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 them in 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 a good 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 peculiar interest 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 are often 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 brought the
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 with Lady 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, with tears, 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 personal charms, 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
Betty Modish, 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 it would 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 on romance, 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.