a lifeless infant, whilst yet altercations between her and her sister were rife. Anne, however, sent due intelligence of her confinement to Queen Mary, first by Sir Benjamin Bathurst, and then by Lady Charlotte Beverwart, who waited until the Queen should have held a conference with the Earl of Rochester, before she could see her Majesty. The delivery of her message produced a visit to Sion House, of which the Duchess gives the following account.[268]

“She (the Queen) came attended by the Ladies Derby and Scarborough. I am sure it will be necessary to have a good voucher to persuade your Lordship[269] of the truth of what I am going to relate. The Princess herself told me, that the Queen never asked her how she did, nor so much as took her by the hand. The salutation was this: ‘I have made the first step, by coming to you, and now I expect you will make the next, by removing my Lady Marlborough.’ The Princess answered, that she had never in all her life disobeyed her, except in that one particular, which she hoped would some time or other appear as unreasonable to her Majesty as it did to her. Upon which the Queen rose up and went away, repeating to the Prince, as he led her to the coach, the same thing that she had said to the Princess.”

Lady Derby, one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting, took up the cue from her royal mistress, and never even went up to the bedside to inquire how the Princess was. The Queen, indeed, upon her return, was heard to say, “she was sorry for having spoken to the Princess,” whose agitation she had observed was so great, that “she trembled, and looked as white as the sheets.”[270] Nevertheless, soon after this visit, all company was forbidden to wait upon the Princess, and her guards were taken from her.

The King was not in England when these indignities were offered to the Princess, and Mary and her constant adviser, Lord Rochester, were alone responsible for the harshness with which an only sister was treated. But Anne, as the presumptive heir apparent, was dear to a people who dreaded the horrors of civil war, and of a disputed succession. In coming from Sion House to London, without guards, her coach was attacked by highwaymen, a circumstance which produced many severe animadversions on the danger to which the heir of the throne was exposed, without an escort, at a period when such adventures were not unknown even in Piccadilly.[271]

Lady Marlborough, distressed at being the manifest cause of the indignities offered to her gracious mistress, entreated Anne to allow her to leave her, and used every argument her thoughts could suggest to persuade the Princess to that effect. These well-meant endeavours were unavailing; for “when I said anything that looked that way,” the Duchess relates, “she fell into the greatest passion of tenderness and weeping that is possible to imagine;[272] and though my situation at that time was so disagreeable to my temper, that could I have known how long it was to last, I could have chosen to have gone to the Indies sooner than to endure it, yet, had I been to suffer a thousand deaths, I think I ought to have submitted rather than have gone from her against her will.”

The result of the Princess’s vexations was a fever, after her confinement, on recovering from which she sent to Dr. Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, hoping through his mediation to convey to Mary her sense of the honour which the Queen, in her last heartless visit, had conferred upon her. Dr. Stillingfleet, whom the Princess found, in her conversation with him, to have become very partial to the Queen, undertook to be the bearer of a letter, in which Anne requested permission to pay her duty to her sister. The Queen’s reply evinced a determined, and, if not an unkind, almost persecuting spirit. She began by telling her sister that since she had herself never used compliments, “so now they will not serve.” She declared that “words would not make them live together as they ought;” there was but one thing she had required, “and no other mark would satisfy her.”[273] But she must have been ignorant of the tenacity of her sister’s disposition, and only partially aware of the influence which the Duchess exercised over the easily moulded Anne, if she could have expected such a sacrifice.

Meantime Lord and Lady Marlborough had the misfortune to lose their infant son, Lord Brackley,—an event to which Anne alludes in the following terms.

“I am very sensibly touched with the misfortune that my dear Mrs. Freeman has had of losing her son, knowing very well what it is to lose a child; but she knowing my heart so well, and how great a share I bear in all her concerns, I will not say any more on this subject, for fear of renewing her passion too much. Being now at liberty to go where I please, by the Queen’s refusing to see me, I am mightily inclined to go to-morrow, after dinner, to the Cockpit, and from thence privately in a chair to see you some time next week. I believe it will be time for me to go to London, to make an end of that business of Berkeley-house.”

