family, like his own, had suffered great misfortunes in the cause of
the Stuarts. She had been introduced to Court, and had obtained a
position there as maid-of-honour to James’s second wife, the young and
beautiful Mary of Modena, by the interest of her elder sister, the
‘_Belle Jennings_’ of Grammont, who had held a similar post during the
lifetime of the first Duchess of York. She and her sister were the only
virtuous women in all that court, and neither the cajoleries of the
King nor his brother availed anything to induce them to join the ranks
of the Nell Gwynnes, the Barbara Palmers, or the Louise de Querouaille,
whose shame helped to swell the peerage.
[Illustration:
SARAH,
DUCHESS OF
MARLBOROUGH.
]
Sarah Jennings was not the equal of her sister in beauty, of whom
Grammont says ‘she had a complexion of dazzling fairness, luxuriant
hair of a light golden colour, an animated countenance, and the most
beautiful mouth in the world. Nature had adorned her with every charm,
to which the Graces had added the finishing touches. She gave you
the idea of Aurora, or of the Goddess of Spring, as the poets depict
those divinities.’ She did not quite come up to this standard,
but, if the judgment of her contemporaries and the truth of the
painter’s brush may be accepted on her behalf, she would have been
the foremost beauty at Whitehall or Saint James’s had not her sister
already held that distinction. Kneller’s portrait of her shows a face
of considerable beauty, poised charmingly upon a graceful neck and
fringed with flowing curls and with luxuriant hair as fine, one would
dare contend, as that of her sister Frances, the theme of that French
gossip. She has in all her portraits that piquant beauty which shines
out of glancing eyes, full and luscious (eyes which the Churchills
have inherited to the present day); that comes of a departure from
regularity of feature; which is exhibited most charmingly in the nose,
tip-tilted ever so little, but destructive of all coldness and frigid
hauteur of appearance; eyes eloquent, nose rebellious, chin a little
cleft and firm; lips somewhat rich and ripe, and with a sensuousness
that must have been three parts the convention that obtained among the
courtly painters of the time. Do you wonder, looking at her counterfeit
presentment, that she should have been the ultimate ruler of that
great commanding officer; the scourge of Ministers of State; or that
the Queen--Anne, the most paltry puppet of a sovereign which modern
times afford our astonished gaze--should have been for years entirely
under her thumb? She was a woman of imperious and ungovernable temper,
shrewd withal, if not a little shrewish; accomplished and clever
enough to have proved, for a time, a match for the intriguers who beset
the Throne during the last years of the seventeenth century and the
first of the eighteenth. During a great part of Queen Anne’s reign
the country, it has been truly said, was ruled by a Triumvirate: the
Duchess of Marlborough ruled her mellifluous Mrs. Morley, the Queen;
the Duke had, in reality, fulfilled the kingly function of going forth
to battle and defeating the enemies of the nation; while Godolphin
ruled the Parliament in his absence. But the greatest of these, in
council, was the Duchess. The Queen was a _quantité négligéable_, and
Marlborough himself, very accurately, if contemptuously, described her
in the Courts of Europe as ‘a very good sort of a woman.’ Anne reigned,
but did not govern, but ‘Mrs. Freeman’ had ambition enough, and very
nearly the capacity, to govern everybody but herself; and there the
want of self-control and her woman’s reckless tongue betrayed her.
There is no doubt that the Duchess was extremely fond of, and ambitious
for, her husband; and that the love was mutual may readily be gathered
from the Duke’s letters to his wife years after their marriage. He
writes after Ramillies: ‘I did not tell my dearest soul in my last
my design of engaging the enemy if possible to a battle, fearing the
concern she has for me might make her uneasy.... If I could begin
life over again, I would devote every hour of it to you, but as God
has been pleased to bless me, I do not doubt but he will reward me
with some years to end my days with you.’ This was twenty-eight years
after their marriage, and is eloquent of Churchill’s rare constancy
and faithful heart. But though he appears from his letters so uxorious
a husband, he exercised a judicious restraint upon his feelings on
occasion, and his naturally equable, calm, and reserved temper stood
him in good stead when the Duchess was more than usually unreasonable
and furious. Thus there is a story told of her, that once, in order to
vex him who admired her beautiful hair so greatly, she cut off those
shining tresses which Kneller has painted so well and laid them on the
Duke’s dressing-table. But, however much he was pained by this act of
singular spite, he showed nothing of it by his manner. He scarcely
seemed to notice them, and when she came again to look for them they
were gone, and no word said. She had failed that time, and did not dare
to mention the circumstance. But, after the Duke’s death, in collecting
his papers, she found her hair which she had cut off years before
treasured up in a secret place among his most cherished possessions.
