Then I spoke to you of Sir Richard Steele—poor Steele! poor Prue! And I spoke also of his friend Addison, the courtly, the reticent, the graceful, and the good. All of these men outlived William and Mary; all of them shone—in their several ways—through the days of Queen Anne.
Royal Griefs and Friends.
Mary, consort of William III., died some six years before the close of the century; she was honestly mourned for by the nation; and I cited some of the tender music which belonged to certain poetic lamentations at the going off of the gentle Queen. The little boy prince, Gloucester, presumptive heir to the throne, died in 1700 (so did John Dryden and Sir William Temple). Scarce two years thereafter and William III.—who was invalided in his latter days, and took frequent out-of-door exercise—was thrown from his horse in passing over the roads—not so smooth as now—between Hampton Court and Kensington. There was some bone-breakage and bruises, which, like a good soldier, he made light of. In the enforced confinement that followed, he struggled bravely to fulfil royal duties; but within a fortnight, as he listened to Albemarle, who brought news about affairs in Holland, it was observed that his eyes wandered, and his only comment—whose comments had always been like hammer-strokes—was, “I’m drawing to the end.”[103] Two days after he died.
Then the palace doors opened for that “good,” and certainly weak, Queen Anne, whose name is so intimately associated with what is called “the Augustan age” of English letters, and whose personal characteristics have already been subjects of mention. She was hardly recovered from her grief at the death of her prince-boy, and was supported at her advent upon royalty by that conspicuous friend of her girl years and constant associate, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. It would be hard to reach any proper understanding of social and court influences in Anne’s time, without bringing into view the sharp qualities of this First Lady of her Chamber. Very few historians have a good word to say for her. She was the wife of that illustrious general, John of Marlborough, whom we all associate with his important victories of Blenheim and of Ramillies; and in whose honor was erected the great memorial column in the Park of Woodstock, where every American traveller should go to see remnants of an old royal forest, and to see also the brilliant palace of Blenheim, with its splendid trophies, all given by the nation—at the warm urgence of Queen Anne—in honor of the conquering general.
You know the character of Marlborough—elegant, selfish, politic, treacherous betimes, brave, greedy, sagacious, and avaricious to the last degree. He made a great figure in William’s time, and still greater in Anne’s reign; his Duchess, too, figured conspicuously in her court. She was as enterprising as the Duke, and as money-loving—having smiles and frowns and tears at command, by which she wheedled or swayed whom she would. She did not believe in charities that went beyond the house of Marlborough; in fact, this ancestress of the Churchills was reckoned by most as a harpy and an elegant vampire. Never a Queen was so beleaguered with such a friend; she was keeper of the privy purse, and Anne found it hard (as current stories ran) to get money from her for her private charities; hard, indeed, to dispose of her cast-off silken robes as she desired. Why, you ask, did she not blaze up into a flame of anger and of resolve, and bid the Duchess, once for all, begone? Why are some women born weak and patient of the chains that bind them? And why are others born with a cold, imperious disdain and power that tells on weaklings, and makes the space all round them glitter with their sovereignty?
When this Sarah of Marlborough was first in waiting upon the Princess Anne, neither Duke nor Duchess (without titles then) could count enough moneys between them to keep a private carriage for their service; and before the Duke died their joint revenues amounted to £94,000 per annum.
Then the great park at Woodstock became ducal property. I have said it was richly worth visiting; its encircling wall is twelve miles in length; the oaks are magnificent; the artificial waters skirt gardens and shrubberies that extend over three hundred acres; the grass is velvety; the fallow deer are in troops of hundreds. And one must remember, in visiting the locality, that there stood the ancient and renowned royal mansion of Henry II.—that there was born the Black Prince—and, very probably, Chaucer may have wandered thereabout, and studied the “daisies white,” and listened to the whirring of the pheasants—a wood-music one may hear now in all the remoter alleys.
How many hundred thousands were expended upon the new Blenheim palace, built in Anne’s time, I will not undertake to compute. The paintings gathered in it—spoils of the great Duke’s military marches—interest everyone; but the palace is as cold and stately and unhome-like and unloveable as was the Duchess herself.