As she grew older, the firm grasp with which she had ever endeavoured to hold her temporal possessions became more tenacious. She seems to have tired out the Treasury with frequent complaints respecting disputed points which concerned her office of Ranger of Windsor Park, and to have been wonderfully grateful to the powers that had the ascendant for civility to which for years she had been unaccustomed. “You have drawn this trouble upon yourself,” she writes to Mr. Scrope, secretary to Mr. Pelham, “by a goodness I have not found in any body these many years.”[[406]] And with corresponding humility she begs him to excuse the length of her letter, for, having none of her servants in the way, she found herself obliged to make use of a female secretary, who was not very correct; “but the hand,” adds the poor old Duchess, “is plain enough to be read easily; the worst of it is, that it looks so frightfully long, that a man of business will turn it before he reads it.”[[407]] Such was the subdued tone in which the Duchess, a year before her death, addressed the official whom in former days she would have commanded.
The vigour and clearness of intellect which had ever distinguished the Duchess, were spared to her until the last. Even in her letters to Mr. Scrope, written mostly in 1743, there is an exactness, distinctness, and force not often to be met with in female correspondence at an earlier age. Her letters on business, and she seems to have passed her days in writing them, are peculiarly clever; sufficiently explicit, but without a word too much. Throughout the Duchess’s letters there is, notwithstanding the asperity of her general remarks, no appearance of discourtesy. In her correspondence with Mr. Scrope, she begins as if addressing a stranger, but, on perceiving that he to whom she wrote entered kindly into her concerns, she becomes gracious, then friendly, and, lastly, even confidential.
To her other concerns was added the charge of Windsor Park, and all the affairs contingent on that office, which the Duchess rendered, when she had nothing else to employ her, a source of irritation, and of occupation.
Queen Caroline, as we have seen, upon the refusal of the Duchess to sell some part of her property at Wimbledon to her Majesty, threatened to take away the annuity of six hundred pounds a year, coupled with the office of Ranger. The threat, to the disgrace of that eulogised Princess, was put into execution; and during Mr. Pelham’s administration, and very shortly before her death, the Duchess applied, through Mr. Scrope, for the restitution of her salary. “Though,” she says, “I have a right to the allowance, I have no remedy, since the crown will pay, or not pay, as they please.” Her arguments for her claims are written with admirable clearness, but couched in terms of earnestness at which one cannot but smile, when we reflect that the writer, now upwards of eighty, who displayed such solicitude for the restitution of the sum of six hundred pounds yearly, not to talk of arrears, which she seems to think were hopeless, was in the receipt of an annual income of at least forty thousand pounds. But it was her right; and the pleasure, perhaps, of triumphing over the injustice of Queen Caroline, then in her grave, moved her to exertion on this subject.
“I have a right,” says this pattern of exactness, “by my grant, to five hundred pounds a year for making hay, (in Windsor Park,) buying it when the year is bad, paying all tradesmen’s bills, keeping horses to carry the hay about to several lodges, and paying five keepers’ wages at fifteen pounds a year each, and some gate-keepers, mole-catchers, and other expenses that I cannot think of. But as kings’ parks are not to be kept as low as private people’s, because they call themselves kings’ servants, I really believe that I am out of pocket upon this account, besides the disadvantage of paying ready money every year for what is done, and have only long arrears to solicit for it.”[[408]]
A more satisfactory and genial occupation, one would suppose, than wrangling for rights and sums of money which would soon be useless to her, might have occupied many of the Duchess’s declining days. In the month of September, previous to her death, she describes herself as having entered into a “new business,” which entertained her extremely; tying up great bundles of papers to assist very able historians to write a Life of the Duke of Marlborough, which would occupy two folios, with the Appendix.
The arrangement of these papers seems to have afforded the Duchess considerable pleasure. Her feelings were rendered callous by age, and she could now peruse with a poignant regret the correspondence of her husband and of Godolphin. The Lord Treasurer, occupied and harassed as he always was, took no copies of his letters, but desired his friend to keep them, so that they had been carefully preserved, and amounted to two or three hundred in number.
Such materials, together with the minute accounts of all continental affairs, would form, the Duchess felt assured, “the most charming history that had ever yet been writ in any country; and I would rather,” she adds, in a spirit with which all must sympathise, “if I were a man, have deserved to have such an account certified of me, as will be of the two lords that are mentioned, than have the greatest pension or estate settled upon me, that our own King, so full of justice and generosity, will give to reward the quick and great performances brought about by my Lord Carteret, and his partner the Earl of Bath.”
With this reverence for the dead, and contempt for the living, the Duchess proceeded with her task; observing, (then in her eighty-fourth year,) “that it was not likely that she should live to see a history of thirty or forty years finished.”
As autumn approached, her strength seemed more and more to fail. In answer to Mr. Scrope’s inquiries respecting her health, she replies, “I am a little better than I was yesterday, but in pain sometimes, and I have been able to hear some of the letters I told you of to-day; and I hope I shall live long enough to assist the historians with all the assistance they can want from me: I shall be contented when I have done all in my power. Whenever the stroke comes, I only pray that it may not be very painful, knowing that everybody must die; and I think that whatever the next world is, it must be better than this, at least to those that never did deceive any mortal. I am very glad that you like what I am doing, and though you seemed to laugh at my having vapours, I cannot help thinking you have them sometimes yourself, though you don’t think it manly to complain. As I am of the simple sex, I say what I think without any disguise; and I pity you very much for what a man of sense and honesty must suffer from those sort of vermin, which I have told you I hate, and always avoid. I send you a copy of a paper, which is all I have done yet with my historians. I have loads of papers in all my houses that I will gather together to inform them; and I am sure you will think that never any two men deserved so well from their country as the Duke of Marlborough and my Lord Godolphin did.”