Part 5

She spent over 40,000_l._ in this way, and the good bishop who preached her funeral sermon took, as an apt text, ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house.’ She rebuilt the castles of Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon Tower, Pendragon, and Brough; she restored the churches of Bongate, Skipton, and Appleby, and the chapels of Ninekirks, Brougham, Bongate, and Mallerstang; she erected a monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey, another--on the old Penrith road--to her mother, the Dowager Countess of Cumberland, and another still to her tutor, Samuel Daniel, and she founded and restored almshouses besides.

But the first Duchess of Marlborough was a prize termagant, although in early life a woman of winning ways. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was the ruler of that great commander and military genius, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, and victor of such hard-fought fields as Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet.

The rise of the Churchills reads like a romance, so constantly was their progress maintained for so many years. He was the son of an impoverished country gentleman who had lost his all in a chivalric attachment to Charles the First, and gained little consideration for it when the Restoration brought Charles the Second to Dover, and the King enjoyed his own again. All the recompense the ruined Cavalier received was the reception of his son, afterwards to become the most famous soldier and general of his time, as a page in the service of the King’s brother, the Duke of York.

Macaulay’s Whiggish prejudices forbade him writing anything to the credit of the Duke of Marlborough; and so he seized upon the gossip of the time, which has come down to us, and has stated as a fact that John Churchill owed this initiatory post to the interest of his sister Arabella, who had become an acknowledged mistress of the Duke of York. ‘The young lady was not beautiful,’ he says, in his _History of England_, ‘but the taste of James was not nice, and she became his avowed mistress. She was the daughter of a poor Cavalier knight who haunted Whitehall, and made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchs and monarchy. The necessity of the Churchills was pressing, their loyalty was ardent, and their only feeling on Arabella’s seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so plain a girl should have obtained such height of preferment.’

But Churchill’s good looks and gallant bearing stood him in better stead than this in that profligate court. He captivated the fancy of his distant cousin, Barbara Palmer, the most beautiful of the King’s mistresses, already created Duchess of Cleveland as the price of her dishonour. Buckingham afforded the King ocular proof of this attachment, and we are told that Churchill was sent into practical banishment, but to an ostensible command in Tangier, or into the Low Countries. The Duchess of Cleveland made her kinsman a present of 5000_l._, with which he promptly purchased an annuity of 500_l._, and so laid a foundation to his fortunes.

England was for a time in close alliance with France, and it was then and there that the young officer--he held a commission in the Guards--learned scientific warfare under those past-masters in the art of war, Condé and Turenne. He remained for five years in Flanders, and during that time distinguished himself at numerous places, more especially at the siege of Maestricht, where ‘the handsome Englishman,’ as Turenne called him, was thanked for his services by Louis XIV.

Returning to England, he was married privately to Sarah Jennings, whose family, like his own, had suffered great misfortunes in the cause of the Stuarts. She had been introduced to Court, and had obtained a position there as maid-of-honour to James’s second wife, the young and beautiful Mary of Modena, by the interest of her elder sister, the ‘_Belle Jennings_’ of Grammont, who had held a similar post during the lifetime of the first Duchess of York. She and her sister were the only virtuous women in all that court, and neither the cajoleries of the King nor his brother availed anything to induce them to join the ranks of the Nell Gwynnes, the Barbara Palmers, or the Louise de Querouaille, whose shame helped to swell the peerage.

