Abigail's Cousin

by Ron Pearse

  "I'd best be off, sis!" He smiled inwardly as his sister pressed him to stay. There was nothing she liked better than to have two males sharing her kitchen, so she begged: "Stay a while, Jack."

  Hearing heavy footfalls outside the door, Abigail rushed through it and the footfalls ceased followed by a long silence and Jack jealous of his sister's absence called out: "Enough of that canoodling, you two!"

  Jack was exaggerating. Greetings between 17th century engaged couples were rather formal occasions and Jack would imagine his sister curtsying to Masham whose own show of emotion would be to take her hand and plant a kiss on one or both. When the couple made their appearance, Masham greeted his future brother-in-law formally:

  "How do you do, Mister Hill!"

  "Captain Hill, sir!" he objected while Abigail busied herself providing her lover a chair, offering him coffee for which attention Masham thanked her profusely before turning warily to Jack:

  "The last time we met was in Flanders, I think, near a town called Maastricht. You've moved a bit further towards the French frontier since then I trust, captain."

  "Now then Mr Masham." interrupted Abigail, "don't you get our Jack talking about Flanders and such places. It's your news we want to hear. How went your interview with the Minister for War?"

  "Henry St John! Well enough, though sometimes it was deuced awkward. When is he going to be told? Because when he is told, he'll think me a complete idiot or an utter scoundrel."

  Jack would have liked to second that observation but was intrigued as to what Masham was talking about and at the sight of his perplexed face, his sister explained:

  "You see Jack, mister Masham's new appointment has not been passed on to him." But Masham put it more succinctly: "Mister St John was interviewing me for an appointment, I already have."

  Abigail's face was creased with suppressed laughter at the incongruity of the situation and finally admitted: "Mr Harley is not talking to Mr St John." Masham was also laughing with Abigail and mocked her slightly saying:

  "Mistress Hill, your sister, Captain doesn't give the true explanation, silencing her by fondly patting her hand, in adding:

  "It's because the queen has asked Mr Harley not to tell the minister for war as the appointment is within his gift."

  Jack put it bluntly when he said: "So this Mister St John is busy interviewing candidates and all the time the position is filled. What a way to run the country!"

  His outburst had sobered them stopping their laughter in its tracks and he got up from the table and, as Abigail coaxed more information from her lover, Jack wandered over to where Belle was busy having crept in when they were talking and resumed her place. She might have thought she was unobserved but Jack was aware of her presence and he began to feel a stirring in his loins which made him restless and he wandered to his former window seat to stare out of the window aware that one pair of eyes was surreptitiously boring into his back. He could hear the pestle grinding crushing the seeds and then a bell tinkled and he was taken by surprise wondering what it was.

  It might have been heaven sent for it was his sister's mistress' bell summoning her after the queen’s afternoon nap. With scarcely a word she hurried away. Masham got up, took his bowl and using an oven pad, took the jug and poured out another bowl of coffee watched avidly by Jack who could not resist observing:

  "Making yourself at home, eh sir. You'll be washing the dishes next."

  Masham looked up sharply at Hill smirking but did not rise to the challenge saying evenly and with a smile playing around his mouth:

  "I learned a lot in the army captain. There was nobody to mend my clothes but me. There was no officer’s mess on campaign. I had to fend for myself. How about you! Who mends your stockings for you?"

  Jack was forced to admit inwardly that Masham had a point but said defiantly: "There's some who prefer domestic bliss to life in the barracks or in the marquee. Don’t you miss the army?”

  Masham strolled over bowl in hand sipping occasionally the hot liquid before placing it on a mat on the table, catching the eye of Belle who smiled with her eyes before resuming her task. Masham spoke to Hill:

  "I miss the bugle call for reveille; the bugle calls to the cavalry, the rattle of musket fire; the dense pall of suffocating smoke; the muffled boom of the unseen cannon and then the ball cleaving its way through a platoon; the screams of men in shock and agony, and the stench of powder, of blood, of hacked limbs. D'you recall the shock of seeing the gush of blood when a sabre strikes a running man..."

