Yet it was this untaught mind, disturbed often by bursts of passion, and in love with wealth and all other worldly advantages,—it was the Duchess of Marlborough, who, of all her class, was the first to detect the fallacy of that scheme by which a whole nation had been ensnared. When the value of the stock rose to an unprecedented height, and the public were more than ever infatuated by false hopes, she saved her husband and her family from ruin, not only by her foresight but by her firmness. Let those who would wholly preclude women from any participation in masculine affairs, remember how often their less biassed judgment, their less employed hours, have been made available to warn and to save. The Duchess happily had sufficient influence over her husband to rescue his disposable property from any further investment in the South Sea Stock. She resisted all the entreaties of Sunderland to employ any further portion of capital in the scheme; she foresaw that no profit would now satisfy the public mind, excited to an unnatural degree, and predicted that the fall of the stock would be as rapid as the rise. She not only withheld the Duke’s hand, but persecuted him to sell out his shares, by which prudent step he realised, it is said, a hundred thousand pounds;[[267]] and this clear-sightedness on the Duchess’s part was the more admirable that it was wholly singular. It was the age of speculation and of companies; and many of the nobility were at the head of some new ephemeral speculation. The Prince of Wales was made governor of the Welsh Copper Company; the Duke of Chandos, of the York Buildings; and the Duke of Bridgewater formed a third for building houses in London.[[268]]
Whilst these bubbles were engaging the public mind, the blow which severed Marlborough for ever from public life, and rendered even his beloved home cheerless, was struck whilst he was yet mourning at Holywell-house the death of his beloved daughters, more especially of the Countess of Sunderland. Throughout the whole of his life the Duke had suffered from intense headaches and giddiness,—warnings disregarded, as they often are, in the feverish pursuit of power, in the race for worldly honours, which the exhausted mind and irritable nerves permit not, ofttimes, even the most successful to enjoy.
On the twenty-eighth of May, 1716, not two months after his beloved daughter Anne had been removed from him, the Duke was attacked by palsy, which for some time deprived him of speech and of recollection. He was attended on this occasion by Sir Samuel Garth, who not only managed his disease with skill, but attended him with the devoted zeal of a partial friend.[[269]] The Duke slowly recovered to a condition not to be termed health, unless a man on the edge of a precipice can be said to be in safety. As a public man he was, indeed, no more; but it is satisfactory to the admirers of this great man to recollect that his last military counsels had been as judicious and as effective as those which he had originated on former occasions. His latest act as commander-in-chief was to concert those measures for defeating the rebellion which proved so successful; his latest prognostic with respect to public affairs was, that that rebellion would be crushed at Preston.[[270]]
From the first attack of the Duke’s disorder, to his release from a state of debility, though not, as it has been represented, of imbecility, a gloom hung over his existence. His bodily and mental sufferings are said to have been aggravated by the Duchess’s violent temper, and petulant attempts to regain power.[[271]] The assertion cannot surprise those who have observed, under various circumstances, characters which are not regulated by high and firm principles. The Duchess had kind and generous impulses, but no habit of self-government. The arbitrary spirit of an indulged wife had now become an unlimited love of sway; her affection for the Duke was not strong enough to teach her to quell for his sake the angry passions, or to check the bitterness of her satirical spirit, because the stings which she inflicted might wound the enfeebled partner of her youthful days.
After some weeks of indisposition, Marlborough was enabled to remove to Bath, where he was recommended to try the waters. When he entered that city, he was received with honours which he was little able to encounter. A numerous body of nobility and gentry hailed his approach, and the mayor and aldermen came, with due formalities, to greet him. It appears that he must very soon have recovered some portion of his former activity, if the following anecdote, related by Dr. William King, a contemporary, and principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxon, be credited.
“That great captain, the Duke of Marlborough,” says Dr. King, “when he was in the last stage of life, and very infirm, would walk from the public rooms in Bath to his lodgings, in a cold, dark night, to save sixpence in coach-hire. If the Duke,” he adds, “who left at his death more than a million and a half sterling, could have foreseen that all his wealth and honours were to be inherited by a grandson of my Lord Trevor’s, who had been one of his enemies, would he have been so careful to save a sixpence for the sake of his heir? Not for his heir, but he would always have saved a sixpence.”[[272]]
Whilst thus retaining what was more in him a habit than a passion, the Duke left Bath, to view with peculiar pleasure the progress of the great palace at Blenheim, where he expressed satisfaction on beholding that tribute to his former greatness. But the enjoyments of Marlborough’s declining years were few and transient, whether they consisted in the exalting contemplation of a noble structure, the suggestion, though not the gift, of a nation’s gratitude; or in the small, the very small gratification of saving a sixpence, imputed to him by his contemporary; though it is possible, and to the good-natured it may appear probable, that to the humbled invalid, conscious of decay, the satisfaction of being able to resume old habits of activity, the habits of military life, may have been one source of the pleasure.
During November, however, in the same year of his first attack, the Duke was threatened with immediate death. The remaining members of his family hastened to bid him what they expected would prove a last farewell. Their parent, however, was for the time spared to them. Again he recovered his health sufficiently to remove to Marlborough house. His reason was happily restored to him, but the use of speech for some time greatly impaired. He recovered it, however, and conversed, though he could not articulate some words. His memory, and the general powers of his mind, were also spared. The popular notion of his sinking into imbecility is, therefore, unfounded, and in this respect it is unfair, and erroneous, to couple him with Swift.
“From Marlborough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show,”