CHAPTER XVI.
The Duchess of Marlborough’s friends and contemporaries—Arthur Maynwaring—Dr. Hare—Sir Samuel Garth—Pope—Lady Mary Wortley Montague—Colley Cibber—Anecdote of Mrs. Oldfield; of Sir Richard Steele.
There must have been, undoubtedly, some attaching, as well as admirable qualities in the Duchess of Marlborough, when we consider the number and quality of those friends whom she found it possible to retain until their death; for most of them she survived.
The Duchess’s earliest political friend, Lord Godolphin, was never, as far as we can learn, replaced in her confidence and regard by any man in power. Shortly before his lordship’s death, she had the misfortune to lose another intimate though humbler friend, her accomplished correspondent, Arthur Maynwaring.
Mr. Maynwaring, like the Duke and Duchess themselves, had set out in life a zealous Jacobite.Early in life he had even exercised his pen in favour of King James’s government; and it was only after becoming acquainted with the chiefs of the Whig party, that he wholly changed his opinions. After mingling for some years in the literary society of Paris, Maynwaring, returning to London, was made one of the commissioners of Customs, and afterwards, by Lord Godolphin, appointed auditor of the Imprests, a place worth two thousand pounds per annum during a pressure of business. Thus provided for, Mr. Maynwaring became the firm and confidential friend of the Duke and Duchess, and of Godolphin; and his judicious advice was often resorted to by his illustrious friends. In return for his zeal and friendship, those by whom he was so much valued, sought to turn him from a disgraceful and unfortunate connexion, into which Maynwaring’s literary and dramatic tastes had involved him. This was a connexion with the celebrated Mrs. Oldfield, to whom he became attached when he was upwards of forty, and whom he loved, says his biographer, “with a passion that could not have been stronger, had it been both his and her first love.” This gifted actress owed much of her celebrity to the instructions of Maynwaring, who wrote several epilogues and prologues for her benefits, hearing her recite themin private. By his friends, Maynwaring was so much blamed for his connexion, that Mrs. Oldfield herself, frequently but ineffectually, represented to him that it would be advantageous for his interests to break it off; but for this disinterestedness Maynwaring loved her the more. He died very suddenly, from taking cold whilst walking in the gardens of Holywell-house, in 1712. He divided his personal property, and an estate which came from a long line of ancestry, between Mrs. Oldfield and his sister. For this he was greatly blamed by the “Examiner,” but vindicated in a paper supposed to be written by his friend Robert Walpole, afterwards the great minister.
Maynwaring was a man of considerable attainments. His style of writing was praised even by the “Examiner;” his memory is preserved by Steele’s dedication of the “Tatler” to him. He was honoured by the entire confidence of the Duchess of Marlborough, and he accorded to her his warmest admiration of her talents, and a partial appreciation of her motives. And he proved himself to be, what she most liked, a sincere friend, not an indiscriminate panegyrist. He told her grace freely what he thought; strove to moderate her resentments; and, whilst he lived, contributed to maintain agood understanding between her and the Queen, by seeking to mollify the hasty judgments of the often irritated Mrs. Freeman.
Possessing an intimate knowledge of the dispositions of all the actors in that busy scene, Mr. Maynwaring, nevertheless, foresaw that the reign of Queen Sarah, as it was called, would not be of long duration. With the sincerity of a true friend, he strove to warn her of this probable issue of the “passion,” as he justly called it, with which the Queen regarded her spoiled friend.[352]He appreciated her Majesty justly, when he hinted that she had not “a very extraordinary understanding,” and that she would, in all probability, eventually prefer the servant who flattered and deceived her, to the one “who told truth, and endeavoured to do good, and to serve right.” Sometimes his sincerity displeased the Duchess; and, according to the fashion of most of her grace’s correspondents, we find him writing to justify his “poor opinion,” which had, he feared, been too hastily expressed. If he wrote from the heart, Maynwaring was, nevertheless, a true admirer of the Duchess’s good qualities. He constantly expressed his conviction of the openness and truth of her disposition. Of cunning, or that part of craft which, says Maynwaring,“Mr. Hobbes very prettily calls crooked wisdom,” he declares her to be entirely exempt. And the advice which he was at times eager to press upon her grace, to conceal her discontent, and to return to court “with the best air that she could,” proved that in this view of her character Maynwaring was sincere.[353]He died at a critical moment, and in him the Duchess lost one of those assiduous and attached adherents, whom it is sometimes the fate of impetuous, but generous characters, to secure as personal friends.
