The affectionate heart of the Princess of Denmark produced a prompt letter of condolence upon the arrest of the Earl; an event, which it appears, from one passage, was to be succeeded by a less abrupt, though equally strict, mode of imprisonment of Anne and her husband. But William was probably fearful of the consequences of such a step as that to which Anne alludes; and the degradation of the Princess into a private station, with the loss of all public honours usually paid to one of her rank, seems to have been the only penalty imposed upon his sister-in-law.
“I am just told by pretty good hands,”[[255]] the Princess writes, “that as soon as the wind turns westerly, there will be a guard set upon the Prince and me. If you hear there is any such thing designed, and that ’tis easy to you, pray let me see you before the wind changes; for afterwards one does not know whether they will let one have opportunities of speaking to one another. But let them do what they please, nothing shall ever vex me, so long as I can have the satisfaction of seeing dear Mrs. Freeman; and I swear I would live on bread and water, between four walls, with her, without repining: for as long as you continue kind, nothing can ever be a real mortification to your faithful Mrs. Morley, who wishes she may never enjoy a moment’s happiness in this world, or in the next, if ever she proves false to you.”
These expressions of affection are reiterated in various forms, in several other letters which the Countess of Marlborough at this time received from her royal mistress.[[256]] These epistles speak well for the generosity of feeling and good-breeding of Anne. The utmost delicacy towards the inferior, the warmest sentiments for the friend, prevail; and those obstacles, which gave the character of heroism to their mutual regard, were doubtless highly favourable to the Countess’s influence. A little love of opposition reigns in all female bosoms; to oppose their wishes, is to strengthen those wishes until they become ardent passions. This, indeed, seems to have been exemplified in the warm intercourse of Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman, and in the midst of state intrigues, dangers, invasions, and treasons, to have thrown a character of romance over their difficulties and their separations, which must have proved consolatory at least to the disinterested party in a friendly alliance which has met with undeserved ridicule.
The anxieties of the Countess probably produced an indisposition to which her friend, in one of these letters, refers. After telling her friend, “for God’s sake, to have a care of her dear self, and give way as little to melancholy thoughts as she can,” she suggests a trial of ass’s milk, and regrets the necessity of her dear Mrs. Freeman’s being “let blood.”[[257]]
The proud, imperious Countess writhed under the disgrace of her lord; and the world might also assign another reason for her distress, and for the passionate expression of her dislike towards his enemies, and towards those of the Lord Treasurer, which even in her latter days dictated the pages of her personal narrative. Amongst the political enemies of Lady Marlborough, the most celebrated, and the least scrupulous, was the celebrated Dean of St. Patrick. Swift, who patronised the authoress of the “Atalantis,” the infamous Mrs. Manley, and who procured that most abandoned woman remuneration from the Tories, for the imprisonment which she sustained for some of her lampoons,[[258]] has adopted one of her falsehoods gravely, and as a matter of acknowledged fact, into his “Remarks upon the four last years of Queen Anne’s reign.” In his character of Lord Godolphin, he says: “His alliance with the Marlborough family, and his passion for the Duchess, were the cords which dragged him into a party which he naturally disliked, whose leaders he personally hated, as they did him.”
This assertion, in which the reputations of two persons are sacrificed by a side-blow, alludes to a report prevalent during the prosperous years of Lady Marlborough’s life, and called into being by that very prosperity. It originated with Swift’s tool, Mrs. Manley, or, as she chose to call herself, Rivella, who was subsequently employed by the Tory party in their periodical, “The Examiner,” after Swift had relinquished his part in it: but he has not blushed to acknowledge that he supplied this disgrace to her sex with much of the venom poured out upon the Whigs, in that noted publication.[[259]]
By the agency of Mrs. Manley, a rumour was spread abroad reflecting on the nature of that friendly connexion between the Marlborough family and Godolphin, which a closer tie afterwards cemented. An intrigue of the grossest character was described, by the pen of that wretched woman, as having taken place between the Lord Treasurer and the Countess of Marlborough; whilst even her devoted husband was alleged to have been acquainted with it, and to have connived at it for purposes of his own interest, and from party motives.[[260]]
These calumnies, which, says the anonymous author of the Duchess’s Life, “however improbable it seems, we remember the time when many people believed more firmly than they did their creed,”[[261]] originated in the intimacy, both personally and in correspondence, not only between the Earl of Marlborough and the Lord Treasurer, but between Godolphin and the able and influential woman whose intellectual sway asserted an enduring power over both these good and distinguished men. In all the difficulties and anxieties of the Earl and Countess, Godolphin participated. Their opinions, their feelings, were in unison with those of the Lord Treasurer. Like him, nurtured in high church and Tory principles, they had abandoned with reluctance those doctrines when the spirit of the age no longer went with them. Like him, their early prepossessions, their maturer affections, leaned to the Jacobite cause. The Countess, indeed, being younger when the mischievous tendencies of those bygone notions of prerogative and divine right were disclosed to her, had more thoroughly imbibed sentiments of the Whig party than Lord Marlborough and Godolphin; but in essential points this celebrated triumvirate accorded.
It was easy for the opposite faction to raise conjectures, and to disseminate calumnies, upon the basis of a friendship so closely cemented, that neither the Earl nor the Countess ever acted without first consulting him whom they regarded as their best friend. It is easy to demolish, by the blast of malignity, every fair fabric which the best affections of our nature raise up; it is easy to put the worst construction upon intimacies, the sources of which the innocent mind would gladly lay bare to the whole world. Endowed with beauty, with wit, fearless in her temper, unbending in her opinions, Lady Marlborough was not, nevertheless, one of those individuals whom the infections of slander could eventually taint. She was of too independent a nature to be readily susceptible of the tender passions. Her domestic character, as a mother, acknowledged to be exemplary even by those who commended her not,[[262]] afforded the best refutation to the corrupt passions of which she was accused. The neglect of daily duties is generally the first signal of a woman’s ruin—the first indication that her mind is unsettled, her inclinations gone astray, her peace and composure destroyed. The virtuous, blameless character of the Princess, who gave the Countess of Marlborough her favour and countenance, was, in a minor degree, a refutation of the malignant charge, raised doubtless in the hope of rending asunder the unanimity of three powerful persons, by awakening the gnawing pangs of suspicion, and the dread of an endangered reputation, to disturb their repose.
The uniform confidence of the most devoted, if not the best beloved of husbands; the pride, the virtuous pride, which he felt in her great qualities; the undying love which he bore her through the toils of campaigns and the turmoil of politics, triumphantly assert the innocence of that woman, of whose misdeeds there would have been abundant willing witnesses, eager to offer their testimony to the absent and injured husband. But the Earl left her, as it appears, without a misgiving with respect to her moral conduct; and trusted her to the honour, as he often commended her to the advice, of that friend whom he loved to his dying hour, and whom he bitterly regretted after his death.[[263]]