A lady of the last century

by Dr. Doran

December 1742—“Your Grace asks me if I have left off footing and tumbling down-stairs. As to the first, my fidgetations are much spoiled; sometimes I have cut a thoughtless caper, which has gone to the heart of an old steward of Mr. Montagu’s, who is as honest as Trusty in the play of ‘Grief à la Mode.’ I am told that he has never heard a hop that he has not echoed with a groan.”

At another of Mr. Montagu’s houses, Sandleford, near Newbury, Berks, his wife found more genial neighbours than in the north. She especially disliked the rough Yorkshire folk, and she did not conceal the little sympathy she had with “agreeable company.” She felt it a misfortune that she found in few people the qualities that pleased her. Like him who thanked God that he had not a heart that had room for many, she was thankful that she could love only the chosen few; but she could bear with twenty disagreeable people at once, while a tête-à-tête with a single one she disliked made her sick. At Sandleford, she played the farmer’s wife’s part without laying aside that of the lady, or, indeed, of the student. She could rattle off the gayest description of a country fair, losing no one of its characteristic features, and next write a long and thoughtful dissertation over Gastrell, Bishop of Chester’s “Moral Proof of the Certainty of a Future State.” The spirit of this dissertation, contained in a long letter to her friend the duchess, is that of what would now be called a Free Inquirer. She will not bow her intellect to any authority of mortal man. She has hope, but lacks knowledge,—except that God is the loving father of all,—and beyond that she evidently thinks the bishop knows no more than she does.

The ladies around her, at Sandleford, were neither so well endowed intellectually as herself, nor seemingly cared to be. Grottos and shellwork showed the bias of their tastes. Mrs. Montagu speaks of visiting one in Berkshire, which was the work of nine sisters (Leah), who in disposition, as well as number, bore “some resemblance to the Muses.” Lord Fane’s grotto at Basildon was one of the mild wonders of the county. When she goes thence to London, depreciation of the latter shows a growing love for rural life. She describes life in London as being—all the morning at the senate, all the night at play. Party politics were her aversion. They were “pursued for the benefit of individuals, not for the good of the country.” The factious heads in London she described as being very full of powder and very empty of thought. Happy in her own home, she could mingle jesting with sympathy when referring to sorrows which other people had to bear. “I pity Miss Anstey,” she wrote, “for the loss of her agreeable cousin and incomparable lover. For my part, I would rather have a merry sinner for a lover than so serious a saint!” Her own husband, however, was not mirthful. He stuck to his mathematics, understood his business as a coal-owner, loved his wife, and found life a pleasant thing, particularly where his lines had fallen.

With the birth of a boy came new occupations, fresh delights, and hitherto unknown anxieties. The nursing mother, remembering her old gay time, declared that “for amusement there is no puppet-show like the pleasant humour of my own Punch at Sandleford.” She fancied a bright futurity for the boy; but her passing ecstasy was damped by the thought of the perils and temptations by which life is beset. “Pity,” she wrote, “that a man thinks it no more necessary to be as innocent as woman than to be as fair.”

In March, 1744, when Mrs. Montagu and her sister thought it a remarkable fear to travel from Sandleford, near Newbury, to Dover Street, London, in one day, with only two breakdowns, Mrs. Montagu left her boy in the Berkshire house. “It was no such easy matter,” she said, “to part with little Punch, with whom we played and pleased ourselves as long as we could afford time.” On her return to Sandleford, in July, the natural beauty of the place seemed centred in little Punch’s person. “He is now an admirable tumbler. I lay him down on a blanket on the ground every morning, before he is dressed, and at night when he is stripped, and there he rolls and tumbles about, to his great delight. If my goddaughter,” adds the Last Century Lady to Doctor Freind, referring to his daughter, “be not a prude, I should recommend the same practice to her.”

The mother’s dreams and duties were soon brought to a melancholy close. In September, 1744, the little heir had his first severe experience of life, and, perhaps happily, it was too much for him. He died of convulsions while cutting his teeth. A few joyous tumbles on the blanket, a few kisses, a few honeyed words, and much pain at last, made up all that he knew of life. Mrs. Montagu tempered her heavy grief with much active occupation and study. She meekly attributed the loss of her son to God’s visitation on her confidence in her own care and watchfulness. She may be said to have lost with him her hopes, her joys, and her health for a considerable period. In September, 1744, she wrote to the duchess:

“Poor Mr. Montagu shows me an example of patience and fortitude, and endeavours to comfort me, though undoubtedly he feels as much sorrow as I can do; for he loved his child as much as ever parent could do.” She discovered all the virtues in Mr. Montagu that adversity needs, and adversity only can show. “I never saw such resignation and fortitude in any one; and in the midst of affliction there is comfort in having such a friend and assistant. It was once my greatest happiness to see him in possession of the dearest of blessings. It is now my greatest comfort to see he knows how to resign it, and yet preserve the virtue and dignity of his temper.” They never had another child; and, if they were not altogether as happy as before, they were, at least, as cheerfully resigned as heirless rich people could persuade themselves to be. Occasionally, however, she envied happier mothers. Referring to one of these, nearly twenty years later, who was then stricken by a profounder grief, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Lord Lyttelon: “Poor Mrs. Stone, between illness and affliction, is a melancholy object. I remember that after my son was dead, I used to envy her her fine boy; but not being of a wicked disposition, did earnestly wish she might not lose him. Poor woman! her felicity lasted longer than mine, and so her grief must be greater: but time is a sure comforter.”