  He stopped realising too late that listening was Belle and he saved her from falling to the floor. As he held her he cursed his clumsy ignorance. She came to quickly and he apologised to her and with his arm around her caught Hill looking down at him jealously and an idea occurred. He comforted her by suggesting:

  "I think you need a walk outside in the fresh air and if you don't mind my asking Captain Hill here to accompany you. I'll have a word with your mistress when she returns. How do you feel about that?"

  Belle smiled and nodded, and Masham spoke to Hill: "Well Captain Hill, will you do Mistress Belle the honour to accompany her outside?"

  The captain needed no second bidding and offered Belle his arm and the couple made their way out and Masham could hear their footfalls down the corridor and then down the steps and then all was silent. Idly he picked up the bowl of coffee sitting down in Belle's chair drained the cooler liquid. He was curious as to what she had been doing and looking into the mortar touched the powder and tasted it.

  Even the aroma of the herb affected him and the taste had the effect of numbing his tongue and wondered whether after all that it was just his words that had affected Belle. The powder seemed to possess a narcotic effect and he could not but help marvel at his future wife's skill and knowledge in preparing potions for the queen in her sufferings. He wondered also whether such herbal remedies might not also find commercial applications outside the palace. He could see from the queen's condition that she had not many years left so his future wife's continued employment was limited.

  Sitting there alone as Belle walked in the garden chaperoned by his future brother-in-law, Masham reflected also upon other occasions when Abigail brought contentment and forgetfulness to the queen. Her playing of the harpsichord when her majesty sat, transported, as they all were especially when she played, 'The Prince of Denmark's March’ composed by Jeremiah Clarke for Anne’s husband, the prince consort.

  Another skill of his intended had come to his knowledge. Unaware he was listening to a woman whom he thought a hundred miles away, he had discovered it was Mistress Hill mimicking the sonorous pronouncements of the Duchess of Marlborough. When it was remembered the esteem in which her former friend Sarah was held by the queen, it was a measure of Sarah's loss of prestige, and Abigail's consequent rise in the queen's favour.

  Added to these accomplishments was her skill as an apothecary to rival Thomas Culpeper himself. Her intelligent conversation and grasp of affairs persuaded him she was an extraordinary woman, and he was going to marry her.

  Chapter 11

  In modern parlance England plc was a thriving concern; to cite the words of the great 20th century historian Sir Arthur Bryant, 'England was the greatest manufacturing and trading country in the world, and the industrial revolution was yet to get under way. Many ships carrying silks, spices, tea and chinaware, minerals, precious stones and metals were criss-crossing the sea routes to India and as many plied between the colonies of the American eastern seaboard and the home country carrying furs, timber, fish and gold, the result of profitable trading. In the New World the indigenous people, the mis-named Indians, were coming round to the viewpoint that it would serve their interests better to back the Yankee, the Indian mis-pronunciation of the epitaph used by the contemptuous French for their English rivals, 'angli'.

  While there was a steady flow of profits into English coffers there was also an outflow of funds to Holland, Austria, Savoy and several German principalities
. But it was yielding results which were demonstrated in 1704 when Marlborough through judicious and diligent application of funds not only provided his allied army of thousands of soldiers with food, drink and new boots in the allied march from the North Sea to the Danube, but also ensured the timely arrival of Prince Eugene's forces marching from northern Italy to pincer-grip with Marlborough's army the Franco-Bavarians at Blenheim.

