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Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne
Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Duchess Sarah represented a nobler idea and grander national policy than that into which her mistress was betrayed. Her later intercourse with Anne was little more than a persecution; and yet what she aimed at was better than the dishonoring and selfish policy by which she was finally conquered. The Marlboroughs were not of those who pressed the German heir upon the queen, or would have compelled her to receive his visit, which she passionately declared she could not bear; but they were determined, all treasonable correspondence notwithstanding, upon the maintenance of the Protestant succession, upon the firm establishment of English independence and greatness,—those objects which alone had justified the Revolution and made the stern chapter of William’s life and reign anything better than an incidental episode. Though he had been false to William, as everybody was false in those days, and had lain so long in the cold shade of his displeasure, Marlborough had, in his whole magnificent career, been little more than the executor of William’s plans, the fulfiller of his policy. The duchess, on her side, with much love of power and of gain, with all the drawbacks of her temper and pertinacity, still bent every faculty to the work of backing up that policy, as embodied in her husband, keeping his friends in power, neutralizing the efforts of his enemies, and bringing the war to an entirely successful conclusion. A certain enlightenment was in all her passionate interferences with the course of public affairs. The men whom she labored to thrust into office were the best men of the time; the ascendency she endeavored so violently to retain was one under which England had been elevated in the scale of nations and all her liberties confirmed. Such persecuting and intolerant acts as the bill against occasional conformity, which was a test of exceptional severity, had her strenuous opposition. In short, had there been no Marlborough to carry on the half-begun war at William’s death, and no Sarah at Anne’s ear to inspire the queen’s sluggish nature with spirit and to keep her up to the mark of the large plans of her predecessor, England might have fallen into another driveling period of foreign subserviency, into a new and meaner Restoration.
That the reader may see, however, to what an extraordinary pass the friendship had come which had been so intimate and close, we add the duchess’s account of the concluding interview. Every kind of exasperating circumstance had accumulated in the mean time between the former friends. There had been violent meetings, violent letters by the score; even in the midst of a thanksgiving service Sarah had taken her mistress to task and imperiously bidden her not to answer. Indeed, the poor queen was more or less hunted down, pursued to her last corner of defense, when the mistress of the robes made her sudden appearance at Kensington one April afternoon in the year 1710, when everything was tending toward her downfall.
As I was entering, the Queen said she was just going to write to me, and when I began to speak she interrupted me four or five times with these repeated words, “Whatever you have to say you may put it in writing.” I said her Majesty never did so hard a thing to any as to refuse to hear them speak, and assured her that I was not going to trouble her upon the subject which I knew to be so ungrateful to her, but that I could not possibly rest until I had cleared myself from some particular calumnies with which I had been loaded. I then went on to speak (though the Queen turned away her face from me) and to represent my hard case, that there were those about her Majesty that had made her believe that I said things of her which I was no more capable of saying than of killing my own children. The Queen said without doubt there were many lies told. I then begged, in order to make this trouble the shorter and my own innocence the plainer, that I might know the particulars of which I had been accused, because if I were guilty that would quickly appear, and if I were innocent this method alone would clear me. The Queen replied that she would give me no answer, laying hold on a word in my letter that what I had to say in my own vindication need have no consequence in obliging her Majesty to answer, etc., which surely did not at all imply that I did not desire to know the particular things laid to my charge, without which it was impossible for me to clear myself. This I assured her Majesty was all I desired, and that I did not ask the names of the authors or relaters of these calumnies, saying all that I could think reasonably to enforce my just request. I protested to her Majesty that I had no design in giving her this trouble, to solicit the return of her favor, but that my sole view was to clear myself: which was too just a design to be wholly disappointed by her Majesty. Upon this the Queen offered to go out of the room, I following her, and begging leave to clear myself, and the Queen repeating over and over again, “You desired no answer and shall have none.” When she came to the door I fell into great disorder; streams of tears flow’d down against my will and prevented my speaking for some time. At length I recovered myself and appealed to the Queen in the vehemence of my concern whether I might not still have been happy in her Majesty’s favour if I could have contradicted or dissembled my real opinion of men or things? whether I had ever, during our long friendship, told her one lie, or play’d the hypocrite once? whether I had offended in anything, unless in a very zealous pressing upon her that which I thought necessary for her service and security? I then said I was informed by a very reasonable and credible person about the court that things were laid to my charge of which I was wholly incapable; that this person knew that such stories were perpetually told to her Majesty to incense her, and had beg’d of me to come and vindicate myself: that the same person had thought me of late guilty of some omissions towards her Majesty, being entirely ignorant how uneasy to her my frequent attendance must be after what had happened between us. I explained some things which I had heard her Majesty had taken amiss of me, and then, with a fresh flood of tears and a concern sufficient to move compassion, even where all love was absent, I beg’d to know what other particulars she had heard of me, that I might not be denied all power of justifying myself. But the only return was, “You desired no answer and you shall have none.” I then beg’d to know if her Majesty would tell me some other time? “You desired no answer and you shall have none.” I then appealed to her Majesty again, if she did not herself know that I had often despised interest in comparison of serving her faithfully and doing right? And whether she did not know me to be of a temper incapable of disowning anything which I knew to be true? “You desired no answer and you shall have none.” This usage was so severe, and these words, so often repeated, were so shocking (being an utter denial of common justice to one who had been a most faithful servant, and now asked nothing more) that I could not conquer myself, but said the most disrespectful thing I ever spoke to the Queen in my life, and yet what such an occasion and such circumstances might well excuse if not justify, and that was, that “I was confident her Majesty would suffer for such an instance of inhumanity.” The Queen answered, “That will be to myself.” Thus ended this remarkable conversation, the last I ever had with her Majesty [the duchess adds].
