Lady Marlborough, distressed at being the manifest cause of the indignities offered to her gracious mistress, entreated Anne to allow her to leave her, and used every argument her thoughts could suggest to persuade the Princess to that effect. These well-meant endeavours were unavailing; for “when I said anything that looked that way,” the Duchess relates, “she fell into the greatest passion of tenderness and weeping that is possible to imagine;[[272]] and though my situation at that time was so disagreeable to my temper, that could I have known how long it was to last, I could have chosen to have gone to the Indies sooner than to endure it, yet, had I been to suffer a thousand deaths, I think I ought to have submitted rather than have gone from her against her will.”
The result of the Princess’s vexations was a fever, after her confinement, on recovering from which she sent to Dr. Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, hoping through his mediation to convey to Mary her sense of the honour which the Queen, in her last heartless visit, had conferred upon her. Dr. Stillingfleet, whom the Princess found, in her conversation with him, to have become very partial to the Queen, undertook to be the bearer of a letter, in which Anne requested permission to pay her duty to her sister. The Queen’s reply evinced a determined, and, if not an unkind, almost persecuting spirit. She began by telling her sister that since she had herself never used compliments, “so now they will not serve.” She declared that “words would not make them live together as they ought;” there was but one thing she had required, “and no other mark would satisfy her.”[[273]] But she must have been ignorant of the tenacity of her sister’s disposition, and only partially aware of the influence which the Duchess exercised over the easily moulded Anne, if she could have expected such a sacrifice.
Meantime Lord and Lady Marlborough had the misfortune to lose their infant son, Lord Brackley,—an event to which Anne alludes in the following terms.
“I am very sensibly touched with the misfortune that my dear Mrs. Freeman has had of losing her son, knowing very well what it is to lose a child; but she knowing my heart so well, and how great a share I bear in all her concerns, I will not say any more on this subject, for fear of renewing her passion too much. Being now at liberty to go where I please, by the Queen’s refusing to see me, I am mightily inclined to go to-morrow, after dinner, to the Cockpit, and from thence privately in a chair to see you some time next week. I believe it will be time for me to go to London, to make an end of that business of Berkeley-house.”
This letter of condolence contained a copy of the cold and arbitrary reply of the Queen to the Princess; the original, Anne specifies, being kept by her, in case it should be necessary to show it for her own justification. At the same time she observes, that having extorted an admission from Dr. Stillingfleet that she had made “all the advances that were reasonable,” she thought that the more “it was noised about that she would have waited on the Queen, but that she refused to see her, the better; and therefore that she should not scruple saying so to anybody, when it came in the way.”[[274]]
Not, however, satisfied with the perpetual assurances of the Princess, that “only death should part her from her dear Mrs. Freeman”—that if her dear friend should ever leave her, “it would break her faithful Mrs. Morley’s heart”—and other repeated declarations of the same nature, the Countess sought to ascertain the sentiments of the Prince George, upon the subject of her quitting the Princess’s service. The reply of the warm-hearted, and certainly at this period of her life, the generous Anne, was equally distinct upon this point as upon the other bearings of the question.
“In obedience to dear Mrs. Freeman, I have told the Prince all she desired me, and he is so far from being of another opinion, that, if there had been any occasion, he would have strengthened me in my resolutions, and we both beg you would never mention so cruel a thing any more.”
“Can you think either of us so wretched,” she continues, “as for the sake of twenty thousand pounds, and to be tormented from morning to night with flattering knaves and fools, we should forsake those we have such objections to, and that we are so certain are the occasion of all their misfortunes?”
“No, my dear Mrs. Freeman,” she thus addressed her in another part of her letter, “never believe your faithful Morley will ever submit. She can wait with patience for a sunshiny day, and if she does not see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again. Once more give me leave to beg you would be so kind never to speak of parting more, for, let what will happen, that is the only thing that can make me miserable.”[[275]]
It is curious, but to the experienced observer of all that passes among the social relations of life, whether of friendship, love, or kindred, not surprising, to find these letters so full of tenderness, and of disinterested attachment, and so acceptable at one time to Lady Marlborough, thus characterized, when she dipped her pen in gall to write the character of her former patroness.