Amongst her advisers and correspondents, Dr. Hare, Bishop of Chichester, performed a grave and conspicuous part. It was his office, seriously though kindly, to admonish her grace; to point out to her the inexpediency of indulging violent passions, upon higher grounds than those defined by her indulgent, and, in some cases, too lenient husband, or by her partial friends Lord Godolphin and Mr. Maynwaring. Yet Dr. Hare, if we may believe the slanderous pen of one of the party writers of the day, was not, in his conduct or opinions, free from a degree of laxity which bordered upon heterodoxy. Having been tutor to the Marquis of Blandford, the deceased and only son of the Duchess, he had acquired a peculiarinterest in the regard of those chastened and bereaved parents. By their aid, chiefly, he had obtained, first, the appointment of chaplain-general to the army, and afterwards the deanery of Worcester and bishopric of Chichester. To Dr. Hare’s conversation, the free and decided opinions of the Duchess upon matters connected with the church, and upon some religious subjects, may, in all probability, be traced. Like herself, the bishop was even accused of scepticism, a charge so monstrous as not for an instant to be entertained in either case. He held, however, opinions of a very questionable nature; and in a work which he published upon “The Difficulties and Discouragements which attend the Study of the Scriptures in the way of Private Judgment,” his style appeared to the convocation so irreverent and absurd, that he thought it best to attempt to conceal his being the author. He translated the Book of Psalms into the original Hebrew metre, which he pretended to have discovered; and employed much of his time in the Bangorian controversy with Dr. Hoadly, another intimate friend of the Duchess of Marlborough. Upon the accession of George the First, the bishop had the mortification of being dismissed from his chaplaincy to that monarch,on account of his irregular and obnoxious opinions.[354]
That the Duchess should entertain peculiar feelings towards this singular man, feelings which led her to receive meekly from him counsels which few others would have presumed to offer, is not a matter of surprise. Those who have lost a tenderly beloved child, know with what an enduring regard even the lowest menials who have shared our offices of affection, and hours of affliction, are naturally considered; how much more must the instructor who formed the mind of a promising son, be endeared to the parents from whom it had pleased the Creator to summon away those early budding virtues, the combination of mental and corporeal superiority! The Duchess, it appears, was so much affected upon her first interview with Dr. Hare, after the death of her son, that he thought it necessary to write an apology to her grace for his too early intrusion into her presence.[355]Eventually the Duchess appears to have derived considerable comfort from the frequent correspondence of Dr. Hare, who accompanied the Duke of Marlborough in several of his campaigns.
After the decease of his distinguished patron, Dr. Hare performed an important and friendly duty to the widowed Duchess. He gave her sincere and disinterested counsels; and in so doing evinced his gratitude to the memory of one who loved, with all her faults, the irascible and discontented woman whom he had left to buffet with storms of her own creation. Not all her possessions, nor her rank, nor the acknowledged purity of her conduct in an immoral age, nor even the influence of her husband’s great name, could procure the Duchess mental repose, nor ensure to her good-will. She lived, to imitate her own military simile, in constant hostilities. Nor was the garrison of her home faithful and friendly. Mutinies broke out, conspiracies were hourly framed against her dominion, and foreign auxiliaries called in to quell her power and abate her pride. Dr. Hare alone, of her surviving friends, as far as her published correspondence enables us to judge, found courage to point out to his warlike friend, that the sources of these skirmishes existed in her own “ill-grounded suspicions and violent passions.” With what candour and right-minded gratitude the Duchess received these admonitions, has already been remarked.
Another friend, whom the Duchess of Marlborough survived, was the amiable Doctor Garth,author of the “Dispensary,” and the intimate associate and physician of the Duke. Garth had the good fortune to retain his popularity at court, and to be appointed the King’s physician, when the Duke and Duchess were regarded with coldness. Yet a signal compliment, it was thought, was paid to this humane and accomplished man, when George the First knighted him with the Duke of Marlborough’s sword. Dr. Garth was of decided Whig opinions, as were most of the Duchess’s associates; and he was of suspected scepticism, as were also many of those in whom she placed confidence. It was, however, so prevalent an imputation in those days, that few eminent men escaped the charge. It must also be allowed, that it was a species of fashionable affectation, for affectation it most probably was, to express, for the poor credit of belonging to a certain philosophical order, a degree of doubt concerning the great truths upon which every hope of human nature depends. Sir Samuel Garth was, says Pope, “a good Christian without knowing himself to be so.” It is to be regretted that he did not know it, for he has bequeathed to the members of his profession the imputation to which, at all events, he thoughtlessly contributed, of being averse to the religious belief of our church, as they areoften obliged to be aliens to its observances. This charge, notoriously unjust in the present day, was not, however, fairly urged against Dr. Garth, who died, according to the somewhat partial evidence of Pope, in the communion of the Roman Catholic church.
