Exit Lady Masham

by Louis Auchincloss

  Masham’s face became mottled with anger as I spoke. When I had finished, he broke into a loud jeering laugh, a kind of bray. “Well, if that isn’t gall! To build up your scheming into a noble sacrifice for world peace! Look, I know you, Abigail Hill! I’m married to you. Are you so lunatic as to believe I’d swallow all that? Do you think I can’t see that your whole life has been dedicated to the destruction of the Marlboroughs? Because you can never forgive the Duchess for being the great lady who found you in the gutter and was fool enough to pull you out! Or the Duke for not responding to your stale virginal lust!”

  Even at such a moment I was able to reflect that the only truly appalling aspect of his charges was that he believed them. It was not what I was that made me feel suddenly ill; it was what I had married.

  “Very well,” I murmured. “There is no use in any further discussion.”

  “You’ll just disobey me and go to the Queen? And request that I be taken off the list of peers; is that it?” Masham’s smile was now sly. “Don’t you think you had better first ask what I shall do?”

  “What will you do, Mr. Masham?”

  “I also shall go to the Queen. And I shall tell Her Majesty how Robert Harley and his minions have trained you from the beginning in your bedchamber duties. How you report back your conversations with your supposed mistress to your actual masters. How Mr. Swift instructs you how to rub the royal back and St. John how to swab the royal hands; how …”

  “And how do you suppose Her Majesty will react to the person who so illuminates her?” I interrupted him.

  “Harshly, no doubt. She will have no further use for either Masham.”

  “So you’ll cut off your nose to spite your face?”

  “No, my girl, I’ll cut off your nose!” he replied with a dreadful shriek of laughter. “That shiny red proboscis that butts into everybody’s business but its own!”

  I was cornered. I doubted that he would really go to the Queen, or even that he would succeed in getting an audience if I opposed it, but how could I take the chance? It was not the ruin of my own favor—I was beginning to think that might be a blessed relief—it was the prospect of the pain that his lies would inflict on my poor mistress. The little sheltered corner that I had tried to build in her stormy life would be smashed to bits.

  “And suppose I do as you say?” I asked. “How do I know that you won’t want to be a marquis next week? Or even a duke?”

  “Because a barony will quite content me. A barony and the few little business ventures that Harley and St. John like quite as much as I do.”

  At the hand-washing the following morning, the Queen looked at me in mild reproach.

  “I suppose this will be the last of your ablutions, Lady Masham.”

  “Oh, ma’am, may I crave a favor?” I had decided to dramatize my point by falling to my knees. “Promise me that I may retain my old functions! If there were any way I could dissociate myself from my husband’s title, I would, but there is no way. Yet surely Your Majesty, as the fountain of honor, may prescribe the court duties of her peers. Let me beg that mine may continue!”

  “Your prayer is granted, my dear,” my mistress replied, at once placated. “If Masham has any objection to his wife’s having such humble tasks, he can discuss the matter with me!”

  The other women of the bedchamber tittered at this, and I kissed Her Majesty’s hand and assured her that Masham was only too proud to have me serve her in the very humblest capacity.

  “We are sure of it,” the Queen continued in her most complacent tone. “And we look forward to fewer interruptions in your schedule of duties. For your husband’s is not the only elevation of the day. Another friend of yours has accepted promotion. Not as a peer, to be sure, but in the church. Mr. Swift will become a dean of cathedral.”

  I arose, clasping my hands in excitement and dismay. “At St. Paul’s, ma’am?”

  “Well, no. Not St. Paul’s. We could hardly consider a man of his published views in quite so public a post. No, Mr. Swift has accepted the deanship of St. Patrick’s.”

  My heart fell. “And may I ask where St. Patrick’s is, ma’am?”

  “Where its name suggests. In Dublin. Where Mr. Swift comes from. And where he will be happy to return. I think it most appropriate.”

  It was thus that the soul-destroying message was delivered! Her Majesty’s blandness was disingenuous.