This letter of condolence contained a copy of the cold and arbitrary reply of the Queen to the Princess; the original, Anne specifies, being kept by her, in case it should be necessary to show it for her own justification. At the same time she observes, that having extorted an admission from Dr. Stillingfleet that she had made “all the advances that were reasonable,” she thought that the more “it was noised about that she would have waited on the Queen, but that she refused to see her, the better; and therefore that she should not scruple saying so to anybody, when it came in the way.”[274]

Not, however, satisfied with the perpetual assurances of the Princess, that “only death should part her from her dear Mrs. Freeman”—that if her dear friend should ever leave her, “it would break her faithful Mrs. Morley’s heart”—and other repeated declarations of the same nature, the Countess sought to ascertain the sentiments of the Prince George, upon the subject of her quitting the Princess’s service. The reply of the warm-hearted, and certainly at this period of her life, the generous Anne, was equally distinct upon this point as upon the other bearings of the question.

“In obedience to dear Mrs. Freeman, I have told the Prince all she desired me, and he is so far from being of another opinion, that, if there had been any occasion, he would have strengthened me in my resolutions, and we both beg you would never mention so cruel a thing any more.”

“Can you think either of us so wretched,” she continues, “as for the sake of twenty thousand pounds, and to be tormented from morning to night with flattering knaves and fools, we should forsake those we have such objections to, and that we are so certain are the occasion of all their misfortunes?”

“No, my dear Mrs. Freeman,” she thus addressed her in another part of her letter, “never believe your faithful Morley will ever submit. She can wait with patience for a sunshiny day, and if she does not see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again. Once more give me leave to beg you would be so kind never to speak of parting more, for, let what will happen, that is the only thing that can make me miserable.”[275]

It is curious, but to the experienced observer of all that passes among the social relations of life, whether of friendship, love, or kindred, not surprising, to find these letters so full of tenderness, and of disinterested attachment, and so acceptable at one time to Lady Marlborough, thus characterized, when she dipped her pen in gall to write the character of her former patroness.

“Her letters,” says the plain-spoken Duchess in her private memoranda, “were very indifferent, both in sense and spelling, unless they were generally enlivened with a few passionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough, but repeated over and over again, without the mixture of anything either of diversion or instruction.”[276]

Thus firmly fixed in the affections of the Princess, none of the numerous efforts which were made by different members of the household, many of whom had been promoted to their situations by the Countess, availed to induce Anne to allow her favourite to be removed—Lord Rochester, her uncle, in vain working to effect that end. The result was a direct and unhappily prolonged hostility between the Queen and the Princess, and it was made a point of duty with regard to the one sister, that no courtier should visit the other. Lady Grace Pierrepoint was one of the few ladies, with the exception of some female members of Jacobite families, who determined to make her election between the two courts in favour of Anne; other ladies of high rank made their visits very rare, paying their respects only on certain occasions. A more decided mark of royal spleen was testified, through the agency of Lord Rochester, when the Princess visited Bath. This nobleman, who loved pageants and addresses, “wrote to the Mayor of Bath, a tallow-chandler, forbidding him, or any of his brethren of the corporation, to show any respect to the Princess Anne, without leave from the court.”

“But it must be owned,” says the Duchess in her contemptuous way, “that this lord had a singular taste for trifling ceremonies. I remember, when he was treasurer, he made his white staff be carried by his chair-side, by a servant bare-headed; in this, among other things, so very unlike his successor, my Lord Godolphin, who cut his white staff shorter than ordinary, that he might hide it, by taking it into the chair with him.”[277]

“My Lord Rochester,” however, must, the Duchess imagines, “have been disappointed, if he expected that the Princess regarded this petty exertion of power with anything but contempt.” Anne was, in fact, infinitely more vexed to observe a frown on the brow of her favourite, than to be precluded from the honours usually paid her.