After this there was no more possibility of reconciliation. Attempts of all kinds were made, and there is even a record of a somewhat pitiful scene in which great Marlborough himself, on his return from the wars, appears on his knees pleading with Queen Anne to take back her old companion into favor, but without effect. Unfortunately for himself, he did not resign at this turning-point, being persuaded both by friends and foes not to do so; and with the evident risk before his eyes of hazarding all the combinations of the war and giving a distinct advantage to the enemy against whom he had hitherto operated so forcibly. He kept his command, therefore, for the public interest rather than his own, and returned, when the season of warfare recommenced, to the post which all these events made uneasy for him, and where his credit was shaken and his prestige diminished by the disfavor of the court and the opposition of the ministry. The responsibility was therefore left upon Anne and her ministers of dismissing him, which they did in the end of 1711, to the consternation of their allies, the delight of the French, and the bewilderment of the nation. The party plots by which this came about are far too long and involved to be capable of explanation here—neither can we enter into the semi-secret negotiations for the humiliating and disgraceful peace secured by the treaty of Utrecht, which were carried on unknown to Marlborough, to the destruction of the alliance and confusion of all his plans. Never, perhaps, was so great a man treated with such contumely. His associate in his work, the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, the great financier of his time, had already fallen, leaving office so poor a man that he would have been wholly dependent on his relations but for the unexpected death of a brother who left him a small fortune. He has left an account of his dismissal by the queen herself and on the ground apparently of personal offense, which is extraordinary indeed.
Anne herself was no doubt little more than a puppet in the hands of successive politicians; but yet the struggle that took place around her at this unfortunate period—the maintenance by every wile of somebody who could influence her, the conflict for her ear and favor—shows her immense importance in the economy of public life. Queen Victoria is the object of universal veneration and respect, but not the smallest official in her government need fear the displeasure of the queen as the highest minister had to fear that of Anne, for whom no one entertained any particular respect. Yet there was little real power in the possession of the unfortunate woman who, badgered on all sides, and refused both peace and rest, sank slowly into disease and decay during the two years which followed the disgrace of the friend of her youth.
She had no longer an audacious Freeman to tell her unwelcome truths and tease her with appeals and reproaches; but it is probable that she soon found her soft-voiced Abigail, her caressing duchess (of Somerset) little more satisfactory; never was a head that wore a crown more uneasy. She held fast to the power which she had been persuaded she was to get into her own hands when she was delivered from the sway of the Marlboroughs, and for a little while believed it possible that she could reign unaided. But this was a delusion that could not last long; and her death was hastened, it is said, by a violent altercation between Harley and St. John, when the inevitable struggle between the two who had pushed all competitors out of place occurred at last. They wrangled over the staff of office in Anne’s very presence, overwhelming her with agitation and excitement. Apart from politics, the royal existence was dull enough. When Dean Swift was at Windsor, following Harley and waiting for the decision of his Irish business, we have occasional glimpses through his eyes which show the tedium of the court. “There was a drawing-room to-day,” he says, “but so few company that the Queen sent for us into her bedchamber, where we made our bows, and stood, about twenty of us round the room, while she looked round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready, and went out.” The same authority mentions her way of taking exercise, which was a strange one. “The Queen was hunting the stag till four this afternoon,” he says; “she drove in her chaise about forty miles, and it was five before we went to dinner.... She hunts in a chaise with one horse, which she drives herself, and drives furiously like Jehu, and is a mighty hunter like Nimrod.” Windsor’s great park and forest must have afforded room and space for some part at least of this course, and a hunt in August would need to have been confined to ground less cultivated than that of the smiling plain which skirts the castle hill on the other side. Queen Anne’s Ride and Queen Anne’s Drive are still well-known names in the locality where the strange apparition of the queen, solitary in her high chaise, and “driving furiously” after the hunt, must once have been a familiar sight.
