It was impossible to know when the Duchess was serious. “Oh, dear me, she had his head off, didn’t she? My ignorance of history is a scandal. Well, let us say Elizabeth and who? Drake?”
“He was a kind of pirate,” I ventured. “A glorious one, but still a pirate.”
“I wonder who could be spreading this report about the Captain-General,” the Queen inquired.
“Why not the Captain-General’s wife?” I suggested.
“Because she of all people should know it’s not true, Masham!”
“Her wish, ma’am, may have sired the thought.”
“Then it’s not so?” the Duchess exclaimed, with exaggerated dismay. “Your Majesty has not given the Duke the life tenure?”
“I have not.”
“But the matter is still under consideration?”
“Why do you suppose I should tell you that, Duchess?”
“Oh, no reason!” Her Grace exclaimed, seeming to clasp the reproof to her bosom as if it had been a compliment. “I had only thought that if our enemies were to know that the man whom they see as their ultimate doom had been placed in command for his lifetime, they would be less likely to give credit to rumors that we were tired of the war and anxious to conclude a dishonorable peace!”
It was hard to know what the Duchess really wanted. I suspected that she was always mentally two steps ahead of us, that she was now calculating both what she would do if the Marlboroughs prevailed and how she would cover herself if they fell.
“Isn’t it also possible, Duchess,” I now suggested, “that the Queen may hold a stronger hand if nobody, at home or abroad, knows what she is going to do? Of course, even if she should give the Duke his office for life, she could still take it away. But it might look as if she were not going to. And why should any officer of the crown wish even to look as if he possessed Her Majesty’s confidence one second after he had ceased to?”
“Ah, there speaks our little Tory dove of peace!” the Duchess exclaimed, as if it were the best of jokes. “We know who has been coaching her!”
This was a rude thrust, but fortunately it irritated the Queen.
“I’ll thank you ladies to speak no more of politics,” she said gruffly. “I have enough of that in my council without its spoiling my tea.”
When the ladies had been dismissed and it was time for the Queen’s nap, she remarked to me with a side glance: “It may interest you to know, Masham, that the Captain-General seems to have anticipated your plans for his wife.”
“Your Majesty has had a letter from Flanders?”
Those drooping eyes looked up for a second. Just for the flash of a second, but, fool that I was, I trembled. “I have had such a letter.”
“May I inquire if it contains good news of the army?”
“It is not about the army. It’s about the Duchess.”
“Oh!”
“I don’t know if Mr. Harley may have mentioned it to you, but…”
“Oh, ma’am, why should he have done so?”
The Queen stared. I had never interrupted her before. “I don’t know if Mr. Harley may have mentioned it to you, but the Duke begs me not to dismiss the Duchess.”
“What has made him suppose there is any likelihood of that?”
“He may have heard rumors. Everybody seems to be hearing rumors.”
Her suspicions made me reckless. I began to wonder if I had anything to lose. “If I may be so bold, ma’am, it seems to me that the Captain-General should have enough to do managing his army without seeking to dictate to Your Majesty whom she may dismiss or not dismiss in her own household.”
“Dictate? He didn’t dictate. He pleaded.” The Queen gave a slight sniff. “Rather abjectly, I thought.”
I seized on this. “But is it fitting that he should write to you on the subject at all?”
“Perhaps not. But much may be forgiven a man when a beloved wife is involved. Particularly a man who risks his life daily in my service!”
All the sympathy that I could get from Swift that evening was a shrug of the shoulders and a muttered comment about the day in which Rome had not been built.
16
When the dismissal of the great Sarah came, it arrived, like so many of Queen Anne’s decisions, without any warning. I learned from Swift that the Duchess had been given ten days’ notice in which to surrender the gold key of her office, and that the Duke, whose sources of information were apparently better than our own, had already arrived in court to intercede with the Queen. When I asked if the Duchess’s correspondence with the Queen had been seized, Swift told me that Sarah had settled that issue by promising not to publish it. And yet the Queen had still insisted on her demission! There was an ineluctable quality about the resentment of Anne of England once it had been aroused. She might forgive a wrong; she would certainly never forget it.