“Dear Mrs. Freeman must give me leave to ask her,” writes the submissive Queen, on one occasion, “if anything has happened to make her uneasy. I thought she looked to-night as if she had the spleen. And I can’t help being in pain whenever I see her so.”[278]

With respect to the mayor’s omission of the wonted respect of going to church with her, Anne thought it was a thing to be laughed at; nor was she probably disturbed in her general placidity by “another foolish thing,” as the Duchess calls it, a trifling, but characteristic proof of Mary’s unsisterly vengeance. When the Princess resided at Berkeley-House, it was her habit to attend St. James’s church; and the preacher, in compliance with custom, ordered a copy of his text to be laid upon her cushion. But Mary, carrying her resentments into that sacred edifice without whose porch worldly passions should be left, ordered that this observance also should be abandoned: the minister, however, refusing to comply, unless an order were given in writing, which the Queen and her advisers “did not care to do,” “that noble design,” as the Duchess terms the Queen’s prohibition, “was dropt.”[279]

Berkeley-house, to which the Princess about this time removed, was the scene of all those cabals, those fears and resentments, those heart-burnings and bickerings, by which a minor court, in open hostility with the more powerful, but less popular head of the family, is tolerably sure to be infested. Berkeley-house, standing on the site of Devonshire-house, and giving the name to Berkeley-square, was at this time the last house in Piccadilly, a distinction which Devonshire-house also possessed until long after the year 1700.[280]

The Princess lived here with her favourite and other friends in a very quiet manner, never seeing the Queen, who still, through Lady Fitzharding and other mediators, insisted upon the dismissal of Lady Marlborough as the condition of reconciliation between herself and Anne; whilst Anne, with her native obstinacy, adhered to her friend in preference to her kindred.

The unkindness of the Queen, however, could only injure the Princess in one way, that of stopping her revenues; but Lord Godolphin was Treasurer, a man too useful to the court to be offended, and who, as the King knew, would quit his office in preference to refuse paying an annuity which had been voted by act of Parliament. Between these discordant sisters, one stay, one common subject of interest and source of affection, there still however was, to mitigate the anger of Mary, and to preserve the semblance of a bond of union between the family. The hopes of the nation, the pride of his family and his preceptors, and the promising representative of weak parents, the infant Duke of Gloucester was now the sole object of mutual interest, for to their common parent the royal sisters could not look conjointly for comfort. Anne had, indeed, already reconciled herself to that culpable monarch, though injured parent, whom she had deserted in the hour of trial; and, upon the threatened invasion of James, had written to assure him that she should fly to him the instant she heard of his landing, saying, “She could ask for his forgiveness, being his daughter, but how could she ask him to present her duty to the Queen?”[281] But Mary, at variance to her dying day with her father, could not join with her sister in those expressions of duty and sentiments of affection, which might have proved a bond between her and Anne, but which were all turned to bitterness in the mind of one who loved her husband, to use her own habitual expression, “more than she loved her life.”[282]

William Duke of Gloucester, a child, at this time, of three years old, was now, therefore, the only bond between these disunited sisters. This Prince, subsequently the favoured charge of the great Marlborough, and of the celebrated Bishop Burnet, was the only surviving offspring of the Prince and Princess of Denmark, of six children, most of whom had died as soon as they were born, and only one of whom, a daughter, had attained the age of a twelvemonth. Both William and Mary appear to have regarded this promising but premature scion of their house as their own peculiar possession; and William, especially after the death of his Queen, manifested the tenderest solicitude for the health and welfare of the young Prince; a circumstance which seemed to imply that the Duke had been dear to his deceased and lamented wife.[283]

The Duchess of Marlborough, indeed, intimates that whenever her Majesty made the young Prince any present of “rattles” or other playthings, “she took especial care to have her attention inserted in the Gazette. Whenever the Duke was ill, she sent a bedchamber woman to Camden-house, to inquire how he did. But this compliment was made in so offensive a manner to the Princess, that I have often wondered how any mortal could hear it with patience. For whoever was sent, used to come without any ceremony into the room where the Princess was, and passing by her, as she stood or sat, without taking more notice of her than if she had been a rocker, go directly up to the Duke, and make their speech to him, or to the nurse, as he lay in her lap.”[284]