  “Will he be leaving soon, ma’am?”

  “As soon as my Lord Oxford, who seems strangely dependent on his advice, can spare him.”

  A few weeks later, the House of Lords, fortified by the dozen new members, including Baron Masham, voted in favor of the negotiation of a peace that would not have to guarantee a non-Bourbon monarch in Madrid. And then, even while we were still rejoicing, the Queen had one of her seizures. For two days it looked as if she might not survive. I hardly left her bedside. One night, when Lord Oxford, as Harley must now be called, was in the royal bedchamber with me, the doctors and nurses posted just out of hearing distance, the following historical interchange took place:

  OXFORD: We have every reason to hope for Your Majesty’s early recovery. However, it behooves great rulers to be prepared for all contingencies. I therefore urge Your Majesty immediately to dismiss the Duke of Marlborough from his command.

  THE QUEEN (faintly): If I should die without dismissing him, Lord Oxford, what do you apprehend he would do?

  OXFORD: He would peddle the crown of England to the Elector of Hanover and to your half brother, and sell it to the one that paid him most!

  THE QUEEN: That is a grave accusation, Lord Oxford. OXFORD: None knows it more than I, ma’am. THE QUEEN: And you, Masham, poor faithful Masham. Do you agree?

  ABIGAIL: God forgive me, ma’am!

  THE QUEEN (after a faint groan): You have all been too much for me. Very well! Dismiss him, Lord Oxford! But don’t come blubbering to me, any of you, if the French come across the Channel and raise King Louis’s lilies on the great tower of Windsor!

  18

  The Queen recovered, but this did not save the Duke of Marlborough, who was dismissed from his military offices on the last day of 1711. Negotiations were immediately opened for peace. As France was hurting badly, and as everyone now accepted Philip V as King of Spain, there seemed no reason that the great war should not come at last to an end. I suppose I should have been happy, but I had an uneasy foreboding. There was something about the setting of the Marlborough sun that seemed to doom us all to live in the dusk of glory.

  I had never much valued glory. Indeed, I had done my little best to be rid of it. But I had had no inkling of what it might be like to live in a world without it. Milords Oxford and Bolingbroke, almost at once, began to seem small chattering figures in the absence of the warrior they had tumbled. In fact, we all began to resemble nothing so much as clownish stagehands fumbling about a darkened scene, pulling at props that we could not quite distinguish in our desperate effort to rearrange the visual effect before the next curtain that would arise … on what?

  The only man who could have got us through was Swift. The Queen had said that he would stay as long as Lord Oxford needed him, but I feared, now that the Treasurer and St. John were frankly at odds, that Swift would be damned in the eyes of at least one of them for being a friend of the other. When he asked me to walk with him in the gardens of Hampton Court on a damp gray morning when no one else was out of doors, I knew that it would be to say farewell.

  “But are there no deanships here?” I cried. “Surely London can’t be so small.”

  “None to which the Queen would appoint me.”

  I nodded ruefully. Nothing would ever shake the Queen’s opinion of the author of A Tale of a Tub. And then, suddenly, my heart seemed unbearably burdened. I could not tolerate the prospect of the long days at court with a hating husband and a bibulous Harley without that enlightening presence. The palace behind us seemed in that moment to shrink to the size of a doll’s house and its inhabitants to so
many gorgeously bedizened puppets. Even my poor beloved mistress began to fade and become dull to my mind’s eye. And I? A schemer, a pusher, a nothing! Our human dignity had been only the robe in which this man had temporarily clothed us.

  I gave in to my melancholy. I shed all pride. I sat down on a marble bench and sobbed unashamedly. Swift remained standing; on his face was that look of calm comprehension that bore so little sympathy.

  “You have awakened me,” I complained bitterly. “And now you expect me to go calmly back to sleep. As though nothing in the world had happened!”

  “Would you rather I had left you sleeping?”

