A QUEEN OF COQUETTES
The 29th of May in the year 1660 was indeed a red-letter day in the
calendar of jovial fox-hunting Squire Jennings, of Sandridge, in
Hertfordshire. It was the day on which his Royal idol, the second
Charles, set out from Canterbury on the last stage of the journey to his
crown. Mounted on his horse, caparisoned in purple and gold, at the head
of a gay cavalcade of retainers, he rode proudly through the Kentish
lanes and villages: through avenues of wildly-cheering crowds, flinging
sweet may-blossoms and flowers under his horse's feet, and waving green
boughs over their heads in a frenzy of welcome.
[Illustration: SARAH, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH]
And it was on this very day, as the "Merrie Monarch" was riding under
the flowery arches and fluttering pennons of London streets, to the
clanging of joy-bells and the thundering of cannon, with a procession
twenty thousand strong behind him, that Squire Jennings' daughter first
opened her eyes on the world in which, though her simple-minded father
little dreamt it, she was destined to play so brilliant a part. No
birthday could have been more auspicious than this which saw the
restoration of a nation's hope; and the sun which flooded it with
splendour was typical of the good fortune that was to gild the life-path
of the Sandridge baby.
If on that day Squire Richard had been told that his baby-girl would
live to wear a Duchess's coronet and to be the bosom-friend and
counsellor of a Queen of England, he would have laughed aloud; and yet
Fate had this and more in waiting for Sarah Jennings in the years to
come. The Squire himself professed to be no more than a plain
country-gentleman, who knew as much as any man about horses and the
management of acres, but knew no more of courts and coronets than of the
man in the moon.
His family, it is true, had been seated for generations on its broad
Hertfordshire lands, and his father had been dubbed a Knight of the Bath
when the Prince of Wales, later Charles I., himself received the
accolade. His mother, too, was a Thornhurst, of Agnes Court, Old Romney,
a family of old lineage and high respectability; but, apart from Sir
John, no Jennings had ever aspired even as high as a mere knighthood,
and certainly they were as far removed from coronets as from the North
Pole.
Squire Jennings had another daughter, Frances, at this time a winsome
little maid of eight summers, already showing promise of a rare
loveliness. And she, too, was destined to a career, almost as brilliant
as, and more adventurous than that of her baby-sister. Her story opened
when one day she was transported, as maid-of-honour to the Duchess of
York, from the modest home in Hertfordshire to the glamour and
splendours of the Royal Court, where her beauty dazzled all eyes.
The Duke of York himself lost his heart at sight of her, and turned on
her the battery of his sighs and smiles, his ogling and flattering
speeches. When she met his advances with coldness, he bombarded her with
notes "containing the tenderest expressions and most magnificent
promises," slipping them into her pocket or muff, as opportunity served;
but the disdainful beauty dropped the _billets-doux_ on the floor for
any one to read who chose to pick them up, until at last the Royal lover
was compelled to abandon the pursuit in despair.
James's brother, the King, made violent love to her; and every Court
gallant, from the Duke of Buckingham to Henry Jermyn, the richest beau
in England, fluttered round her beauty like moths around a candle. How,
after many romantic vicissitudes, Frances Jennings gave her heart and
hand to Dick Talbot, the handsomest man in the British Isles; how she
raised him to a Dukedom, and, as Duchess of Tyrconnel, queened it as
Vicereine of Ireland; and how, in later life, she sank from this dizzy
pinnacle to such depths of poverty that for a time she was thankful to
sell tapes and ribbons in the New Exchange bazaar in the Strand, is one
of the most romantic stories in the annals of our Peerage.
While Frances Jennings was coquetting with coronets and playing the
madcap at the Court of Whitehall, Sarah was growing to girlhood in her
rustic environment in Hertfordshire, more interested in her pony and her
toys than in all the baubles that made up the life of that very fine
lady her sister, and giving no thought to her beauty, to which each day
was adding its touch of grace. But she was not long to remain in such
innocence; for one day when she was still but a child of twelve her
sister came in a splendid Court carriage, and took her off to London,
where a very different life awaited her.
