Chapter XI (2)

The children thus entrusted to their maternal grandmother became a solace to the Duke and Duchess, and were nurtured with attention, both to the elegance of their minds and to their happiness. There is nothing more touching than the affection of the old for infants, nothing more consolatory than to observe how beautifully Providence renews the greatest of all pleasures, in restoring to the grandfather the tenderness, and the consequent parental joys, of the father. Those who have represented Marlborough as of a narrow spirit, and a cold, designing heart, should have beheld him gazing with delight upon his youthful granddaughters, when taking lessons in music and dancing, or performing such parts as were suited to their capacity in certain dramas, which turned often upon the exploits of the grandfather, and on the gifts and graces of the grandmother. In the decline of life, Marlborough listened, with a pleasure which he cared not to conceal, to the recital of his own deeds from infantine lips; and there were others, distinguished in their way, who deemed it not beneath their high vocations to aid such entertainments as were the recreations of the beloved grandchildren at Holywell House, or at Windsor Lodge.[254]

Dr. Hoadley, at this time Bishop of Bangor, and afterwards of Winchester, was the intimate associate, and, as it seems from certain anecdotes, the spiritual friend of Marlborough in his latter days. He was a controversialist of the first order, had signalised himself in an intellectual combat of this kind against Atterbury, and also, on a later occasion, in the noted Bangorian controversy, in which his adversary, the celebrated William Law, is said to have gained the ascendency. The Bishop, with all his learned acquirements, was formed to enliven society by his cheerfulness, as well as to elevate its tone by his superior intellect. He entered, with the kindness that becomes the learned so well, into the amusements and pursuits of the young favourites of his illustrious friend. Though not a dramatist himself, he was the father of two very celebrated dramatists, at this time children; the one, Dr. Benjamin Hoadley, physician to George the Second, and the author, among other plays, of the “Suspicious Husband;” and the other, Dr. John Hoadly, a clergyman, whose most serious composition was the oratorio of Jephtha, but who thought it not inconsistent with his sacred character to write humorous farces, and to perform with Garrick and Hogarth a parody upon the ghost scene of Julius Cæsar.[255]

Dr. Hoadley, though the father of dramatists, was not, if we may believe Pope, the most lively writer among the many noted controversialists of the day. He dwelt in long sentences, to which Pope alluded when he wrote

“——Swift for closer style,[256]
But Hoadly for the period of a mile.”

Yet the younger performers in the play of “All for Love,” to which the good-natured Bishop wrote a prologue, thought his effusions, no doubt, of the highest merit; and they turned upon a subject which they could both comprehend and enjoy, the great exploits of Marlborough. Perhaps it was the Bishop’s elaborate verses which occasioned the Duchess’s aversion to poetry, when so employed, and which produced the clause in her will, bequeathing to Glover and to Mallet one thousand pounds, upon condition of their not inserting a single line of verse in the biography which they had engaged to write of her husband.[257]

“All for Love”[258] was enacted with all the proprieties, the Duchess “scratching out some of the most amorous speeches, and no embrace allowed.”[259] “In short, no offence to the company,” Miss Cairnes, daughter of Sir Alexander Cairnes of Monaghan, and afterwards married to Cadwallader, eighth Baron Blayney,[260] was domesticated in the Marlborough family at the request of the Duchess, who, esteeming her mother, Lady Cairnes, took the daughter into her family and brought her up with her granddaughters, under the care of a governess, Mrs. La Vie, a relation of Lady Cairnes, and the daughter of a French refugee. Both these ladies were important additions to the social enjoyments of Holywell, or the Lodge. Lady Blayney, who lived to the age of eighty, became and continued an attached friend to the family. Her recollections furnished the descendants of the famed Duke with several anecdotes of their ancestors, and amongst others with the foregoing account of the play.

Mrs. La Vie, the other inmate of the family, was a woman also of considerable attainments. She translated into French a letter addressed by the Duchess to George the First, on one occasion, in order to clear up some suspicions of her loyalty. Mrs. La Vie was also a frequent visitant amongst the select parties given under the agreeable form of suppers, by Lady Darlington, to George the First, where, excepting his Majesty, persons of taste and distinguished talent were alone admitted.[261]

Surrounded by this agreeable domestic society, the Duke and Duchess might have expected to pass serenely into an old age of peace. But both public and private events occurred, which depressed, though they could not render morose, a mind so kindly and amiably constituted as that of Marlborough, whilst certain circumstances aroused once more the fiery spirit of the Duchess, who rejoiced in the whirlwind.

She had lived to see, among other strange vicissitudes, her former foe, Harley, deprived not only of power, but of liberty; he had been imprisoned two years in the Tower, when his impeachment, and the sudden abandonment of that contested measure, excited public curiosity as to the cause of so unaccountable an affair.