For obvious reasons, it was considered wisest to keep me out of sight while the Duke was with the Queen at Windsor, but there were plenty of tongues to inform me of what went on. I blushed for our great general when I heard that he had actually gone down on his knees to the Queen, and I was almost sorry when I heard that all he had succeeded in doing was to reduce the time in which the key had to be yielded. The Queen had told the obeisant warrior that her ten stipulated days were now three!
Returning to my own apartments after the Queen’s hand-washing, I was appalled to be greeted by my pale-faced chamberwoman, who stuttered out the message that the Captain-General himself was waiting for me in my parlor. I found the great man standing before the fireplace, contemplating a miniature of himself that I had never parted with.
“I have aged, Mrs. Masham,” he said with a bow and a gesture toward his likeness. “You, madam, have been rejuvenated.”
“Hardly, sir.” Indeed, he had aged, though not much. He stood as straight as ever, and his eyes were as clear and calm and faintly amused as formerly, but there were dark lines under them, and his figure had filled out. “I am greatly honored by this visit.”
“You guess its purpose?”
“Alas, does Your Grace not know that nobody can induce the Queen to change her mind, once it is made up?”
“Not even the person who helped her to make it up?”
“No! And anyway, I didn’t. I’m sorry, my lord Duke, but there is nothing I can do for you.”
“Would you if you could?” He actually smiled at me. “I thought we had been friends, Abigail Hill.”
“How can you remind me of that,” I cried in anguish, “when it was you who besought the Queen to dismiss me?”
“That was not personal,” he replied calmly. “That was because I had reason to suspect that you were aiding Harley to undermine me in Her Majesty’s favor. That you were working for the peace party.”
“Actually, I wasn’t. Then.”
“You mean you are now?”
“I think this terrible war should be ended, yes!”
“Listen to me, Abigail Hill.” He stepped closer to me and fixed me with that terrifying opaque stare. “When I tell you that I am able to march to the palace of Versailles itself and dictate peace to the so-called Sun King, do you believe me? A peace that might last a hundred years?”
It was a fantastic moment. The hero of Europe was actually asking me to allow him to win the war! He went on to tell me how vital to the cause his peace of mind was, and how Sarah’s temper brought her at moments to the brink of insanity. He said that he had to know, when he returned to Flanders, that he was leaving her in stable condition and that only then could he place all of his mind and energy on the rapid completion of the conflict. When, at the end of his now passionate appeal, he actually touched me, taking my hand in his, I burst into tears and pulled it away. I could not speak; I was near hysteria. I fell on the divan and covered my face.
“Go, please go, my lord!” I gasped.
“Very well. But remember, Abigail, I am trusting you!”
When I looked up, he was gone. I locked myself in my chamber and
refused to see anybody. I was terrified that Swift would ask for me. I simply could not endure another scene.
I could not see the Queen until the next morning. When I brought her the silver bowl and ewer, she looked at me in mild surprise.
“You look exhausted, Masham.”
“I haven’t slept all night, ma’am.”
“What has upset you?”
“Oh, ma’am, I’ve been so worried about my cousin Sarah! Do you suppose Your Majesty might reconsider her demission?”
“Reconsider it? Are you out of your mind?”
“But if the Duke takes it so to heart?”
“Then that, I fear, must be the Duke’s problem.”
“But will he be able to command effectively in the field?”
“Well, I should hope so!” The Queen’s stare showed annoyance. “And if he cannot, I have other generals.”
“But not like the Duke.”
“Masham, I forbid you to say anything more on this subject!”
“Oh, ma’am, please!”
“Masham! You forget yourself. What’s wrong, girl? Are you breeding again?”
When I met Swift that afternoon, in the great hall of armor, he wagged a finger at me.
