are lines so familiar, that it is difficult to dispossess the imagination of the ideas which they have lodged there. Both of these celebrated men, indeed, suffered from the same mortal and humiliating disease; and the dire malady, which is no respecter of persons, afflicted the kindly, the humane, the pure, the religious Marlborough, and abased also the vigorous intellect of the coarse, selfish, and profane Swift. Both suffered from the same oppressing consciousness of diminished mental energy. The lucid intervals of Swift were darkened by a cruel sense of present powerlessness, and of past aberrations; and Marlborough is said, when gazing upon a portrait of himself, painted in his days of vigour, to have uttered the affecting exclamation, “That was a man!”[[273]] But here the similitude of the two cases ends. Marlborough was never reduced to that last degree of human distress, insanity; it appears by the journals of the House of Lords that he attended the debates frequently for several years after the commencement of his illness, and he performed the functions of his public offices with regularity. Marlborough was permitted by his Creator the use of reason, the power of reflection,—time, therefore, to arrange complicated worldly concerns, and to prepare for a happier sphere. Venerated by his friends, domestics, and relatives, Marlborough was permitted to his latest hour to share in the hallowed domestic enjoyments which by no immoral courses he had forfeited, by no disregard of others destroyed.
The very different termination of Swift’s career—the retributive justice which, if we believed in spirits, poor Stella’s ghost might have witnessed—the joyless close of an existence which no affectionate cares sought to cheer; the consignment of the wretched and violent lunatic to servants and keepers; the moody silence of the once eloquent and witty ornament of courtly saloons; the deep despair to which medicine could not minister, but which a moral influence might have alleviated, but which no son nor daughter’s tender perseverance, with untaught, but often, perhaps, effectual skill, sought to solace;—these, with all other gloomy particulars of Swift’s awful aberrations and death, on which not one light of consciousness was shown, must be by all remembered. Unloved he died; the affection which could, for the gentle Cowper, brave the desolating sight and company of hopeless insanity, was not the portion of one who, in this world of great moral lessons, had ever sacrificed others to his own gratification.
It was one of Marlborough’s first acts, after his partial recovery, to tender to the King, through Lord Sunderland, then in power, the resignation of his employments; but George the First, with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely have been expected from his rugged nature, declined receiving it, declaring that “the Duke’s retirement from office would excite as much pain as if a dagger should be plunged in his bosom.” Marlborough, therefore, reluctantly, and certainly to the injury of his health, remained in office; and that accordance with his Majesty’s wishes was attributed by the Duchess to Lord Sunderland, who stood in need of his father-in-law’s assistance, in the administration which he had lately formed to the exclusion of Walpole and Townshend.
CHAPTER XII.
Third Marriage of Lord Sunderland—Calumnies against the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough—Interview between the Duchess and George the First—The result—Her differences with Lord Sunderland—Illness, death, and character of the Duke of Marlborough.—1721–22.
The Duchess of Marlborough tasted at this time sufficient of the real troubles of life to chasten a spirit less elastic than that which she possessed. Amongst various mortifications, Lord Sunderland inflicted a bitter pang, by marrying for the third time. His last wife, Judith, the daughter of Benjamin Tichborne, Esq., was not only of an unsuitable age, but inferior in rank, property, and connexions, to the Earl’s station and circumstances. He aggravated this affront to the family of his former wife, by settling on her successor a portion of his property, to the injury of his children. No remonstrances on the part of the Duchess could prevent this annoying union, and subsequent arrangement; but her letters to Lord Sunderland teemed with invective, whilst his lordship’s replies were filled with bitter recriminations.
A mind so constituted as Lord Sunderland’s was not calculated to rise above the littleness of revenge, when opportunity occurred. A report, which became current among the higher circles, that the Duchess favoured the Pretender, gave him probably less concern than it would at a former period have imparted. The Duchess, from consideration for her husband, concealed the rumour from him; but Sunderland summoned his father-in-law suddenly to his house, and acquainted him, in a coarse and unfeeling manner, with the calumny. The Duke returned to the Duchess greatly disturbed, and, in answer to her inquiries, informed her that she was accused of favouring the Pretender, and assisting him with a sum of money in his designs upon the throne.
The Duke, shattered in nerves, was greatly agitated by this abrupt disclosure; but it was received by the Duchess with disdain, and by an endeavour to soothe his irritation. But when her husband informed her that the King had heard the report, and that even the Duke was supposed to share her treasonable practices, she resolved, with her wonted courage, to appear at the drawing-room, in order to ascertain how deeply the poison of calumny had worked.
On her first appearance she was received coldly; and when on a second occasion she repaired to court, a reception equally chilling, and equally contrasted with the marked attention which had formerly been paid to her, confirmed her fears; and upon this demonstration of displeasure she resolved to make her wrongs and her innocence known to the King.
The person through whose mediation the Duchess did not think it unseemly to address his Majesty, was the Duchess of Kendal, formerly Madame Schulemberg, the mistress, or, as some supposed, the left-handed wife of George the First; a lady whose mental and personal qualities were not, fortunately for the safety of virtue, such as to cast a lustre over the equivocal, if not disgraceful position in which she stood.