"By spirit robb'd of power—by warmth, of friends—
By wealth, of followers! without one distress,
Sick of herself through very selfishness."[ 81]
And yet I suspect that the Duchess of Marlborough has never met with justice. History knows her only as Marlborough's wife, an intriguing dame d'honneur, and a cast-off favourite. Vituperated by Swift, satirized by Pope, ridiculed by Walpole—what angel could have stood such bedaubing, and from such pens?
"O she has fallen into a pit of ink!"
But glorious talents she had, strength of mind, generosity, the power to feel and inspire the strongest attachment,—and all these qualities were degraded, or rendered useless, by temper! Her avarice was not the love of money for its own sake, but the love of power; and her bitter contempt for "knaves and fools" may be excused, if not justified. Imagine such a woman as the Duchess of Marlborough out-faced, out-plotted by that crowned cypher, that sceptred commonplace, queen Anne! It should seem that the constant habit of being forced to serve, outwardly, where she really ruled,—the consciousness of her own brilliant and powerful faculties brought into immediate hourly comparison with the confined trifling understanding of her mistress, a disdain of her own forced hypocrisy, and a perception of the heartless baseness of the courtiers around her, disgusting to a mind naturally high-toned, produced at length that extreme of bitterness and insolence which made her so often "an embodied storm." She was always a termagant—but of a very different description from the vulgar Castlemaine.
Though the picture of Colonel Russell, by Dobson, is really fine as a portrait, the recollection of the scene between him and Miss Hamilton[ 82]—his love of dancing, to prove he was not old and asthmatical,—and his attachment to his "chapeau pointu," make it impossible to look at him without a smile—but a good-humoured smile, such as his lovely mistress gave him when she rejected him with so much politeness.—Arabella Churchill, the sister of the great Duke of Marlborough, and mistress of the Duke of York, has been better treated by the painter than by Hamilton; instead of "La grande créature, pale et decharnée," she appears here a very lovely woman. But enough of these equivocal ladies. No—before we leave them, there are yet two to be noticed, more equivocal, more interesting, and more extraordinary than all the rest put together—Bianca di Capello, who, from a washerwoman, became Grand Duchess of Florence, with less beauty than I should have expected, but as much countenance; and the beautiful, but appalling picture of Venitia Digby, painted after she was dead, by Vandyke: she was found one morning sitting up in her bed, leaning her head on her hand, and lifeless; and thus she is painted. Notwithstanding the ease and grace of the attitude, and the delicacy of the features, there is no mistaking this for slumber: a heavier hand has pressed upon those eyelids, which will never more open to the light: there is a leaden lifelessness about them, too shockingly true and real—
"It thrills us with mortality,
And curdles to the gazer's heart."
Her picture at Windsor is the most perfectly beautiful and impressive female portrait I ever saw. How have I longed, when gazing at it, to conjure her out of her frame, and bid her reveal the secret of her mysterious life and death!—Nearly opposite to the dead Venitia, in strange contrast, hangs her husband, who loved her to madness, or was mad before he married her, in the very prime of life and youth. This picture, by Cornelius Jansen, is as fine as any thing of Vandyke's: the character expresses more of intellectual power and physical strength, than of that elegance of face and form we should have looked for in such a fanciful being as Sir Kenelm Digby: he looks more like one of the Athletæ than a poet, a metaphysician, and a "squire of dames."