The Princess, however, happy in her favourite circle, seems to have received these indignities with her wonted apathy, whilst she testified her affection for Lord and Lady Marlborough by the offer of a pension of a thousand pounds a year, creating a new place in her household as an excuse for that granted annuity to one whom she considered as a victim in her cause. But Marlborough, though his income was materially reduced by the loss of his lucrative employments, respectfully declined the generosity of his kind patroness.[285]

These bickerings between the Queen and the Princess were soon, however, painfully and effectually terminated. The small-pox at that time raged fearfully in London. Thousands died of the disease, and apprehensions were entertained for the safety of the Queen, who had never had the cruel distemper. Mary had a short time previously been much concerned at the sudden decease of Archbishop Tillotson, who was struck with palsy whilst performing service in Whitehall Chapel. She had spoken of this revered prelate with tears, and her mind had been considerably disturbed at the loss of so valuable a friend. Whilst still grieving for this event, she fell ill; but her natural spirits sustained her. The disease seemed to subside; and to Bishop Burnet, who was with her for an hour on the day of the attack, she complained of nothing. On the following morning she went out; but returned oppressed with the cruel malady to her closet. There she shut herself up, burnt many of her papers, and put the rest in order. Nevertheless, thinking it might be only a transient indisposition, she used some slight remedies: these were ineffectual to relieve her, and in two days the small-pox appeared in its most malignant form.[286]

The Princess Anne was at this time indisposed, and remaining, by her physician’s advice, upon one floor, lying constantly on a couch. Yet, upon hearing of the Queen’s illness, she sent a lady of the bedchamber with a message of kindness and respect, begging that her Majesty would allow her the happiness of waiting on her, and declaring that she would run any risk in her present situation to have that satisfaction. To this message, which was delivered to the Queen herself, a reply was returned, in the King’s name, that the Queen would send an answer on the following day. Accordingly a letter arrived, announcing that, since the Queen was ordered to be kept as quiet as possible, the writer, Lady Derby,[287] was ordered by the King to request that the Princess would defer her visit.

The construction which Lady Marlborough put upon this “civil answer was, that poor Queen Mary’s disease was mortal, more than even if the physicians had told her that it was;” yet she added also the uncharitable interpretation, “that the deferring the Princess’s coming was only to leave room for continuing the quarrel, in case the Queen should chance to recover, or for reconciliation with the King (if that should be thought convenient) in case of the Queen’s death.”[288]

Be that as it may, the two sisters never met again. The King, overwhelmed by a knowledge of the Queen’s danger, seems to have been occupied with far different thoughts than those imputed to him by the Duchess, and probably consulted only the Queen’s well-doing, when he prohibited a harassing interview between her and the Princess, which might have hastened the approaching event. On the third day of Mary’s illness, the stern, reserved monarch was completely bowed down by the intelligence that the medical advice called to supersede the erroneous treatment of Dr. Ratcliffe, was resorted to too late. He called Dr. Burnet into his closet, and with a burst of anguish exclaimed, that there was “No hope of the Queen; that, from being the happiest, he was now going to be the most miserable creature upon earth.” The Queen bore the awful consciousness of approaching death with far more composure than he, for whom she had sacrificed every other tie, could assume. When apprised by Archbishop Tenison that all hope of her recovery was at an end, she quickly comprehended the reverend prelate’s intention, for which he sought to prepare her by degrees. She evinced no agitation. She said, she thanked God that she had always resolved that nothing should be left to the last hour; she had then nothing to do, but to look up to God, and submit to his will. Indeed, as one who loved this virtuous Princess observes, “her piety went farther than submission, for she seemed to desire death rather than life.”[289]

