“I send you enclosed that most precious letter you sent me yesterday by Mr. Charlton. You will easily believe it has made me drop a great many tears, and you may be very sure that to my life’s end I shall observe very religiously all that my poor dear child desired. I was pleased to find that my own inclinations had led me to resolve upon doing everything that she mentions before I knew it was her request, except taking Lady Anne, which I did not offer, thinking that since you take Lady Frances home, who is eighteen years old, she would be better with you than me, as long as you live, or with the servants that her dear mother had chose to put about her, and I found by Mr. Charlton this thought was the same that you had. But I will be of all the use that I can to her, in everything that she wants me, and if I should happen to live longer than you, though so much older, I will then take as much care of her as if she were my own child. I have resolved to take poor Lady Anne Egerton, who, I believe, is very ill looked after. She went yesterday to Ashridge, but I will send for her to St. Albans, as soon as you will let me have dear Lady Dye; and while the weather is hot, I will keep them two and Lady Harriot, with a little family of servants to look after them, and be there as much as I can; but the Duke of Marlborough will be running up and down to several places this summer, where one can’t carry children, and I don’t think his health is so good as to trust him by himself. I should be glad to talk to Mr. Fourneaux, to know what servants there are of my dear child’s you do not intend to keep, that if there is any of them that can be of use in this new addition to my family, I might take them for several reasons. I desire, when it is easy to you, that you will let me have some little trifle that my dear child used to wear in her pocket, or any other way; and I desire Fanchon will look for some little cup she used to drink in. I had some of her hair not long since that I asked her for, but Fanchon may give me a better lock at the full length.”
The children thus entrusted to their maternal grandmother became a solace to the Duke and Duchess, and were nurtured with attention, both to the elegance of their minds and to their happiness. There is nothing more touching than the affection of the old for infants, nothing more consolatory than to observe how beautifully Providence renews the greatest of all pleasures, in restoring to the grandfather the tenderness, and the consequent parental joys, of the father. Those who have represented Marlborough as of a narrow spirit, and a cold, designing heart, should have beheld him gazing with delight upon his youthful granddaughters, when taking lessons in music and dancing, or performing such parts as were suited to their capacity in certain dramas, which turned often upon the exploits of the grandfather, and on the gifts and graces of the grandmother. In the decline of life, Marlborough listened, with a pleasure which he cared not to conceal, to the recital of his own deeds from infantine lips; and there were others, distinguished in their way, who deemed it not beneath their high vocations to aid such entertainments as were the recreations of the beloved grandchildren at Holywell House, or at Windsor Lodge.[[254]]
Dr. Hoadley, at this time Bishop of Bangor, and afterwards of Winchester, was the intimate associate, and, as it seems from certain anecdotes, the spiritual friend of Marlborough in his latter days. He was a controversialist of the first order, had signalised himself in an intellectual combat of this kind against Atterbury, and also, on a later occasion, in the noted Bangorian controversy, in which his adversary, the celebrated William Law, is said to have gained the ascendency. The Bishop, with all his learned acquirements, was formed to enliven society by his cheerfulness, as well as to elevate its tone by his superior intellect. He entered, with the kindness that becomes the learned so well, into the amusements and pursuits of the young favourites of his illustrious friend. Though not a dramatist himself, he was the father of two very celebrated dramatists, at this time children; the one, Dr. Benjamin Hoadley, physician to George the Second, and the author, among other plays, of the “Suspicious Husband;” and the other, Dr. John Hoadly, a clergyman, whose most serious composition was the oratorio of Jephtha, but who thought it not inconsistent with his sacred character to write humorous farces, and to perform with Garrick and Hogarth a parody upon the ghost scene of Julius Cæsar.[[255]]
Dr. Hoadley, though the father of dramatists, was not, if we may believe Pope, the most lively writer among the many noted controversialists of the day. He dwelt in long sentences, to which Pope alluded when he wrote
“——Swift for closer style,[[256]]
But Hoadly for the period of a mile.”
Yet the younger performers in the play of “All for Love,” to which the good-natured Bishop wrote a prologue, thought his effusions, no doubt, of the highest merit; and they turned upon a subject which they could both comprehend and enjoy, the great exploits of Marlborough. Perhaps it was the Bishop’s elaborate verses which occasioned the Duchess’s aversion to poetry, when so employed, and which produced the clause in her will, bequeathing to Glover and to Mallet one thousand pounds, upon condition of their not inserting a single line of verse in the biography which they had engaged to write of her husband.[[257]]
“All for Love”[[258]] was enacted with all the proprieties, the Duchess “scratching out some of the most amorous speeches, and no embrace allowed.”[[259]] “In short, no offence to the company,” Miss Cairnes, daughter of Sir Alexander Cairnes of Monaghan, and afterwards married to Cadwallader, eighth Baron Blayney,[[260]] was domesticated in the Marlborough family at the request of the Duchess, who, esteeming her mother, Lady Cairnes, took the daughter into her family and brought her up with her granddaughters, under the care of a governess, Mrs. La Vie, a relation of Lady Cairnes, and the daughter of a French refugee. Both these ladies were important additions to the social enjoyments of Holywell, or the Lodge. Lady Blayney, who lived to the age of eighty, became and continued an attached friend to the family. Her recollections furnished the descendants of the famed Duke with several anecdotes of their ancestors, and amongst others with the foregoing account of the play.
Mrs. La Vie, the other inmate of the family, was a woman also of considerable attainments. She translated into French a letter addressed by the Duchess to George the First, on one occasion, in order to clear up some suspicions of her loyalty. Mrs. La Vie was also a frequent visitant amongst the select parties given under the agreeable form of suppers, by Lady Darlington, to George the First, where, excepting his Majesty, persons of taste and distinguished talent were alone admitted.[[261]]
Surrounded by this agreeable domestic society, the Duke and Duchess might have expected to pass serenely into an old age of peace. But both public and private events occurred, which depressed, though they could not render morose, a mind so kindly and amiably constituted as that of Marlborough, whilst certain circumstances aroused once more the fiery spirit of the Duchess, who rejoiced in the whirlwind.