She was not, it is true, to move like Frances in the splendid circle of
the Throne, though she was to be on its fringe and to catch many a
glimpse of it. Her more modest _rôle_ was to be playfellow and companion
of the Duke of York's younger daughter, Anne--a shy, backward child, a
few years younger than herself, who suffered from an affection of the
eyes, which practically closed books and the ordinary avenues of
education to her.
To such a child cradled in a palace and hedged round by ceremonial,
Sarah Jennings, with the superabundant health and vitality of a
country-bred girl, was an ideal playmate; and before many days had
passed the timid, clinging Princess was the very slave of the vivacious,
romping, strong-willed daughter of the squire. Thus was begun that union
between the strong and the weak, which in later years was to make Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough, virtual Queen of England, while her childish
playfellow, Anne, wore the crown.
It was under such conditions that Sarah Jennings blossomed rapidly into
young womanhood--little less lovely than her ravishing sister, but
infinitely more dowered with strength of mind and character--an
imperious young lady, with the cleverest brain and tongue, and the most
inflexible will within the circle of the Court.
While Sarah was playing with her Royal charge in the Palace nursery,
John Churchill, son of a West Country knight, whose life was to be so
closely linked with hers, had already climbed several rungs of the
ladder at the summit of which he was to find a Duke's coronet. He had
made his first appearance at Court while she was still in the cradle at
Sandridge; and although, no doubt, she had caught many a glimpse of the
handsome young courtier and favourite of the King, in her eyes he moved
in a world apart, as far removed by his splendid environment as by his
ten years' superiority in age.
John Churchill was, at least, no better born than herself. He was son of
one Winston Churchill, of a stock of West Country gentry, who had flung
aside his cap and gown at Oxford to wield a sword for King Charles; and
who, when Cromwell took the fallen reins of government into his own
hands, was made to pay a heavy price for his loyalty by the forfeiture
of his lands and a fine of £4,000. When Charles I.'s son came to his
own, Winston's star shone again; his acres were restored, he was dubbed
a knight, and was rewarded with well-paid offices under the Crown.
Moreover, a place at Court, as page-boy, was found for his young son
John; and another, as maid-of-honour to the Duchess of York, for his
daughter Arabella.
From the day young Churchill entered the service of James, Duke of York,
Fortune smiled her sweetest on him. The Duke was captivated by the boy's
handsome face, his intelligence and charming manners, and took him at
once into favour. By the time he was sixteen he was a full-blown officer
of the Guards, and the idol of the Court. His good looks, his graces of
person, and powers of fascinating wrought sad havoc in the breast of
many a Court-lady; and, boy though he was, there were few favours which
might not have been his without the asking.
Even Barbara Villiers, my Lady Castlemaine, who had for many years been
the King's "light o' love," and had borne him three sons, all
Dukes-to-be, cast amorous eyes on the handsome young Guardsman; and,
what is more, succeeded where beauty failed, in drawing him within the
net of her coarse, middle-aged charms. Strange stories are told of the
love-making of this oddly-assorted pair, which had a ludicrous
conclusion. One day King Charles was informed that if he would take the
trouble to go to Lady Castlemaine's rooms he would be rewarded by a
singular spectacle--that of young Churchill dallying with his mistress
and the mother of his children. And so it proved; for when the King made
an unexpected appearance he was just in time to see the
lieutenant-Lothario disappearing through an open window and his
inamorata on the verge of hysterics on a sofa.
One cannot blame the "Merrie Monarch" for deciding that such activities
were better fitted for another field of exercise. The young Lothario was
packed off to Tangier to cool his ardour by a little bloodshed; but
before he went Lady Castlemaine handed him a farewell present of £5,000
with which, according to Lord Chesterfield, "he immediately bought an
annuity of £500 a year of my grandfather Halifax, which was the
foundation of his subsequent fortune."
