The great misfortune of Newcastle’s life was to be suddenly forced into the position of a Commander-in-Chief, without any previous training, or personal inclination; and perhaps the great error of his life may have been his flight to Holland after the battle of Marston Moor; but, as was shown on the pages dealing with the incident, a good deal has been urged, and may justly be urged, in defence of his conduct on that occasion.
If he made many mistakes as a General, he never showed want of courage as a soldier. If he asked for appointments and honours from the King, he amply paid for them, both with money and with services. If his wife said that he was too great an admirer of the fair sex, there is nothing to show that he was immoral. If he was somewhat eccentric, he had a good deal of originality. If he was extravagant when young, he was economical when old. If he was ambitious, he never intrigued. If his literary work is open to criticism, he himself is said to have been an excellent critic.
Although a loyal, a stately, a polished and a handsome courtier, he was no hanger-on at Court; and his dignified retirement to Welbeck, when the licentious Court of Charles II had been established, showed at least good taste. He always appears to have had enemies near the King, both in the reign of Charles I and in that of Charles II; but he must have been very popular in the country, or he would not have been able to raise such large forces for the army of the North, during the civil war.
Lastly, he is to be admired for his business-like perseverance in retrieving his ruined fortunes after the Restoration, when they were in a condition which would have broken the heart of a man of meaner spirit.
As to the Duchess of Newcastle, let us at once get rid of the idea, held by M. Montégut, and apparently also by other people, that she was the first of the Blue Stockings. The origin of that term is well known. Quite a hundred years after the death of our Duchess, the leader of a coterie of learned ladies invited a clever but ill-clad scholar to attend their social gatherings. He always wore breeches and the usual bluish-grey stockings of the cheaper kind; and when he pleaded lack of suitable attire, his hostess said: “Oh! Come in your blue-stockings”. The little gatherings of these ladies were afterwards called the meetings of the Blue Stockings.
But, even taking the term in its wider sense, as including the learned ladies of any, or of all ages, we might find women far more learned than Margaret Newcastle in the depths of antiquity. As to her own country, a century before her time Erasmus wrote: “The monks, famed in times past for learning, are become ignorant; and women love books. It is pretty enough that this sex should now at last betake it self to antient examples.” In the sixteenth century, very literary ladies were to be found in the families of Sir Thomas More and Sir Anthony Cooke, and to give Henry VIII his due, it must be acknowledged that he took good care his daughters should be thoroughly educated and cultivated women. Nor was our Duchess by any means the first of her sex to rush into print in the seventeenth century; moreover, much as she wrote for the press, little print did she read except her own, and she seems to have been almost entirely devoid of scholarship.
Again, in the first half of the century in which lived the Duchess of Newcastle, unlike that Duchess Lady Jane Grey knew Latin and Greek and studied Plato. At the same time, in Italy, the notorious courtesan, Tullia of Aragon, was a poetess; and, like several of her contemporary courtesans, knew, as says Aretino, “all Petrarch and Boccaccio by heart, beside innumerable fine Latin verses by Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc.” Any of these ladies could have taught the Duchess lessons and put her in the corner as a dunce.
In another sense, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, was unlike what are generally known as literary ladies; for she was no patroness of literary people; she was not the leader of any literary set, she started no literary school; she led a retired life, was nervous in society, and was so much absorbed in her own writings that she seems to have taken no interest in those of anybody else, either ancient or modern.
Had she but spent a larger proportion of her time in learning instead of in teaching, she might have become a successful author; for undoubtedly she had talent, although not genius. The fatal idea that all her “conceptions,” as she called them, were worthy of paper, and in most cases worthy of print, was the chief cause of her literary ruin.