The Duchess at first hailed with delight the rising talents of Lord Carteret, whose disinterested and aspiring mind excited her lively admiration. Upon the motion of censure upon Sir Robert Walpole, made by Mr. Sandys, her hopes of the country revived, yet she dreaded lest the influence of the minister behind the throne might continue, after a “golden bridge” had been made for him to pass over to his unhonoured retirement. She lived to see Sir Robert Walpole driven to the very threshold of the Tower, and to learn that he had been compelled to the expedient, almost unparalleled in effrontery, of offering through the Bishop of Oxford a bribe to the Prince of Wales of fifty thousand pounds, to detach him from the party by whom he had been espoused. The indignant refusal of the Prince to accept of any conditions while Sir Robert Walpole remained at the head of affairs, completed the downfal of the despised, but still indefatigable minister. The Duchess had the mortification of seeing him, in spite of contempt, protected by the sovereign, and honoured by a peerage; and still more, of learning that he had succeeded by bribes and insinuations to corrupt and divide his foes, and to frustrate the scheme of his impeachment, the only proof of public honour that had been signalised for many years.[[391]]
Lord Carteret, her favourite, who had spoken against Walpole, in her grace’s opinion, as well as man could, who had exerted against the minister the powers of what was, in the estimation of an incomparable judge,[[392]] the ablest head in England, was, with Mr. Sandys, the first to embrace the offers of a court, and to accept employments and honours, upon the condition that Walpole should remain unpunished. This the Duchess, in her own manner, foretold. She who knew courtiers and statesmen well, “was confident that there was nothing Sir Robert Walpole so much desired as to secure himself by a treaty of quitting with safety;” and “that there were some so desirous to have the power, that they would give him a golden bridge to go over; and that there would be a scheme to settle a ministry from which she could not believe that England would receive any good.” Events proved the justness of this prediction.
It was not until two years before her death that the Duchess ventured to give to the world what she considered as a complete vindication of herself. When the work, entitled “An Account of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from her first coming to Court in the year 1710,” was published, she was eighty-two years of age. Her conviction must have been that she could not live long; to life she had, according to her own statement, become indifferent, but she still cherished a desire for justification in the eyes of posterity. The charges alleged against her were avarice, insolence, and ingratitude to her royal mistress. Doubtful of her own powers of executing a complete and connected work, the Duchess selected as the nominal historian of her life, Nathaniel Hooke, best known as the compiler of a Roman history, and long the companion, and in some respects a dependent, of the great and learned. Hooke had been a sufferer in the South Sea bubble, after which epidemic infatuation he described himself, in a letter to the Earl of Oxford, as in some measure happy to find himself at that time “just worth nothing;” that being considered, at the period in question, as an escape compared with the heavy burden of debts. The cause of the Duchess’s preference to Hooke is not discoverable, since he was a Quietist and a Mystic, and had evinced the sincerity of his religious opinions by taking a Catholic priest to Pope on his deathbed, to the great annoyance of Bolingbroke.[[393]] The Duchess did not object to Hooke on that account, and gave him the large sum of five thousand pounds, on condition that he would aid her in her work. She would not, however, allow him to make use of all her letters, and they were, according to the historian’s statement, sadly garbled at her grace’s desire.[[394]] In the course of their mutual task, however, certain conversations arose, in which the Duchess perceived, or fancied she perceived, an intention on the part of Hooke to beguile her into popery. The result was a violent quarrel; but whether before or after the completion of the work does not appear. Hooke, in extenuation of the quarrel, stated, on his own part, that finding her grace without religion, he had attempted to infuse into her mind his own opinions.
Whether this account be true or not, it is acknowledged that by the united efforts of the Duchess and the historian in her pay, a work was produced of singular power and interest. A reference to the passages from this curious narrative, quoted in this work, will prove the truth of the foregoing observation. The distinctness of the statements, the nervous simplicity of the language, and the fearlessness of the sentiments of the work, convey to the mind a conviction of the sincerity and conscious rectitude of the writer. No traces of mental decay are evident; but it is not difficult to perceive in the abrupt termination of some passages, the curtailing hand of some cautious critic, according to Horace Walpole, that of the historian.
No sooner did the “Account” appear, than it was attacked by various anonymous writers. The Duchess had compiled her work in the form of a letter, and a similar framework was adopted in the construction of several of the answers to her Vindication. It is remarkable that she addressed her justification to Lord Cholmondeley, the third Earl of that name, the son-in-law of Sir Robert Walpole. The public eagerly perused the publication, yet it is said not to have made any considerable impression in favour of the Duchess at the time in which it appeared.
The “Vindication of her Conduct,” as it is entitled, was not, however, the only work that the Duchess compiled in her own defence. Several of her manuscript narratives are now for the first time made serviceable in compiling this work. But there appears, from a passage in one of her letters to Mr. Scrope, to have been another book, which she showed only to a few confidential friends, and, among the number, to Mr. Scrope.
“I am going,” she writes to him, “to make you a more unreasonable request than I ever have yet done, or I hope ever shall, which is, that you will give me one hour of your time to read the enclosed book, some time when you happen to have so much leisure, and send it me back when you have done with it; for though it is printed, I would not by accident have it made public. When I printed a letter to vindicate my own conduct, when I had the honour of serving Queen Anne, I thought it necessary to say something upon the subject of the enclosed book; but after it was done I thought it was better to show it to a few of my particular friends, because they were so near relations that would be exposed by it, for all the facts are as well proved as what I think is possible you may have read in the accounts given of my honest endeavours to serve her Majesty Queen Anne; and as to all that relates to accounts, from your own office, you must know the relation is true.”
To this communication Mr. Scrope replies, after, in his answer, referring to other matters, “I herewith return to your grace the book you were pleased to send me, which I read with an aching heart.”[[395]]
Happily for her grace’s fame, she was vindicated by one man of ability, Henry Fielding, whilst her traducers, except in one instance, were devoid of talents sufficient to bear down the testimony of her plain facts, or to weaken the effect of her shrewd arguments.[[396]] The Duchess was unfortunate in provoking the malignant wit of Horace Walpole, whose satire, couched in terms of playful gossip, like nauseous medicines in sweet syrup, has been spread far and wide in his universally popular works. Horace Walpole is an instance, that to be what Dr. Johnson calls a “good hater,” it is not necessary to cherish the brooding enmities of a misanthropic retirement, in which the angry and vindictive passions are supposed to be fostered with propitious care. The only proof of attachment which he evinced to his family was his bitterness towards their foes, a bitterness indulged with all the rancour of a worldly man, who knows not the virtue of forbearance. His estimate of the Duchess’s character is well known. He allows her not one good quality, and seems to experience a gratification such as fiends might betray, when, in a tone of exultation, he announces her death.
The dislike which the Duchess manifested for Sir Robert Walpole was attributed by his son to a base spirit of revenge. Among the few favourites whom she possessed among her relations, was Lady Diana Spencer, afterwards Duchess of Bedford. It became, according to Horace Walpole, a scheme of the Duchess of Marlborough to marry this young lady to Frederic Prince of Wales. She offered her to his royal highness with a fortune of a hundred thousand pounds. He accepted the proposal, and a day was fixed for the nuptials, which were to be solemnized secretly at the Lodge in the Great Park at Windsor; but Sir Robert Walpole gained intelligence of the plot, and “the secret was buried in silence.”[[397]]