  “Much! I had made my peace with myself. I was happy to be a spectator. I was getting through my life, which is as much as can be expected of a poor thing like me. And now nothing will ever be the same!”

  “You’re married to a peer of the realm. You’re the intimate of a great sovereign. You have your children.”

  “But that great sovereign is not going to live forever! You know as well as I the state of her health. And my poor children, God help them, are Mashams. After the demise of the Queen I shall have no further voice in their upbringing. You have never seen Oates Manor in Buckinghamshire, my friend.” Here I dried my eyes and made an effort to pull myself together. “That is the dismal spot where I shall be immured for life. Once the Queen is gone, Masham will have nothing more to gain from me. He will remember only my low birth—never the peerage that my favor brought him. He will go to London when he wishes, but he will never take me with him. My son will be raised to drink and hunt and carouse with his father. My daughters will be wed before they are fairly nubile to farmers so that the heir may have all.”

  “And how could my staying prevent that, Abigail?”

  “It wouldn’t. But at least I would have a richer garden of memories. I could live on that.”

  “I will write to you, my friend.”

  It was like him to give me only that. No offer of consolation, no assurance of prayers. He would not insult me by denying the accuracy of my predictions; he promised me only what he knew he could fulfill. And he has fulfilled it—faithfully. He still writes to me. It is my greatest, almost my only comfort.

  “I have only one piece of advice to leave with you, Abigail. If the Queen’s health continues to decline, the Jacobites will make a last-ditch effort to enlist her sympathy in favor of her brother. Always remember this: that James Stuart will never be King of this realm unless he abandons Rome, which he will never do. If he tries to usurp the crown, he will only bring useless bloodshed to this island. Her Majesty has too kind a heart to leave such a legacy to her subjects. It would be a sordid epitaph to a glorious reign.”

  “If there is still a task to be done, Jonathan, why don’t you stay to do it?”

  “Because a man has only so much usefulness behind the scenes. I’ve used every bit of influence I have. It’s time to move on.”

  I rose, in despair, to go back to the palace. For I could only agree with him.

  19

  Everything seemed to fall to pieces. Oxford and Bolingbroke, who had had, it now appeared, nothing in common but their joint resolution to be rid of Marlborough, took to snarling at each other, like two jackals over the corpse of a lion. Oxford was in favor of a conventionally negotiated peace, to be arrived at by parleys between the French and Spanish delegates and all of our allies. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, agile and undependable as ever, sought to by-pass the Dutch, the Emperor and Spain, and to negotiate directly but secretly with Versailles. He was more persuasive than Oxford, and it was his policy that won out in the council.

  My old friend Harley seemed now to be suffering from a kind of moral collapse. Whether it was a belated remorse over his treatment of the great Duke or discouragement at the growing success of Bolingbroke’s policies or simply the degeneration of advancing age, I could not tell, but it was only too apparent that he was becoming careless of his person, lazy in his duties and even more self-indulgent in his consumption of gin and wine. The Queen was increasingly critical of him. She complained to me that he repeated himself over and over and no longer seemed able to answer her questions. Was he senile or drunk, or both, she wanted to know? I defended him as best I could, but when she told me that he had spent one of his audiences pestering her to allow his son, who had married the only child of the Duke of Newcastle, to be heir to the latter’s title, I became disgusted myself. Harley may have been my oldest friend, but our country was still at war.

  It made matters worse that the Queen’s health continued to decline alarmingly. She had to be hoisted into her hunting carriage in a chair specially fashioned to be pulled away when she was seated, and in Windsor she was raised from the first to the second story on a platform hauled by pulleys. I was obliged to be with her constantly now, and I could see only little of my children. It exasperated me that Oxford should add to my worries by conferring with the Queen only after he had finished a tankard of gin, but when I reproved him for this, he told me to mind my own business.

  “My own business!” I retorted indignantly. “And who was it, I should like to know, who taught me to make the Queen my business!”

  “The Queen is not Robert Harley, Abigail.”