Whilst this solemn scene was passing at Kensington, the Princess sent every day to inquire after the state of the Queen, but received no encouragement to urge her desire of an interview. On one occasion, the Lady Fitzharding, who had the charge of the Duke of Gloucester, broke into the room where the dying Mary lay, and declaring the Princess’s message to her, endeavoured to impress her Majesty with a sense of her sister’s distress. The Queen, according to the Duchess of Marlborough, returned no answer but “a cold thanks.”[290] Nor did she ever, in the course of her illness, send any message whatsoever to the sister from whom she was estranged. In extenuation of this seeming inconsistency in one so devout, it must be stated, that she had so far adopted the stoical notions of her husband, as to preclude him and herself from the trial of a last farewell. After causing to be delivered to him a small casket, in which she had formerly written her sentiments, she devoted her time to prayer. The Archbishop of Canterbury administering, and all the bishops standing round, Mary received the Holy Communion—that solemn service, in which, even in the fulness of health, we cannot participate without an awful consciousness of the immediate presence of our Maker. Faint but calm, the dying Queen followed the whole office; and, when that was concluded, she composed herself to meet her God. She slumbered sometimes, but she was not refreshed; for, “like others who labour and are heavy laden,” nothing refreshed her but prayer. At last her strong reason began to be obscured, her speech to falter; she tried in vain to say something to the King; she endeavoured to join in the holy offices of the archbishops. Cordials were given her; but all was ineffectual; and she sank about one o’clock in the morning of the twenty-eighth of December, her disorder having first displayed fatal symptoms on Christmas Day.[291]

In this beautiful picture of an exemplary deathbed, but two objects are wanting: a father reconciled, a sister restored to affection. But the father, who regretted more that his daughter died unforgiven by him, and undutiful, than her death itself, was at a distance; his pardon and his blessing could not have been obtained. The sister prayed for admission, and was refused. Such is the effect of party violence, which ruled even in the breast of the pious, affectionate, and strong-minded Mary! If it be said, “how hardly shall a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven,” it may also be a matter of consideration how difficult it must prove for the soul, torn by the strong contending passions which darken a political career, to enter into that blessed rest, where selfishness and ambition can find no mansion!

The Princess Anne, unchecked by indifference to her amiable advances, by the advice of Lord Sunderland and others, wrote to the King, shortly after the Queen’s death, a letter expressive of her “sincere and hearty sorrow for his affliction,” and declaring herself “as sensibly touched by his misfortune,” as if she had not been so unhappy as to fall under her sister’s displeasure. Her letter found the King too dejected, and too much humbled by his calamity, to think of refusing her petition. During the Queen’s illness, his anguish had broken out into violent lamentations; after her death his spirits sank so low, that many persons feared that he was following her. In this depression of spirits and strength, he betook himself to those aids of religion which, with a due seriousness, and a respect for sacred subjects, he had never, during his busy intercourse with the great world, resorted to with heartfelt earnestness, as the only solace, the only cure for bereavements which leave us heart-broken, dependent, and wretched beings.

Whilst William was in this state of mind, the great and good Lord Somers, who had long lamented the feuds which disturbed the royal family, visited him at Kensington, for the purpose of interceding with a view to reconciling these differences. He found the King sitting at the end of his closet in an agony of grief, little to be expected from one who rarely betrayed the passions by which his spirits were now overwhelmed. The King, lost in his own bitter reflections, paid no attention to the entrance of Lord Somers, until that nobleman, remarkable for his courtesy and prudence,[292] broke the silence by expressing a hope that now all disunion between his Majesty and the Princess Anne might cease. “My lord, do what you will; I can think of no business,” was the agonised reply of the King; and to all the observations which Somers made, he returned no other answer.[293] The Duchess of Marlborough, however, imputes the reconciliation to Lord Sunderland, who had, on all occasions, as she says, shown himself to be a man of sense and breeding, and had used his utmost endeavours, before the Queen’s death, to make up the breach between the two sisters, though, she thinks, he never could have succeeded during the lifetime of Mary. Although the reconciliation was opposed by the Earl of Portland, yet the quarrel was at last adjusted; and Anne visited the King, who received her with cordiality, and promised her that St. James’s palace should in future be her residence.[294]

“And now,” says the Duchess, “it being publicly known that the quarrel was made up, nothing was to be seen but crowds of people of all sorts flocking to Berkeley-house, to pay their respects to the _Prince_ and _Princess_: a sudden alteration which, I remember, occasioned the half-witted Lord Carmarthen to say one night to the Princess, as he stood close by her in the circle, ‘_I hope your highness will remember that I came to wait upon you when none of this company did_;’ which caused a great deal of mirth.”

