In spite of the stream of private criticism already indicated, the almost unmixed adulation of which the Duchess was the subject is indicated by the Letters and Poems, in Honour of the incomparable Princess Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle, published in 1676, two years after her death. In her lifetime, too, the praise was equally extravagant. Resounding Latin titles, such as Illustrissima Heroina, Excellentissima Dux, Eminentissima Princeps, came to her from high sources. The Rector Magnificus of the University of Leyden called her not only Princeps fæminini sexus, but Princeps terrarum. And the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in a complimentary address said that the great women of old could not contend with her for the palm of learning, but rather would they, with bent knee, adore this solam Margaretam Consumatissimam Principem. Even so sane a man as Evelyn wrote her a most flattering letter when she sent him her works in 1674. Beginning with Zenobia he assembled the great women of ancient times, the learned ladies of more modern days in France, Spain, Italy, and Holland, and concluded with
Mary de Gournay, & the famous Anna M. Schurman: and of our owne country, Queene Elizabeth, Queene Jane, the Lady Weston, Mrs. Philips our late Orinda, the daughters of Sr Tho: More; the Queene Christina of Sweden, & Elizabeth, daughter of a queen also to whom the renowned Des Cartes dedicated his learned worke, & the profound researches of his extraordinary talent. But all these, I say, sum'd together, possesse but that divided, which yr Grace retaines in one; so as Lucretia Marinella, who writ a book (in 1601) dell' Excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti è mancamenti de gli huomini, had no neede to have assembled so many instances and arguments to adorne the work, had she lived to be witnesse of Margarite, Dutchess of Newcastle, to have read her writings, & to have heard her discourse of the science she comprehended.[105]
Praise could hardly go further.
The best modern judgment discards the encomiums, but yet gives the Duchess a fairly high place. Sir Egerton Brydges, the editor of her Autobiography, says:
That the Duchess was deficient in a cultivated judgment; that her knowledge was more multifarious than exact; and that her powers of fancy and sentiment were more active than her powers of reasoning, I will admit; but that her productions, mingled as they are with great absurdities, are wanting either in talent or in virtue, or even genius, I cannot concede.[106]
The Duchess was buried in Westminster Abbey with this inscription on her monument:
Here lies the loyal Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess, his second wife, by whom he had no issue. Her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble family, for all the brothers were valliant, and all the sisters virtuous. This Duchess was a wise, witty, and learned Lady, which her many books do well testify; She was a most virtuous, and loving, and careful wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries; and when they came home never parted with him in his solitary retirements.
The two books by the Duchess that one would not willingly let die are her Life of her husband and her Autobiography. These are of permanent value as pictures of the life of a great, rich family like that of her girlhood home, and the straitened life in exile, with the later affluent and splendid life of a noble high in royal favor such as was the Duke of Newcastle. All the personal portions of both books are told with an air of genuineness, a naïveté, that make delightful reading. The Duchess summed up her life as that of a woman "honourably born, carefully bred, and nobly married to a wise man," and it was out of these happy domestic relations that her best work came.
Mrs. Katherine Philips (1631-1664)
Contemporary with the Duchess of Newcastle was Katherine Fowler, better known as Mrs. Katherine Philips, and better still as the "Matchless Orinda." She was the daughter of John Fowler, "an eminent merchant in Bucklersbury," and Katherine Oxenbridge. Aubrey gives a quaint account of her precocious childhood as it was described to him by "her cosen Blacket who lived with her from her swadling cloutes till eight, and taught her to read." Aubrey says: "When a child she was mighty apt to learn, and ... she had read the Bible through before she was full four yeares old; she could have sayed I know not how many places of Scripture and Chapters. She was a frequent hearer of sermons; had an excellent memory and could have brought away a sermon in her memory."[107]