The end of this poor queen’s life was disturbed by a new and terrible struggle, in which natural sentiment and public duty, and all the prepossessions and prejudices of her nature, were set in conflict one against the other. This was upon the question of the succession. The family of Hanover, the Electress Sophia and her son and grandson, had been chosen solemnly by Parliament as the nearest members of the royal race who were Protestants, and were recognized as the heirs to the throne in all public acts and in the prayers of the church. But to Anne the house of Hanover was of no special interest. She did not love the idea of successor at all. She had declared to Marlborough passionately that the proposed visit of the Hanoverian prince was a thing which she could not bear, and there was no friendship, nor even acquaintance, between her and relatives so far removed. But apart from all public knowledge, in the secret chambers and by the back-stairs came whispers now of another name, that of James Stuart, more familiar and kindly—the baby-brother about whom Anne had believed the prevailing fable, that he was a supposititious child, for whom she had invented the name of the Pretender, but who now in her childless decay began to be presented before her as the victim of a great wrong. Poor queen! she was torn asunder by all these contradictions; and if her heart was melting toward her father’s son, all the dull experience which she had acquired in spite of herself must have convinced her that this solution of the difficulty was impossible. Her life of late had been one long conflict; imperious Sarah first, then Harley and St. John quarrelling in her very presence-chamber; and when the door was shut and the curtains drawn and all the world departed save Abigail lying on a mattress on the floor to be near her mistress, here was the most momentous question of all. She who desired nothing so much as quiet and to be left in peace, was once again compelled to face a problem of the utmost importance to England, and on which she alone had the power to say a decisive word. Little wonder if Anne was harassed beyond all endurance. But those who pressed this question upon her waning senses were the instruments of their own overthrow. The powers of life worn out before their time could bear no more. The hopes of the Jacobite party were rising higher every day as the end drew near; but at the last she escaped them, having uttered no word of support to their cause; and in the confusion which ensued, George I. was peacefully proclaimed as soon as the queen out of her lethargy had slipped beyond the boundaries of any earthly kingdom.
The Marlboroughs, who had been living on the Continent since their disgrace, came back after this new change. The duke’s entry into London “in great state, attended by hundreds of gentlemen on horseback and some of the nobility in their coaches” a few days after, is reported by one of the chroniclers of the time. The duchess followed him soon after, and whether her temper and disposition had so far mended as to allow him to enjoy the peace he had so often longed for by the side of her he loved, he had at least a tranquil evening-time among his friends and dependents, and the grandchildren who were to be his heirs—for only one of his own children survived at his death. Duchess Sarah lived long after him.
She was sixty-two when he died, but, nevertheless, in spite of temper and every other failing, was still charming enough to be sought in marriage by two distinguished suitors—one of them that proud Duke of Somerset whose first wife had supplanted her at court. She answered this potentate in the only way consistent with the dignity of a woman of her age and circumstances; but added, with a noble pride which sat well upon her, that had she been but half her age, not the emperor of the world should ever have filled the place sacred to great Marlborough. It is a pity we could not leave her here in the glow of this proud tenderness and constancy. She was capable of that and many other noble things, but not of holding her tongue, of withdrawing into the background, or accepting in other ways the natural change from maturity to age. Her restless energies, however, had some legitimate outlet. She finished Blenheim, and she wrote innumerable explanations and memoranda, which finally shaped themselves into that “Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough from her first Coming to Court,” which is one of the most interesting of all mémoires pour servir. This was published in her eighty-second year, and it is curious to think of the vivacious and unsubdued spirit which could throw itself back so completely out of the calm of age into the conflicts and the very atmosphere of what had passed thirty years before. And she did her best to prepare for a great life of Marlborough which should set him right with the world. But her time was not always so innocently employed, and it is to be feared that she wrangled to the end of her life. The “Characters” of her contemporaries which she left behind are full of spite and malice. There was no peace in her soul. A characteristic little story is told of her in an illness. “Last year she had lain a great while ill without speaking; her physicians said she must be blistered or she would die. She called out, ‘I won’t be blistered and I won’t die!’ and apparently for the moment kept her word.” She lived long enough to be impaled by Pope in verses which an involuntary admiration for this daring, dauntless, impassioned woman makes us reluctant to quote. She survived almost her entire generation, and was capable of living a hundred years more had nature permitted. She was eighty-four when she succumbed at last, in the year 1744, thirty years after the death of the queen.