But although matters were thus publicly made up, the King, at least in the opinion of the Duchess, never cared to testify the slightest public respect for Anne, nor to conciliate her regard. From the beginning of his reign, when he committed the heinous offence on which much stress was laid, that of disappointing the Princess of a plate of peas on which she had set her mind,[295] to the last hour, he was still mightily indifferent to the placid, but, it must be acknowledged, somewhat uninteresting Anne. But all his affronts were borne with imperturbable patience by the Princess. When she waited upon his Majesty at Kensington, no more respect was shown her than to any other lady, “till the thing caused some discourse in town, after which Lord Jersey waited upon her once or twice down stairs, but not oftener. And if any one came to meet her,” continues the Duchess, “it was a page of the back-stairs, or some person whose face was not known. And the Princess, upon these occasions, waited an hour and a half, just upon the same foot as the rest of the company, and not the least excuse was made for it.”[296]

All this submission was very galling to the proud, high-spirited favourite, who would have braved William in presence of his whole court, had she been the Princess, rather than have paid one tribute of respect to the careless and contemptuous monarch. Lady Marlborough looked on indignant, and was of opinion that the Princess conciliated a great deal too much. She could not endure that her royal mistress should move a single step that she would not have taken in her place; nor was there a single advance on Anne’s part of which she approved, except her last letter to the Queen, and her offer of visiting her dying sister.[297] This candid acknowledgment she makes with an almost indecent boldness, not to be wondered at in one who, in her later days, defended herself, in a court of justice, a suit against her grandson.[298]

It must, indeed, be allowed, that the list of petty grievances with which the Duchess swells the indignities offered to the Princess Anne, appears, at this distance of time, puerile and vexatious. Her complaints are detailed with a solemnity which seems ridiculous, now that all the stirring passions which gave importance to those incidents are at rest. Her narrative, sarcastic as it is, was unfortunately polished by the hired assistance of Hook, the historian, and, after repeated revisions, which must have shorn many pungent and characteristic passages, was given to the disappointed public, respectably moderate. Still these “annals of a wardrobe,” as Horace Walpole designates them, this “history of the back stairs,” possess—as even he who speaks of “old Marlborough” with bitter contempt is fain to allow—some “curious anecdotes, some sallies of wit, which fourscore years of arrogance could not fail to produce in so fantastic an understanding.”[299]

With the account of the death of Queen Mary, much of the Duchess’s caustic satire subsides. Still she has a few touches reserved for William. Even the sorrow which the monarch experienced, and his desolate situation in a foreign country, where he reigned unloved, did not soften the unceasing aversion and contempt with which the Duchess regarded the royal widower.

His first grave offence, after Mary’s decease, was his silence in regard to a letter written by the dutiful and subservient Anne, congratulating his Majesty upon the honour done to his name and adopted country, by the taking of Namûr. Probably the King would have received congratulations with a better grace, from any one than from her, who might regard herself as having a sort of partnership interest in the glory of England. Good wishes from Anne were somewhat like the next heir to an estate setting forth a strain of rejoicing, on the growth of timber, or on the improvement of lands, to him who was actually in possession. The King took no notice of the humble epistle, or, in the Duchess’s words, “showed his brutal disregard for the writer,” by never returning “any answer to it, nor so much as a civil message.”[300]

The next offence, and it certainly was one which spoke ill of William’s good breeding, was his compelling Prince George to wear coloured clothes on the royal birthday, almost immediately after the death of his brother, the King of Denmark. The Prince, knowing that deep mourning was sometimes allowed in certain instances, requested, through Lord Albemarle, permission to keep on his mourning when he paid his respects to his Majesty.[301] William’s ungracious reply was, that he should not see his brother-in-law unless he came in colours; and the subservient Prince was forced to comply.

