LAST YEARS (1760-1762)
Lady Mary writes the history of her own times--Her health--Death of
Edward Wortley Montagu--His will--Lady Mary ponders the idea of
returning to England--She leaves Italy--She is held up at Rotterdam--She
reaches London--Horace Walpole visits her--Her last illness--Her
fortitude--Her death--She leaves one guinea to her son.
One of Lady Mary's amusements towards the end of her life was writing
the history of her own time. "It has been my fortune," she said, "to
have a more exact knowledge both of the persons and facts that have made
the greatest figure in England in this age, than is common; and I take
pleasure in putting together what I know, with an impartiality that is
altogether unusual. Distance of tie and place has totally blotted from
my mind all traces of resentment or prejudice; and I speak with the same
indifference to the Court of Great Britain as I should do of that of
Augustus Caesar." Lady Mary, however, merely wrote for her own
entertainment, and burnt her manuscript almost as soon as it was
composed. It would certainly have made interesting reading; but she
never had any idea of publication. "I know mankind too well to think
they are capable of receiving the truth, much less of applauding it; or,
were it otherwise, applause to me is as insignificant as garlands on the
dead."
"I am exceedingly glad of your father's good health: he owes it to his
uncommon abstinence and resolution," Lady Mary wrote to her daughter,
April 11, 1759. "I wish I could boast the same. I own I have too much
indulged a sedentary humour and have been a rake in reading. You will
laugh at the expression, but I think the liberal meaning of the ugly
word rake is one that follows his pleasures in contradiction to his
reason. I thought mine so innocent I might pursue them with impunity. I
now find that I was mistaken, and that all excesses are (though not
equally) blamable. My spirits in company are false fire: I have a damp
within; from marshy grounds frequently arises an appearance of light. I
grow splenetic, and consequently ought to stop my pen, for fear of
conveying the infection."
"My health is very precarious; may yours long continue and see the
prosperity of your family. I bless God I have lived to see you so well
established, and am ready to sing my _Nunc dimittis_ with pleasure,"
Lady Mary wrote to her daughter in November, 1760; and early in the next
year she touched on the same subject in a letter to Sir James Steuart.
"I have not returned my thanks for your obliging letter so soon as both
duty and inclination prompted me but I have had so severe a cold,
accompanied with a weakness in my eyes, that I have been confined to my
stove for many days.... I am preparing for my last and longest journey,
and stand on the threshold of this dirty world, my several infirmities
like posthorses ready to hurry me away."
It was in January, 1761, that Edward Wortley Montagu passed away at the
age of eighty-three. He died at Wharncliffe, the family seat of the
Wortleys, where he had lived in a most miserly manner. He had only one
luxury--tokay, of which he was passionately fond. He left a great
fortune, the highest estimate of which was £1,350,000. Horace Walpole
said the estate was worth £600,000. Walpole gives some particulars of
the legacies: "To his son, on whom six hundred a-year was settled, the
reversion of which he has sold, he gives £1,000 a-year for life, but not
to descend to any children he may have by any of his many wives. To Lady
Mary, in lieu of dower, but which to be sure she will not accept,
instead of the thirds of such a fortune, £1,200 a-year; and after her to
their son for life; and then the £1,200 and £1,000 to Lady Bute and to
her second son; with £2,000 to each of her younger children; all the
rest, in present, to Lady Bute, then to her second son, taking the name
of Wortley, and in succession to all the rest of her children, which are
numerous; and after them to Lord Sandwich, to whom, in present, he
leaves about £40,000. The son, you perceive, is not so well treated by
his own father as his companion Taaffe[22] is by the French Court, where
he lives, and is received on the best footing; so near is Fort l'Evêque
to Versailles."
[Footnote 22: Theodore Taaffe, an Irish adventurer, who, with Edward
Wortley Montagu, was imprisoned in Fort l'Evêque, at Paris, for cheating
at cards in 1751. The incident has been given in a pamphlet written by
Montagu.]
On hearing of the death of her husband, Lady Mary bethought herself of
returning to England, from which she had been absent for more than a
score of years. She was seventy-two years old, and may well have thought
that her time, too, would soon come, and that she would like to die in
her native country. Still, it was some time before she could bring
herself to a decision to set out. She was delighted with the political
success of Lord Bute and pleased with her daughter's prosperity, but "I
am doubtful whether I will attempt to be a spectator of it," she
confided in Sir James Steuart in April. "I have so many years indulged
my natural inclinations to solitude and reading, I am unwilling to
return to crowds and bustle, which would be unavoidable in London. The
few friends I esteemed are now no more: the new set of people who fill
the stage at present are too indifferent to me even to raise my
curiosity." Also, as she said, she was beginning to feel the worst
effects of age, blindness excepted, and was grown timorous and
suspicious.
It was no light thing for a woman of Lady Mary's age to voyage alone,
except for a servant or two, from Venice to London. Yet her indomitable
spirit came to her aid, and in the autumn of 1761 she left Italy. She
travelled by way of Augsberg and Frankfort to Rotterdam. The journey had
been far from agreeable. "I am dragging my ragged remnant of life to
England," she wrote to Sir James Steuart on November 20. "The wind and
tide are against me; how far I have strength to struggle against both I
know not; that I am arrived here is as much a miracle as any in the
golden legend; and if I had foreseen half the difficulties I have met
with I should not certainly have had courage to undertake it.... I am
nailed down here by a severe illness of my poor Marianne, who has not
been able to endure the frights and fatigues that we have passed."