Sarah Jennings was not the equal of her sister in beauty, of whom Grammont says ‘she had a complexion of dazzling fairness, luxuriant hair of a light golden colour, an animated countenance, and the most beautiful mouth in the world. Nature had adorned her with every charm, to which the Graces had added the finishing touches. She gave you the idea of Aurora, or of the Goddess of Spring, as the poets depict those divinities.’ She did not quite come up to this standard, but, if the judgment of her contemporaries and the truth of the painter’s brush may be accepted on her behalf, she would have been the foremost beauty at Whitehall or Saint James’s had not her sister already held that distinction. Kneller’s portrait of her shows a face of considerable beauty, poised charmingly upon a graceful neck and fringed with flowing curls and with luxuriant hair as fine, one would dare contend, as that of her sister Frances, the theme of that French gossip. She has in all her portraits that piquant beauty which shines out of glancing eyes, full and luscious (eyes which the Churchills have inherited to the present day); that comes of a departure from regularity of feature; which is exhibited most charmingly in the nose, tip-tilted ever so little, but destructive of all coldness and frigid hauteur of appearance; eyes eloquent, nose rebellious, chin a little cleft and firm; lips somewhat rich and ripe, and with a sensuousness that must have been three parts the convention that obtained among the courtly painters of the time. Do you wonder, looking at her counterfeit presentment, that she should have been the ultimate ruler of that great commanding officer; the scourge of Ministers of State; or that the Queen--Anne, the most paltry puppet of a sovereign which modern times afford our astonished gaze--should have been for years entirely under her thumb? She was a woman of imperious and ungovernable temper, shrewd withal, if not a little shrewish; accomplished and clever enough to have proved, for a time, a match for the intriguers who beset the Throne during the last years of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth. During a great part of Queen Anne’s reign the country, it has been truly said, was ruled by a Triumvirate: the Duchess of Marlborough ruled her mellifluous Mrs. Morley, the Queen; the Duke had, in reality, fulfilled the kingly function of going forth to battle and defeating the enemies of the nation; while Godolphin ruled the Parliament in his absence. But the greatest of these, in council, was the Duchess. The Queen was a _quantité négligéable_, and Marlborough himself, very accurately, if contemptuously, described her in the Courts of Europe as ‘a very good sort of a woman.’ Anne reigned, but did not govern, but ‘Mrs. Freeman’ had ambition enough, and very nearly the capacity, to govern everybody but herself; and there the want of self-control and her woman’s reckless tongue betrayed her.

There is no doubt that the Duchess was extremely fond of, and ambitious for, her husband; and that the love was mutual may readily be gathered from the Duke’s letters to his wife years after their marriage. He writes after Ramillies: ‘I did not tell my dearest soul in my last my design of engaging the enemy if possible to a battle, fearing the concern she has for me might make her uneasy.... If I could begin life over again, I would devote every hour of it to you, but as God has been pleased to bless me, I do not doubt but he will reward me with some years to end my days with you.’ This was twenty-eight years after their marriage, and is eloquent of Churchill’s rare constancy and faithful heart. But though he appears from his letters so uxorious a husband, he exercised a judicious restraint upon his feelings on occasion, and his naturally equable, calm, and reserved temper stood him in good stead when the Duchess was more than usually unreasonable and furious. Thus there is a story told of her, that once, in order to vex him who admired her beautiful hair so greatly, she cut off those shining tresses which Kneller has painted so well and laid them on the Duke’s dressing-table. But, however much he was pained by this act of singular spite, he showed nothing of it by his manner. He scarcely seemed to notice them, and when she came again to look for them they were gone, and no word said. She had failed that time, and did not dare to mention the circumstance. But, after the Duke’s death, in collecting his papers, she found her hair which she had cut off years before treasured up in a secret place among his most cherished possessions. She was used to tell the tale herself, and when she came to this part, she invariably broke down and ‘fell a-crying’ for shame and grief.

‘The beauty of the Duchess of Marlborough,’ says Horace Walpole, ‘had always been of the scornful and imperious kind, and her features and air announced nothing that her temper did not confirm; both together, her beauty and temper, enslaved her heroic lord.’

She was pugnacious beyond all bounds, and commanded fear and respect, even when she was not loved, by her undoubted abilities. She had a son and four daughters. The son died in early youth; her daughters all became peeresses, and they and their daughters were harried by her continually. She affected to be fond of her granddaughter, the Duchess of Manchester, daughter of the Duchess of Montagu, her youngest child. She said to her one day, ‘Duchess of Manchester, you are a good creature, and I love you mightily--but you _have_ a mother!’ ‘And _she_ has a mother,’ replied the Duchess of Manchester. And she had, indeed, in a superlative degree.

