Six days later—there are no entries in the diary to record the suspense of these six days—she is sent for to London to see the King, a higher test for her strength of mind, even, than the former persuasions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Will she capitulate at last? or will she come out with her flag still flying? the tongues of London wagged. The interview is best given in her own words:
Upon the 17th when I came up, my Lord told me I must resolve to go to the King next day. Upon the 18th being Saturday, I went presently after dinner to the Queen to the Drawing Chamber where my Lady Derby told the Queen how my business stood, and that I was to go to the King, so she promised me she would do all the good in it she could. When I had stayed but a little while there I was sent for out, my Lord and I going through my Lord Buckingham’s chamber, who brought us into the King, being in the Drawing Chamber. He put out all those that were there, and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair side, when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands, which my Lord consented to, but I beseeched His Majesty to pardon me for that I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever, sometimes he used fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul means, but I was resolved before, so, as nothing would move me, from the King we went to the Queen’s side, and brought my Lady St. John to her lodging and so we went home.
There is a little note at the side of this entry: “The Queen gave me warning not to trust my matters absolutely to the King lest he should deceive me.”
The affair was not allowed to rest there. Two days later she was again summoned before the King, and a sour, unedifying spectacle the majesty of James I must have presented, thus confronted with the young obstinacy of the heiress of Westmoreland:
I was sent for up to the King into his Drawing Chamber, where the door was locked and nobody suffered to stay here but my Lord and I, my Uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, my Lords Arundel, Pembroke and Montgomery, Sir John Digby. For lawyers there were my Lord Chief Justice Montague, and Hobart Yelverton the King’s Solicitor, Sir Randal Crewe that was to speak for my Lord and I. The King asked us all if we would submit to his judgement in this case, my uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, and my Lord answered they would, but I would never agree to it without Westmoreland, at which the King grew in a great chaff. My Lord of Pembroke and the King’s solicitor speaking much against me, at last when they saw there was no remedy, my Lord, fearing the King would do me some public disgrace, desired Sir John Digby would open the door, who went out with me and persuaded me much to yield to the King. Presently after my Lord came from the King, when it was resolved that if I would not come to an agreement there should be an agreement made without me.
After these encounters she retired to Knole, while Dorset remained in London, “being in extraordinary grace and favour with the King.” She, poor thing, resumed at Knole the pitiful monotony of her country existence, which to a mind so vigorous must have been irksome in the extreme, and the Diary becomes again the record of her small occupations threaded with the worry and sorrow of her dissensions with her husband. It is illuminating that she never criticizes him; there are references to his “worth and nobleness of disposition”; her spirit, although high and emancipated enough to stand out against the King in the defence of Westmoreland, could not conceive revolt against the subjection of matrimony. It is an idea which never once enters her head. She even writes him a letter to give him “humble thanks for his noble usage toward me in London”; but a very little while after this “Thomas Woodgate came from London and brought a squirrel to the Child, and my Lord wrote me a letter by which I perceived my Lord was clean out with me, and how much my enemies have wrought against me.”
Conscientious as she is, she no longer finds enough events to justify a daily entry. Perhaps—who knows? for my part I strongly suspect it—her fighting spirit preferred even the ordeals and excitements of London to the tedium of Knole. She has very little to tell: only the gowns she wore, the books she read, the games she played with the steward, and the ailments of the Child.
At this time I wore a plain green flannel gown that William Pinn made me and my yellow taffety waistcoat. Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne’s Essays, and Moll Neville in the Fairy Queen. The Child had a bitter fit of her ague again insomuch I was fearful of her that I could hardly sleep all night and I beseeched God Almighty to be merciful and spare her life.
This ague of the Child’s is a constant preoccupation. I suppose that it was a kind of convulsion, for which the cure was a “salt powder to put in her beer.” On certain days a return of it appears to have been confidently expected, for I find: “upon the 4th should have been the Child’s fit, but she missed it,” and two days later she has “a grudging of her ague.” There is a good deal about the Child—never referred to under any other designation until she attains her 5th birthday, after which she is promoted to “my Lady Margaret.” The portrait of her which is here reproduced hangs over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting-room; her ring dangles on a ribbon round her neck, and her hair is done in an elaborate manner which defied all my efforts, when I was the same age, to do my own in the same way.
She was an amusement and a consolation, as well as a source of anxiety, to her mother. Her garments are carefully noted: