Part 11

Queen Anne "had a person and appearance not at all ungraceful, till she grew exceeding gross and corpulent. There was something of majesty in her look, but mixed with a sullen and constant frown, that plainly betrayed a gloominess of soul and cloudiness of disposition within. She seemed to inherit a good deal of her father's moroseness, which naturally produced in her the same sort of stubborn positiveness in many cases, both ordinary and extraordinary, and the same sort of bigotry in religion." This passage, being written for insertion in a party work, appeals to vulgar opinion. The slight contraction in the queen's eyes, the writer perfectly well knew, had been occasioned by violent inflammation in her childhood, and was not connected with temper. The Duchess of Marlborough likewise well knew, and had experienced, that excessive indulgence, and not moroseness, in his family circle, was the fault of the unhappy James II., her own early benefactor. However, this libel was to have been published under Bishop Burnet's mask. Thus does the creature of the bounty of those she maligns pursue her theme: "Queen Anne's memory was exceeding great, almost to a wonder, and had these two peculiarities very remarkable,--that she could, when she pleased, forget what others would have thought themselves bound by truth and honour to remember, while she remembered all such things as others would have thought it a happiness to forget. Indeed, she chose to exercise it in very little besides ceremonies and customs of courts, and such-like insignificant trifles. So that her conversation, which otherwise might have been enlivened by so great a memory, was only made more empty and trifling by its chiefly turning upon fashions and rules of precedence, or some such poor topics. Upon which account, it was a sort of misfortune to her that she loved to have a great crowd come to her, having little to say to them, but 'that the weather was either hot or cold;' and little to inquire of them, but 'how long they had been in town?' or the like weighty matters. She never discovered any readiness of parts, either in asking questions or in giving answers. In matters of ordinary moment, her discourse had nothing of brightness or wit; in weightier matters, she never spoke but in a hurry, and had a certain knack of sticking to what had been dictated to her to a degree often very disagreeable, and without the least sign of understanding or judgment." As the duchess was considered the queen's "dictator" for thirty years, she had ample opportunity of speaking on this trait of her character; but it only became apparent to her when the dictatorship was transferred for a few years to another person. "The queen's letters," she continues, "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 either of diversion or instruction."

Now turn the medal, and read the reverse:--"Queen Anne had a person and appearance very graceful; something of majesty in her look. She was religious without affectation, and certainly meant to do everything that was just. She had no ambition, which appeared by her being so easy in letting King William come before her to the crown, after the king, her father, had followed such counsels as made the nation see they could not be safe in their liberty and lives without coming to the extremities they did; and she thought it more for her honour to be easy in it, than to make a dispute who should have the crown first that was taken from her father. And it was a great trouble to her to be forced to act such a part against him, even for security, which was truly the case; and she thought those that showed the least ambition had the best character. Her journey to Nottingham was purely accidental, never concerted, but occasioned by the great fright she was in when King James returned from Salisbury; upon which she said she would rather jump out of the window than stay and see her father."

Those who have read the previous character drawn of Queen Anne by the same person must think the contradictions between the two truly monstrous, and the emanation of a bewildered brain. Some candid persons, disposed to sentimentalise on the fierce duchess, have supposed that, after a lapse of time, her mind had softened towards her benefactress, and that she wrote the last character as a reparation for the first. But such inferences vanish before the fact that the duchess herself favours the world with her motives, in raising a statue at Blenheim to her former royal mistress, and adorning it with the laudatory inscription, the whole being avowedly not to do justice to Queen Anne, but to vex and spite Queen Caroline, the consort of George II. Here are her words: "This character of Queen Anne is so much the reverse of Queen Caroline, that I think it will not be liked at court." In the middle of the last century, the Duchess of Marlborough hated Queen Caroline more than she did Queen Anne. Such is the real explanation of these discrepancies.

Other contemporary authors have mentioned traits of Queen Anne, according to their knowledge. When all are collected and examined, certain contradictions occur; for they do not enough distinguish between the actions of Anne in her youth, as an uneducated and self-indulgent woman, and the undeniable improvement in her character. Even the awful responsibility of a reigning sovereign, whose practical duties were at that era by no means clearly defined, awoke her conscience to trembling anxiety for the welfare of her people. Much permanent good she assuredly did, and no evil, as queen-regent, notwithstanding the ill-natured sarcasms of a Whig politician, who, when mentioning her demise at an opportune juncture for the Hanoverian succession, declared that "Queen Anne died like a Roman, for the good of her country." But no sovereign was ever more deeply regretted by the people. The office of regality was, there is no doubt, a painful occupation to her; for her constant complaint was, observes Tindal, "that she was only a crowned slave," the originality of which expression savours not of the dulness generally attributed to this queen.