‘The great Sarah’ was, in fact, never happy unless she had some quarrel on hand. She was offended by her granddaughter, Lady Anne Egerton’s conduct in arranging a marriage between her brother and a daughter of Lord Trevor. This alliance certainly could not fail to be galling to the widowed Duchess, who, now that her husband was dead, idolised his memory and pursued with an unquenchable hatred all those who had opposed him in former years. For Lord Trevor had been one of the great Duke’s bitterest enemies; and now for a grandson of Marlborough to marry a daughter of one who had reviled him and had sat in the seat of the scorner! It was too much. She had a portrait of her granddaughter brought her, and, to show her hatred, painted the face black and wrote an inscription for it, ‘She is much blacker within.’

Her temper had grown more furious with her advancing years, soured as she had been by the ultimate revolt of Anne against her imperious and insulting behaviour toward her Majesty in public. She had given the Queen her gloves and fan to hold during State ceremonies, and affected not to hear when spoken to. Certainly no royal favourite had ever before held power by the uncompromising frankness with which the Duchess of Marlborough treated the Queen; and whatever else may be laid to her charge, neither flattery nor a cringing attitude, fulsome adulation nor obsequious humility, can be attributed to her. All those qualities of the sycophant are to be found in the character of Abigail Hill, the poor relation for whom the Duchess had found a small position in the royal nursery, and who managed by these meannesses to alienate the affections of the weak and sullen Queen. Courts were different then, and politics entered largely even into the doings and attention of the royal domestics. Abigail Hill, who had been engaged as a rocker of royal or princely cradles, exercised her influence, tutored as it was by Mr. Secretary Harley, upon the Queen, who dismissed the Duchess of Marlborough from her office as Mistress of the Robes, and with the dismissal of the Duchess fell the Ministry of Marlborough and Godolphin.

Marlborough, who was as able a diplomat as he was a soldier, who knew the secrets of every European Court, was unconscious of the plottings and backstairs influences which were undermining his own power. The Duchess, too, knew nothing until their political ruin was accomplished, and then all was in vain. Although the conqueror of so many hard-fought fields and the crafty overreacher of astute statesmen might plead for the reinstatement of his wife with all his eloquence, and even go on his knees to implore the Queen’s favour, the steadfast obstinacy of a stupid woman oppressed for years, and too weak for revolt until now, was proof against all the matchless services and traditions of the man; and the position which the great Sarah’s arrogance and folly had lost them the Marlboroughs never regained.

‘The Viceroy over the Queen,’ as she had been termed, was no longer heard; even when she went in person to Kensington Palace, the Queen would no longer listen to her. ‘Dear Mrs. Morley’ and ‘Dearest Mrs. Freeman’ were estranged for ever, and though six years later the Queen died, and that commonplace dynasty the House of Hanover came to the throne in the person of George I., neither the Duke nor the Duchess of Marlborough ever again held the power which had once been theirs. Marlborough died in 1720. His wife survived him for over twenty-four years, dying at the advanced age of eighty-four. Age did not wither her resolution nor custom stale her pugnacity. She still panted, like the war-horse in Job, for the fray; she sniffed contention from afar, and kept Death himself waiting an unconscionable time. A year before her death, when very ill and like to shuffle off this mortal coil, her physicians, in consultation over her bed, upon which she lay in apparent unconsciousness, decided that she must either be blistered or she must die. ‘Must’ was no word to utter in her presence; compulsion was not to be thought of or applied to that proud spirit. ‘I won’t be blistered, and I won’t die,’ she exclaimed, with her old fire and vehemence--and she did neither at that time.