The Duke of Marlborough was present at several of the debates which related to this singular business. He voted with the minority who were opposed to Harley. The Duchess was reported, also, to have been “distracted with disappointment,” when the proceedings against Harley were quashed by some secret influence. Yet, notwithstanding her well-known hostility to Harley, and her equally well-known adherence to Whig principles, there have been distinct statements of her having intrigued with the Jacobite party, at that time justly formidable to the King of England.

Before the acquittal of Lord Oxford took place, report at that time, and tradition has since, alleged, that Mr. Auditor Harley, the unfortunate statesman’s brother, waited privately on the Duchess of Marlborough, and showed her a letter which had been written formerly from the Duke to the Pretender. Mr. Harley, after reading this letter, declared to the Duchess that it should be produced at Lord Oxford’s trial, if that proceeding were not instantly abandoned. The Duchess, it is stated, seized the letter, committed it to the fire, and defied her foe. Mr. Harley then thus addressed her:—“I knew your grace too well to trust you; the letter you have destroyed is only a copy; the original is safe in my possession.”[262] This is one anecdote, unsupported by any authority, implicating the Duchess in the charge of a treasonable correspondence. It may be remarked, that the previous vacillating and crooked course which Marlborough had pursued with respect to the exiled family, in the time of William the Third, may have given rise to this imputation.

Another statement, bearing an aspect of greater probability, was communicated by Mr. Serjeant Comyns, afterwards Chief Baron of the Exchequer, to the late respected and gifted Benjamin West, Esq., President of the Royal Academy. Mr. West transmitted the circumstance to Mr. Gregg, a barrister, from whose handwriting the anecdote was noted down in the Biographia Britannica.

Lord Harley, the eldest son of Lord Oxford, attended by Mr. Serjeant Comyns, waited, it is said, on the Duke of Marlborough, to request his grace’s attendance at the trial of the attainted peer. The Duke, somewhat discomposed, inquired what Lord Oxford wanted of him, and was answered by Mr. Comyns, that it was only to ask his grace a question or two. The Duke became more and more agitated, and walked about the room for a quarter of an hour, evidently much embarrassed; but at length he inquired of Lord Harley on what account his attendance at the trial was required. Lord Harley answered, that it was only for the purpose of certifying his handwriting; and, to the still further questions of the Duke, informed him that Lord Oxford had in his possession all the letters which he had ever received from the Duke since the Revolution. Upon this, Marlborough became extremely perturbed, pacing the room to and fro, and even throwing off his wig in his passion; and to the further interrogatories of Mr. Comyns, as to what answer they should carry back to Lord Oxford, he returned for answer, “Tell his lordship I shall certainly be there.” “This,” adds the retailer of this anecdote, “is the true reason why Lord Oxford was never brought to trial.”[263]

This strange story has been refused credit by the able biographer of Marlborough, who has dismissed the imputation with contempt. It appears, indeed, on several accounts, not to be worthy of credit. Harley might have produced such letters long before, if he had it in his power, in order to weaken the party opposed to him, amongst whom the most violent was Lord Sunderland, son-in-law of Marlborough, who was greatly incensed when the trial of Harley was stopped. Yet Sunderland, it afterwards appears, was not devoid of suspicions regarding the Duchess’s fidelity to the ruling powers; or, probably, domestic differences caused him, at a subsequent period, to imbibe, with unfair readiness, prejudices which were diligently inculcated to her disadvantage. There were, also, other public events which aggravated dissensions already begun, and widened differences of opinion, even among the few who could remain dispassionate observers of the greatest of all national infatuations, the South Sea scheme.

The pernicious policy of William the Third, in borrowing money from the public, and paying the interest of those sums by means of certain taxes, has been justly blamed as the origin of much embarrassment and calamity to the country.[264] A species of gaming, new to the nation, and arising out of the uncertain state of public credit, became fascinating to the commercial world, and a spirit of adventure pervaded all ranks and conditions of society.

The anxiety of both Houses of Parliament to reduce the national debt fostered a scheme, brought to bear in the eleventh year of Queen Anne’s reign, of forming a fund for paying the interest of the debt, in an annuity of six per cent. All taxes upon wines, sugar, vinegar, tobacco, India silks, and other goods, were appropriated to the aid of this fund, and to the shareholders was granted the monopoly of a trade to the South Sea, or coast of Peru, in Mexico; and proprietors of navy bills and other securities were incorporated into a company which, under the name of the South Sea Company, was soon regarded by the public as a community possessing the most enviable privileges. The first scheme of this notable project was framed by Harley. Sunderland afterwards carried it on, and by this means sought to strengthen his parliamentary interest. A wild spirit of speculation inflamed the minds of innumerable suitors to the ministers, through whose influence shares were alone obtained; and even the prudent and experienced Marlborough was tempted, upon the revival of the scheme in the present reign, to increase the share which he had originally held in the stock.[265]

Sir John Blount, a scrivener, who matured, if it could be so called, the South Sea scheme, had formed his plan upon the Mississippi scheme, which in the preceding year had failed in France, and had ruined whole families. Undeterred by this warning, even the wary Duchess of Marlborough sought and obtained from Lord Sunderland subscriptions for herself, and her friends and connexions, as the greatest boon that ministerial power could grant.