“Don’t you know the Queen never changes her mind? Harley and I will forgive you this once, Abbie. But only because of the abject failure of your treason. You may regain the good opinion of the angels of peace by your renewed efforts on their behalf.”
“What makes you suppose I’m still willing?”
“Our hope is that your sanity will return when the mighty Duke goes back to Flanders.”
He was right. It seemed that Swift was always right. Glory departed for the continent, and Abigail went back to the drab job of disparagement. But Glory, before it vanished, had to be briefly debased. I learned the sorry tale of how Duchess Sarah, at the end of the Queen’s stipulated period, flung the gold key on the floor, and the victor of Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde had to stoop to retrieve it and carry it to his remorseless sovereign.
Sarah’s fury almost reached the heights that her spouse had feared. She stripped her apartments at Windsor, Kensington and Hampton Court, tearing out the marble mantels and even the doorknobs. She bore away trunkloads of papers and files and took down from the corridors paintings and portraits that she claimed had been gifts from the Queen. And when she was gone, with all of her loot, she bombarded the royal offices with letters demanding sums, supposedly long overdue, insisting on the fulfillment of old promises allegedly made by the Queen even before her accession.
“Was ever a friend so used in the history of friendship?” the Queen complained bitterly to me. “All I ever wanted was to do things for my beloved Mrs. Freeman. But she took and took and took! There was no satisfying her with affection or gifts or trust or even admiration. She wanted my very soul, and for what? To fling it away! I must face it, Masham. She never cared for anyone but her husband. Not even for her children. John Churchill must be made of some strange substance not to have been consumed to ashes in that heat!”
“It is strange, ma’am,” I murmured. “No other man in the world could have put up with her. She has cost him more anguish than the Sun King and all his hordes. Or was it her fire that heated the forge on which his sword was wrought?”
17
The months that followed were marked at court by the incessant maneuvering of the war and peace factions for the favor of the Queen. I had learned my lesson about being too obvious in expressing a point of view, but there were still ample occasions, when my mistress and I were alone together, for me to signify a heartfelt accord with her yearning to end the bloodshed and to echo her doubts as to the wisdom of maintaining even a successful commander in charge of a war that he prosecuted with such relentless zeal. I had resolved all of my own qualms now and docilely allowed myself to be tutored and badgered by the increasingly impatient Swift. He could not seem to endure the delay.
“What do you expect?” I would ask him. “One doesn’t end world conflicts overnight.”
“Overnight! Over decade! It’s easy to see that none of your loved ones is rotting in a Flanders ditch!”
“My brother Jack is going to Canada.”
“Aye, but it’s not so bloody there. The poor savages whom the French pay have only arrows to meet our bullets.”
The great event that pushed the peace party into the lead was the stabbing of Harley by the mad Frenchman Guiscard, who did not comprehend how valuable his intended victim was to the beleaguered Sun King. When I visited my wounded friend in his bed of pain, he murmured to me: “I’m not accusing Swift of arranging this, but he would have been entirely capable of it!”
What he meant was that the attempted assassination had been just what was needed to hoist him into the public eye in a sympathetic light. When he recovered, the Queen, without fear of violent repercussions, was able to nominate him Lord Treasurer and create him Earl of Oxford and Mortimer.
It was not an easy time for me. The task set for me by the new First Minister and his friend Swift became more and more exhausting. Everything they did was now aimed at the dismissal of Marlborough. I had to be always on the alert with the Queen, watching for the opportune moment at which to slip into the conversation one of their carefully selected anecdotes about the Captain-General’s political ambition. I could not risk seeming too insistent; I could not afford to be a bore; and I had to be sure that my ammunition, when discharged, would not simply create a gap that the Duchess of Somerset could fill with her own explosive material. Add to all of this that I was pregnant again, the fourth time in three years, that my little boy was constantly ill and that I was suffering from chronic colds and headaches!
