CHAPTER III.
1684 TO 1687.
State of manners and morals—Of parties—Defence of Churchill—His share in the Revolution—Progress of that event.
The new reign brought with it early demonstrations of royal confidence towards Lord Churchill, and consequently to his wife. Almost the first act of James was to despatch Churchill to Paris to notify his accession, and to establish more firmly the good faith which already subsisted between James and the French monarch.
Lady Churchill, meantime, continued to hold the same post near the person of Anne, who resided at her palace in the Cockpit, Westminster. The Duchess, in her “Conduct,” has given no insight into this period of her life. We may suppose it to have been passed in the quiescent round of duties more insipid than fatiguing, and in the still more irksome society of the domestic, good-natured, but uninteresting Princess.
The court amusements in those days were of a description perfectly in unison with the tastes and habits of the higher classes, to whom the satire of St. Evremond, upon a similar order of persons in France, might have been, without even a shadow of sarcasm, applied. “You live in a country,” says St. Evremond, writing to Mademoiselle de l’Enclos, “where people have wonderful opportunities of saving their souls: there, vice is almost as opposite to the mode as virtue; sinning passes for ill-breeding, and shocks decency and good manners, almost as much as religion.”[[87]] The sarcasm was just,—that not what is good or what is bad, but what was considered fashionable, or agreeable, was the rule for those who lived in the great world to observe. Gambling was the passion, intrigue the amusement, of those days of fearful iniquity. The female sex, in all ages responsible for the tone given to morals and manners, were in a state of general depravity during the whole period of Lady Churchill’s youth; and even those who were reputed most virtuous, and held up as patterns to their sex, overlooked, if they did not countenance, the open exhibition of vice within their very homes. The Duchess of Buckingham, “a most virtuous and pious lady in a vicious age and court,”—“lived lovingly and decently with” her husband, the arch-profligate of the time; and though she knew his delinquencies, never noticed them, and had complaisance enough even to entertain his mistresses, and to lodge them in her own house.[[88]] Queen Katharine, the neglected and insulted wife of Charles the Second, deemed it her conjugal duty to fall down on her knees at his deathbed, and to entreat pardon for her offences. Whereupon the King vouchsafed to answer her, “that she had offended in nothing.”[[89]] So humbled, so degraded, were the few virtuous female members of the debased English aristocracy; and so slight was that virtue which could bear, in the closest tie, the constant exhibition of vice! That a woman should forgive—that her best interests, her only chance of happiness, consist in a dignified endurance of the worst of evils, a vicious husband—no reasonable being can doubt; but that as a Christian, as a female, she cannot be excused in remaining within the contamination of vice, is not to be disputed.
Continental alliances, the exile of the restored Princes during the greater portion of their youth, and the consequent introduction of foreign amusements and foreign manners, to which we must add a yet tottering and unsettled national faith, may account, in a great measure, for this universal corruption. Nor can we suppose the lofty Lady Churchill to have escaped wholly from the pernicious influence of what she must have seen and heard. Masquerading was the rage; and not only in private, or in gay halls or banquet-rooms, but in the streets and alleys, the theatre, and other places of public resort, it was adopted as a diversion, to pass away hours tedious to uneducated minds.
In the reign of Charles, Frances Jennings, the eider sister of the Duchess, was flattered, rather than ashamed, at the publicity of her adventure in the theatre, disguised as an orange-girl, in the sight of the Duchess of York, her patroness, and of the whole court.[[90]] The frolic was, indeed, fully borne out in its extravagance and assurance by precedent. “At this time,” says Bishop Burnet, “the court fell into much extravagance in masquerading; both the King and the Queen and all the court went about masked, and came into houses unknown, and danced there with wild frolic. In all this, people were so disguised, that, without being in the secret, none could know them. They were carried about in hackney chairs. Once the Queen’s chairmen, not knowing who she was, went from her. So she was quite alone, and was much disturbed, and came to Whitehall in a hackney coach, some say in a cart.”[[91]]
On another occasion, Queen Katharine thought it not unseemly to resort to a fair at Audley, in company with the Duchesses of Buckingham and Richmond, disguised like country lasses, all in red petticoats, waistcoats, et cetera; Sir Bernard Gascoigne riding before the Queen on “a cart jade,” and the two Duchesses also on double horses, one with a stranger before her, the other with Mr. Roper. These ladies happened so to have overdressed their parts, as to excite the attention of the crowd; looking, as it is related, “more like antiques than country volk.” The Queen, however, who made her way up to a booth, to buy “a pair of yellow stockings for her sweethart,” was discovered, as well as her attendant, Sir Bernard, “by their giberish,” to be strangers. The result may easily be supposed; the assembled country people mounted their horses, and, all amazement and curiosity, pursued the royal party to the court gate.[[92]]
This adventure was, however, less remarkable in those days, from the practice which Charles the Second maintained, of pursuing his diversions almost continually in the midst of his people, walking about the town without guards, and with a single friend. Hyde Park, described by a contemporary as “a field near the town,” and used as a course, was beginning to be fashionable, and was preferred to other places of resort by Charles, on account of its fine air, and extent of prospect. It was at this time the private property of a publican, and the entrance was guarded by porters with staves, by whom a sum of money was levied upon every horseman, coach, or cart that entered.[[93]] Here, to give a specimen of the manners of the day, Charles exhibited one of the first coaches made with glass windows, presented to him by the accomplished Grammont, and the source of a bitter contention between Lady Castlemaine, and Miss Stewart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond, as to which of them should succeed the Queen, and the Duchess of York, in the distinction of driving in the new-fashioned vehicle.
Spring Gardens, the resort of the fashionable world after driving in Hyde Park, and the scene in which many of the plots of our old comedies are laid, were also much in vogue at this period. “Here” says an old writer, “were groves and warbling birds, alleys and thickets,” and in the centre a place for selling refreshments, similar to the cafés in the Parc at Brussels, or in the Bois de Boulogne at Paris. And here, the enclosure opening into the broad walks of St. James’s Park, were many idle hours wiled away by both sexes. These recreations, with water parties on the Thames, were the amusements in which the soberminded Anne, and her high-bred and haughty attendant, Lady Churchill, might indulge without loss of dignity, or danger to reputation.