INTRODUCTION
Among the records, few at best, left by time of her who was destined to be the mother of two queens regnant of England, there is one which bears its own pathetic significance.
It is a very small book, only about four inches long by three wide, bound in stamped leather from which the gilding is half worn away, with a broken silver clasp, and thick, stiff pages.[1]
1.Additional MSS., 15,900 B. M.
1.Additional MSS., 15,900 B. M.
1.Additional MSS., 15,900 B. M.
Was this little book a gift from Edward Hyde to the young daughter whom he dearly loved? Who is to tell us now?
It is a girl’s tiny notebook, a treasure perhaps to her, in which she writes down occasional memoranda as they occur to her, but as we turn the leaves it seems to bridge with a familiar touch the centuries which lie between us and that vanished time. There is a page of figures, a little poetry (“The Contented Marter”), a list of household matters, “3 bras candlesticks, 4 bras kittles, driping pans,” and so on. Anallusion to a servant—“Betty came to my Mother”—is on another leaf.
One fancies, somehow, that Anne kept this book by her bedside, jealously clasped, along with her little store of devotional reading. She filled it full of writing in pencil, quite easy to decipher, save that time has made it pale and dim.
Some of the sentences are in the French she came to know very perfectly in later days, and speak of a long dead romance.
“Je n’en vey mourir d’amour, mais ce n’est pas pour un infidèle comme vous.—Anne Hyde.”
“Adieu pour jamais, mais n’oubliez pas la plus misérable personne du monde.—Anne Hyde.”
Was the “infidèle” meant for Spencer Compton or Harry Jermyn? Do the plaintive words point to the bitterness of supposed desertion by one higher than either? When were they written? There is no date to guide us.
Elsewhere there is a mention of one, her aunt Barbara Aylesbury, greatly beloved:
“Je l’aime plus que moy-mesne mille fois.—Anne Hyde.”
But on another page (it must have been much earlier), the girl, as girls will, sets down gravely the short story of her young life, here transcribed:
“If I live till the 22 of March 1653, I am 16 yeare old. My dear Aunt Bab was when she died 24 yeare old and as much as from Aprell to August.”[2](This is the Barbara Aylesbury of the other entry.) “I was borne the 12 day of March old stile in the yeare of our Lord 1637 at Cranbourne Lodge neer Windsor in Barkshire and lived in my owne country till I was 12 yeares old haveing in that time seen the ruin both of Church and State in the murtheringe of my Kinge. The first of May old stile 1649 I came out of England being then 12 yeares old 1 month and 15 days. I came to Antwerp 6 of May old stile the August following I went to Bruxells for 3 or 4 days and returned againe to Antwerp where I stayed 3 weekes being loged at the court of her Highness the Princess Royall. I returned to Antwerp in May where I have been ever since February 8 1653. I am now 15 years old.”
2.Barbara, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, died in September 1652. (Nicholas Papers.)
2.Barbara, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, died in September 1652. (Nicholas Papers.)
2.Barbara, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, died in September 1652. (Nicholas Papers.)
So abruptly the record ends. The writer has no more to say, for she is yet only on the threshold of life.
Turn the page. Over the leaf in another hand, large and straggling, someone has inscribed a final memorandum. The little book would never be wanted by its owner any more, but there was room for this.
“On the 3 day of March being fryday the Dutchess dyed at St James and was buried the wednesday following 1671.”
Between the two dates a little span of years, not a score; and yet how great a sum of the things which go to fill up life—of hope and love and splendour, of pain and grief and disappointment.
It is this story that we try now to construct out of the memorials of her time; the life story of the woman who, without any extraordinary beauty or charm, so far as we are able to judge, to balance the comparative obscurity from which she sprang, was fated in an age when the claims of high birth were jealously guarded to become the wife of a Prince of the Blood Royal of England.
Even in the seventeenth century, gilded as it was by the slowly dying radiance of romance, the “glory and the dream” of chivalry, the strange tale reads like a fable, and yet the life, short as it was, of Anne Hyde, had results for her age and country which even now can hardly be measured accurately and dispassionately, like the ever-widening circles on the surface of a pool into which a pebble has been cast.