“I believe,” says the Duchess, after relating this instance of William’s contemptuous conduct, “I could fill as many sheets as I have already written, with relating the brutalities that were done to the Prince and Princess in this reign. The King was, indeed, so ill-natured, and so little polished by education, that neither in great things nor in small had he the manners of a gentleman.”[302]

The Duchess makes no allowance for his Majesty’s habits and character. Precise as he seems to have been in the article of Prince George’s attire, William hated formalities, and especially those public addresses which must be so peculiarly tedious to a sovereign. Respecting this very siege of Namûr, touching which he gave so much offence to the Duchess, he committed an act of ill-breeding towards no less an individual than the mayor of a borough. This worshipful person having come to court to present an address, combining the two dissimilar topics of condolence for the death of the Queen, and congratulation for the success at Namûr, introduced himself by saying that “he came with joy in one hand and grief in the other.” “Pray put them both into one hand, good Mr. Mayor,” was the King’s laconic remark, heedless of the impression which he made upon formal courtiers and ladies in waiting, who, like the Duchess of Marlborough, could sooner pardon a defect in morals, than a solecism in manners.[303] It was probable, from his Majesty’s known aversion to compliments, public and private, that he intended no offence to the Princess Anne, when he committed the “brutality” of not answering her letter.

Notwithstanding the spirit manifested in these animadversions by the Countess of Marlborough, the Earl sought every opportunity of maintaining the good understanding between the Princess and the court.[304] This he justly thought of importance, possibly for the reason avowed by Dalrymple, that an apparent reconciliation between the royal family had all the good effects of a real one, “because it obliged inferior figures to suspend their passions by the example of their superiors.”[305] But Marlborough, although taking an active part in the House of Lords, was not at present allowed to enter the royal presence, though having a “fair and very great reversion” of favour.[306]

The only adverse event during the remaining portion of William’s reign, which particularly affected Lord and Lady Marlborough, was the conspiracy of Sir John Fenwick, one of the most active Jacobites of the day. With this party, though not personally with Fenwick, Marlborough, it cannot be denied, had been deeply and culpably implicated. No considerations can excuse the dishonourable intercourse which Marlborough, in conjunction with Godolphin and others, had carried on with the exiled monarch. It resulted from a temporising and mean policy, which sought to secure an indemnity from James in case of his restoration, or of the accession of the Prince of Wales. If the reasons which engaged Marlborough to aid the accession of William were valid, and sprang from a pure source, those reasons were still in force to promote the peaceable rule of the reigning monarch, and to support him on his throne.

The rash encouragement which Godolphin and Marlborough had given to James’s emissaries, now involved them in a serious dilemma. Fenwick, convicted, upon the evidence of an intercepted letter to his wife, of being concerned in the plot formed at this time to assassinate William, sought to avert the justly merited sentence from which he afterwards suffered, by a disclosure of the names of those whom he declared to have been concerned in the conspiracy. He was instructed in the details of his pretended confessions, by Lord Monmouth, afterwards the noted and eccentric Earl of Peterborough. He accused the Duke of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Marlborough, Godolphin, and Russell, of treasonable practices; and of having, in particular, accepted pardons from the late King.

These noblemen were, however, fully cleared of the charges made against them by Fenwick; and Marlborough, standing up in his place in the House of Lords, solemnly denied ever having had any conversation whatsoever with Sir John Fenwick during the reign of the present King. Lord Godolphin vindicated himself in the same manner. Fenwick was executed, and Monmouth stripped of all his offices, and sent to the Tower; but was saved from further punishment by the mediation of Bishop Burnet.[307] Cleared, therefore, from this atrocious accusation, Marlborough, who, with his wife, had suffered much uneasiness whilst the proceedings against Fenwick were pending, experienced, in the end, the security which a subject derives from the dominion of a rightly thinking and high-minded prince, and the superior strength and wisdom of such a government to the uncertain rule of passion and despotism. It was William’s policy to make large allowance for the transient defection of his subjects; to endeavour to bring them back to duty by mildness and forgiveness; and to show no petty spleen, nor undue displeasure at the lingering fondness which they might cherish for their absent and justly-deposed monarch. Some time, however, elapsed before Marlborough received any outward proof of his sovereign’s restored confidence. William, indeed, openly regretted that he could not employ a nobleman who was great both in military affairs and as a cabinet minister, and “one who never made a difficulty.”[308] But, at length, either the King’s scruples were overcome: or, as he allowed, in any enterprise, choosing to act upon the principle of converting an enemy into a friend, he appointed Marlborough to a situation of the highest trust.