Revolted Woman: Past, present, and to come

by Charles G. Harper

Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset,
Pembroke, and Montgomery,
Aged 81.

Macaulay’s Whiggish prejudices forbade him writing anything to the credit of the Duke of Marlborough; and so he seized upon the gossip of the time, which has come down to us, and has stated as a fact that John Churchill owed this initiatory post to the interest of his sister Arabella, who had become an acknowledged mistress of the Duke of York. ‘The young lady was not beautiful,’ he says, in his History of England, ‘but the taste of James was not nice, and she became his avowed mistress. She was the daughter of a poor Cavalier knight who haunted Whitehall, and made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchs and monarchy. The necessity of the Churchills was pressing, their loyalty was ardent, and their only feeling on Arabella’s seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so plain a girl should have obtained such height of preferment.’

But Churchill’s good looks and gallant bearing stood him in better stead than this in that profligate court. He captivated the fancy of his distant cousin, Barbara Palmer, the most beautiful of the King’s mistresses, already created Duchess of Cleveland as the price of her dishonour. Buckingham afforded the King ocular proof of this attachment, and we are told that Churchill was sent into practical banishment, but to an ostensible command in Tangier, or into the Low Countries. The Duchess of Cleveland made her kinsman a present of 5000l., with which he promptly purchased an annuity of 500l., and so laid a foundation to his fortunes.

England was for a time in close alliance with France, and it was then and there that the young officer—he held a commission in the Guards—learned scientific warfare under those past-masters in the art of war, Condé and Turenne. He remained for five years in Flanders, and during that time distinguished himself at numerous places, more especially at the siege of Maestricht, where ‘the handsome Englishman,’ as Turenne called him, was thanked for his services by Louis XIV.

Returning to England, he was married privately to Sarah Jennings, whose 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.

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.’