Exit Lady Masham Read online

  Exit Lady Masham

  Louis Auchincloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  …

  …

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART TWO

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Chart of Stuart and Hanoverian Succession

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON

  1983

  Copyright © 1983 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

  mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by

  any information storage or retrieval system, except as

  may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in

  writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be

  addressed in writing to Houghton Mifflin Company, 2 Park

  Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  Exit Lady Masham.

  1. Masham, Abigail, Lady, 1684 or 5–1734—Fiction.

  2. Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 1665–1714—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3501.U25E9 1983 813’.54 83-319

  ISBN 0-395-34388-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  D 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A signed first edition of

  this book has been privately

  printed by The Franklin Library.

  TO BARBARA W. TUCHMAN,

  who has made history more fascinating

  than any fiction

  PART ONE

  1

  Oates Manor

  Buckinghamshire

  November, 1733

  It was Lord Hervey who persuaded me to embark on these memoirs. So strong an impression did he make on me that here I am, only a week after his suggestion, taking up my pen.

  “Don’t put it off, Lady Masham, I beg of you,” he urged me. “You owe it to history. Those of us who were privileged to view the making of great events have the duty to record them. Some of the mightiest monarchs survive to posterity only in the pages of humble scribes. George II and Queen Caroline will have Hervey. Queen Anne will have Your Ladyship.”

  “You forget you’re talking to an old woman. I may not have the time.”

  “I don’t consider fifty-three old.”

  “So you’ve looked me up!”

  “That is a penalty of fame.”

  “Fame! Admit, my friend, that your good Queen Caroline would not have asked me to come to court today had you not piqued her curiosity by telling her my story. Isn’t that true? She had never heard of me, had she?”

  “My dear lady, what does that prove? The Queen was raised in a petty German court and knows nothing but Teutonic history. Still, we must give her credit. She wants to learn, and she never forgets. Most German princesses are absolutely hopeless. She was recalling the other day what her mother had replied to our minister to Anspach when he suggested that her daughter should learn the tongue of the nation that her betrothed husband would one day rule. ‘Ach, there’s no sense to that! After the Hanover family have been on the throne another year or so, the English will all speak German.’ It is true that it was I who first brought your name to Her Majesty’s attention, but she listened with the greatest interest to your story. And, of course, every English schoolchild has heard of you.”

  “The way they’ve heard of the Battle of Hastings. As something ancient and remote from their daily lives. Oh, yes, I understood those glances in court today, Lord Hervey! ‘Who is that? Lady Masham? You don’t mean the friend of Queen Anne? Is she still alive?’”

  “Well, I’d be the last man in the world to deny the shortness of a courtier’s memory. But some people recall more than you suppose. And it wasn’t that long ago, anyway. When did Queen Anne die? In 1714? Why, that’s not a score of years back.”

  “It seems more to one who has hardly been away from Oates Manor in all that time. I feel like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. I am stepping down from my pedestal into a new world. And not one, I fear, that I like very much.”

  “All the more reason to keep the past alive.”

  “Well, the country mouse will think about it, Lord Hervey, when she’s back in her quiet nest.”

  As this manuscript will not be published in my lifetime—and certainly never, if my husband survives me—I should explain who Lord Hervey is. He is the court chamberlain whom Queen Caroline dotes on, quite as if he were her own son. Much more so, actually, for both she and King George are reputed to detest the Prince of Wales. It is generally believed that Sir Robert Walpole depends on Lord Hervey to keep the Queen in line politically when she is acting as regent during the frequent visits of her spouse to his beloved Hanover. But more important, at least to me, the chamberlain is supposed to be the most beautiful and charming man at court. They say he bewitches both sexes, that husbands forgive him for lying with their wives and even their mistresses. It is notorious that he is the father of Miss Vane’s last child, whom the Prince of Wales is raising as his own bastard!

  Out of the blue I received a letter from Lord Hervey three weeks ago, instructing me that Her Majesty desired to make my acquaintance and appointing the day on which I was summoned to St. James’s Palace. I had become so accustomed to my quiet life in the country, with my back firmly turned on courts and palaces, that it required a considerable resolution to overcome my inertia and obey.

  Everything at St. James’s seemed much the same as in the old days, except for the presence of many more guards, a symptom, not of George II’s fear of assassination, but of his passion for the military. Lord Hervey, who met my chair by the gate, was even more charming than I had anticipated. He escorted me to where Queen Caroline, with the Princesses Caroline and Emily, was receiving at a late afternoon drawing room. After I had made my curtsy I was invited to sit with the royal group. The Queen, a robust, straight-backed woman, who may have been pretty when she was young, addressed me in the gruff, direct German manner.

  “I am most interested in the court of Queen Anne, Lady Masham. It seems to have been a women’s paradise. All the favorites were ladies!” Here she laughed, rather crudely, and glanced at her daughters, as if to suggest that such an anomaly could have existed only in England. “Is it true that the Queen and the Duchess of Marlborough addressed each other as ‘Mrs. Jones’ and ‘Mrs. Smith’?”

