THE DISGRACE OF THE DUCHESS.

The disgrace of the Duchess involved the fall of the Whigs. A few days after the scene at Kensington, Anne named two Tories to court appointments, and next dismissed successively all the Whigs from the Ministry—Boyle, Russell, Godolphin, and Walpole. They were replaced by Bolingbroke, Harley, the Earl of Jersey, and the Dukes of Ormonde and Shrewsbury. Anne spared only the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough—not from compassion but through fear. The irate Mistress of the Robes drove about London daily in her splendid equipage, and repeated at every visit she made that she would publish the Queen’s letters, and that some day the infamous motives which had brought about her disgrace would be disclosed. Whilst the timid Anne grew terrified at these menaces, the formidable Sarah remained at St. James’s, holding her head aloft and dealing out bitter denunciations against her enemies the victorious Tories.

When the Duke of Marlborough came back from Flanders, during the Christmas holidays, he met with the coldest reception possible. The usual motion of thanks to him had been dropped by his friends for fear of its being negatived by the Tory majority. The new ministers, however, waited upon him, promising that he should have all his present military commands, and also the nomination of the generals who were to serve under him. His wife had never ceased making efforts at court, by means of “one person” there, who happened to be in good favour with the Queen, and to whom the Duchess wrote long accounts of the past, justifying herself, and exposing the ingratitude, as well as malice, of her enemies. All these accounts that gentleman read to Anne; but he might as well have read them to a stock or stone. According to her Grace, the Queen never offered a word, good or ill, except on one particular point. Lady Masham and Harley had employed Swift and other writers to accuse the Duchess of having grossly cheated her royal mistress of vast sums of money; and on that occasion her Majesty was pleased to say, “Everybody knows cheating is not the Duchess of Marlborough’s crime.” Where there was so much received in what was deemed an honourable as well as regular way,[50] there was no great temptation to embezzle and cheat; and the Duchess was in all respects a higher-minded person than her husband, in whom love of money became at last the ruling passion to such a degree as to make him stoop to all kinds of mean and paltry actions. The Duchess, as Mistress of the Robes, boasts that she had dressed the Queen for nine years for thirty-two thousand and some odd hundred pounds; and she asks if ever Queen of England had spent so little in robes! “It evidently appears,” says her Grace, “that, by my economy in the nine years I served her Majesty, I saved her near ninety thousand pounds[51] in clothes alone. Notwithstanding this,” continues the Duchess, “my Lord-Treasurer (Harley) has thought fit to order the Examiner (Swift) to represent me in print as a pick-pocket all over England; and for that honest service, and some others, her Majesty has lately made him a Dean.”

Just at this moment, the Duchess thought herself obliged to appear at Court “on account of some new clothes which, as Groom of the Stole, she had by her mistress’s orders bought for her;” but the Queen charged the only friend her Grace had there to advise her, as from himself, not to come. It was scarcely possible, after this to think of retaining her office; and it appears that the Duchess, of her own accord, sent in her resignation. Lord Dartmouth, however, gives another version of the matter, as follows:—

Emboldened and urged by her Ministers, Anne requested Marlborough to demand the return of the golden Keys which were the symbols of her office. The Duke, who dreaded the consequences of such a step, entreated the Queen to wait till the end of the campaign, promising that he would then retire with his wife. But Anne was driven to extremity by calumnies that reddened her cheek with shame, and she demanded the immediate return of the Keys. Marlborough threw himself on his knees, and entreated her to give him at least ten days’ respite. Anne consented to three days, and that interval having expired, renewed her commands. The Duke hastened to the palace, and demanded to be ushered into the presence. But Anne refused to receive him until she received back her gold Keys from the Duchess, and Marlborough at length resigned himself to encounter his wife’s anger. On reaching home, he told the Mistress of the Robes that she must give up the golden insignia of office, which she at first refused; but on his persistently intimating the necessity of her resignation, she threw her gold Key on the floor, and told him to do what he liked with it; and that then Marlborough caught it up and carried it to the Queen.[52]