She was used to tell the tale herself, and when she came to this part,
she invariably broke down and ‘fell a-crying’ for shame and grief.
‘The beauty of the Duchess of Marlborough,’ says Horace Walpole, ‘had
always been of the scornful and imperious kind, and her features and
air announced nothing that her temper did not confirm; both together,
her beauty and temper, enslaved her heroic lord.’
She was pugnacious beyond all bounds, and commanded fear and respect,
even when she was not loved, by her undoubted abilities. She had a
son and four daughters. The son died in early youth; her daughters
all became peeresses, and they and their daughters were harried by
her continually. She affected to be fond of her granddaughter, the
Duchess of Manchester, daughter of the Duchess of Montagu, her youngest
child. She said to her one day, ‘Duchess of Manchester, you are a good
creature, and I love you mightily--but you _have_ a mother!’ ‘And _she_
has a mother,’ replied the Duchess of Manchester. And she had, indeed,
in a superlative degree.
‘The great Sarah’ was, in fact, never happy unless she had some quarrel
on hand. She was offended by her granddaughter, Lady Anne Egerton’s
conduct in arranging a marriage between her brother and a daughter
of Lord Trevor. This alliance certainly could not fail to be galling
to the widowed Duchess, who, now that her husband was dead, idolised
his memory and pursued with an unquenchable hatred all those who had
opposed him in former years. For Lord Trevor had been one of the great
Duke’s bitterest enemies; and now for a grandson of Marlborough to
marry a daughter of one who had reviled him and had sat in the seat of
the scorner! It was too much. She had a portrait of her granddaughter
brought her, and, to show her hatred, painted the face black and wrote
an inscription for it, ‘She is much blacker within.’
Her temper had grown more furious with her advancing years, soured
as she had been by the ultimate revolt of Anne against her imperious
and insulting behaviour toward her Majesty in public. She had given
the Queen her gloves and fan to hold during State ceremonies, and
affected not to hear when spoken to. Certainly no royal favourite had
ever before held power by the uncompromising frankness with which the
Duchess of Marlborough treated the Queen; and whatever else may be
laid to her charge, neither flattery nor a cringing attitude, fulsome
adulation nor obsequious humility, can be attributed to her. All those
qualities of the sycophant are to be found in the character of Abigail
Hill, the poor relation for whom the Duchess had found a small position
in the royal nursery, and who managed by these meannesses to alienate
the affections of the weak and sullen Queen. Courts were different
then, and politics entered largely even into the doings and attention
of the royal domestics. Abigail Hill, who had been engaged as a rocker
of royal or princely cradles, exercised her influence, tutored as it
was by Mr. Secretary Harley, upon the Queen, who dismissed the Duchess
of Marlborough from her office as Mistress of the Robes, and with the
dismissal of the Duchess fell the Ministry of Marlborough and Godolphin.
Marlborough, who was as able a diplomat as he was a soldier, who knew
the secrets of every European Court, was unconscious of the plottings
and backstairs influences which were undermining his own power. The
Duchess, too, knew nothing until their political ruin was accomplished,
and then all was in vain. Although the conqueror of so many hard-fought
fields and the crafty overreacher of astute statesmen might plead for
the reinstatement of his wife with all his eloquence, and even go on
his knees to implore the Queen’s favour, the steadfast obstinacy of a
stupid woman oppressed for years, and too weak for revolt until now,
was proof against all the matchless services and traditions of the man;
and the position which the great Sarah’s arrogance and folly had lost
them the Marlboroughs never regained.