Whilst he afforded the relief of his art, and the enjoyment of his conversation, to patients of the higher classes, Dr. Garth was not, as the prosperous are apt to be, unmindful of the lowly and suffering. His character appears to have presented a rare compound of bland and conciliating manners with an independent spirit. His labours at the College of Physicians were directed to purposes of charity, which then engaged the attention of that body. His literary talents were applied to satirize the unworthy members of his profession, and to elevate its character. He was an uncommon instance of a man possessing literary attainments and acquiring professional eminence. In those days, and even so late as the time of Darwin, the pursuit of the belles lettres was not inimical to the extension of a medical practice, and Garth’s celebrated satire on a portion of his professional brethren introduced him into all that a physician most prizes. Finally, when the corpse of the illustrious Dryden lay neglected and unburied, Dr. Garth broughtthe deserted remains to the College of Physicians, raised a subscription to defray the expenses of the funeral, and, following the body to Westminster Abbey, had the office, peculiarly honourable to him under such circumstances, of pronouncing an oration over the grave in which the rescued clay was deposited.
Such was the physician and friend of Marlborough. It appears an endless task to enumerate and to portray the numerous literary characters who poured forth their tribute to the greatness of the Duke, or who shared the favour of the Duchess of Marlborough. Devoid as they both were of any decided literary bias, they were nevertheless, in various ways, so much connected with some writers and wits of the day, that it may not be deemed irrelevant to bring forward a few of those who were thus distinguished.
The offensive lines written by Pope upon the character of the Duchess, as Atossa, could not have been the production of a friend. That the Duchess, in her intercourse with the great and gay, encountered frequently the master-spirit of the day, whose religious and political prepossessions led him to write her attributes in characters of gall, cannot be doubted. Pope, however, was not, it appears, one of her correspondents; and subsequently, in her intimacy withLady Mary Wortley Montague, the Duchess cherished his bitterest enemy. That gifted woman, indeed, found in the Duchess a kindred spirit. The collision of such minds must have been remarkable. Lady Mary was yet in her prime, when the Duchess, morose, and a cripple, delighted to visit her, and to entertain her brilliant friend, and be in turn entertained. The great world, its hollowness, and its consequent disappointments, were sufficiently unveiled to both, to render the confidence of social life comparatively delightful. Yet both still loved the world too well; both were essentially worldly in their natures. The one turned her calculating mind to power; the other to admiration. The career of their youth, brilliant in each, was in each succeeded by a joyless, an unloved, almost a despised old age.
It was the pleasure of the Duchess, in her later days, to receive, without ceremony, Lady Mary and her daughter Lady Bute, who frequently sat by her Grace while she dined, or went through the process of casting up her accounts. Both Lady Mary and her daughter were especial favourites, and enjoyed, accordingly, the rare fortune of never quarrelling with her grace. To them she unfolded the events of her long and harassing life; to them she communicated, withtears, the anecdote, so often quoted, of her cutting off the fair and luxuriant hair of which she was even, at that age, proud, to provoke her stoical husband, when he had one day offended her. The mode in which the provocation was offered, and was received, was characteristic of both parties. The Duchess placed the tresses which the Duke had prized in an antechamber, through which he must often necessarily pass, in order that they might attract his view. The Duke showed no symptoms of observation and vexation, appeared as calm as was his wont, and the Duchess thought that her scheme had failed: she sought her ringlets, but they had disappeared. Years afterwards, she discovered them in a cabinet belonging to the Duke, after his death, amongst other articles which she knew he prized the most of all his precious collections. And at this point of her story, the Duchess, as well she might, melted into tears.[356]The noble, kind heart which had been devoted to her was cold in the grave, and those of her family who remained, were worse than indifferent to her joys or her woes.