Her person is represented differently by those who saw her daily. "Her complexion was ruddy and sanguine; the luxuriance of her chestnut hair has already been mentioned. Her face was round and comely, her features strong and regular; and the only blemish in it was that defluxion which had fallen on her eyes in her childhood, had contracted the lids, and given a cloudiness to her countenance." Thus the frown that the Duchess of Marlborough dwells on malevolently did not arise from ill-nature, but from defect of vision. The duchess has likewise given a malignant turn to a trifling incident arising from Anne's near-sightedness, quoted in her early life. "Queen Anne was of a middle stature," observes another contemporary; "not so personable and majestic as her sister, Queen Mary. Her face was rather comely than handsome; it seemed to have a tincture of sourness in it, and, for some years before she died, was rubicund and bloated. Her bones were small, her hands extremely beautiful, her voice most melodious, and her ear for music exquisite. She was brought up in High Church principles, but changed her parties according to her interest. She was a scrupulous observer of the outward and visible forms of godliness and humility in public service; as, for instance, she reproved once the minister of Windsor Castle for offering her the Sacrament before the clergy present had communicated;" thus forgetting her position and dignity as head of the church.

ESTHER JOHNSON.

[BORN 1684. DIED 1728.]

JEFFREY.

Esther Johnson, better known to the reader of Swift's works by the name of Stella, was the child of a London merchant, who died in her infancy, when she went with her mother, who was a friend of Sir William Temple's sister, to reside at Moorpark, where Swift was then domesticated. Some part of the charge of her education devolved upon him, and, though he was twenty years her senior, the interest with which he regarded her appears to have ripened into something as much like affection as could find a place in his selfish bosom. Soon after Sir William Temple's death he got his Irish livings, besides a considerable legacy; and as she had a small independence of her own, it is obvious that there was nothing to prevent their honourable and immediate union. Some cold-blooded vanity or ambition, however, or some politic anticipation of his own possible inconstancy, deterred him from this outward and open course, and led him to an arrangement which was dishonourable and absurd in the beginning, and in the end productive of the most accumulated misery.

He prevailed upon her to remove her residence from the bosom of her own family in England to his immediate neighbourhood in Ireland, where she took lodgings with an elderly companion of the name of Mrs Dingley--avowedly for the sake of his society and protection, and on a footing of intimacy so very strange and unprecedented, that, whenever he left his parsonage-house for England or Dublin, these ladies immediately took possession and occupied it till he came back. A situation so extraordinary and undefined was liable, of course, to a thousand misconstructions, and must have been felt as degrading by any woman of spirit and delicacy; and, accordingly, though the master of this Platonic seraglio seems to have used all manner of paltry and insulting practices to protect a reputation which he had no right to bring into question,--by never seeing her except in the presence of Mrs Dingley, and never sleeping under the same roof with her,--it is certain both that the connection was regarded as indecorous by persons of her own sex, and that she herself felt it to be humiliating and improper.

Accordingly, within two years after her settlement in Ireland, it appears that she encouraged the addresses of a clergyman of the name of Tisdal, between whom and Swift there was a considerable intimacy, and that she would have married him, and thus sacrificed her earliest attachment to her freedom and her honour, had she not been prevented by the private dissuasions of that false friend who did not choose to give up his own claims to her, although he had not the heart or the honour to make her lawfully his own. She was then a blooming beauty of little more than twenty, with fine black hair, delicate features, and a playful and affectionate character. It seems doubtful to us whether she originally felt for Swift anything that could properly be called love; and her willingness to marry another in the first days of their connection, seems almost decisive on the subject; but the ascendancy he had acquired over her mind, and her long habit of submitting her own judgment and inclinations to his, gave him at last an equal power over her, and moulded her pliant affections into too deep and exclusive a devotion.

Even before his appointment to the deanery of St Patrick's, it is utterly impossible to devise any apology for his not marrying her, or allowing her to marry another; the only one he ever appears to have stated himself, viz., the want of a sufficient fortune to sustain the expenses of matrimony, being palpably absurd in the mouth of a man born to nothing, and already more wealthy than nine-tenths of his order; but after he obtained that additional preferment, and was thus ranked among the well-beneficed dignitaries of the Establishment, it was plainly an insult upon common sense to pretend that it was the want of money that prevented him from fulfilling his engagement. Stella was then twenty-six, and he near forty-five, and both had hitherto lived very far within an income that was now more than doubled. That she now expected to be made his wife appears from the care he took in the Journal indirectly to destroy that expectation; and though the awe in which he continually kept her probably prevented her either from complaining or inquiring into the cause, it is now certain that a new attachment, as heartless, as unprincipled, and as fatal in its consequences as either of the others, was at the bottom of this cruel and unpardonable proceeding.