‘The Viceroy over the Queen,’ as she had been termed, was no longer
heard; even when she went in person to Kensington Palace, the Queen
would no longer listen to her. ‘Dear Mrs. Morley’ and ‘Dearest Mrs.
Freeman’ were estranged for ever, and though six years later the Queen
died, and that commonplace dynasty the House of Hanover came to the
throne in the person of George I., neither the Duke nor the Duchess
of Marlborough ever again held the power which had once been theirs.
Marlborough died in 1720. His wife survived him for over twenty-four
years, dying at the advanced age of eighty-four. Age did not wither
her resolution nor custom stale her pugnacity. She still panted, like
the war-horse in Job, for the fray; she sniffed contention from afar,
and kept Death himself waiting an unconscionable time. A year before
her death, when very ill and like to shuffle off this mortal coil,
her physicians, in consultation over her bed, upon which she lay in
apparent unconsciousness, decided that she must either be blistered or
she must die. ‘Must’ was no word to utter in her presence; compulsion
was not to be thought of or applied to that proud spirit. ‘I won’t
be blistered, and I won’t die,’ she exclaimed, with her old fire and
vehemence--and she did neither at that time.
She died, possessed of immense wealth, at Marlborough House, on October
18th, 1744. She left an income of 30,000_l._ a year to her grandson,
Charles, Duke of Marlborough, and the same to his brother; while her
hatreds were shown in the legacies she bequeathed to Pitt (afterwards
Earl of Chatham) and to the Earl of Chesterfield, in recognition of
their opposition to one of her pet aversions, Sir Robert Walpole.
The mother of that doughty champion of the Church in the thirteenth
century, Robert de Insula, Bishop of Durham from 1274 to 1283, must
have been the very ideal of a shrew. The Bishop rose to his high
station from quite a menial office in the monastery of Durham, and his
origin was so lowly that he had no family name, but is supposed to
have assumed one from his birthplace of Holy Island, off the Durham
coast. The monkish chronicler of Waverley calls him Halieland, and the
Monk of Lanercost dubs him ‘Robertus de Coquinâ,’ from which it would
seem that even these old historians had their prejudices. However that
may be, the Bishop was either not ashamed of his origin, or else had
all the vanity of a ‘self-made’ man, for he was not slow to allude
to the original meanness of his birth on occasion, as the following
anecdote may show:--‘The Bishop was once at Norham, and the Lord of
Scremerston sent him a present of some country ale. The Bishop had
long been unused to such humble beverage, yet, from respect to the
donor, and also to the good report of the liquor, he tasted a cup of
it--_et non sustinens statim a mensa surgens evomuit_. “See,” said he,
“the force of custom: you all know my origin, and that neither from my
parents nor my country can I derive any taste for wine, and yet now my
country liquor is rendered utterly distasteful to me.”’
To his mother the Bishop gave a train of male and female servants,
and an honourable establishment, as befitted the parent of one come
to such high dignity as to be Bishop Palatine of Durham. He visited
her afterwards, and apparently found the dame in anything but a sweet
temper.
‘What ails my sweet mother?’ says he; ‘how fares she?’
‘Never worse,’ quoth she.
‘And what ails thee, then, or troubles thee?’ asks the good son. ‘Hast
thou not men and women and attendants sufficient?’
‘Yea,’ quoth she, ‘and more than enough. I say to one, “Go,” and he
runs; to another, “Come hither, fellow,” and the varlet falls down on
his knee; and, in short, all things go on so abominably smooth that
my heart is bursting for something to spite me, and pick a quarrel
withal.’ And with that she fell a-weeping.
Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Charles, third Earl Stanhope,
granddaughter of the great Earl of Chatham, and niece of William Pitt,
was a woman of unbounded vanity, arrogance, and ill-temper. A technical
termagant she could not be, for she was never married, and that was
perhaps a better fate which met General Sir John Moore at Corunna
than would have been his had he survived his disastrous retreat, and
returned to England. For Hester Stanhope was his _fiancée_; and if
he had married her, she could not have failed of keeping him in a
life-long subjection.
