During her stay in England, Lady Newcastle consoled herself in her anxieties with pens and paper, of which we shall hear a good deal later.
It was probably not very long before Lady Newcastle’s visit to London that King Charles I was beheaded, an incident unmentioned in her memoirs. But perhaps she regarded it as a tragedy too well known to require notice.
After being in England a year and a half, having heard that her husband was “not very well,” and having but “small hopes” of raising money out of his estates, Lady Newcastle returned to him. Sir Charles Cavendish was prevented from accompanying her by ague, and she had reached her husband only a short time, when news came of Sir Charles’s death.
Clarendon[135] describes Sir Charles Cavendish as Newcastle’s “brave brother, who was a man of the noblest and largest mind, though the least, and most inconvenient body that lived”. Almost the only words at all approaching disparagement of her husband, occurring in the Duchess’s story of his life, are in her already quoted statement that he had “not so much of scholarship and learning as his brother Sir Charles Cavendish”.
[135] Hist., vol. II, part II. bk. viii.
As we have seen, Newcastle had written to his wife, in England, that unless she or his brother sent him money immediately, he would starve; therefore it might be reasonably supposed that he had sold the last of his horses. Such was very far from being the fact. When Lady Newcastle returned, she found her starving husband with “the Mannage of his horses,” as she calls it, so splendid that “all strangers that were Persons of Quality” came to see it.
It was at Antwerp that Newcastle wrote his famous book on horsemanship, which we will notice when we consider his literary works in a later chapter.
Ben Jonson had written, concerning Newcastle’s horsemanship:—
When first, my Lord, I saw you back your horse,