STATE OF PARTIES IN ACTION ON THE ACCESSION OF ANNE—HARLEY AND BOLINGBROKE AIM AT OVERTHROWING THE SWAY OF THE DUCHESS—ABIGAIL HILL BECOMES THE INSTRUMENT OF THE DUCHESS’S DOWNFALL.

The year following that in which the Duke d’Anjou succeeded to the throne of Spain saw Anne Queen of England.

On her accession Queen Anne had found three parties in action—the Tories, the Whigs, and the Jacobites. The first asserting the sovereignty of the royal prerogative; the second the extension of public liberty; the last demanding the exclusion of the Protestant George of Hanover, designated by the Commons as the Queen’s heir, and the recall of the Chevalier St. George, the Romanist son of James II., then an exile in France, where Louis XIV. had welcomed him under the title of James III.

Of these three parties, the last, who were desirous of a revolution with a change of dynasty, naturally found themselves excluded from public affairs; the Queen, facile and conciliating, divided the power of the State between the two others, and chose a ministry comprising the most eminent men among both Whigs and Tories.

Those statesmen jointly carried on the government for four years, after which the opposition of their sentiments and interests became so violent that it divided them. The Tories, representing the landed interest, which had suffered during the war, clamoured for peace with all their might; the Whigs, on the contrary, representing the monied interest, had lent their funds to the State, and desired the continuance of hostilities, as it enhanced the value of their capital. The Whigs triumphed in this first struggle. They ejected, in the first instance, three Tories from the Ministry, and afterwards obtained the dismissal of all the rest—Mansel, Harley, and Bolingbroke, and then ruled without division. They reckoned amongst their ranks the most illustrious men of the day: Marlborough, the great soldier; the skilful financier, Godolphin; the formidable speaker, Robert Walpole; the army, public opinion, parliament, and even the very heart of the Queen, through the Duchess of Marlborough, who, intoxicated with her almost unlimited sway, no longer deigned to ask, but commanded.

The influence of the Duchess of Marlborough at the court of Queen Anne was now well understood by the continental powers of Europe. When England, in 1703, received a foreign potentate as her guest, the Duchess, was, of all her subjects, the object peculiarly selected for distinction. Charles, the second son of the Emperor of Austria, having recently been proclaimed, at Vienna, King of Spain, in opposition to the Duke of Anjou, completed his visits to sundry courts in Germany, whither he had repaired to seek a wife, by paying his respects to Anne of England. Anne received her royal ally with great courtesy at Windsor, whither he was conducted by Marlborough, and there entertained with a truly royal magnificence. All ranks of people crowded to see the young monarch dine with the Queen in public, and his deportment and appearance were greatly admired by the multitude, more especially by the fair sex, whose national beauty was, on the other hand, highly extolled by Charles. The Duchess of Marlborough, though no longer young, still graced the court which she controlled. It was her office to hold the basin of water after dinner to the Queen, for the royal hands to be dipped, after the ancient fashion of the laver and ewer. Charles took the basin from the fair Duchess’s hand, and, with the gallantry of a young and well-bred man, held it to the Queen; and in returning it to the Duchess, he drew from his own finger a valuable ring and placed it on that of the stately Sarah.

It was two years after this visit that Charles sent a letter of thanks for the assistance granted him by the Queen against the French, which he addressed to the Duchess of Marlborough, “as the person most agreeable to her Majesty.” The King might have added, as a partisan most favourable to the aid afforded him, and most inimical to the sway of France, which, by the will of the late King of Spain, Charles the Second, had been unjustly extended over the Spanish monarchy.

At the time of the overthrow of the Tories, she had pushed obsession of her royal mistress even as far as constraint. To the Whigs, who had proscribed her brother, Anne preferred the Tories; but, in spite of these sympathies the favourite had demanded the dismissal of the Ministry, and the Queen had yielded, though not without the deepest grief, to her imperious Mistress of the Robes.