She died, possessed of immense wealth, at Marlborough House, on October 18th, 1744. She left an income of 30,000_l._ a year to her grandson, Charles, Duke of Marlborough, and the same to his brother; while her hatreds were shown in the legacies she bequeathed to Pitt (afterwards Earl of Chatham) and to the Earl of Chesterfield, in recognition of their opposition to one of her pet aversions, Sir Robert Walpole.

The mother of that doughty champion of the Church in the thirteenth century, Robert de Insula, Bishop of Durham from 1274 to 1283, must have been the very ideal of a shrew. The Bishop rose to his high station from quite a menial office in the monastery of Durham, and his origin was so lowly that he had no family name, but is supposed to have assumed one from his birthplace of Holy Island, off the Durham coast. The monkish chronicler of Waverley calls him Halieland, and the Monk of Lanercost dubs him ‘Robertus de Coquinâ,’ from which it would seem that even these old historians had their prejudices. However that may be, the Bishop was either not ashamed of his origin, or else had all the vanity of a ‘self-made’ man, for he was not slow to allude to the original meanness of his birth on occasion, as the following anecdote may show:--‘The Bishop was once at Norham, and the Lord of Scremerston sent him a present of some country ale. The Bishop had long been unused to such humble beverage, yet, from respect to the donor, and also to the good report of the liquor, he tasted a cup of it--_et non sustinens statim a mensa surgens evomuit_. “See,” said he, “the force of custom: you all know my origin, and that neither from my parents nor my country can I derive any taste for wine, and yet now my country liquor is rendered utterly distasteful to me.”’

To his mother the Bishop gave a train of male and female servants, and an honourable establishment, as befitted the parent of one come to such high dignity as to be Bishop Palatine of Durham. He visited her afterwards, and apparently found the dame in anything but a sweet temper.

‘What ails my sweet mother?’ says he; ‘how fares she?’

‘Never worse,’ quoth she.

‘And what ails thee, then, or troubles thee?’ asks the good son. ‘Hast thou not men and women and attendants sufficient?’

‘Yea,’ quoth she, ‘and more than enough. I say to one, “Go,” and he runs; to another, “Come hither, fellow,” and the varlet falls down on his knee; and, in short, all things go on so abominably smooth that my heart is bursting for something to spite me, and pick a quarrel withal.’ And with that she fell a-weeping.

Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Charles, third Earl Stanhope, granddaughter of the great Earl of Chatham, and niece of William Pitt, was a woman of unbounded vanity, arrogance, and ill-temper. A technical termagant she could not be, for she was never married, and that was perhaps a better fate which met General Sir John Moore at Corunna than would have been his had he survived his disastrous retreat, and returned to England. For Hester Stanhope was his _fiancée_; and if he had married her, she could not have failed of keeping him in a life-long subjection.

She was undoubtedly a clever woman, witty, and with some learning; but all her doings were eccentric and fantastical beyond measure, and tinctured strongly with hereditary madness. For her father was something more than strange in his doings. He, too, had gifts, but they were overlaid by a singular species of mental alienation. He was a furious Republican, and it is related of him that, in accordance with those principles, he caused his armorial bearings to be obliterated from his plate, his carriages, and from everything he possessed. He halted only before the destruction of the iron gates of his house at Chevening: having removed even the magnificent tapestry given to his ancestor, the great Stanhope, by the King of Spain, for the reason that it was (to quote himself) ‘damned aristocratical.’ He sold all his Spanish plate, weighing six hundredweight, for the same whim, and was used to sleep at once with twelve blankets over him and his bedroom window wide open.

