“The Countess of Ogle to her daughter, Elizabeth.
“1674(-5), March 24.” A letter of reprimand for ill behaviour and for “one of the unkindest, undutyfullest letters that ever was writ to a mother”.
That graceful epistle seems to have been written more than a year before Ogle’s letter to his father; but probably it had been provoked by the family habit of daughter-dealing.
The best short account of the life of the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, after the Restoration, is to be found in Sir Egerton Brydges’s Preface to the Duchess’s “True Relation” of her own life.
“After the Restoration, peace and affluence once more shone upon them amid the long-lost domains of the Duke’s vast hereditary property. Welbeck opened her gates to her Lord; and the castles of the North received with joy their heroic chieftain, whose maternal ancestors, the baronial house of Ogle, had ruled over them for centuries in Northumberland. But Age had now made the Duke desirous only of repose; and her Grace, the faithful companion of his fallen fortunes, was little disposed to quit the luxurious quiet of rural grandeur, which was as soothing to her disposition, as it was concordant with her duty. To such a pair the noisy and intoxicated joy of a profligate Court would probably have been a thousand times more painful than all the wants of their late chilling, but calm, poverty. They came not, therefore, to palaces and levees; but amused themselves in the country with literature and the arts. This solitary state, this innocent magnificence, seems to have afforded contempt and jests to the sophisticated mob of dissolute wits, who crowded round King Charles II. These momentary buzzers in the artificial sunshine of the regal presence, probably thought that they, who having the power to mix with superior wealth, in the busy scenes of high life, could prefer the insipid charms of lonely Nature, were only fit to be the butt of their ridicule!”
All very true, except on one point. This account, as well as one or two other accounts, of the post-Restoration life of the Newcastles might lead a reader to suppose that during the latter part of their existence they never went to London. Any such supposition would be most erroneous. They may have gone there very seldom; but, when they did go, they took good care to make their presence felt. As Pepys will tell us in a later chapter, they made a great show of splendour, and the Duchess became the talk of the Town!
THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE AND THEIR FAMILY
By Diepenbeck