  This victory together with English naval success in capturing Gibraltar and a second land victory at Ramillies two years later would seem to have cemented the Whigs' grip on power. Captain-General Marlborough and lord treasurer Godolphin had also enlisted the services of the greatest mover-and-shaker of the age in the person of Robert Harley, former Speaker in the House of Commons, to initiate and steer financial bills through Parliament. But as the war dragged on and ever more money was needed to finance it, Robert Harley began, in the war's sixth year to question the motives of the powerful men he served, the so-called Duumvirs, a term borrowed from ancient Rome, being the term used to describe the two consuls elected to rule that city and empire for one year.

  Soldiers from the successful battles and other engagements were beginning to make their presence felt on the streets of London. There were soldiers with amputated limbs, victims of French canister and grape shot, begging in the streets and thoroughfares where Londoners were apt to walk and recreate in the course of their daily lives. Soldiers loitered around coffee houses, in the middle of shopping arcades, around taverns and public houses, outside Parliament, in the vicinity of the houses of the good and great, including the palaces reserved for bishops and royalty.

  In short despite the successes by land and sea, the English people were beginning to feel a war malaise exacerbated by shortages of food due to a combination of bad harvests and the depredations of French privateers and pirates which had the effect of causing shortages and thereby raising prices, especially of bread. In this general atmosphere of discontent the opponents of the war, the Tories, began to raise questions in Parliament especially when a finance bill was being put through both Houses, and Robert Harley was getting most of that criticism. He had been a non-party man but was now widely seen as having taken the Duumvirs shilling. He did not like it coming as he did from a long line of Dissenters who had risked all to espouse neutrality in religion and politics.

  He was approached by leading Tories to support the cause of peace with the promise that, in the event of elective success at the polls, he would be recommended as lord treasurer, now filled by Lord Godolphin. It was the highest political office at the time and Harley knew that to win it he would have to change sides. It was nominally in the gift of the monarch but she was expected, and it was her inclination so to do, to appoint a Tory, as she perceived that party as closer to the Church of England, that she passionately supported, than the Whigs, whom she disdained as men of business and trade notwithstanding Godolphin and Marlborough were Whigs although also firm friends, and the queen set great store by friendship, so scarce in her earlier life, as princess and daughter of a Catholic father, the deposed James II. Such men and women who had given her comfort in those times had been the Churchills, Godolphin and others including Robert Harley.

  Notwithstanding, Robert Harley had also deduced the queen disliked non-conformists and dissenters though she exercised a certain fairness by not supporting measures which threatened more discrimination. His father, a royalist supporter of Charles I, the executed monarch, had performed a small service to the princess by allowing her to reside at one of his houses when she was forced to leave London during the Great Revolution and they had glimpsed each other on that occasion.

  His chance for office came in 1704 when Lord Nottingham, displeased over the queen's lack of support for a bill discriminating against dissenters, resigned. When the queen looked around for someone to replace him, she remembered the royalist sympathiser who was a country Whig as opposed to the court Whigs her predecessor, William III, had preferred. In the days when she was an outcast, along with others out-of-favour, such as her best friend Sarah Churchill and her husband John Churchill and their friend, the earl Godolphin, she remembered Robert Harley's visits to the Cockpit, her living quarters at the time. He was unobtrusive and a man of few words which she liked though she was judging him against Sarah her friend who was the most talkative woman of her age.

  So Robert Harley became Secretary of State for European affairs and, at the same time, was also able to persuade the queen to appoint his protégé, Henry St John, as Minister for War. The two men came to the realisation that in the wake of the war's increasing unpopularity it would also do them no harm to lean towards the anti-war party, the Tories, who also were strong supporters of the Church of England.

  In his dealings with the queen Harley had discovered that the servant closest to her and upon whom the queen increasingly relied was his cousin, Abigail Hill, who, by reason of a brother in the army was also anti-war. This brother Jack Hill complained of Marlborough's treatment denying him promotion and generally giving him a bad name.

  News had reached the War Office of a terrible defeat for the allied soldiers in Spain at the hands of a Franco-Spanish army led by the Duke of Berwick, a Jacobite supporter. Worse still was the information reaching the minister that the allies had lost owing to a shortage of English soldiers, the funding for the despatch of reinforcements being in the hands of the lord treasurer, Lord Godolphin. Robert Harley sensed his time had come to lay before the queen the evidence and call for Godolphin's dismissal.