  “Not quite, ma’am. Her late Majesty adopted the sobriquet of ‘Mrs. Morley,’ while the Duchess chose the surname ‘Freeman.’”

  “And did they call each other ‘Mrs. Morley’ and ‘Mrs. Freeman’ in public?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am, never. That was only for their private use. They desired to ease the gêne that may exist between sovereign and subject.”

  “Really! I cannot imagine a German royalty permitting such a liberty. And yet I do not believe that any gêne exists between me and those whom I like and trust. Is it not so, Lord Hervey?” She turned to her chamberlain with what seemed as close to a wink as a Teutonic princess could emulate. “He tells me of his amours, the naughty boy! The late Queen and her beloved Duchess must have been like two old village gossips. And it
was you, Lady Masham, who broke up that famous friendship? How did you do it?”

  My disgust with the House of Hanover was so strong at this point that I was at a loss for words. Had the Pretender at that junction appeared in the doorway, I think I should have knelt to him, even at the risk of my head! But at last I managed to find my tongue and to murmur something about the rupture between myself and the Duchess having been of the latter’s seeking.

  “But what had she against you?” the Queen persisted. “That you had stolen Queen Anne’s heart?”

  Another coarse laugh, and another oeillade to the Princesses, showed me clearly enough how the Queen construed my relationship to Anne of England. I tried to keep my composure by reminding myself that it was not the first time that I had been subjected to such insinuations.

  “I can only repeat, ma’am, that you must go to my cousin for your answer.”

  “Your cousin? The great Duchess is your cousin? I thought you had been only a bedchamber woman to the late Queen. I shall never understand your English families.”

  “They are confusing, ma’am. They keep going up and down. We cannot boast the stability of the continent.”

  Fortunately, the royal circle now opened to welcome the King’s mistress, Lady Deloraine, and the old “favorite” of Queen Anne’s days was quickly forgotten. It was on my way out of the palace, escorted by the still solicitous Lord Hervey, that the colloquy took place that I have recorded. At the end of it, when I was in my chair and about to be borne away, I did a strange thing. It is the kind of thing that any lonely, forgotten old woman may do when confronted with a man who is young and beautiful and kind to her. I seized his hand and imprinted my lips on it.

  ***

  As I look about the world today, I begin to see what Lord Hervey meant. The group of persons who exercised political power in the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign have disappeared so completely from the London scene that it is almost as if they had never existed. And look at the ones who have not disappeared. Look at the people who in 1711 were supposed to have been swept out of power by the “Tory clique,” headed by Robert Harley and Henry St. John, and assisted by the wily Abigail Hill, that sly hussy who managed to turn herself into “Lady Masham.” Those who were ostensibly defeated seem now to have embedded themselves in the golden fabric of English glory, while the Tory clique has been relegated to obscurity or disgrace. Who today has heard of Abigail? What is St. John but a pardoned traitor? Or Harley but a drunken and now dead politician? Yet old Sarah, the widowed Duchess of Marlborough, is holding court at Blenheim Palace as splendidly as any queen. She has become the very symbol of our late victories abroad, and her deceased warrior-husband is our national hero and legend. The days of the Marlborough ascendancy in the reign of Queen Anne are deemed by many the finest pages in our history.

  I suppose I should have expected all this. My illustrious friend the great Dean Swift used to say that history is made by those who have a “strong style.” Nobody, he would argue, cares about “facts.” The great Queen Elizabeth was actually a puppet in the hands of William Cecil, but as she was composed of brilliant colors and he of dull grays, she usurps his rightful place in all the chronicles. Suetonius’s Livia, in like fashion, has blinded us to a hundred dreary senators and generals, and, nearer to our own day, Louis XIV has emitted gorgeous rays to distract the attention of posterity from the grubbing ministers behind his gilded throne.

  But it cannot be only that the more dramatic figures tend to obscure the drones; it must be more than that. History is a kind of rite; we read it in the faith that what went before will help us to visualize what may come after, and even to hope that what may come after will be for our betterment. We do not care to dwell unduly on the casualties and costs of wars; we prefer to emphasize what our Gallic cousins call “gloire.” We feel that gloire may be somehow the soul or pulse of the nation, and if that be the case, what cost can be too great?

  Robert Harley, later Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Henry St. John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, and Abigail Hill, later Baroness Masham, had very little to do with gloire. That may be why we have been so rapidly erased, or at least obscured, in the annals of this island’s history. And I am beginning to persuade myself that Lord Hervey is right; that that is all the more reason I should set down my recollections.