A young man so enterprising and so gifted by nature could scarcely fail
to go far, when his energies were directed into a suitable channel. He
proved that he could serve under the banner of Mars as gallantly as
under the pennon of Cupid. He did such doughty deeds against the Dutch,
under Monmouth, that he was made a Captain of Grenadiers. At the siege
of Nimeguen his reckless bravery won the unstinted praise of Turenne,
who, when one of his own officers cowardly abandoned an important
outpost, exclaimed, "I will bet a supper and a dozen of claret that my
handsome Englishman will recover the post with half the number of men
that the officer commanded who has lost it." And the "handsome
Englishman" promptly won the supper for the Marshal. Moreover, by an act
of splendid daring, during the siege of Maestricht he saved the Duke of
Monmouth's life; and returned to England a hero and a colonel, having
thoroughly purged his indiscretion in Lady Castlemaine's boudoir. If he
had toyed dangerously with the King's mistress, he had at least saved
the life of his Sovereign's best-loved son.
It was at this time that Churchill seems to have first set eyes on Sarah
Jennings, now standing on the verge of womanhood, and as sweet a flower
as the Court garden of fair girls could show. He saw her moving with
queenly grace and dainty freshness among a crowd of the loveliest women
at a Royal ball, her proud well-poised head rising above them as a lily
towers over meaner flowers. And--such are the strange ways of love--from
that first glance he was fascinated by her as no other woman ever had
power to fascinate him. When he sought an introduction to her, the
bright spirit that shone in her eyes, her clever tongue, and her
graciousness quickly forged the chains which he was proud to wear to his
life's end. Seldom has a woman's spell worked such quick magic--never
has the love it gave birth to proved more loyal and enduring.
But Sarah Jennings was no maid to be easily won by any man--even by a
lover so dowered with physical graces and so invested with the halo of
romance as John Churchill. She knew all about his heroism on
battlefields; she knew also of that little incident in a palace boudoir,
and of many another youthful peccadillo of the gallant young colonel.
She was no flower to be worn and flung aside; and she meant that Colonel
Churchill should know it. She could be gracious to him, as to any other
man; but she quickly made the limits of her indulgence clear. To all his
amorous advances she presented a smiling and inscrutable front; his
ardour was as unwelcome as it was premature.
Had she designed to make a conquest of her martial lover she could not
have set to work more diplomatically. Colonel Churchill had basked for
years in woman's smiles, often unsought and undesired; to coldness and
indifference he was a stranger; but they only served, as becomes a
soldier, to make him more resolute on victory. As a subtle tongue and a
handsome person made no impression on this frigid beauty, he had
recourse to his pen (since his sword was useless for such a conquest)
and inundated her with letters, breathing undying devotion, and craving
for at least a smile or a look of kindness.
"Show me," he writes, "that, at least, you are not quite
indifferent to me, and I swear that I will never love
anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a
conquest of me that, had I the will, I had not the power
ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you and
know if I shall be so happy as to see you to-night."
But to all his protestations and appeals she returns no response. If she
is deaf to the pleadings of love she must, he determined, at least give
him her pity. He writes to tell her that he is "extreme ill with the
headache," and craves a word of sympathy, as a beggar craves a crust. He
vows, in his pain,
"by all that is good I love you so well that I wish from
my soul that if you cannot love me, I may die, for life
could be to me one perpetual torment. If the Duchess,"
he adds, "sees company I hope you will be there; but if
she does not, I beg you will then let me see you in your
chamber, if it be but for one hour. If you are not in the
drawing-room you must then send me word at what hour I
shall come."
At last the iceberg thaws a little--though it is only to charge him with
unkindness! She assumes the _rôle_ of virtue; and, with a woman's
capriciousness, charges her lover with the coldness and neglect which
she herself has visited on him.
"Your not writing to me," she says, "made me very uneasy,
for I was afraid it was want of kindness in you, which I
am sure I will never deserve by any action of mine."