During his residence in London, from 1710 to 1712, regardless of the ties that bound him to Stella, he allowed himself to be engaged by the amiable qualities of Miss Esther Vanhomrigh; and, without explaining the nature of those ties to his new idol, strove by his assiduities to obtain a return of affection, while he studiously concealed from the unhappy Stella the wrong he was consciously doing her. [The consequences of this double connection form one of the most tragic stories in our language--the formal ceremony by which he made Stella his wife, under the cloud of secrecy, and still keeping her from the enjoyment of her rights; the death of Miss Vanhomrigh of a broken heart, and the miserable fate of Stella.] Vanessa (so he called Miss Vanhomrigh) was now dead. The grave had heaped its tranquillising mould on her agitated heart, and given her tormentor assurance that he should no more suffer from her reproaches on earth; and yet, though with her the last pretext was extinguished for refusing to acknowledge the wife he had so infamously abused, we find him, with this dreadful example before his eyes, persisting to withhold from his remaining victim that late and imperfect justice to which her claim was so apparent, and from the denial of which she was sinking before his eyes in sickness and sorrow to the grave. For the sake of avoiding some small awkwardness or inconvenience to himself,--to be secured from the idle talking of those who might wonder why, since they were to marry, they did not marry before, or perhaps merely to retain the object of his regard in more complete subjection and dependence,--he could bear to see her pining year after year in solitude and degradation, and sinking at last to an untimely grave, prepared by his hard and unrelenting refusal to clear her honour to the world even at her dying hour.

ESTHER VANHOMRIGH.

[1723.]

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

This unfortunate lady, when she first became acquainted with Swift, was in her twentieth year, and joined to all the attractions of youth, fashion, and elegance, the still more dangerous gifts of a lively imagination, a confiding temper, and a capacity of strong and permanent affection. Conscious of the pleasure which Swift received from her society, and of the advantages of youth and fortune which she possessed, and ignorant of the peculiar circumstances in which he stood with respect to another, naturally (and surely without offence either to reason or virtue) Miss Vanhomrigh gave way to the hope of forming a union with a man whose talents had first attracted her admiration, and whose attentions, in the course of their mutual studies, had by degrees gained her affections, and seemed to warrant his own. The friends continued to use the language of friendship, but with the assiduity and earnestness of a warmer passion, until Vanessa (the poetical name bestowed upon her by him) rent asunder the veil, by intimating to Swift the state of her affections; and in this, as she conceived, she was justified by her favourite, though dangerous maxim, of doing that which seems in itself right, without respect to the common opinion of the world. We cannot doubt that he actually felt the "shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise," expressed in his celebrated poem, though he had not courage to take the open and manly course of avowing those engagements with Stella, or other impediments which prevented him from accepting the hand and fortune of her rival. Without therefore making this painful but just confession, he answered the avowal of Vanessa's passion in raillery, and afterwards by an offer of devoted and everlasting friendship, founded on the basis of virtuous esteem. Vanessa seems neither to have been contented nor silenced by the result of her declaration, but to the very close of her life persisted in endeavouring, by entreaties and arguments, to extort a more lively return to her passion than this cold proffer was calculated to afford.

Upon Swift's return to Ireland, we may guess at the disturbed state of his feelings, wounded at once by ungratified ambition, and harrassed by his affection being divided between two objects, each worthy of his attachment, and each having great claims upon him, while neither was likely to remain contented with the limited return of friendship in exchange for love, and that friendship, too, divided by a rival. Time wore on. Mrs Vanhomrigh was now dead. Her two sons survived her but a short time; and the circumstances of the young ladies were so embarrassed by inconsiderate expenses, as gave them a handsome excuse for retiring to Ireland, where their father had left a small property near Celbridge. The arrival of Vanessa in Dublin excited the apprehensions of Swift and the jealousy of Stella. She importuned him with complaints of neglect and cruelty; and it was obvious that any decisive measure to break their correspondence would be attended with some such tragic consequence as, though late, at length concluded their story.

About the year 1717, she retired from Dublin to her house and property near Celbridge, to nurse her hopeless passion in seclusion from the world. Swift seems to have foreseen and warned her against the consequences of this step. His letters uniformly exhort her to seek general society, to take exercise, and divert as much as possible the current of her thoughts from the unfortunate subject which was preying upon her spirits. Until the year 1720, he never appears to have visited her at Celbridge; they only met when she was occasionally in Dublin. But in that year, and down to the time of her death, Swift came repeatedly to Celbridge.