Thus got rid of by an intrigue, the Tories, and at their head the two celebrated statesmen, Harley and Bolingbroke, worked steadfastly in the dark to regain power. Harley was a skilful and eloquent orator. He had quitted the bar to enter parliament, and his suppleness as well as his talents had rapidly carried him on to the Speakership and the Ministry. He had specially directed his attention to finance, and passed for the most skilful financier of his day. A man of wit and taste, he loved books and manuscripts, and patronised the most illustrious writers of the reign: Swift, the English Rabelais, Pope, Boileau, and Prior, the Regnier of Great Britain. But he was not unjustly reproached for his obstinacy of character, the changeableness of his opinions, his proneness to descend to little means, and an unfortunate passion for drink.[42]

The other chief of the Tory party was Henry St. John, so well-known under the name of Bolingbroke.[43] He descended from an old Norman family allied to the royal house of Tudor. His grandfather, as though he had foreseen the future, had bequeathed him the greater part of his property, and Bolingbroke began the world under the happiest auspices of birth and fortune. At twenty-six, after a career of youthful licentiousness, he married and entered parliament. He had all the necessary qualifications for playing a distinguished part therein: a noble countenance, ready eloquence, an incredible capacity for work, a mind which later astonished Voltaire, a memory so retentive that he avoided reading mediocre books from the fear of retaining their contents. At thirty, his lofty and copious oratory, unceasingly fed by study of the ancient models, captivated both Lords and Commons. His powerful and versatile genius embraced at once poetry and jurisprudence, history and the belles lettres. He was associated, like Harley, with the first writers in England—Pope, Prior, Swift, Dryden, even with Addison himself, the Whig poet and essayist. He was one of those consummate orators who, joining grace to eloquence, was the foremost alike in pleasure or business. He was in the habit of saying that only fools were unable to find or enjoy leisure. He possessed, in short, the peculiar talents and vices which were destined later to immortalise as well as disgrace Mirabeau.

Uniting their talents and their rancour against the imperious and uncompromising woman who had compassed their disgrace, Harley and Bolingbroke, in their turn, had set about overthrowing the sway of the Duchess. They craftily endeavoured to undermine, therefore, that friendship which constituted her strength, and sought for a rival who might supplant her in the Queen’s heart. There was then at court a young lady named Abigail Hill, the daughter of a bankrupt merchant of London, who, when in poverty, had been taken by the hand by the Duchess of Marlborough, to whom she was cousin, and through her influence appointed bedchamber-woman to the Queen. By a singular chance, Abigail Hill was also a cousin of Harley, who during his administration married her to Masham, a dangling official of the royal household, who had been indebted for his post rather to his birth and connections than any personal merit.

Up to the period of Marlborough’s brilliant victory of Ramilies (May, 1706), the influence of the Duchess over the mind of her sovereign was not visibly lessened by her own indiscretion, or by the arts of her opponents. From the moment of Anne’s accession, she had flung herself with ardour into politics. To dominate was her favourite passion. And she imagined that she could decide affairs of State as easily as she directed a petty intrigue, or suppressed a squabble within the interior of the royal household. Instead of using the absolute sway she had over the Queen with tact and moderation, she exercised it with an imprudent audacity. Her party predilections were diametrically opposed to those of Anne, who was sincerely attached to the principles of the Tories, and who ardently desired to bring them into power. The Duchess did not allow her a moment’s repose until she had, by concession after concession, surrounded herself by the chiefs of the Whig party, whom she at heart detested. Hence an endless succession of piques, misunderstandings, and jars between the royal Lady and her imperious Mistress of the Robes. The glory and the important services of the Duke had, however, long deferred the explosion of these secret resentments; but it was when Harley found it impossible by any means to establish himself in the favour of the Duchess, and gain her over to his interest, that he hit upon a plan which succeeded to the utmost, as trifles often do when more important engines fail. The one he used was ready to his hand in the person of the bedchamber-woman, who had been placed about the Queen by the Duchess herself. In a letter, supposed to have been addressed to Bishop Burnet, the Duchess gives a brief account of this person, who was her kinswoman, in explanation to his inquiry as to the first cause of her disagreement with the Queen.

Abigail Hill—a name rendered famous from the momentous changes which succeeded its introduction to the political world—was the appropriate designation of the lowly, supple, and artful being on whose secret offices Harley relied for the accomplishment of his plans. Mistress Hill at this time held the post of dresser and chamber-woman to her Majesty. The world assigned certain causes for the pains which the proud favourite (the Duchess) had manifested to place her cousin in a post where she might have easy access to the Queen’s ear, and obtain her confidence. The Duchess, it was said, was weary of her arduous attendance upon a mistress whom she secretly despised. She had become too proud to perform the subordinate duties of her office, and proposed to relieve herself of some of them, by placing one on whom she could entirely depend, as an occasional substitute in the performance of those duties which even habit had not taught her to endure with patience. Since after the elevation of the Duke, in consequence of the battle of Blenheim, she had become a princess of the empire,[44] she was supposed to consider herself too elevated to continue those services to which she had been enured, first in the court of the amiable Anne Hyde, then in that of the unhappy Mary of Modena, and since, near her too gracious sovereign, the meek, but dissembling Anne.