  Just at that time a brother of Godolphin was very ill and he spent much time away from court and even when present was very morose. The queen felt her long time friend and advisor was in need of a rest and when Harley laid his evidence before her, Anne placated her conscience by convincing herself she would be acting in his best interests. Harley's triumphalism however seemed to blind him to the serious consequences of his action.

  Queen Anne wanted to see the results of the extensive alterations to Kensington House that now earned the name of Palace so chose it as the next meeting place for the customary Council of War. In the enormous new stateroom designated for the meeting a newly designed Queen Anne table had been installed surrounded by brand new Queen Anne chairs which would carry their labels engraved in gold. At the top of the table, one label read, HER MAJESTY while the adjacent one read, SECY TO HER MAJESTY, and so the labels each denoted the office of the man seated around the table.

  The room was well illuminated being overlooked by new, high windows of the new sash type with glass provided by a new glass manufactory funded by Parliament but staffed and managed by Huguenot craftsmen and artisans recently expelled from France by Louis XIV. Robert Harley and Henry St John were visiting the chamber designated for the council of war at the instigation of the latter whose newness to government now manifested itself in an undiplomatic suggestion:

  "I wonder Robert whether you should take your place at the chair labelled Secretary of State, or, that of Lord Treasurer." But Harley looked gravely at St John coldly commenting: "Would it not be presumptuous of anyone to sit without the direction of her majesty? I'm quite content where my seat shall be, but I do look forward to the countenance of the duke after she has made her wishes known."

  St John still overlooking Harley's demeanour was full of the moment and himself as he walked to stand behind the seat MINISTER FOR WAR saying blithely: "Perhaps when you move up I could exchange my seat." Harley humoured his companion: "All we need Henry is a company of your pipers and we can have musical chairs."

  Then St John was serious taking in Harley's earlier comment: "You know," he confided, "I should be sorry to see the duke humiliated."

  But Harley dismissed his friend's comment: "A sudden outbreak of conscience, Henry. You should have thought of that before bringing me your evidence. A good omelette needs broken eggs."

  St John misheard eggs as heads as he launched into a panegyric of the duke: "Marlborough has seen a good few broken heads but it
is the saving of the many that I remember him by both at Blenheim and Ramillies. He's likely the finest general England has ever had and I can tell you that had he been at Alamanza, he would have thrashed his nephew or not fought at all. There is another explanation of our defeat that you should know."

  Harley was alive to the bitterness in his friend as he replied: "And what may that be?"

  "Why that spy William Gregg you had arrested last December. He might have forewarned the French who forced a battle to their advantage."

  Harley walked round the table and stood next to St John, whispering: "I have another explanation, Henry. It is this. John Churchill's sister's liaison with our late lamented Stuart king James producing James Fitzjames, now Duke of Berwick. He is therefore Marlborough's nephew and I happen to know they meet regularly, incredible as it may sound."

  St John was aghast: "A marechal of France, our enemy, meeting up with our captain-general. It's not just incredible, it's bizarre."

  But Harley pressed the point: "Don't you think the French would more likely get their information from this liaison rather than my clerk. And remember, his interlocutors tortured him for incriminating evidence and failed."

  When Harley had finished St John put two fingers to his lips and gestured beyond the room and St John opened the door and both listened to a murmur of voices without intelligibility and construing wrongly an argument to their advantage, St John muttered:

  "Let us go to the new refectory Robert! We are serving no purpose here. A footman is bound to let us know when the meeting will start, if ever it does." Harley murmured assent already smelling the aromas of roasting meat making his nose wrinkle in anticipation of culinary delights and pointing invited his friend: "Lead the way, McDuff. I'm close behind you."

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