“But to come to the sequel of the King’s message: I solemnly protest that the loss of my Lord Marlborough’s employments would never have broke my rest one single night upon account of interest; but I confess, the being turned out is something very disagreeable to my temper; and I believe it was three weeks before my best friends could persuade me that it was fit for me to go to a court which (as I thought) had used my Lord Marlborough very ill. However, at last they prevailed, and I remember the chief argument was urged by my Lord Godolphin, who said that it could not be thought that I made any mean court to the King and Queen, since to attend the Princess was only to pay my duty where it was owing.”
The consequence of this advice, upon which Lady Marlborough so much relied, was, that “she waited on her mistress to Kensington.” Particulars of the interview may readily be conceived. The offended dignity of Mary, the suppressed vexation of the tearful Anne, the flush of anger on the brow of the haughty lady in waiting, that subdued but not intimidated favourite, nature struggling with etiquette, as she bent before the Queen whom she hated, and followed the Princess whom she governed and despised;—all these circumstances combined must have formed a fine scene for the pen or the pencil.
Unfortunately, no details of the meeting are permitted us, but the effect which it had upon the temper even of the mild and prudent Mary, may be inferred from a letter which the Queen wrote to her sister on the ensuing day.
After premising that she had something to say which she thought would not be very pleasing to the Princess, the Queen reminded her sister that nobody was ever “suffered to live at court in my Lord Marlborough’s circumstances.” It was therefore incumbent on her Majesty, as she thought, though much against her will, to tell her sister how very unfit it was that Lady Marlborough should stay with the Princess either; “since that,” added the Queen, “gives the husband so just a pretence of being where he ought not.”
“Taking everything into consideration,” the Queen, therefore, plainly intimated to her sister, that, since she had allowed Lady Marlborough to accompany her to Kensington on the foregoing night, her Majesty was reduced to the necessity of plainly telling her, that her lady of the bedchamber “must not stay,” and “that she had all the reason imaginable” to look upon Anne’s bringing her as “the strangest thing that ever was done; nor,” added the Queen, “could all my kindness for you, (which is ever ready to turn all you do the best way at any other time,) have hindered me from showing you that at the moment; but I considered your condition, and that made me master myself so far as not to take notice of it then.”
“But now,” adds the Queen, “I must tell you, it was very unkind in a sister, would have been very uncivil in an equal, and I need not say I have more to claim, which, though my kindness would make me never extort, yet when I see the use you would make of it, I must tell you I know what is due to me, and expect to have it from you. ’Tis upon that account, I tell you plainly, Lady Marlborough must not continue with you in the circumstances her lord is.”
This assumption of the Queen towards her offending sister, Mary softened by kinder terms. “I have all the real kindness imaginable for you,” she added, “and as I ever have, so will always do, my part to live with you as sisters ought;” and neither the King nor she were willing, as she said, to have recourse to harsher means.
But, notwithstanding the resolution expressed in the foregoing paragraph,—“the sight of Lady Marlborough,” the Princess proceeds to say, “having changed her style, does naturally change her thoughts.”[[229]] “She could pass over most things,” and “live with her sister as became her,” but she complained of the want of common civility exhibited by that sister, in not comprehending her wishes, and avoiding the contact with which she had placed her with Lady Marlborough.
This reproof was felt severely by Anne, and gave dire offence to her who had courted the rebuke, and it afforded Mary the desired opportunity of putting a direct affront upon her. Nor could numbers of affectionate expressions, nor what the Duchess of Marlborough calls, in the conclusion of the epistle, “useless repetitions,” intended “to remind her sister of the distance between them,” heal the wounds thus made, nor reconcile Anne to a sister who had incurred the displeasure of one whom she loved better than all the world besides.
From this time the firebrand of discord, thrown between the two royal sisters, was never extinguished except by death. The mortification inflicted upon Lady Marlborough was bitterly commented upon by her, years after she had outlived the effects of other changes in those whom she served, and those whom she endeavoured to serve. This first humiliation was, perhaps, her bitterest pang of the sort; and she, to “whose temper the being turned out was not very agreeable,”[[230]] must have writhed under the banishment from that court, in whose atmosphere she had been accustomed from her early youth to consider herself as a privileged individual.