The ungrateful kinswoman had been early acquainted with adversity, which was the remote cause of her ultimate greatness. “Mrs. Masham,” the Duchess tells us, in her succinct narrative, “was the daughter of one Hill, a merchant in the city, by a sister of my father. Our grandfather, Sir John Jenyns, had two-and-twenty children, by which means the estate of the family, which was reputed to be about four thousand pounds a year, came to be divided into small parcels. Mrs. Hill had only £500 to her fortune. Her husband lived very well for many years, as I have been told, until turning projector, he brought ruin on himself and family. But as this was long before I was born, I never knew there were such people in the world till after the Princess Anne was married, and when she lived at the Cockpit; at which time an acquaintance of mine came to me and said, she believed I did not know that I had relations who were in want, and she gave me an account of them. When she had finished her story, I answered, that indeed I had never heard before of any such relations, and immediately gave her out of my purse ten guineas for their present relief, saying I would do what I could for them.”

Not contented with conferring important benefits on Abigail’s brothers and sister, the Duchess tells us that even the husband of Mrs. Masham had several obligations to her. “It was at my instance,” says the indignant benefactress, “that he was first made a page, then an equerry, and afterwards groom of the bedchamber to the Prince; for all which he himself thanked me, as for favours procured by my means.”

Towards the Queen, Mrs. Hill displayed a servile, humble, gentle, and pliant manner, in singular contrast with that of the commanding and haughty Duchess. Anne, accustomed to opposition and remonstrance, nay, sometimes rebukes, upon certain points she had at heart, was delighted to find that as regarded both religious opinions and politics, her lowly attendant coincided with her. Mrs. Hill was, or pretended to be to serve her purpose, an enemy to the Hanoverian succession, if not a partizan of the exiled Stuarts—subjects on which the Queen and the Duchess were known to have frequent controversies, which sometimes degenerated into angry disputes. Such was the woman whom the Tories set up to oppose and undermine the influence of the redoubtable Sarah. Mrs. Masham was able to give them, by means of her court-appointment, continual access to the Queen. She had neither the wit nor the intelligence of her rival, but she pleased Anne by the simplicity of her manners and the amenity of her temper. Moreover, two powerful ties, political and religious, though strangely contradictory in their sympathies, attached her to her royal mistress. An ardent Jacobite, she, equally with the Queen, desired the return of the Pretender; like her, too, she was a zealous Protestant.

Carrying out Harley’s injunctions, Mrs. Masham strove secretly to sap the power and credit of the Whigs at Court, by daily representing to Queen Anne the disquieting influence of their chief, Marlborough—master, as he was, of the parliament, the army, the ministry, the court,—more sovereign, in fact, than the Queen herself; and she recalled to mind that last dismissal of the Tories, so rudely and imperiously dictated by the Duchess. The Queen, moved even to terror by such advice, drew closer by degrees to her new confidante, and shortly manifested towards her a favour which the Duchess of Marlborough was the first to perceive. But instead of seeking to revive a friendship still endeared to the Queen, the Duchess complained sharply of it being shared. At the same time she heaped every species of contempt, sarcasm, and insult upon Mrs. Masham, spread the vilest calumnies about her, and then, perceiving the inutility of her efforts, directed the current of her wrath against the throne. In the month of August, 1708, during a thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s on the occasion of the battle of Oudenarde, Anne found that she had not put on her diamonds, and blamed the Duchess for the omission, it belonging to her duty as Mistress of the Robes. The quondam favourite made her Majesty a haughty reply; and Anne, hurt at it, repeated her reproaches with greater warmth. The Duchess, furious, imposed silence upon her royal mistress. “I don’t ask you for an answer,” she exclaimed loud enough to be heard by the court and congregation, “don’t answer me.” The Queen remained silent, dreading further scandal, but she did not forget that day’s incident.[45]