  Things had reached such a pass between us that I was reluctant to go to his chambers at Windsor one evening when he sent me an urgent summons. But when I received a second with a “Please, Abigail!” added at the bottom, I decided to comply. I found him looking very old without his wig, and a bit shaky. He was not drunk, but there was a tumbler by his side filled with what I assumed to be gin.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve asked me here to be your drinking companion.”

  “Stop moralizing, Abigail, and listen to me. What is your husband up to with St. John?”

  “I didn’t know they were up to anything. Except the usual speculations.”

  “No, this is different. I’m convinced this has something to do with the succession. Something they want to persuade the Queen to do.”

  “Well, why don’t you warn her?”

  “Because she won’t see me alone.”

  “And whose fault is that?” I exploded. “Who has been treating her audience chamber as if it were a public tavern?”

  Harley’s face was like a portrait overpainted with another. I thought I could make out the pink flush of indignation under the pale, puffy mask of his now habitual sadness. “There is no use our going into that now. It must wait for another time. You and I owe each other a few debts, my girl. You can pay off one of yours by keeping an eye on your husband.”

  “What could he and St. John be up to that’s so terrible?”

  “That’s what I want you to find out.”

  “Why should Masham trust me? He knows I’m for the Queen before anyone. You and St. John used to be so close. Is there nothing left of that old friendship?”

  “Bolingbroke has no friends. He trusts nobody. He would have employed a taster for his mother’s milk. Oh, Abbie, I fear you have joined them!”

  “Joined them? How?”

  “Gone over to them. Conspired with them. Profited with them!”

  “My poor old friend, you’re making no sense.” I glanced at the tumbler. “That wretched stuff will be the end of you.”

  He was moodily silent for a moment. “I meant well,” he muttered. “But my means have been foul.”

  “If that’s all you had to say, I shall leave you,” I said, turning to the door. “But not to the gin, I hope. Don’t forget you’re to present the Prince of Savoy to Her Majesty in two hours’ time.”

  The great Eugène, second only to Marlborough among the glorious generals of our alliance, had come to pay his respects to the Queen, and the corridors of the palace were crowded with courtiers anxious for a glimpse of him. The Queen was not feeling well, and she received him in a small parlor with only a dozen present. When Lord Oxford presented the tall, angular, olive-colored, plain gentleman in the absurdly large peruke, the Queen did him the
honor of rising to her feet.

  “It is not every day, Your Serene Highness,” she murmured in her low, sweet voice, “that we have the honor of greeting the greatest general of Europe.”

  The Prince, who was nearly related to half the royalties of the continent, was not awed by a Stuart. He probably regarded his cousin-german, Mary of Modena, Anne’s stepmother, as the only rightful Queen of our isle. This may have been why he now laughed, with a freedom that just missed impertinence, as he replied: “If I am that, it is Your Majesty who has made me so!”

  “What does the Prince mean, Lord Oxford?” the Queen asked in a low tone, which I could just catch, turning to her First Minister.

  Had Oxford been sober, he might have replied, with his usual suavity: “He means, ma’am, that a compliment from Your Majesty creates the state it confers.” But instead he muttered in a thick voice: “I suppose His Highness refers to Your Majesty’s dismissal of the Duke of Marlborough. He appears to believe that Your Majesty created a void in glory that a lesser rank had to fill.”

  The Queen looked much put out and did not address another word either to the Prince or to Oxford during the audience, which was saved only by a flattering speech offered to the Prince by Viscount Bolingbroke. When the company withdrew, the Queen signaled for me to remain. She sat for some moments in silence after we were alone. When she spoke, she did not look at me.

  “Your friend Lord Oxford was impudent.”

  “Then he is no longer my friend, ma’am.”

  “Did you not think he was impudent?”

  “I fear he had a glass too much wine.”

  “But it is impudence, is it not, to come into my presence the worse for wine?”

  “Undoubtedly, ma’am.”

  “And it’s not just today, Masham. He does it constantly now!”