She was undoubtedly a clever woman, witty, and with some learning;
but all her doings were eccentric and fantastical beyond measure,
and tinctured strongly with hereditary madness. For her father was
something more than strange in his doings. He, too, had gifts, but they
were overlaid by a singular species of mental alienation. He was a
furious Republican, and it is related of him that, in accordance with
those principles, he caused his armorial bearings to be obliterated
from his plate, his carriages, and from everything he possessed. He
halted only before the destruction of the iron gates of his house at
Chevening: having removed even the magnificent tapestry given to his
ancestor, the great Stanhope, by the King of Spain, for the reason that
it was (to quote himself) ‘damned aristocratical.’ He sold all his
Spanish plate, weighing six hundredweight, for the same whim, and was
used to sleep at once with twelve blankets over him and his bedroom
window wide open.
[Illustration:
LADY HESTER
STANHOPE.
]
Two of a kind rarely agree together, and so it is not surprising to
find that Lady Hester Stanhope felt her father’s society insupportable.
She left home and went to reside with her grandmother, the dowager
Lady Chatham, in Somersetshire; afterwards going to keep house for her
uncle, William Pitt, in his retirement at Walmer. A year later, he
became again Prime Minister, and she, acting as one of his assistant
private secretaries, moved for a time in the centre of political and
social turmoil. But when Pitt died, broken-hearted at the news of
Napoleon’s victory of Austerlitz, his niece suddenly lost the prestige
that had given her a factitious importance, and was fain to retire
to the obscurity of Montagu Square, where for a time she kept house
for her two half-brothers who both held commissions in the army. War
breaking out, her occupation was gone, and, after a short retirement
to Builth, she set out upon some extraordinary escapades in
travelling which finally landed her in Syria, where she lived until
1839 in a rambling house--half monastery, half palace--on the slopes
of Mount Lebanon, intriguing with or against the Porte, and the petty
Sheiks and Emirs of the surrounding country. She was in receipt of
a Government pension of 1200_l._ a year for a very long period, and
had considerable wealth besides, until her reckless extravagance
dissipated all and brought her not only to poverty, but in debt to
the amount of 40,000_l._ She kept up a considerable household in her
seclusion upon Mount Lebanon, and retained a physician all to herself.
Certainly she never paid him anything, but he seems to have taken it
out in a kind of posthumous vilification, acting as the Boswell to her
Johnson, and publishing, some years after her death, three volumes of
memoirs, correspondence, and conversations. He was a poor, invertebrate
sort of a creature, this physician, who was content to stay beside a
patient--or rather an employer--who not only paid him nothing, but
consistently refused to follow his advice, and medicined herself with
nostrums. It was sufficient for him to sit by her, to listen to her
harangues--she made nothing of talking incessantly for twelve hours at
one sitting--and to endure the plentiful abuse of doctors in general,
and himself in particular, which was the staple of her conversation:
to have been at length sent away with the curt intimation that he ‘had
better take himself off,’ seems to have aroused no resentment in this
much-enduring man. Certainly, he mentions that he was, personally and
professionally, subjected constantly to stinging insults, and that he
suffered from her tyranny; but it would not appear that he ever grew
restive under these repeated indignities.
Lady Hester was, indeed, no mealy-mouthed blue-stocking. She had
a rasping tongue, used on occasion language rather more free than
welcome, and had the voice of a drill-sergeant. Added to these
qualifications, she possessed biceps of unusual development, and used
her muscles with effect on the miserable men and women Arabs over whom
she ruled with the rigour of a Draco or a military martinet. She rather
prided herself on the straight and forcible blows she could deliver,
and lost no opportunity of demonstrating her prowess upon her trembling
slaves. Her ‘physician’ remarks that ‘from her manner towards people it
would have seemed that she was the only person in creation privileged
to abuse and to command; others had nothing else to do but to obey and
not to think. She was haughty and overbearing, impatient of control,
born to rule, and more at her ease when she had a hundred persons to
govern than when she had only ten.... Never was any one so fond of
wielding weapons, and of boasting of her capability of using them upon
a fit occasion, as she was.’ She kept a kind of armoury in her bedroom,
and slept with a steel mace beside her, a battle-axe and an assortment
of daggers, poniards, and other murderous cutlery of that description
lying within easy reach; and, if she did not actually use them upon
the cowering wretches with whom she was surrounded, was probably owing
rather to their care in not giving offence to this terrible she-devil
than to any forbearance on her part. She stunned her _entourage_ by
her unusual combination of masculine and feminine powers of offence
and defence. She could storm and rage, could nag and scold with the
most proficient virago, and fists or mace were ready when those more
womanlike resources were exhausted.
