She was pugnacious beyond all bounds, and commanded fear and respect, even when she was not loved, by her undoubted abilities. She had a son and four daughters. The son died in early youth; her daughters all became peeresses, and they and their daughters were harried by her continually. She affected to be fond of her granddaughter, the Duchess of Manchester, daughter of the Duchess of Montagu, her youngest child. She said to her one day, ‘Duchess of Manchester, you are a good creature, and I love you mightily—but you have a mother!’ ‘And she has a mother,’ replied the Duchess of Manchester. And she had, indeed, in a superlative degree.
‘The great Sarah’ was, in fact, never happy unless she had some quarrel on hand. She was offended by her granddaughter, Lady Anne Egerton’s conduct in arranging a marriage between her brother and a daughter of Lord Trevor. This alliance certainly could not fail to be galling to the widowed Duchess, who, now that her husband was dead, idolised his memory and pursued with an unquenchable hatred all those who had opposed him in former years. For Lord Trevor had been one of the great Duke’s bitterest enemies; and now for a grandson of Marlborough to marry a daughter of one who had reviled him and had sat in the seat of the scorner! It was too much. She had a portrait of her granddaughter brought her, and, to show her hatred, painted the face black and wrote an inscription for it, ‘She is much blacker within.’
Her temper had grown more furious with her advancing years, soured as she had been by the ultimate revolt of Anne against her imperious and insulting behaviour toward her Majesty in public. She had given the Queen her gloves and fan to hold during State ceremonies, and affected not to hear when spoken to. Certainly no royal favourite had ever before held power by the uncompromising frankness with which the Duchess of Marlborough treated the Queen; and whatever else may be laid to her charge, neither flattery nor a cringing attitude, fulsome adulation nor obsequious humility, can be attributed to her. All those qualities of the sycophant are to be found in the character of Abigail Hill, the poor relation for whom the Duchess had found a small position in the royal nursery, and who managed by these meannesses to alienate the affections of the weak and sullen Queen. Courts were different then, and politics entered largely even into the doings and attention of the royal domestics. Abigail Hill, who had been engaged as a rocker of royal or princely cradles, exercised her influence, tutored as it was by Mr. Secretary Harley, upon the Queen, who dismissed the Duchess of Marlborough from her office as Mistress of the Robes, and with the dismissal of the Duchess fell the Ministry of Marlborough and Godolphin.
Marlborough, who was as able a diplomat as he was a soldier, who knew the secrets of every European Court, was unconscious of the plottings and backstairs influences which were undermining his own power. The Duchess, too, knew nothing until their political ruin was accomplished, and then all was in vain. Although the conqueror of so many hard-fought fields and the crafty overreacher of astute statesmen might plead for the reinstatement of his wife with all his eloquence, and even go on his knees to implore the Queen’s favour, the steadfast obstinacy of a stupid woman oppressed for years, and too weak for revolt until now, was proof against all the matchless services and traditions of the man; and the position which the great Sarah’s arrogance and folly had lost them the Marlboroughs never regained.
‘The Viceroy over the Queen,’ as she had been termed, was no longer heard; even when she went in person to Kensington Palace, the Queen would no longer listen to her. ‘Dear Mrs. Morley’ and ‘Dearest Mrs. Freeman’ were estranged for ever, and though six years later the Queen died, and that commonplace dynasty the House of Hanover came to the throne in the person of George I., neither the Duke nor the Duchess of Marlborough ever again held the power which had once been theirs. Marlborough died in 1720. His wife survived him for over twenty-four years, dying at the advanced age of eighty-four. Age did not wither her resolution nor custom stale her pugnacity. She still panted, like the war-horse in Job, for the fray; she sniffed contention from afar, and kept Death himself waiting an unconscionable time. A year before her death, when very ill and like to shuffle off this mortal coil, her physicians, in consultation over her bed, upon which she lay in apparent unconsciousness, decided that she must either be blistered or she must die. ‘Must’ was no word to utter in her presence; compulsion was not to be thought of or applied to that proud spirit. ‘I won’t be blistered, and I won’t die,’ she exclaimed, with her old fire and vehemence—and she did neither at that time.
She died, possessed of immense wealth, at Marlborough House, on October 18th, 1744. She left an income of 30,000l. a year to her grandson, Charles, Duke of Marlborough, and the same to his brother; while her hatreds were shown in the legacies she bequeathed to Pitt (afterwards Earl of Chatham) and to the Earl of Chesterfield, in recognition of their opposition to one of her pet aversions, Sir Robert Walpole.
The mother of that doughty champion of the Church in the thirteenth century, Robert de Insula, Bishop of Durham from 1274 to 1283, must have been the very ideal of a shrew. The Bishop rose to his high station from quite a menial office in the monastery of Durham, and his origin was so lowly that he had no family name, but is supposed to have assumed one from his birthplace of Holy Island, off the Durham coast. The monkish chronicler of Waverley calls him Halieland, and the Monk of Lanercost dubs him ‘Robertus de Coquinâ,’ from which it would seem that even these old historians had their prejudices. However that may be, the Bishop was either not ashamed of his origin, or else had all the vanity of a ‘self-made’ man, for he was not slow to allude to the original meanness of his birth on occasion, as the following anecdote may show:—‘The Bishop was once at Norham, and the Lord of Scremerston sent him a present of some country ale. The Bishop had long been unused to such humble beverage, yet, from respect to the donor, and also to the good report of the liquor, he tasted a cup of it—et non sustinens statim a mensa surgens evomuit. “See,” said he, “the force of custom: you all know my origin, and that neither from my parents nor my country can I derive any taste for wine, and yet now my country liquor is rendered utterly distasteful to me.”’
To his mother the Bishop gave a train of male and female servants, and an honourable establishment, as befitted the parent of one come to such high dignity as to be Bishop Palatine of Durham. He visited her afterwards, and apparently found the dame in anything but a sweet temper.
‘What ails my sweet mother?’ says he; ‘how fares she?’
‘Never worse,’ quoth she.