Old age and decline of the Duchess—Her incessant wrangling with Sir Robert Walpole—Her occupations—The compilation of her Memoirs.
It is now necessary to touch upon the closing scene of the Duchess’s long and eventful life. Let it not be supposed that it passed in a calm retirement from the turmoils of the world, or in the agitating though small sphere of domestic faction. She was a politician to the last; but the gales which had in early life driven her along, now blew from a different direction. She despised and reviled the Whig administration of Sir Robert Walpole, with as much inveteracy as she had formerly manifested towards Lord Rochester and Lord Oxford. She considered the mode of managing public affairs to be disgraceful to her country.[[383]] She professed to deem it a sacred duty to use every exertion to defeat the measures of the minister, Walpole; and perhaps that profligate minister had, in the three kingdoms, no enemy more potent, as far as the influence of property was concerned, and certainly not one more determined, than Sarah Duchess of Marlborough.
It was in vain that the minister attempted to conciliate her by proffered honours. Few of the favours which he had to confer came up to her ideas of what her family and her influence merited. Sir Robert had revived the order of the Bath, a measure described by his son as an “artful bank of thirty-six ribbons to supply a fund of favours in lieu of places.” “He meant too,” adds the lively historian, “to stave off the demands for garters, and intended that the red should be a step for the blue, and accordingly took one of the former himself.” He offered the new order to the Duchess for her grandson, the Duke, and for the Duke of Bedford, who had married one of her granddaughters. The answer he received was a haughty intimation that her grandson should take nothing but the garter. “Madam,” answered Sir Robert, “they who take the Bath will sooner have the Garter.” He proved the sincerity of this assurance, by taking the garter himself in the year following, with the Duke of Richmond, who, like himself, had been previously installed knight of the Bath.[[384]]
On the accession of George the Second, the hated ascendency of Walpole, greatly to the wrath of the Duchess, gained fresh strength. The King doubtless preferred another man, but the Queen’s influence was all-powerful; she had long desired Sir Robert, whose stability in power was, in this instance, based upon his knowledge of mankind, and who proffered to her Majesty that respectful devotion which the rest of the world assigned to the mistress, not to the wife of George the Second. The Queen repaid this proof of discernment by a preference which ceased only with the existence of the minister. Before the real choice of the King had become public, and when it was still supposed that Sir Spencer Compton was to be premier, the King and Queen received the nobility at their temporary abode at Leicester-house. Lady Walpole, as her son relates, could not make her way between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor approach nearer to the Queen than the third or fourth row. But no sooner did the gracious Caroline perceive her, than she exclaimed, “There, I am sure, I see a friend.” The crowd fell back, and, “as I came away,” said her ladyship, “I might have walked over their heads.”[[385]]
This predilection would, independent of her injuries, be sufficient to account for the Duchess’s aversion to the very Princess whom, some years before, she had extolled as a model of excellence. The Queen, it might have been thought, would have possessed a hold over her good opinion, from the very nature of her education, which she received from the careful and judicious hands of the electress Sophia, the “nursing mother” of the Hanoverian interests. But nothing could mitigate the aversion and contempt of the Duchess towards the new school of Whiggism, which, to her penetrating view, but little resembled the disinterested spirit of Godolphin, or the unflinching adherence of her son-in-law Sunderland to what he termed patriotism. That word had now gone quite out of fashion, and it consisted with Sir Robert Walpole’s notions of perfect good-breeding, upon which it was his weakness to pique himself, to laugh generally at those high-minded sentiments which the Duchess, to her credit, ever professed, and the absence of which, however often they might be violated in the frailty of human nature, could not be compensated by the “pompous pleasantry”[[386]] with which Walpole satirised all that is good and great.
The Duchess has left on record the workings of her powerful mind. With an intellect unenfeebled by age, whilst she described herself, in 1737, as a perfect cripple, who had very little enjoyment of life, and could not hold out long, she gave ample proof that her reasoning faculties were unimpaired, her discernment as acute as it had ever been; and that wonderful power, the result of both qualities, of seeing into the events of futurity as far as the concerns of this world are involved, had in her arrived at a degree of perfection which can scarcely be too much admired.