Chapter III
THE AUTHOR OF “GULLIVER”
THERE are few figures in history, and still fewer in literature, which have occupied so great a place in the world’s attention, or which retain so strong a hold upon its interest, as that of Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick’s. It is considerably more than a century since he died, old and mad and miserable: a man who had never been satisfied with life, or felt his fate equal to his deserts; who disowned and hated (even when he served it) the country of his birth, and with fierce and bitter passion denounced human nature itself, and left a sting in almost every individual whom he loved; a man whose preferment and home were far from the center of public affairs, and who had no hereditary claim on the attention of England. Yet when the English reader, or he who in the farthest corner of the New World has the same right to English literature as that which the subjects of Queen Victoria hold,—as the American does—from the subjects of Queen Anne,—reads the title at the head of this page, neither the one nor the other will have any difficulty in distinguishing among all the ecclesiastical dignitaries of that age who it is that stands conspicuous as the dean. Not in royal Westminster or Windsor is this man to be found; not the ruler of any great cathedral in the rich English midlands where tradition and wealth and an almost Catholic supremacy united to make the great official of the church as important as any official of the state—but far from those influences, half as far as America is now from the center of English society and the sources of power, one of a nation which the most obstinate conservative of to-day will not hesitate to allow was then deeply wronged and cruelly misgoverned by England, many and anxious as have been her efforts since to make amends. Yet among the many strange examples of that far more than republican power (not always most evident in republics) by which a man of native force and genius, however humble, finds his way to the head of affairs and impresses his individuality upon his age, when thousands born to better fortunes are swept away as nobodies, Swift is one of the most remarkable. His origin, though noted by himself, not without a certain pride, as from a family of gentry not unknown in their district, was in his own person almost as lowly and poor as it was possible to be. The posthumous son of a poor official in the Dublin law-courts, owing his education to the kindness, or perhaps less the kindness than the family pride, of an uncle, Swift entered the world as a hanger-on, waiting what fortune and a patron might do for him, a position scarcely comprehensible to young Englishmen nowadays, though then the natural method of advancement. Such a young man in the present day would betake himself to his books, with the practical aim of an examination before him, and the hope of immediate admission through that gate to the public service and all its chances. It is amusing to speculate what the difference might have been had Jonathan Swift, coming raw with his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, shouldered his robust way to the head of an examination list, and thus making himself at a stroke independent of patronage, gone out to reign and rule and distribute justice in India, or pushed himself upward among the gentlemanly mediocrities of a public office. One asks would he have found that method more successful, and endured the desk and the routine of his office, and
“got on” with the head of his department, better than he endured the monotony and subjection, the possible slights and spurns of Sir William Temple’s household, which he entered, half servant, half equal, the poor relation, the secretary and companion of that fastidious philosopher? The question may be cut short by the almost certainty that Swift could not have gained his promotion in any such way; but his age had not learned the habit of utilizing education, and he was one of the idle youths of fame. “He was stopped of his degree,” he himself writes in his autobiographical notes, “for dullness and insufficiency, and at last hardly admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is called in that college speciali gratia.” Recent biographers have striven to prove that this really meant nothing to Swift’s discredit, but it is to be supposed that in such a matter he is himself the best authority.