She had the most excruciatingly ridiculous pride of birth and rank,
and was vain of her personal appearance long after any such beauty
as she ever possessed had fled. That beauty could only have been
of complexion; for if her resemblance to her uncle, William Pitt,
upon which she always insisted, was more than a fancy, her features
must have been mean and insignificant. Pitt was the object of her
whole-souled admiration, and the Pitt family--she was a Pitt on
her mother’s side--she apparently considered to be above all the
ordinary rules and restrictions of honour and probity which bind, or
are supposed to bind, meaner mortals. Her physician tells us that
she had on an occasion asked him if such an one ought not to act in
a certain way. ‘Undoubtedly,’ said he; ‘a person of principle would
not act otherwise.’ ‘Principle!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you mean by
principle? I am a Pitt!’ Nothing was impossible after this.
But it seems likely that this, like most of her sayings and doings,
was merely a pose, meant to attract attention and make her notorious.
It was doubtless to the same end that she professed to dabble in
magic and astrology, and that she affected a belief in the proximate
coming of the Messiah. Awaiting His arrival, she kept two Arabian
mares constantly saddled which had never been ridden, and these mares
had each a special attendant whose business was to keep everything
ready for the celestial visitor, who should ride thence in triumph to
Jerusalem with Lady Hester Stanhope as a kind of lady-guide!
And so to end this galaxy of shining lights in the whole art and
mystery of shrewishness and termagancy. Many more there be, but these
are the most notorious of that unblessed company.
Turn we now to the unhappy marriages of men of genius, whose careers in
literature and art are public property.
The instances are so numerous in which men of genius or great mental
activity have embittered their lives by marriages which have proved
fruitful of discord and strife, that the proposition, ‘Should Genius be
mated?’ might well be negatived in discussion.
Warning examples, from Socrates with his shrewish Xanthippe, to the
morose and bearish Thomas Carlyle, who rendered his wife’s existence
miserable with his acerbity and ill-humours, are frequent throughout
the centuries, and sufficient, one might think, to deter Genius from
mating with Common-sense, or to hinder Common-sense from running the
risks of a lifelong companionship with Genius. And yet artists and
literary men, musicians and philosophers, marry after the repeated
failures of their predecessors to secure domestic happiness; and women,
in their ambition to marry men who show evidences of successful careers
in intellectual occupations, have no hesitancy in risking a martyrdom
of mental solitude and loneliness that is certainly less directly
painful and agonising than the fate of those stalwarts who died for
conscience sake, but which is drawn out indefinitely in years of
apparent neglect and obvious aloofness from all the interests of their
husbands’ lives.
But, in considering the unhappy relations that have often existed
between the men of genius who have married women of ordinary, or less
than ordinary, mental capacity, the indictment must fall far heavier
upon the women, because--as will be shown--the active ill-humours and
spiteful opposition of their wives have far outweighed the indifference
or want of thought of which these men of parts may have been
unconsciously guilty in their homes. It is, and has always been, the
especial attribute or misfortune of genius that it should be mentally
isolated and solitary, impatient of and uncaring for petty domestic
details and the sordid cares of housekeeping. Pegasus is a brute
transcended beyond the dray-horse that pounds the earth with vibrant
hoofs. He soars above the mountain-tops and breathes the rarefied air
of the most Alpine heights. He does not go well in double harness and
so has no companion on his journeys.