And then, just when a truce seemed actually within our grasp, the House of Lords, by a tiny majority, legislated that no peace could be negotiated that did not encompass the removal of the French King’s grandson from the throne of Spain. Even if, by a miracle, we could induce Louis XIV to attempt to depose his grandson, Philip V, the latter had now sufficient backing from the Spanish people to resist his awesome ancestor.
Swift was beside himself. I had never seen him so agitated. He seemed almost irrational. He called on me at Kensington, summoning me from the chamber of my sick son, to accuse me of abandoning the cause for selfish reasons. When I burst into tears, he relented only enough to offer me his peculiar form of sympathy.
“I’m sorry about your boy, but to me it’s one life against thousands!”
When I say that I did not at once throw him out of my chamber, you will realize the hold that man had on me! He proceeded now to tell me of Harley’s plan to persuade the Queen to create twelve new peers for a Tory majority in the Lords.
“You will have to fight the Somersets every step of the way, Abbie!” he warned me. “They will struggle to the death against anything that degrades the peerage.”
I did not know the full extent of the threatened degradation until the next morning, when Masham burst into my bedroom while I was reading The Spectator. He was grinning broadly.
“Have you seen Harley’s list of the new peers?”
“No. Is it out?”
“Don’t tell me I’m ahead of you for once! St. John is to be Lord Bolingbroke.”
“An earl?”
“No, only a viscount. Our new Lord Oxford is not tempted to swell the Elysian fields of earldom in which he now so happily romps.”
“St. John will resent that. How can Harley be so shortsighted?”
“Don’t forget he has the Queen to cope with. She can be very stingy with her peerages.”
“Who else is named?”
“The rest are all barons.”
“That makes sense. Why should Her Majesty create earls and viscounts when barons have an equal vote?”
“That is precisely the way Oxford put it to me.”
“You seem very intimate with him these days.”
“Oh, we imbibe together!”
“I don’t think you
should encourage that weakness in him, Mr. Masham. It’s bad enough in anyone, but a crime in a minister.”
“A crime? Pray speak more gently of your benefactor.”
“My benefactor! What do I owe Harley? The obligation, it seems to me, is quite the other way round.”
“The Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, in his infinite wisdom, has seen fit to include your humble servant’s name in the proposed list. Greetings, Baroness Masham of Oates!”
I crumpled The Spectator in my agitation and pulled my sheet about me to warm my now shivering shoulders.
“But that’s absurd!” I cried. “I can’t be a peeress! Her Majesty will never hear of it. A baroness wouldn’t be permitted to do the things in her bedchamber that I do.”
“Then you must quit them.”
“Quit them? But I don’t want to quit them! They are the whole basis of my friendship with the Queen!”
“You had better get another basis, then. For Lady Masham is what you’re going to be, lass, and that’s that. My Lord Treasurer has spoken.”
“But the Queen has not spoken.”
“And you haven’t spoken to the Queen. Is that what you mean?”
“You always absurdly exaggerate my influence with her.”
“Do I now? And how did your brother Jack get command of that Canadian expedition, I’d like to know? Through his military reputation?”
“Jack deserved that,” I cried, stung. “Jack has proved him self a brave and capable officer. And his engagements have been with the enemy, not with sluts in the streets of Windsor!”
“Hoity-toity! But I know your opinion of me. You’d forgo the pleasure of being a peeress to keep me from being a peer. But get this straight, Mrs. Masham. You shall not speak to the Queen. That’s an order from your husband!”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. It was no time to lose my composure. “Let me try to explain,” I said in a calmer tone. “You know that I have been trying to help Lord Oxford and St. John with the Queen. It has involved my putting myself in opposition to the Marlboroughs. In view of my obligations to the Duchess and my sincere admiration of the Duke, this has been a source of some anguish to me. Surely you can see that I must not profit by their fall? Would you even wish to yourself? Would you want people to say that Sam Masham shot down their hero for a peerage?”
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