About one point there is no doubt—Anne accepted the resignation with eagerness and joyfulness, and divided the Duchess’s Court places between Lady Masham and the Duchess of Somerset. It astonished most people to see the Duke consent to serve when his wife was dismissed—to see him continue to hold command of the troops under the Ministry which had sprung out of a bed-chamber squabble, and which was sure to thwart him in all his measures. His enemies have generally accounted for this by assuming that the Duke’s avarice was at the bottom of it; but his lady assigns very different reasons. “The Duke of Marlborough,” she says, “notwithstanding an infinite variety of mortifications, by which it was endeavoured to make him resign his commission, that there might be a pretence to raise an outcry against him, as having quitted his Queen’s and his country’s service merely because he could not govern in the cabinet as well as in the field, continued to serve yet another campaign. All his friends here, moved by a true concern for the public welfare, pressed him to it, the confederates called him with the utmost importunity, and Prince Eugene entreated him to come with all the earnestness and passion that could be expressed.” These were certainly powerful inducements, and they may have mingled (together with that passionate fondness for a fine army which every good general must contract) with Marlborough’s love of money.

Mr. Hallam says, with strong and proper feeling, “It seems rather a humiliating proof of the sway which the feeblest prince enjoys even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes of Europe should have been changed by nothing more noble than the insolence of one waiting woman and the cunning of another. It is true that this was effected by throwing the weight of the crown into the scale of a powerful faction; yet the House of Bourbon would probably not have reigned beyond the Pyrenees but for Sarah and Abigail at Queen Anne’s toilette.”[53]

The Queen, altogether unmindful of her former warm attachment to her Mistress of the Robes, overjoyed to find herself free, wrote, with her own hand, the dismissal of the Duchess, and gave herself up to her enemies.

The Duchess, quite beside herself with chagrin and fury, only thought of some means or other of revenge. As a first step she demanded payment of the arrears of her pension—a boon she had with great high-mindedness refused on Anne’s accession. But that was not all. When she was about to quit the sphere of her palace triumphs, she gave directions for the removal of the locks from the doors and the marble chimney-pieces she had put up at her own cost in her apartments. “It is all very well,” remarked the Queen to her Secretary of State, “but tell the Duchess if she demolishes the fittings-up of my palace, she may depend upon it that I will not build hers at Woodstock.” The Duchess consented to abandon the chimney-pieces, and withdrew at once to her country seat, near St. Alban’s, where she lived in a style of great magnificence.

In the retirement of private life, Marlborough, worn out with the harass attendant upon such a lengthened succession of arduous campaigns, and wearied with political intrigue, now hoped to enjoy that which he had for years longed for—the society of those so dear to him, from whom he had been so many years separated. But it was not to be. Quiet happiness in the evening of his eventful life was not destined to be his lot. His wife, for whom he had ever shown such strong and unalterable affection, was a woman thwarted in all her designs—outraged, injured, mortified, and disgusted with the court and with the world. She was no longer young, nor possessed of the great attractions which had formerly thrown a veil over the deformities of her temper, which, always violent, had now become soured by adversity. She had no indulgence left for others. Dissatisfied with her friends, her children, and everything about her, she was disposed to wrangle and dispute on the slightest provocation.

Next came a great affliction—more deeply felt by both, perhaps, than either the fickleness of the Queen or the virulence of their political enemies—the death under their own roof at St. Alban’s of their long-tried, attached, and amiable friend, Lord Godolphin. This sad event determined Marlborough to reside abroad until happier days dawned—their ungrateful country no longer offering any charms for them. His long-cherished desire for rural leisure, retirement, and the quiet enjoyments of private life had ended in disappointment. The master of wealth and great possessions, palatial edifices rising around him, and rank, glory, and well-earned honour his own; yet was he the mark of envy, hatred, and jealousy. Not even could he and the Duchess enjoy and return the ordinary courtesies of society without incurring observation and provoking suspicion. His enemies had triumphed, his Queen was cold and unjust, and now his dearly-loved friend, his adviser and confidant, the sharer of his sorrows, his consoler and encourager, was no more. A blight had fallen upon his existence.

Marlborough sailed from Dover to Ostend in October, 1712, and his wife followed him in a few months afterwards, she having remained behind to arrange his or her own affairs. The Duke was furnished with a passport, it is said, by the instrumentality of his early favourite and secret friend Bolingbroke. His request to see the Queen before his departure from her dominions was refused; and the apathetic Anne never again saw her great general, or the woman for whom she once professed so strong an attachment. When it was told her that both he and the Duchess had left England, she coolly remarked to the Duchess of Hamilton—“the Duke of Marlborough has done wisely to go abroad.”

Thus was the illustrious soldier, then sixty-two years of age, and the Duchess in her fifty-second year, driven from their country by the machinations of a party too strong for them to resist without the especial favour of the Queen.