It was her practice to write down her impressions and recollections of the various circumstances in which she had been engaged, and to entrust them to such friends as were likely to be interested in those details. Many of these productions she put into the hands of Bishop Burnet. Her character of Queen Anne; her able account of Sacheverell, written with impartiality and clearness; her character of Lord Halifax, of the Duke of Shrewsbury, Lord Somers, Lord Cowper, Swift and Prior, and others, have been preserved among her papers, and were composed expressly for her friends.[[387]] It was during the Duchess’s residence abroad that she is supposed by Dr. Coxe to have written her long letter in vindication of her general conduct to Mr. Hutchinson; from which unpublished document many facts in this work have been taken. But in 1788, a little book, called “Opinions of the Duchess of Marlborough,” collected from her private papers, was printed, but not published, with a preface, and notes by an anonymous editor, known to be Sir John Dalrymple, afterwards Lord Hailes. These memoranda, for they scarcely deserve a more imposing name, were commenced in the year 1736, and terminated in 1741. They are undoubtedly genuine, and are written with a spirit and fearlessness which plainly speak their source.[[388]] The learned antiquary and eminent historian who collected and honoured them with a preface, was not an admirer of the high-spirited lady, upon whose political conduct he has commented unsparingly in his memorials of Great Britain. Yet he could scarcely have done more to place the Duchess on a footing with the many other female writers who have added to the stores of British literature, than in preserving, as the shadow of his name must preserve, these specimens of the occupations of her solitary hours.
The aversion of the Duchess to Sir Robert Walpole appears to have been the ruling passion of her mind. “I think,” she writes, “’tis thought wrong to wish anybody dead, but I hope ’tis none to wish he may be hanged, for having brought to ruin so great a country as this.” Yet she declares herself still partial to the Whig principles, observing, nevertheless, that both parties were much in fault; and the majority in both factions she calls by no milder term than “knaves,” ready to join with each party for the sake of individual benefit, or for the purpose of carrying any particular measure.[[389]]
Like many other old persons, the Duchess viewed the world through the medium of a dark veil, which years and disappointments had interposed before her intellectual perceptions. The world was no longer the same world that it had been. Honour, patriotism, loyalty, had fled the country, and she, “though an ignorant old woman,” as she called herself, could anticipate that national degradation begins with laxity of principle. She upheld stoutly the purity of former times, of that “well-intentioned ministry,” of which Swift had successfully sapped the foundations. Deceived by everybody, as she averred, and not able to depend upon a thing which she heard, she yet perceived that, as long as Walpole continued in power, the general demoralisation was progressing; and that he would continue in power until the Queen died, she was equally and mournfully certain.
The Duchess was not a character to sit still and complain, and her efforts to resist what she justly deemed the influence of a corrupt administration were earnest and laudable. She resolved, as she said, for the good of her country, that wherever she had an ascendency, the partisans of the hated minister should meet, in the elections, with a spirited resistance. It was in her power to procure the return or the rejection of any members that she pleased, in Woodstock and in St. Albans. On one occasion she managed to defeat an objectionable candidate, in a manner truly ingenious and characteristic. A certain Irish peer having put up at St. Albans, daring to brave her dislike to him and to his party, she took the following method to vanquish him. His lordship had formerly written and printed, at his own expense, a play. He had also offered it to the managers of one of the theatres, by whom it had been rejected. It was, however, circulated, but treated with so much contumacy by the critics, that the peer bought it up; and some curiosity being excited upon the subject, the copies that remained dispersed became extremely valuable, and were sold for a guinea a piece. Expensive as they were, the Duchess resolved to collect all she could, even at that price. She was even at the expense of having a second edition printed, and hundreds of them given to the freemen of St. Albans, and people hired to cry them up and down the town whilst the election was going on. The result was, that the unfortunate nobleman lost his election, through the ridicule that was thus skilfully pointed at him with his own weapons.[[390]]