Elizabeth,
Countess of
Shrewsbury.
Lady Saint Lo was now become extremely wealthy, with her own fortune and the added wealth of three husbands deceased, but she was far from content. She was building incessantly, both terrestrial habitations and airy castles, and hungered both for more wealth and greater social distinction. For some while she cast about for another partner, and at length found a suitable quarry in George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, another widower with a grown-up family. Him she married, and from that time he knew but little peace. True, the first year or so of their union seems to have been comparatively mild, but the storms that ensued were beyond anything. The Earl was for nineteen years the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots, and she seems to have aroused the jealousy of the Countess, for the unfortunate Talbot was surrounded with his wife’s spies, and the espions whom the English Queen’s suspicious nature also set around him made his life a misery. Poor Talbot! two queens and a wife—and such a wife—to serve, guard, and pacify. How wretched he must have been in that gorgeous palace of ‘Chattysworth,’ as the old-time spelling had it! His wife embittered his own sons against him, while her family of Cavendishes hated him cordially, and, as he had foolishly made over his property to her upon his marriage, he lived practically upon sufferance. Queen Elizabeth, in whose service he continually expressed the greatest loyalty, took the part of his wife, and ordered him to be content with an allowance of 500l. per annum which the Countess vouchsafed him—‘to my perpetual infamy and great dishonour,’ as he wrote, ‘thus to be ruled and overranne by my wief, so bad and wicked a woman. But your Majesty shall see that I will observe your commandments, though no curse or plage on earth colde be more grievous to me.’ Poor fellow! his faults were few, probably the greatest of them being a weak amiability which led him to be reconciled time and again to his wife, who used every reconciliation as a means to the end of entreating him even more shamefully than before. He died at length, wearied out with lawsuits, the ingratitude of his own children, and the bitter animosity of his wife. She survived him for many years, and died, aged eighty-eight, in the winter of 1607, during a hard frost which put a stop to the building works which she was carrying on here and there over all her possessions. She was passionately fond of bricks and mortar, or else was mindful of a prophecy that she should live so long as she continued building. That prophecy was fulfilled by the frost, which rendered her workmen idle.
Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, was another insatiate builder, and a woman of very great independence of character; not a vindictive fiend, like old Bess of Hardwicke, but, all the same, a woman who would have her way. She married the Earl of Dorset, as weak and vicious a man as she was a strong and virtuous woman, with whom she lived most unhappily. When he fortunately died, she declared that she would not wed a man who was either a curser, a courtier, or a swearer, or who had children; and it so happened that in marrying Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, she allied herself to a widower with a family, who was both a courtier and a proficient in vile language and fancy swearing. He, however, soon joined the majority, and his widow took no more chances in the lottery of marriage. She busied herself in rebuilding her castles, which had been destroyed during the Civil War, six of them throughout Cumberland and Westmoreland; and spent the remainder of her long life in journeying from one to another, carrying with her the huge volumes in which she had collected the records of the Clifford family and the memoirs of her own life. Hers was the borough of Appleby, for which Sir John Williamson, Secretary of State, proposed a candidate. But the Countess, who had despised Cromwell and loathed the viciousness of Charles the Second’s entourage, replied, in a characteristic note, ‘I have been bullied by an usurper; I have been neglected by a Court; but I won’t be dictated to by a subject. Your man shan’t stand.—Ann Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery.’ She was a wonderful woman. She spoke five languages fluently, and was accomplished in many ways, and, according to Bishop Rainbow, of Carlisle, who preached her funeral sermon, ‘she had a clear soul shining through a vivid body: her body was durable and healthful,’ he continues; ‘her soul sprightful and of great understanding and judgment faithful memory, and ready wit.’ She was ‘a perfect mistress of forecast and aftercast,’ and, according to Doctor Donne, ‘knew well how to converse of all things, from predestination to slea-silk.’ She was no less great as a builder than Nimrod was mighty as a hunter, and Bess of Hardwicke was scarce her equal in the piling up of bricks and mortar.
Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset,
Pembroke and Montgomery,
Aged 18.
She spent over 40,000l. in this way, and the good bishop who preached her funeral sermon took, as an apt text, ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house.’ She rebuilt the castles of Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon Tower, Pendragon, and Brough; she restored the churches of Bongate, Skipton, and Appleby, and the chapels of Ninekirks, Brougham, Bongate, and Mallerstang; she erected a monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey, another—on the old Penrith road—to her mother, the Dowager Countess of Cumberland, and another still to her tutor, Samuel Daniel, and she founded and restored almshouses besides.
But the first Duchess of Marlborough was a prize termagant, although in early life a woman of winning ways. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was the ruler of that great commander and military genius, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, and victor of such hard-fought fields as Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet.
The rise of the Churchills reads like a romance, so constantly was their progress maintained for so many years. He was the son of an impoverished country gentleman who had lost his all in a chivalric attachment to Charles the First, and gained little consideration for it when the Restoration brought Charles the Second to Dover, and the King enjoyed his own again. All the recompense the ruined Cavalier received was the reception of his son, afterwards to become the most famous soldier and general of his time, as a page in the service of the King’s brother, the Duke of York.