Was ever wayward woman so unjust? For weeks Churchill had been deluging
her with ardent letters, to which she had not deigned to answer one
word. Now she assumes an air of injured innocence, and accuses _him_ of
unkindness! She even promises to see him, but cannot resist the
temptation to qualify the concession with a gibe.
"That would hinder you," she says, with delicious, if
cruel satire, "from seeing the play, which I fear would
be a great affliction to you, and increase the pain in
your head, which would be out of anybody's power to ease
until the next new play. Therefore, pray consider; and,
without any compliment to me, send me word if you can
come to me without any prejudice to your health."
At any rate, the Sphinx had spoken and shown that she had some feeling,
if only that of pique and unreason; and the despairing lover was able to
take a little heart. After all, coquetry, even if carried to the verge
of cruelty, holds more promise than Arctic coldness.
But the course of love, which could scarcely be said to have even begun,
was not to run at all smoothly. Sir Winston Churchill had set his heart
on his son marrying a gilded bride, and he had discovered the very woman
for his ambitious purpose--one Catherine Sedley, daughter of his old
friend Sir Charles Sedley, a lady, no longer quite young, angular and
unattractive, but heiress to much gold and many broad acres. And he lost
no time in impressing on his handsome boy the necessity of such an
alliance. Pretty maids-of-honour were all very well to practise
love-making on; but land and money-bags far outlast and outshine
penniless beauty.
For a few undecided weeks the lure seemed to attract Churchill, coupled
though it was with the death of his romance. He dallied with the
temptation as far as the stage of marriage-settlements; and rumour had
it that the match was as good as made. Handsome Jack Churchill was to
marry an elderly and gilded spinster, and to mount on her money-bags to
greatness!
No sooner had these rumours reached the ear of Sarah Jennings than she
flew into a towering rage. "Marry a shocking creature for money!" she
raved; "and this was what all his passionate protestations of love
amounted to!" Sitting down in her anger she poured out the vials of her
wrath on her treacherous swain, bidding him wed his gold.
"As for seeing you," she wrote, "I am resolved I never
will in private or in public if I can help it; and, as
for the last, I fear it will be some time before I can
order so as to be out of your way of seeing me. But
surely you must confess that you have been the falsest
creature upon earth to me. I must own that I believe I
shall suffer a great deal of trouble; but I will bear it,
and give God thanks, though too late I see my error."
Never had maid been so cruelly treated by man! After spurning Churchill
for months, returning nothing to his ardour and homage but a disdainful
shoulder or a gibe, the moment he dares to turn his eyes on any other
divinity she is the most outraged woman who ever staked happiness on a
man's constancy. But at least her anger served the purpose of bringing
Churchill back to his allegiance more promptly than smiles could have
done. He, who had never yielded a foot to an enemy on the field of
battle, quailed before the tornado of his lady's anger. He broke off the
negotiations for his marriage with Miss Sedley, who quickly found a
solace in the Duke of York's arms in spite of her lack of beauty, and
came back to the feet of his outraged lady on bended knees.
But if she was coy and cold before, she was unapproachable now. In vain
did he vow that he had never ceased to love her more than life--that he
adored her even more now in her anger than in her indifference.
"I vow to God," he wrote, "you do so entirely possess my
thoughts that I think of nothing else in this world but
your dear self. I do not, by all that is good, say this
that I think it will move you to pity me, for I do
despair of your love, but it is to let you see how unjust
you are, and that I must ever love you as long as I have
breath, do what you will. I do not expect in return that
you should either write or speak to me. I beg that you
will give me leave to do what I cannot help, which is to
adore you as long as I live; and in return I will study
how I may deserve, though not have, your love."