A year afterwards, during the autumn of 1709, another altercation took place still more deplorable. Anne was in the habit of allowing a bottle of wine to be daily carried to one of her laundrymaids who was ailing, without previously asking leave of the Mistress of the Robes. This coming to the knowledge of the Duchess, she ran after the Queen one day as Anne was proceeding on her charitable errand, reproached her for having usurped her functions, and behaved with such violence that the lackeys at the bottom of the stairs could overhear what she said. Indignant at this, Anne rose to leave the room, but the Duchess prevented her by placing her back against the door, and, during an hour, exhausted herself by launching invectives against her sovereign. Having sufficiently vented her rage, the angry woman ended by saying that doubtless she should never see her again, but she cared very little about that. “I think,” calmly replied Anne, “the seldomer the better.” The Duchess at length quitted the room, but from that day the links of their hitherto close friendship were rudely broken, their correspondence interrupted, and the Queen gave her entire confidence to Mrs. Masham.

The subtle Abigail was ever on the watch to closely observe the frequent disagreements between her Majesty and the Mistress of the Robes, and did not fail to turn them to skilful account. When the storm had subsided, and the Queen poured into her friendly ear confidential complaints of the absent Duchess, Abigail’s sympathy, acquiescence, and responsive condolences, were ever ready, and effected their purpose. The lady-dresser thus gradually wormed herself into the Queen’s affections, and as gradually undermined what remained of friendly feeling between her powerful kinswoman and their royal mistress. Every one at court had become aware of the influence of the new favourite before the Duchess herself perceived it; but it was not in the power of the artful relative, nor of her tool, the Queen, much longer to blind the woman whom they had, with true vulgarity of mind, gloried in deceiving.[46]

From the time of Mrs. Masham’s admittance to close attendance on the Queen, the Duchess seemed in a constant state of irritation and annoyance. Her letters to Anne showed the mortification and vexation she endured, and prove the petty and ungrateful conduct of the bedchamber-woman, whose hold on the Queen’s regard was sustained by a thousand mean and paltry instances of treachery to her benefactress. That Queen Anne, who had once been really attached to a woman like the Duchess of Marlborough, could condescend to replace her by such a rival is not a little surprising, and shows the true bent of her character to have been such as to render her unworthy of the friendship of an honest and high-minded woman. That the Duchess herself entered into details of petty injuries, and descends to justify herself, cannot be wondered at; for such subjects were forced upon her, and much as it galled her feelings to be obliged to notice what she held in contempt, still she had no other course to pursue.

At length, the Duchess perceived clearly enough that she had been hoodwinked in certain matters by the Queen and Mrs. Masham, and that without any reasonable cause for resorting to mystery or deception. Having discovered that not only was Mrs. Hill’s marriage known to the Queen, though she had denied any knowledge of the event, but that her Majesty had been herself at the wedding, and given a large dower to the bride, the Duchess immediately wrote to Mrs. Masham, to desire an explanation of her reasons for concealing so important an occurrence from one whom she had every reason to consider her only friend. The cautious answer which she received to her question was dictated, as she easily perceived, by no other than Harley, whose tool she now saw, too late, her unworthy cousin was; and it became sufficiently plain that her empire over the mind of the weak Queen was gone.

The Duchess was, whatever her faults, upright, honest, truthtelling, and fearless; and she was long before she could suspect the treachery and meanness of a dependent; and still longer in believing that the woman who had for so many years been her pupil, and had been accustomed to her frankness, could condescend to a low cabal, and, displacing her from her councils, solace herself with the society of a person so immeasurably her inferior.

The betrayed Mistress of the Robes could now trace the whole system of deception which had been carried on to her injury for a considerable time; her relative and former dependent being the chief agent—her sovereign the accomplice. She could account for the interest which Harley had now acquired at court by means of this new instrument. She could explain to her astonished and irritated mind certain incidents, which had seemed of little moment when they occurred, but which afforded an unquestionable confirmation of all that she had learned.

When the Duchess could no longer doubt the mortifying truth, she communicated the fact to her friend, Lord Godolphin, and to her husband, then abroad. Marlborough wearied with these, as he considered them, petty dissensions, wrote a somewhat stern letter to his wife. The great soldier was annoyed and distressed at the details of paltry wrongs which he was obliged to hear, and grown impatient, forgot that sometimes,—

“Dire events from little causes spring;”

he did not contemplate his own, his wife’s, and his friend’s disgrace, from the contemptible quarrels among the women about the court.