But to her sound, shrewd mind the fallacy of all the expectations which a greedy public formed, was very soon apparent. The Duchess was not one of those stars of our later days, before whom an astonished world bends with adoration. Mathematics and logic had never directed her powerful understanding. She was no political economist; her speculations on all such subjects arose out of the great practical lessons which she had witnessed. Her education had been limited. To arithmetic as a science she was a stranger. “Lady Bute,” says the ingenious writer of recently published anecdotes of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, “sat by her (the Duchess) whilst she dined, or watched her in the curious process of casting up her accounts—curious, because her grace, well versed as she was in all matters relating to money, such as getting it, hoarding it, and turning it to the best advantage, knew nothing of common arithmetic. But her sound, clear head could invent an arithmetic of its own. To lookers-on it appeared as if a child had scribbled over the paper, setting down figures here and there at random; and yet every sum came right to a fraction at last, in defiance of Cocker.”[266]

Yet it was this untaught mind, disturbed often by bursts of passion, and in love with wealth and all other worldly advantages,—it was the Duchess of Marlborough, who, of all her class, was the first to detect the fallacy of that scheme by which a whole nation had been ensnared. When the value of the stock rose to an unprecedented height, and the public were more than ever infatuated by false hopes, she saved her husband and her family from ruin, not only by her foresight but by her firmness. Let those who would wholly preclude women from any participation in masculine affairs, remember how often their less biassed judgment, their less employed hours, have been made available to warn and to save. The Duchess happily had sufficient influence over her husband to rescue his disposable property from any further investment in the South Sea Stock. She resisted all the entreaties of Sunderland to employ any further portion of capital in the scheme; she foresaw that no profit would now satisfy the public mind, excited to an unnatural degree, and predicted that the fall of the stock would be as rapid as the rise. She not only withheld the Duke’s hand, but persecuted him to sell out his shares, by which prudent step he realised, it is said, a hundred thousand pounds;[267] and this clear-sightedness on the Duchess’s part was the more admirable that it was wholly singular. It was the age of speculation and of companies; and many of the nobility were at the head of some new ephemeral speculation. The Prince of Wales was made governor of the Welsh Copper Company; the Duke of Chandos, of the York Buildings; and the Duke of Bridgewater formed a third for building houses in London.[268]

Whilst these bubbles were engaging the public mind, the blow which severed Marlborough for ever from public life, and rendered even his beloved home cheerless, was struck whilst he was yet mourning at Holywell-house the death of his beloved daughters, more especially of the Countess of Sunderland. Throughout the whole of his life the Duke had suffered from intense headaches and giddiness,—warnings disregarded, as they often are, in the feverish pursuit of power, in the race for worldly honours, which the exhausted mind and irritable nerves permit not, ofttimes, even the most successful to enjoy.

On the twenty-eighth of May, 1716, not two months after his beloved daughter Anne had been removed from him, the Duke was attacked by palsy, which for some time deprived him of speech and of recollection. He was attended on this occasion by Sir Samuel Garth, who not only managed his disease with skill, but attended him with the devoted zeal of a partial friend.[269] The Duke slowly recovered to a condition not to be termed health, unless a man on the edge of a precipice can be said to be in safety. As a public man he was, indeed, no more; but it is satisfactory to the admirers of this great man to recollect that his last military counsels had been as judicious and as effective as those which he had originated on former occasions. His latest act as commander-in-chief was to concert those measures for defeating the rebellion which proved so successful; his latest prognostic with respect to public affairs was, that that rebellion would be crushed at Preston.[270]

From the first attack of the Duke’s disorder, to his release from a state of debility, though not, as it has been represented, of imbecility, a gloom hung over his existence. His bodily and mental sufferings are said to have been aggravated by the Duchess’s violent temper, and petulant attempts to regain power.[271] The assertion cannot surprise those who have observed, under various circumstances, characters which are not regulated by high and firm principles. The Duchess had kind and generous impulses, but no habit of self-government. The arbitrary spirit of an indulged wife had now become an unlimited love of sway; her affection for the Duke was not strong enough to teach her to quell for his sake the angry passions, or to check the bitterness of her satirical spirit, because the stings which she inflicted might wound the enfeebled partner of her youthful days.