When, about three weeks later, Marianne had sufficiently recovered to
move on, Lady Mary was held up by a hard, impenetrable frost. The delay
irked her, and she became somewhat depressed, and said that she was
dubious, in her precarious state of health, whether she would arrive at
her destination. At the beginning of the new year, she did actually make
a start, and got half way to Helvoet, and was obliged to turn back by
the mountains of sea that obstructed the passage. "I have had so many
disappointments I can scarce entertain the flattering thought of
arriving in London," the poor lady complained; but she found comfort in
that "It is uncommon at my age to have no distemper, and to retain all
my senses in their first degree of perfection." Later in the month she
arrived in London.
Horace Walpole, who heard everything, had, of course, heard that Lady
Mary was returned to England, and in a letter of October 8, 1761,
announced her return, adding with a brutality unusual even in him: "I
have not seen her yet, though they have not made her perform quarantine
for her own dirt." However, as he discovered shortly after, it was Lady
Mary Wrottisley, and not Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had arrived.
Of course, when Lady Mary had come to London, Walpole was one of the
first to go and see her. "I went last night to visit her," he wrote to
Sir Horace Mann on January 29. "I give you my honour, and you who know
her, would credit me without it, the following is a faithful description.
I found her in a miserable little chamber of a ready-furnished house,
with two tallow candles, and a bureau covered with pots and pans. On
her head, in full of all accounts, she had an old black-laced hood,
wrapped entirely round, so as to conceal all hair or want of hair. No
handkerchief, but up to her chin a kind of horse-man's riding-coat,
calling itself a _pet-en-l'air,_ made of a dark green (green I
think it had been) brocade, with coloured and silver flowers, and lined
with furs; boddice laced, a foul dimity petticoat sprig'd, velvet
muffeteens on her arms, grey stockings and slippers. Her face less
changed in twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her so, and
she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed to have taken
it for flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear.
She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect
as ever, her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing
but the dearness of provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian,
a French, and a Prussian, all men-servants, and something she calls an
_old_ secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful;
she receives all the world who go to homage her as Queen-mother, and
crams them into this kennel. The Duchess of Hamilton, who came in just
after me, was so astonished and diverted, that she could not speak to
her for laughing. She says that she left all her clothes at Venice. I
really pity Lady Bute; what will the progress be of such a commencement?"
Lady Mary rented a house in Great George Street, Hanover Square, whither
her daughter and grandchildren came often. Occasionally she went about,
and from time to time would grace an assembly with her presence. Horace
Walpole saw her at some gathering, dressed in yellow velvet and sables,
with a decent laced head and a black hood, almost like a veil, over her
face. His prognostication that she would by her interference and demands
for "jobs" make life hideous for Lord and Lady Bute proved to be
unfounded, and he had the grace to say, "She is much more discreet than
I expected, and meddles with nothing"; but he could not refrain from
saying that "she is woefully tedious in her narrations."
Lady Mary was suffering from cancer, which she concealed from her family
and acquaintances until about the beginning of July (1762). Then it
burst, and there was no hope of her life being much prolonged. On July 2
she wrote her last letter to Lady Frances Steuart, saying, "I have been
ill a long time, and am now so bad I am little capable of writing, but I
would not pass in your opinion as either stupid or ungrateful. My heart
is always warm in your service, and I am always told your affairs shall
be taken care of." If she was a bad woman to cross, at least even on her
deathbed she tried to do service to her friends. Death had no terrors
for her; she said she had lived long enough; and she died, as she had
lived, with great fortitude.
Lady Mary passed away on August 21, 1762, at the age of seventy-three.
Her remains were interred in the graveyard of Grosvenor Chapel, where
also lie Ambrose Phillips, David Mallett, Lord Chesterfield, William
Whitehead, John Wilkes, and Elizabeth Carter.
All that Lady Mary possessed, except some trifling legacies, she left to
Lady Bute. Her fortune is believed to have been inconsiderable, except
for some valuable jewels. Walpole had one last gibe: "With her usual
maternal tenderness and usual generosity, she has left her son one
guinea." The gibe was unworthy, because Walpole knew quite well the
career of that son, who, anyhow, was sufficiently provided for. It may
be that it was the pricking of Walpole's conscience for this last
outburst that made him later administer a stern rebuke to Lady Craven.
"I am sorry to hear, Madam, that by your account Lady Mary Wortley was
not so accurate and faithful as modern travellers. The invaluable art of
inoculation, which she brought from Constantinople, so dear to all
admirers of beauty, and to which we owe, perhaps the preservation of
yours, stamps her an universal benefactress; and as you rival her in
poetic talents I had rather you would employ them to celebrate her for
her nostrum, than detect her for romancing."
End of Project Gutenberg's Lady Mary Wortley Montague, by Lewis Melville