But Miss Vanhomrigh, irritated at the situation in which she found herself, determined on bringing to a crisis those expectations of an union with the object of her affections, to the hope of which she had clung amid every vicissitude of his conduct towards her. The most probable bar was his undefined connection with Mrs Johnson, which, as it must have been perfectly known to her, had doubtless long excited her secret jealousy; although only a single hint to that purpose is to be found in their correspondence, and that so early as 1713, when she writes to him, then in Ireland, "If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, _except 'tis what is inconsistent with mine_." Her silence and patience under this state of uncertainty for no less than eight years, must have been partly owing to her awe for Swift, and partly perhaps to the weak state of her rival's health, which from year to year seemed to announce speedy dissolution. At length, however, Vanessa's impatience prevailed, and she ventured on the decisive step of writing to Mrs Johnson herself, requesting to know the nature of that connection. Stella, in reply, informed her of her marriage with the dean; and, full of the highest resentment against Swift for having given another female such a right on him as Miss Vanhomrigh's inquiries implied, she sent to him her rival's letter of interrogation, and, without seeing him or awaiting his reply, retired to the house of Mr Ford, near Dublin. Every reader knows the consequence. Swift, in one of those paroxysms of fury to which he was liable, both from temper and disease, rode instantly to Marley Abbey. As he entered the apartment, the sternness of his countenance, which was peculiarly formed to express the fiercer passions, struck the unfortunate Vanessa with such terror that she could scarce ask whether he would not sit down. He answered by flinging a letter upon the table, and, instantly leaving the house, mounted his horse and returned to Dublin. When Vanessa opened the packet, she only found her own letter to Stella. It was her death-warrant; she sunk at once under the disappointment of the delayed yet cherished hopes which had so long sickened her heart, and beneath the unrestrained wrath of him for whose sake she had indulged them. How long she survived this last interview is uncertain, but the time does not seem to have exceeded a few weeks.

MARY ASTELL.

[BORN 1668. DIED 1731.]

BALLARD.

This great ornament of her sex, the daughter of a merchant in Newcastle, and born about the year 1668, was taught all the accomplishments which were usually learned by young women of her station; and although she proceeded no further in the languages at that time than the learning of the French tongue, yet she afterwards gained some knowledge of the Latin. And having a piercing wit, a solid judgment, and tenacious memory, she made herself a complete mistress of everything she attempted to learn with the greatest ease imaginable. At about twenty years of age she left Newcastle and went to London, where, and at Chelsea, she spent the remaining part of her life, and where she prosecuted her studies very assiduously, and in a little time made great acquisitions in the sciences.

The learning and knowledge which she had gained, together with her great benevolence and generosity of temper, taught her to observe and lament the loss of it in those of her own sex, the want of which, as she justly observed, was the principal cause of their plunging themselves into so many follies and inconveniences. To redress this evil as much as lay in her power, she wrote and published the two parts of her ingenious treatise, entitled, "A Serious Proposal to the Ladies." Afterwards came her "Letters, concerning the Love of God, between the author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr John Norris." Notwithstanding her great care to conceal herself, her name was soon discovered and made known to several learned persons, whose restless curiosity would hardly otherwise have been satisfied. These letters have been much applauded for their good sense, sublime thoughts, and fine language.

Afterwards she acquired a more complete knowledge of many classic authors,--Xenophon, Plato, Hierocles, Tully, Seneca, Epictetus, and Antoninus. In 1700 she published her "Reflections on Marriage," which was followed by her book against the sectaries, "Moderation truly Stated,"--a work of which, notwithstanding all the arts she used to conceal herself, she was soon discovered to be the author. Afterwards came her "Religion of a Church of England Woman;" and her "Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War."

As her notions and sentiments of religion, piety, charity, humility, friendship, and all the other graces which adorn the good Christian, were most refined and sublime, so she possessed these rare and excellent virtues in a degree which would have made her admired and distinguished in an age less degenerate and profane; and though from the very flower of her age she lived and conversed with the fashionable world, amidst all the gaiety, pomp, and pageantry of the great city, yet she well knew how to resist and shun those infatuating snares. To know God, and to be like Him, was her first and great endeavour. Though easy and affable to others, to herself she was often over-severe. In abstinence, few or none ever surpassed her; for she would live like a hermit a considerable time together, with a crust of bread and water, with a little small beer. And at the time of her highest living, she very rarely eat any dinner till night, and then it was by the strictest rules of temperance.