The Duchess’s early admirer, Colley Cibber, must not be omitted in the list of those who have contributed to exalt her fame. Cibber, as we have seen, wrote with enthusiasm of her personalcharms, which with equal liberality he alleged to have outlived the days of her youth. And not only from the custom, at that time fashionable, of admitting actors and actresses, even of doubtful character, into the society of the great, but in the practice of his profession as a player, Cibber must have had frequent opportunities of marking the gradual ripening to perfection, and the less gradual process of decay of those charms which riveted his faculties. The company of comedians to whom Cibber belonged were called the King’s servants, and styled gentlemen of the great chamber. They wore a livery of scarlet and gold, and were made the peculiar concern of the court, the King frequently interfering in their concerns and management. This company performed at Drury Lane, except when by royal command it was transported to Hampton Court, or to Windsor, to entertain the assembled court.[357]On such occasions, the Duchess must frequently have encountered the sculptor’s son, who, elated with a commission in a regiment of horse, had had, when first they met, indulged brighter day-dreams than his future existence realised. The stage, nevertheless, was at that time at its height of prosperity: all classes contributed to honour and support its ornaments. The original Lady Townly and Lady BettyModish, the beautiful but the frail Mrs. Oldfield, is said to have acquired her inimitable art of representing the manners of aristocratic females, from the number of high-born ladies whom she visited, whilst yet under the acknowledged protection of General Churchill, and, afterwards, of Arthur Maynwaryng. Bolingbroke, with all his Jacobite notions, thought himself not degraded by an intimate friendship with Booth. The spirit of the age was dramatic, as Steele’s “extravagant pleasantry” exemplifies. Being asked, by a nobleman, after the representation of Henry the Eighth, at Hampton Court, how the King, George the First, liked the play, “In truth,” answered the accomplished manager, “so terribly well, my lord, that I was afraid I should have lost all my actors; for I was not sure the King would not keep them to fill the posts at court, that he saw them so fit for in the play.”[358]
Cibber, nevertheless, was, in the commencement of his career, after he had exchanged the show and uniform of the cavalry for the sock and buskin, not only contented, but delighted, with a salary of ten shillings a week. It is well known, also, that he kept back his play of the “Careless Husband,” in despair of not being able to find an actress to personate, as in those critical days itwould be necessary to personate, the woman of fashion, that Lady Betty Modish whom Mrs. Oldfield improved afterwards to perfection, by the society and connexions of her accomplished and high-born admirers. She is acknowledged, indeed, by Cibber, to have been the prototype of that lively being of the dramatist’s fancy; “the agreeably gay woman of quality, a little too conscious of her natural attractions;” or, in less courtly language, a well-bred coquet.[359]
Originally of the same profession that Cibber had adopted when he waited upon the Duchess of Marlborough at Derby, Sir Richard Steele, afterwards appointed to be the head of the royal company of comedians, deserves to be noticed, from his projected connexion with the fame of the Marlborough family. For Steele, in his paper called “The Reader,” has left an account of his intention to write a life of the Duke of Marlborough, confining himself to the Duke’s military career:a project which, unhappily, was never executed, but the materials for which were, according to Steele’s assertion, in his possession.
The conduct and the conscience of Steele were incessantly at variance. His natural disposition was amiable, but so incautious, that his famous parallel between Addison and himself must be admired equally for its candour and its truth. “The one,” says Steele, speaking of his friend, “with patience, foresight, and temperate address, always waited and stemmed the torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the bank for his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it.” This beautiful description of true friendship is indeed characteristic of him who found it inconvenient to have written the “Christian Hero,” from the comparisons between his practice and his precepts which were incessantly drawn by his associates. Steele had all the brilliancy, and many of the failings, of his gifted countrymen. That his mind was never debased by the irregular pursuits and dissolute society to which he gave his time, is apparent from the beautiful sentiments which pervade that exquisite comedy, the “Conscious Lovers,” one of the most elegant delineations of that species of love which borders onromance, in the range of our dramatic literature. Those who remember the most pathetic and elevated strain of reflection which is displayed in a certain paper of the Spectator, in which this feeling writer describes his introduction suddenly into the apartment of a dying friend, must allow Steele to have possessed infinite power over the passions of the human heart. Devoted to the House of Hanover, reviled by Swift, and expelled from the House of Commons for his paper, the Englishman, in which he advocated principles congenial to those of the Duchess of Marlborough, Steele was doubtless an approved acquaintance, though perhaps not on the footing of an intimate friend.
A strange contrast to the preceding characters whose peculiarities have been faintly touched, was the celebrated William Penn, who appears among the list of the Duke of Marlborough’s correspondents; and, if slight expressions may be trusted, was among the number of the Duchess’s privileged acquaintance. Penn, in a letter to the great general, whom he addresses as “my noble friend,” in 1703, speaks of sending a letter under “my Lady Duchess’s cover,” and mentions the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, whose correct judgment he commends in the incidental manner of one, intimate with the circle to which he refers.This singular and high-minded personage, whom Burnet severely calls “a vain, talking man,” came into constant collision with the Duke and Duchess at the court of James the Second, where, in spite of his refusal to uncover in the King’s presence, he was received with distinction. Penn was perhaps not the less acceptable to the Duchess from his non-conformist principles. His fearlessness, and the persecutions which, for conscience sake, he sustained in the early part of his life, perhaps redeemed, in her eyes, the visionary nature of his religious impressions, the absurdity, to her strong mind, of his secret communications from God, and the suddenness of his conversion. At all events, the sterling character of Penn, and his contempt of worldly advantages, must have formed an agreeable variety among her numerous, and dissimilar associates.