Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne. Маргарет Олифант
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If you do but remember what the queen said to me the night before your lord was turned out of all; then she began to pick quarrels; and if they should take off twenty or thirty thousand pounds, have I not lived upon as little before? When I was first married we had but twenty (it is true indeed the king was so kind to pay my debts) and if it should come to that again what retrenchment is there in my family I would not willingly make and be glad of that pretence to do it? Never fancy, my dear Mrs. Freeman, if what you fear should happen, that you are the occasion; no, I am very well satisfied, and so is the prince, too, that it would have been so however, for Caliban is capable of doing nothing but injustice; therefore rest satisfied you are noways the cause, and let me beg once more for God’s sake that you would not mention parting more, no, not so much as think of it, and if you should ever leave me, be assured it would break your faithful Mrs. Morley’s heart.
A still stronger expression of the same sentiment, with a little gleam of self-assertion and sense of injured dignity, follows, after the princess had, as would seem, taken counsel with her George. That heavy prince fully acquiesced at least, if nothing more, in his wife’s devotion.
In obedience to dear Mrs. Freeman I have told the prince all she desired me, and he is so far from being of another opinion, if there had been occasion, he would have strengthened me in my resolutions, and we both beg you would never mention so cruel a thing again. Can you think either of us so wretched that for the sake of twenty thousand pounds, and to be tormented from morning to night with flattering knaves and fools, we should forsake those we have such obligations to, and that we are so certain we are the occasion of all their misfortunes? Besides, will you believe we will truckle to Caliban, who from the first moment of his coming has used us at that rate as we are sensible he has done, and that all the world can witness that will not let their interest weigh more with them than their reason? But suppose I did submit, and that the king could change his nature so much as to use me with humanity, how would all reasonable people despise me? How would that Dutch monster laugh at me, and please himself with having got the better! and which is much more, how would my conscience reproach me for having sacrificed it—my honor, reputation, and all the substantial comforts of this life—for transitory interest, which even to those who make it their idol, can never afford any real satisfaction, much less to a virtuous mind? No, my dear Mrs. Freeman, never believe that your faithful Mrs. Morley will ever submit. She can wait with patience for a sunshine day, and if she does not live to see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again. Once more give me leave to beg you would be so kind never to speak of parting more, for, let what will happen, that is the only thing that can make me miserable.
Such are the letters which Lord Macaulay describes as expressing “the sentiments of a fury in the style of a fish-woman.” It was not indeed pretty to call great William Caliban, but Anne was fond of nicknames, and the king’s personal appearance was not his strong point. To us the above outburst of indignation seems both natural and allowable. She had been subject to an inveterate and petty persecution—her little magnanimities had been answered by exactions. We are all so ready to believe that when a woman is involved she must be the offender, that most readers will have set down the insults to which Anne was subject to the account of Mary. But it is curious to note that in these letters all the blame is thrown upon the harsh brother-in-law, the Dutch monster, the alien, who had made so many strangers into English noblemen, and who identified Marlborough, among all the other courtiers who had been as
little steadfast to him, as the object of a pertinacious persecution. The princess says nothing of her sister. It is Caliban who is capable of nothing but injustice. It is he who will laugh if he gets the better of her. Anne’s style is perhaps not quite worthy of the Augustan age, but it is at least very intelligible and full of little individual turns which are more characteristic than the smoother graces. That she loved her friend with her whole heart, that she had a generous contempt for interested motives, and, humble as she was, a just sense of her own dignity, are all abundantly and very simply manifest in them. They will give to the impartial reader the impression of a natural and artless character, with much generous feeling and much tender affectionateness: tenacious of her rank and its observances, yet willing to throw all these trifles down at the feet of her friend. Poor young lady! When we recollect how constantly the princess’s “condition” had to be thought of, how her long patience and many pains ended constantly in the little waxen image of a dead baby and nothing more, who can wonder that the world seemed falling to pieces about her when she was threatened with the loss of the one strong sustaining prop upon which she had hung from her childhood—the friend who had helped her through all the first experiences of life, the companion who had amused so many weary days and made the time pass as no one else could do!
All these miserable disputes, however, were ended in a moment when brought into the cold twilight of a death-chamber, where even kings and queens are constrained to see things at their true value. Of all the royal personages in the kingdom, Mary’s would have seemed to any outside spectator the soundest and safest life. William had never been healthy, and was consumed by the responsibilities and troubles into which he had plunged. Anne had these ever-succeeding maternities to keep her at a low level; but Mary was young, vigorous, and happy—happy at least in her devotion to her husband and his love for her. It was she, however, who, to the awe and consternation of the world, was cut down in her prime after a few days’ illness, in the midst of her greatness. Such a catastrophe no one could behold without the profoundest impulse of pity. Whatever she had done a week before, there she lay now helpless, all her splendors gone from her, the promise of a long career ended, and her partner left heartbroken upon the solitary throne to which she had given him the first right.
The sight of so forlorn a man,—so powerful, yet as impotent when his happiness was concerned as the meanest,—left thus heartbroken without courage or strength, his sole companion gone, and nothing but strangers, alien minds, and doubtful counselors round, is enough to touch any heart. Anne, like the rest of the world, was shocked and startled by the sudden calamity. She sent anxious messages asking to be admitted to her sister’s bedside; and, when all was over, partly no doubt from policy, but we may be at least permitted to believe partly from good feeling, presented herself at Kensington Palace to show at least that rancor was not in her heart. Unfortunately, there was no reconciliation between the sisters: the breach continued to the end of the queen’s life, Burnet informs us. But when the forlorn and solitary king was roused in his misery to receive his sister-in-law’s message, a sort of peace was patched up between them over that unthought-of grave. There was no longer any public quarrel or manifestation of animosity—and with this melancholy event the first half of Anne’s history may be brought to an end.
Chapter II
THE QUEEN AND THE DUCHESS
A YEAR after the accession of William and Mary, and before any of the bitternesses and conflicts above recorded had openly begun, the only child of Anne on whose life any hopes could be built was born. Her many babies had died at birth or immediately after, and their quick and constant succession, as has been said, was the distinguishing feature of her personal life. But after the Revolution, when everything was settling out of the confusion of the crisis, and when as yet no further family troubles had disclosed the family rancors and disagreements, in the country air of Hampton Court, where the new king and queen were living, a little prince was born. Though he was sickly at first, like all the rest, he survived the dangers of infancy, and, called William after the king, and bearing from the first day of his life the title of Duke of Gloucester, was received joyfully by the nation at large and everybody concerned as the authentic heir to the crown. This child kept, it would seem, a little hold on the affections of the childless Mary during the whole course of the quarrel with his mother, bitter as it was, and continued an object of interest and kindness to William as long as he lived. The interposition of the quaint and precocious boy, with his big head, his premature enlightenment as to what it was and was not prudent to say, his sparkle of childish ambition, and all his old-fashioned ways, made a curious and welcome diversion in the troubled scene where nothing was happy, not even the child. He was the chief occupation of Anne’s life when comparative peace followed the warlike interval above related, and a cold and forced civility replaced the active hostilities which for years had been raging between the court and the household of the princess.
Anne has never got much credit for her forbearance and self-effacement