“If you have good reasons,” he writes, “for what you write of the kindness and esteem the Queen has for Mrs. Masham and Mr. Harley, my opinion should be, that my Lord Treasurer and I should tell her Majesty what is good for herself; and if that will not prevail, to be quiet, and to let Mr. Harley and Mrs. Masham do what they please; for I own I am quite tired, and if the Queen can be safe I shall be glad. I hope the Lord Treasurer will be of my mind; and then we shall be much happier than by being in a perpetual struggle.”

At length the mask of affected humility assumed by Mrs. Masham was thrown off entirely; and, confident in the support of her royal mistress, the upstart favourite exhibited all the scorn and insolence which was in her nature. The Duchess expatiates with feminine pertinacity upon the stinging impertinences and insulting condescensions she had to endure from her lately exalted cousin. One instance she dwells on with bitter recollection, for it was the first time the minion of the Queen had dared to show her how little she regarded her.

When having with difficulty obtained an interview with Mrs. Masham, the Duchess upbraided her with her treachery, and observed, that she was certain no good intentions towards herself could have influenced her actions, Abigail replied:—

“... very gravely, that she was sure the Queen, who had always loved me extremely, would always be very kind to me. I was some minutes before I could recover from the surprise with which so extraordinary an answer struck me. To see a woman whom I had raised out of the dust put on such a superior air, and to hear her assure me, by way of consolation, that the Queen would always be very kind to me!—I was stunned to hear her say so strange a thing!”

The Duchess of Marlborough was now, therefore, at open variance with her cousin. Towards her Majesty she stood in a predicament the most curious and unprecedented that perhaps ever existed between sovereign and subject. The amused and astonished court beheld Anne cautiously creeping out of that subjection in which the Duchess had, according to her enemies, long held the timid sovereign.

A confidential friend of the Duchess, Mr. Mainwaring, remarks of her, in one of his letters, that she was totally deficient in that “part of craft which Mr. Hobbes very prettily calls crooked wisdom.”[47] Apt, as she herself expresses it, “to tumble out her mind,” her openness and honesty were appreciated, when at an advanced age, and after she had run the career of five courts—by that experienced judge, the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who often presumed upon the venerable Duchess’s candour in telling her unpalatable truths, which none but the honest could have borne to hear. It was this uprightness and singleness of mind which rendered the Duchess unwilling to believe in the duplicity and the influence of her cousin. Warned of it by Mr. Mainwaring, it was not until she found in the Queen a defender of Mrs. Masham’s secret marriage, that the Duchess was roused into suspicion. It was then that she communicated her conviction to Lord Godolphin and to Marlborough, and besought their advice and assistance.

The Duke had just then prepared measures for carrying on the war, and had completed every arrangement for his voyage into Holland; the only thing which detained him in England was, says Cunningham, “the quarrel among the women about the court.” He desired his often-offended Duchess “to put an end to those controversies, and to avoid all occasions of suspicion and disgust; and not to suffer herself to grow insolent upon the favour of fortune; “otherwise,” said he, “I shall hardly be able hereafter to excuse your fault, or to justify my own actions, however meritorious.” To which the Duchess replied, “I will take care of those things, so that you need not be in any fear about me; but whoever shall think to remove me out of the Queen’s favour, let them take care lest they remove themselves.”

It was not long before Marlborough perceived that the Duchess was not mistaken in her apprehensions; nor before he became painfully aware of the fact, that services of the greatest magnitude are often not to be weighed against slights and petty provocations.

Queen Anne, however, had some pangs of conscience, in spite of her joy at being emancipated from the thraldom of her haughty Mistress of the Robes, in ill-treating the great general who had filled her reign with glory; but the uninterrupted gossip which she delighted now to indulge in with her waiting-woman compensated for all.

Soon after Marlborough had won the sanguinary battle of Malplaquet, the celebrated trial of the noted Doctor Sacheverell took place; on which occasion an incident occurred which completed the downfall of the Duchess. The prosecution of Sacheverell had been advised by the Duke, lest he should preach him and his party out of the kingdom.

[42] This habit of drinking had then invaded even the highest ranks of English society, the Queen herself not being exempt. Walpole, Harley’s enemy, has traced a curious and tolerably accurate portrait of him in his “Letters.”