  Certainly, I have the time. My husband shoots all day and drinks all night. He is faithful enough to our modus vivendi; we rarely talk, but we also rarely quarrel. My son is busy with the farm across the way, he calls only on Sundays. I never entertain now, so the neighbors have ceased to invite us out. And then, too, when I was young, I used to dream that one day I should be a writer!

  Yet I have the feeling, the odd feeling deep down inside me, that my words will be so much spray, evaporating on the weatherbeaten but stubbornly enduring monuments of John and Sarah Churchill.

  2

  I was one of four children, two boys and two girls, and I was born in London in the year 1680. So much has happened to our island since that day, eight years before good William and Mary stripped Mary’s father, the proselytizing papist, James II, of his crown, and two decades before we were engaged, under her sister Anne, in an all-out war against the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, that it is difficult for young people now to realize that at my birth we were ruled by a charming and amiable concealed Catholic, Charles II, who, unlike his fanatical younger brother and heir, believed in living and letting live where religion was concerned and in buying peace abroad and affluence at home by the simple expedient of taking bribes from the Sun King. Happy days!

  My father, William Hill, was a successful merchant in the city, and my mother, born Jennings, was one of the many siblings of Sarah Churchill’s father. We grew up in a handsome brick house in Chelsea in an atmosphere of ease and letters—my parents had a literary bent that I pride myself on having inherited—but all came to a sudden end in the nineties, when my poor father, after a series of reverses, became a bankrupt. The humiliation of poverty proved too much for his proud soul; he pined away and died, and my mother, who seemed to live only in him, soon followed. Alice and I and Jack and Frank, none of us yet twenty, had to fend for ourselves as best we could. There were uncles and aunts enough but none willing to support so large a brood, except with advice. I was finally placed in the household of a Lady Rivers in Kent.

  The job was called a chambermaid’s, but a laundress was what in fact I was. It was a lonely, cold house, and I had no friends and no opportunity to make any. I missed my sister and brothers bitterly, and my only diversion was a rare trip to London to see them. Alice was also a laundress, but the boys had done better, as boys in our situation always do. Frank was a page in the household of the Prince of Denmark, and Jack was in the army.

  Queen Mary II had died, and her husband, the Prince of Orange, now William III, was reigning alone, as reluctantly legislated by Parliament when she had stipulated that she would accept the crown of her dethroned father, King James, only on the condition that her dour Dutch consort reign jointly with her. No one had thought he would survive her, but he had, and her sister had been deprived of her royal right for several years. Now, however, William’s health was failing, and everybody looked forward to the day when the Princess of Denmark (as the heiress apparent was styled) should become a thoroughly English Queen Anne.

  My parents had been of the Jacobite persuasion and used in private to toast poor old King James across the water, hounded from his throne, as my father put it, by his “pelican” daughters. But as Sarah Churchill, now Countess of Marlborough, was the intimate friend and supposed ruler of the allegedly passive Princess Anne, it seemed as if the Hills would have more to gain from the surviving pelican than from her exiled sire. Everyone expected the Marlboroughs to dominate the coming reign.

  But could we poor Hills expect anything from a cousin so exalted? I had learned not to mention my relationship to Sarah to other members of Lady Rivers’s household. On the one occasion that I had do
ne so, it had been greeted with peals of laughter as a very good joke. And indeed how could anyone be expected to believe that a laundress was cousin-german to the second most important woman in England? There were times when even I could hardly believe it myself; when I was convinced that all the pleasure in the world to which I could ever look forward would be to read books in my time off and see my brother Jack advance in the army. For Jack was the one of us who was handsome enough and brave enough to succeed on his own. Perhaps one day he would marry an heiress who would allow me to be her housekeeper. Anyway, I could dream.

  I shall never know what it was that put Sarah in mind of me, but when she was visiting in Penshurst Palace nearby, she drove over to call upon Lady Rivers. The old steward, who had always despised me as “too fine for my station,” came with gaping mouth to the laundry to tell me to change my skirt and report to the drawing room.

  “Milady Marlborough desires to speak with you, gal!”

  When I arrived in the indicated chamber, discreetly garbed in gray, Lady Rivers, with some embarrassment, retired to leave me alone with this magnificent cousin whom I had never seen.

  “I’ve come to take you away with me, Abigail Hill! I should have done so before, had I known to what a sad position you had fallen. You shall be a member of my household, and if you are as well read as your sister tells me, you shall have a chance to become governess to my daughters.”

  “Then you have seen my sister Alice, Cousin?” I exclaimed in happy astonishment.

  “She, too, is now a member of my household. Since last week. I have decided to do something about all the Hills!”

  My heart almost burst at the vision of being reunited with Alice and freed from menial labor. At that moment I would have gladly died for Sarah Marlborough.

  “Oh, madame! How can I ever thank you?”

  “By being a good girl and a good governess,” Sarah replied brusquely. She was evidently not one who cared for gushing. “And now I suggest you pack your things and come up to London with me. Lady Rivers has been so good as to agree to your leaving immediately.”