Two of a kind rarely agree together, and so it is not surprising to find that Lady Hester Stanhope felt her father’s society insupportable. She left home and went to reside with her grandmother, the dowager Lady Chatham, in Somersetshire; afterwards going to keep house for her uncle, William Pitt, in his retirement at Walmer. A year later, he became again Prime Minister, and she, acting as one of his assistant private secretaries, moved for a time in the centre of political and social turmoil. But when Pitt died, broken-hearted at the news of Napoleon’s victory of Austerlitz, his niece suddenly lost the prestige that had given her a factitious importance, and was fain to retire to the obscurity of Montagu Square, where for a time she kept house for her two half-brothers who both held commissions in the army. War breaking out, her occupation was gone, and, after a short retirement to Builth, she set out upon some extraordinary escapades in travelling which finally landed her in Syria, where she lived until 1839 in a rambling house--half monastery, half palace--on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, intriguing with or against the Porte, and the petty Sheiks and Emirs of the surrounding country. She was in receipt of a Government pension of 1200_l._ a year for a very long period, and had considerable wealth besides, until her reckless extravagance dissipated all and brought her not only to poverty, but in debt to the amount of 40,000_l._ She kept up a considerable household in her seclusion upon Mount Lebanon, and retained a physician all to herself. Certainly she never paid him anything, but he seems to have taken it out in a kind of posthumous vilification, acting as the Boswell to her Johnson, and publishing, some years after her death, three volumes of memoirs, correspondence, and conversations. He was a poor, invertebrate sort of a creature, this physician, who was content to stay beside a patient--or rather an employer--who not only paid him nothing, but consistently refused to follow his advice, and medicined herself with nostrums. It was sufficient for him to sit by her, to listen to her harangues--she made nothing of talking incessantly for twelve hours at one sitting--and to endure the plentiful abuse of doctors in general, and himself in particular, which was the staple of her conversation: to have been at length sent away with the curt intimation that he ‘had better take himself off,’ seems to have aroused no resentment in this much-enduring man. Certainly, he mentions that he was, personally and professionally, subjected constantly to stinging insults, and that he suffered from her tyranny; but it would not appear that he ever grew restive under these repeated indignities.

Lady Hester was, indeed, no mealy-mouthed blue-stocking. She had a rasping tongue, used on occasion language rather more free than welcome, and had the voice of a drill-sergeant. Added to these qualifications, she possessed biceps of unusual development, and used her muscles with effect on the miserable men and women Arabs over whom she ruled with the rigour of a Draco or a military martinet. She rather prided herself on the straight and forcible blows she could deliver, and lost no opportunity of demonstrating her prowess upon her trembling slaves. Her ‘physician’ remarks that ‘from her manner towards people it would have seemed that she was the only person in creation privileged to abuse and to command; others had nothing else to do but to obey and not to think. She was haughty and overbearing, impatient of control, born to rule, and more at her ease when she had a hundred persons to govern than when she had only ten.... Never was any one so fond of wielding weapons, and of boasting of her capability of using them upon a fit occasion, as she was.’ She kept a kind of armoury in her bedroom, and slept with a steel mace beside her, a battle-axe and an assortment of daggers, poniards, and other murderous cutlery of that description lying within easy reach; and, if she did not actually use them upon the cowering wretches with whom she was surrounded, was probably owing rather to their care in not giving offence to this terrible she-devil than to any forbearance on her part. She stunned her _entourage_ by her unusual combination of masculine and feminine powers of offence and defence. She could storm and rage, could nag and scold with the most proficient virago, and fists or mace were ready when those more womanlike resources were exhausted.

She had the most excruciatingly ridiculous pride of birth and rank, and was vain of her personal appearance long after any such beauty as she ever possessed had fled. That beauty could only have been of complexion; for if her resemblance to her uncle, William Pitt, upon which she always insisted, was more than a fancy, her features must have been mean and insignificant. Pitt was the object of her whole-souled admiration, and the Pitt family--she was a Pitt on her mother’s side--she apparently considered to be above all the ordinary rules and restrictions of honour and probity which bind, or are supposed to bind, meaner mortals. Her physician tells us that she had on an occasion asked him if such an one ought not to act in a certain way. ‘Undoubtedly,’ said he; ‘a person of principle would not act otherwise.’ ‘Principle!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you mean by principle? I am a Pitt!’ Nothing was impossible after this.