Was ever lover more abject, or ever maid so hard of heart, at least in
seeming? To this pathetic effusion, which ought to have melted the heart
of, and at least wrung forgiveness from, a sphinx, she retorted that he
had merely written it to amuse himself, and to "make her think that he
had an affection for her when she was assured he had none." At last,
however, importunity tells its tale. She consents to see him; but warns
him that
"if it be only to repeat those things which you have said
so often, I shall think you the worst of men and the most
ungrateful; and 'tis to no purpose to imagine that I will
be made ridiculous to the world."
Still again she gave signs of thawing. To his next letter, in which he
wrote:
"I do love and adore you with all my heart and soul, so
much that by all that is good, I do and ever will be
better pleased with your happiness than my own,"
she answered:
"If it were sure that you have that passion for me which
you say you have, you would find out some way to make
yourself happy--it is in your power. Therefore press me
no more to see you, since it is what I cannot in honour
approve of; and if I have done so much, be as good as to
consider who was the cause of it."
At last Churchill had received a crumb of real encouragement. Even the
veriest poltroon in love must take heart at such words as these--"you
would find out some way to make yourself happy--_it is in your power_."
And it was with a light step and buoyant heart that he went the
following day to the Duchess's drawing-room to pursue in person the
advantage her letter suggested. But the very moment he entered the room
by one door his capricious mistress left it by the other; and when, in
his anger at such cavalier treatment, he wrote to ask the meaning of it,
and if she did not think it impertinent, she left him in no doubt by
answering that she did it "that I may be freed from the trouble of ever
hearing from you more!"
Once more Churchill, just as he had begun to hope again, was relegated
to the shades of despair. She refused to speak to him, she avoided him
in a manner so marked that it became the talk of the Court, and brought
her lover into ridicule. To such extremity was he reduced that he
actually wrote to her maid to beg her intercession.
"Your mistress's usage to me is so barbarous that sure
she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she
would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent her a letter
which I desire you will give her. I do love her with all
my soul, but will not torment her; but if I cannot have
her love I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what
she has already done, let her read my letter and answer
it, and not use me thus like a footman."
In her reply to this letter Sarah assumed again an air of wounded
innocence. She had done nothing, she declared, with tears in her pen, to
deserve what he had written to her; and since he evidently had such a
poor opinion of her she was angry that she had too good a one of him.
"If I had as little love as yourself, I have been told
enough of you to make me hate you, and then I believe I
should have been more happy than I am like to be now.
However," she continued, "if you can be so well contented
never to see me, as I think you can by what you say, I
will believe you, though I have not other people."
No wonder the poor man was driven to his wits' end by such varied and
contradictory moods. After avoiding him for weeks in the most marked and
merciless manner she charges him with "being content never to see her."
Although she had never uttered or penned a syllable of love in return
for his reams of passionate protestations, she taunts him with having
less love than herself! Was ever woman so hard to woo or to understand,
or lover so patient under so much provocation?
She further accused him of laughing at her when he was "at the Duke's
side," to which he retorted "I was so far from that, that had it not
been for shame I could have cried." She even swore that it was he who
avoided _her_; and he proves to her that he had followed her elusive
shadow everywhere, and had even "made his chair follow him, because I
would see if there was any light in your chamber, but I saw none."
But even this arch-coquette recognised that the most devoted lover's
forbearance has its bounds, and she was much too clever a woman to
strain them too far. When she had brought him to the verge of suicide by
her moods and vapours she saw that the time of surrender had come; and
when her lover's arm was at last around her waist and her head on his
shoulder, she vowed that she had never ceased to love him from the
first, and that she had never meant to be unkind!
Thus it came to pass that one winter's day in 1677, at St James's
Palace, John Churchill led his bride to the altar, which proved the
portal to one of the happiest wedded lives that have ever fallen to the
lot of mortals. How little, at that crowning moment, Sarah Churchill
could have foreseen those distant days of the future, when she was left
to walk alone the last stage of life, in which she would read and
re-read, with tear-dimmed eyes, the faded letters which her coldness had
wrung from her lover in the flood-tide of his passion and his despair.