After some weeks of indisposition, Marlborough was enabled to remove to Bath, where he was recommended to try the waters. When he entered that city, he was received with honours which he was little able to encounter. A numerous body of nobility and gentry hailed his approach, and the mayor and aldermen came, with due formalities, to greet him. It appears that he must very soon have recovered some portion of his former activity, if the following anecdote, related by Dr. William King, a contemporary, and principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxon, be credited.

“That great captain, the Duke of Marlborough,” says Dr. King, “when he was in the last stage of life, and very infirm, would walk from the public rooms in Bath to his lodgings, in a cold, dark night, to save sixpence in coach-hire. If the Duke,” he adds, “who left at his death more than a million and a half sterling, could have foreseen that all his wealth and honours were to be inherited by a grandson of my Lord Trevor’s, who had been one of his enemies, would he have been so careful to save a sixpence for the sake of his heir? Not for his heir, but he would always have saved a sixpence.”[272]

Whilst thus retaining what was more in him a habit than a passion, the Duke left Bath, to view with peculiar pleasure the progress of the great palace at Blenheim, where he expressed satisfaction on beholding that tribute to his former greatness. But the enjoyments of Marlborough’s declining years were few and transient, whether they consisted in the exalting contemplation of a noble structure, the suggestion, though not the gift, of a nation’s gratitude; or in the small, the very small gratification of saving a sixpence, imputed to him by his contemporary; though it is possible, and to the good-natured it may appear probable, that to the humbled invalid, conscious of decay, the satisfaction of being able to resume old habits of activity, the habits of military life, may have been one source of the pleasure.

During November, however, in the same year of his first attack, the Duke was threatened with immediate death. The remaining members of his family hastened to bid him what they expected would prove a last farewell. Their parent, however, was for the time spared to them. Again he recovered his health sufficiently to remove to Marlborough house. His reason was happily restored to him, but the use of speech for some time greatly impaired. He recovered it, however, and conversed, though he could not articulate some words. His memory, and the general powers of his mind, were also spared. The popular notion of his sinking into imbecility is, therefore, unfounded, and in this respect it is unfair, and erroneous, to couple him with Swift.

“From Marlborough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show,”

are lines so familiar, that it is difficult to dispossess the imagination of the ideas which they have lodged there. Both of these celebrated men, indeed, suffered from the same mortal and humiliating disease; and the dire malady, which is no respecter of persons, afflicted the kindly, the humane, the pure, the religious Marlborough, and abased also the vigorous intellect of the coarse, selfish, and profane Swift. Both suffered from the same oppressing consciousness of diminished mental energy. The lucid intervals of Swift were darkened by a cruel sense of present powerlessness, and of past aberrations; and Marlborough is said, when gazing upon a portrait of himself, painted in his days of vigour, to have uttered the affecting exclamation, “That _was_ a man!”[273] But here the similitude of the two cases ends. Marlborough was never reduced to that last degree of human distress, insanity; it appears by the journals of the House of Lords that he attended the debates frequently for several years after the commencement of his illness, and he performed the functions of his public offices with regularity. Marlborough was permitted by his Creator the use of reason, the power of reflection,—time, therefore, to arrange complicated worldly concerns, and to prepare for a happier sphere. Venerated by his friends, domestics, and relatives, Marlborough was permitted to his latest hour to share in the hallowed domestic enjoyments which by no immoral courses he had forfeited, by no disregard of others destroyed.

The very different termination of Swift’s career—the retributive justice which, if we believed in spirits, poor Stella’s ghost might have witnessed—the joyless close of an existence which no affectionate cares sought to cheer; the consignment of the wretched and violent lunatic to servants and keepers; the moody silence of the once eloquent and witty ornament of courtly saloons; the deep despair to which medicine could not minister, but which a moral influence might have alleviated, but which no son nor daughter’s tender perseverance, with untaught, but often, perhaps, effectual skill, sought to solace;—these, with all other gloomy particulars of Swift’s awful aberrations and death, on which not one light of consciousness was shown, must be by all remembered. Unloved he died; the affection which could, for the gentle Cowper, brave the desolating sight and company of hopeless insanity, was not the portion of one who, in this world of great moral lessons, had ever sacrificed others to his own gratification.

It was one of Marlborough’s first acts, after his partial recovery, to tender to the King, through Lord Sunderland, then in power, the resignation of his employments; but George the First, with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely have been expected from his rugged nature, declined receiving it, declaring that “the Duke’s retirement from office would excite as much pain as if a dagger should be plunged in his bosom.” Marlborough, therefore, reluctantly, and certainly to the injury of his health, remained in office; and that accordance with his Majesty’s wishes was attributed by the Duchess to Lord Sunderland, who stood in need of his father-in-law’s assistance, in the administration which he had lately formed to the exclusion of Walpole and Townshend.