Mrs. Montagu found relief for her sorrows, as well as for indisposition, from which she suffered greatly at intervals, at Tunbridge Wells and in small country gaieties. Thus, in 1745, at a country fair (ladies went to such sports in those days), Mrs. Montagu was not more surprised to see a gingerbread Admiral Vernon lying undisturbed on a basket of Spanish nuts, than she was at Tunbridge Wells to behold grave Doctor Young and old Colley Cibber on the most intimate terms. Mrs. Montagu, on the Pantiles, asked the doctor how long he intended to stay, and his answer was, “As long as your rival stays.” When this riddle was explained, the “rival” proved to be the sun. People from all ends of the world then congregated at the Wells, and Mrs. Montagu sketched them smartly, and grouped them cleverly, in pen and ink. One of the best of these outline sketches is that of a country parson, the vicar of Tunbridge, to whom she paid a visit in company with Doctor Young and Mrs. Rolt. “The good parson offered to show us the inside of his church, but made some apology for his undress, which was a true canonical dishabille. He had on a gray striped calamanco nightgown; a wig that once was white, but, by the influence of an uncertain climate, turned to a pale orange; a brown hat encompassed by a black hatband; a band somewhat dirty, that decently retired under the shadow of his chin; a pair of gray stockings, well mended with blue worsted, strong symptoms of the conjugal care and affection of his wife, who had mended his hose with the very worsted she had bought for her own.” The lively lady and her companions declined to take refreshment at the parsonage, where, she made no doubt, they would have been “welcomed by madam, in her muslin pinners and sarsnet hood; who would have given us some mead and a piece of cake that she had made in the Whitsun holidays, to treat her cousins.” After dinner at the inn, the vicar joined them, “in hopes of smoking a pipe, but our doctor hinted to him, that it would not be proper to offer any incense but sweet praise to such goddesses as Mrs. Rolt and your humble servant. I saw a large horn tobacco-box, with Queen Anne’s head upon it, peeping out of his pocket.” Wherever Mrs. Montagu wended during this autumn of 1745, she filled her letters with these pen-and-ink sketches of what she saw. But that eventful year brought more serious duties. In 1745, when the Jacobites were about to invade England, Mr. Montagu went from London to York, to aid in raising and arming the people. The Yorkshire gentlemen acted with great spirit, and stood by their homesteads instead of flying to London. “Though it gives me uneasiness and anxiety,” wrote the young wife, “I cannot wish those I love to act otherwise than consistently with those principles of honour that have always directed their actions.” The rebellion spoiled the London gaieties. Drums and routs had no longer a fashionable meaning. “I have not heard of any assemblies since I came to town; and, indeed, I think people frighten each other so much when they meet, that there is little pleasure arising from society.... There is not a woman in England, except Lady Brown, that has a song or tune in her head, but, indeed, her ladyship is very unhappy at the suspension of operas.”

The death of Mrs. Montagu’s mother, in the following year, drew from her a tender and well-deserved tribute of affection in a touching and simple letter to Mrs. Freind. In 1747, her friend, Mr. Lyttelton, lost his first wife, and wrote a monody on her, for the public ear. The monody walks on very high stilts, and occasionally falls and struggles on the ground. Mrs. Montagu thought it had great merit, and that her friend would be inconsolable; but Lyttelton brought out, the same year, his “Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul,” of which Mrs. Montagu was a diligent reader and a constant eulogist. In less than two years, the widower left unfinished a prettily begun epitaph to his Lucy, with whom he had enjoyed six years of conjugal felicity, and married a daughter of Sir Robert Rich. With her came a life of warfare, followed by a treaty by which each party agreed to live at peace with, and wide apart from, the other.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Montagu made friendly progresses to princely mansions in various parts of the country. She had hearty welcome at all, from lay and ecclesiastical nobles alike. This did not influence her critical eye. At Wilton, then and now one of the best examples of an English nobleman’s residence, she writes: “As to the statues and bustos, they certainly are very fine, but I think too many. Heroes should not have so many competitors, nor philosophers so much company; a respectable society may be increased into a mob. I should, if they were mine, sell half of their figures to purchase their works, which are, indeed, the images of wise men.”