The life of the household of dependents at Moor Park, where young Swift attended Sir William’s pleasure in the library, while the Johnsons and Dingleys, the waiting-gentlewomen of a system which now lingers only in courts, hung about my lady, her relatives, gossips, servants, is to us extremely difficult to realize, and still more to understand. This little cluster of secondary personages, scarcely at all elevated above the servants, with whom they sometimes sat at table, and whose offices they were always liable to be called on to perform, yet who were all conscious of gentle blood in their veins, and a relationship more or less distinct with the heads of the house, is indeed one of the most curious lingerings of the past in the eighteenth century. When we read in one of Macaulay’s brilliant sketches, or in Swift’s own words, or in the indications given by both history and fiction, that the parson,—perhaps at the great house,—humble priest of the parish, found his natural mate in the waiting-maid, it is generally forgotten that the waiting-maid was then in most cases quite as good as the parson: a gently bred and well-descended woman, like her whom an unkind but not ignoble fate made into the Stella we all know, the mild and modest star of Swift’s existence. It was no doubt a step in the transition from the great medieval household, where the squire waited on the knight with a lowliness justified by his certainty of believing himself knight in his turn, and where my lady’s service was a noble education, the only school accessible to the young gentlewomen of her connection—down to our own less picturesque and more independent days, in which personal service has ceased to be compatible with the pretensions of any who can assume, by the most distant claim, to be “gentle” folk. The institution is very apparent in Shakspere’s day, the waiting-gentlewomen who surround his heroines being of entirely different mettle from the soubrettes of modern comedy. At a later period such a fine gentleman as John Evelyn, in no need of patronage, was content and proud that his daughter should enter a great household to learn how to comport herself in the world. In the end of the seventeenth century the dependents were perhaps more absolutely dependent. But even this, like most things, had its better and worst side.
That a poor widow with her child, like Stella’s mother, should find refuge in the house of her wealthy kinswoman at no heavier cost than that of attending to Lady Temple’s linen and laces, and secure thus such a training for her little girl as might indeed have ended in the rude household of a Parson Trulliber, but at the same time might fit her to take her place in a witty and brilliant society, and enter into all the thoughts of the most brilliant genius of his time, was no ill fate; nor is there anything that is less than noble and befitting (in theory) in the association of that young man of genius, whatsoever exercises of patience he might be put to, with the highly cultured man of the world, the ex-ambassador and councilor of kings, under whose auspices he could learn to understand both books and men, see the best company of his time, and acquire at second hand all the fruits of a ripe experience. So that, perhaps, there is something to be said after all for the curious little community at Moor Park, where Sir William, like a god, made the day good or evil for his people according as he smiled or frowned; where the young Irish secretary, looking but uneasily upon a world in which his future fate was so unassured, had yet the wonderful chance once, if no more, of explaining English institutions to King William, and in his leisure the amusement of teaching little Hester how to write, and learning from her baby prattle—which must have been the delight of the house, kept up and encouraged by her elders—that “little language” which had become a sort of synonym for the most intimate and endearing utterances of tenderness. No doubt Sir William himself (who left her a modest little fortune when he died) must have loved to hear the child talk, and even Lady Giffard and the rest, having no responsibility for her parts of speech, kept her a baby as long as possible, and delighted in the pretty jargon to which foolish child-lovers cling in all ages after the little ones themselves are grown too wise to use it more.
Jonathan Swift left Ireland, along with many more, in the commotion that succeeded the revolution of 1688—a very poor and homely lad, with nothing but the learning, such as it was, picked up in a somewhat disorderly university career. Through his mother, then living at Leicester, and on the score of humble relationship between Mrs. Swift and Lady Temple, of whom the reader may perhaps remember the romance and tender history,—a pleasant association,—he was introduced to Sir William Temple’s household, but scarcely, it would appear, at first to any permanent position there. He was engaged, an unfriendly writer says, “at the rate of £20 a year” as amanuensis and reader, but “Sir William never favoured him with his conversation nor allowed him to sit at table with him.” Temple’s own account of the position, however, contains nothing at all derogatory to the young man, for whom, about a year after, he endeavored, no doubt in accordance with Swift’s own wishes, to find a situation with Sir Robert Southwell, then going to Ireland as secretary of state. Sir William describes Swift as “of good family in Herefordshire.... He has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and kept all my accounts as far as my small occasions required. He has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a very good current hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good friends, though they have for the present lost their fortunes,” the great man says; and he recommends the youth “either as a gentleman to wait on you, or a clerk to write under you, or upon any establishment of the College to recommend him to a fellowship there, which he has a just pretence to.” This shows how little there was in the position of “a gentleman to wait on you,” of which the young suitor need have been ashamed. Swift’s own account of this speedy return to Ireland is that it was by advice of the physicians, “who weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his health,” which he was young enough to have endangered by the temptations of Sir William’s fine gardens; a “surfeit of fruit” being the innocent cause to which he attributes the disease which haunted him for all the rest of his life.
His absence, however, from the Temple household was of very short duration, Sir Robert Southwell having apparently had no use for his services, or means of preferring him to a fellowship, and he returned to Moor Park in 1690, where he remained for four years. It was quite clear, whatever his vicissitudes of feeling might have been, that he identified himself entirely with his patron’s opinions and even prejudices, and was
