Exit Lady Masham Read online

  “How extraordinary! But leave me out of it. The Queen doesn’t want to talk politics with me.”

  “We can’t afford to leave you out of it, Abbie.”

  “I’m sorry, Henry. You’ll have to find someone else.”

  “Don’t you care about the peace? Don’t you care about men getting killed for nothing?”

  I looked at him, half in curiosity. I had always assumed that this brilliant disciple of Harley’s was out for himself and for himself alone. But no doubt it was possible for a statesman to care for himself as well as for humanity. St. John may have looked forward to a benign Europe with himself as the prince of peace.

  “I care about staying in the slot where I belong,” I insisted “I care about doing the job God gave me to do.”

  “And how can you be sure what that is?” He paused, for Masham had reappeared in the doorway. “Well, do this for me, will you? Listen to Jonathan Swift. You like him, don’t you?”

  “Everyone likes him. Except the Queen.”

  “Exactly. He can’t talk to her. But he can talk to you.”

  “He can talk to me, certainly.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  He turned to go as Masham called out jovially: “If I car help Master Swift, inform me! She’s a stubborn baggage, but I know how to move her!”

  13

  Jonathan Swift had appeared at court early in 1710, as a protégé of Harley, and had begun a career for which I can find no parallel in any history book. He was Irish-born, a bachelor of middle years, a lazy man, but of prodigious energy and a one-time secretary of the late Sir William Temple, who had long represented our government in Holland. Following Sir William’s death he had returned to Dublin and had now been sent over by the Church of Ireland to petition the crown for the grant of certain tithes. I do not even know whether or not he was ultimately successful in his embassy, for this mission seemed to be engulfed in the larger one of his becoming, for three years, the close advisor and spokesman to the press of the Tory leaders.

  How did he manage it? Even now it is difficult to say. He had neither money nor birth, nor any great connections, at least until he had conquered the total admiration of two men as different as Harley and St. John. He was neither soft of speech nor gently persuasive; indeed, he could be harsh and dogmatic, and he was plainly outspoken in an age of the crudest flattery. He was always voicing opinions that were near heresy, in both ecclesiastical and political matters, and although women exercised great influence over our statesmen, he was never credited with—or accused of—a love affair at court. No, so far as I could make it out, Swift conquered the Tories by his intellect alone, by the massive reach of his imagination and by the inexorable logic with which he deduced the conclusions from the phenomena that this imagination encompassed. Men agreed with Swift because they had to agree with him, or seem fools, not only to others but to themselves. Only the Queen held out. She had discovered, unfortunately, that he was the author of A Tale of a Tub and could never forgive his sarcasms at the expense of the church.

  When, years later, he published his famous Gulliver’s Travels, which all the world has read, I thought back on him as having come to Windsor somehow as his hero came to Lilliput, except that he towered over us, not by the giant size of his body, but of his brain. He viewed us all with an easy and sometimes amiable familiarity, impressed by nobody and by nothing. I was enormously flattered that, from the very beginning of our acquaintance, made at Harley’s evening gatherings, he seemed to find my intelligence large enough to embrace his judgments.

  Although his physique was not commanding—he was rather short than tall—Swift’s countenance inspired respect. His eyes were sky blue, with a flash of sapphire, and he had a disconcerting way of fixing them on you in a prolonged stare, almost a glare. He had thick dark eyebrows, a large, finely chiseled aquiline nose and a firm, oval chin with a dimple. Although, as I have said, he was not given to gallantry at court (I did not know at the time of his lifelong enigmatic relationship with a certain lady in Dublin), his attentions to a woman were highly flattering, for he seemed just the type of man that would be apt to despise the intellect of our sex.

  Swift had made a point of becoming friendly both with Masham and myself. I sometimes observed him and my husband laughing heartily together in a corner or window embrasure, away from the rest of the company, and I suspected that they had a common taste for ribaldry. But Swift, unlike Masham, never showed any disposition to try such stories on me. He was inclined, on the contrary, to be almost too serious. He would come to our apartments of an evening, and if we were playing cards, he would stalk about the chamber until a table had broken up and was ready to talk. He would never pick up a hand himself.

  One evening, when he had withdrawn with me to a divan, he quizzed me about my fondness for cards.

  “I was watching you tonight, Mrs. Masham. You appeared to be giving the game your total attention. Your body was erect and still. There was no movement whatever except when you pulled a card and placed it on the table with a click. Is the game so difficult?”

  “One must remember the cards. After the first three tricks, it should be possible to calculate what each of the other players holds.”

  “And is this a source of keen pleasure to you?”

  “It is a source of pleasure, Mr. Swift. My life has not been so filled with pleasures that I can ignore cards. Besides, whist is like life. You cannot expect to win with a poor hand, but with skill you may reduce defeat to a minimum.”

  “In chess there is no element of chance. I should think a person of your intellect would prefer it.”

  “Perhaps I should, were I a man. But as a woman, with so many disadvantages, I prefer the cards. They reflect the struggle as I see it around me: so much for luck, so much for skill. The high trumps may come to the undeserving, but there is always the chance that they may misuse them. And then, too, the contest proceeds so smoothly, so intellectually!” I clasped my hands in sudden recognition of how much I really did care for the game. “There is no blood, no squalor. It is a world of form. Or ideals, if you wish.”

  “No, I don’t wish,” Swift retorted with a rumbling chuckle. “I don’t wish it at all! I see the game you’re really playing. May I be so bold as to instruct you what it is?”

  “By all means. I welcome candor.”

  “Then you shall have it! My friend Harley has told me something of your life before you came to court.”

  “I was a laundress, Mr. Swift.”

  “But no ordinary one. A laundress with some great connections.”

  “Those, you might put it, were my trumps.”

  “Precisely! You were dealt a poor hand, but you had a couple of high cards. And you played them with consummate skill.”

  “On the contrary, I had great good luck.”

  “You mean because the Duchess trumped her own ace? Perhaps, but you see it as whist, anyway. That’s just my point. Be it luck or skill, you won your rubber.”

  “The game is hardly over yet.”

  “When you say that, do you imply that you may still lose? But you may also bid a slam! Aren’t you settling for too little?”

  “To what do you assume that I might aspire, Mr. Swift? Should I ask the Queen to replace the Duke of Marlborough with Captain Masham and build me a palace the size of Blenheim?”

  “It would be an excellent start!” he exclaimed, slapping his knee. “Then we could call a halt to this crazy war!”

  “We can dream, I suppose.”

  “Must it be just a dream, Mrs. Masham? Oh, I know what Harley says about your determination not to mix in politics. But I’m not suggesting that you appoint generals or build palaces. I’m simply suggesting that, as a person of known integrity and respected judgment, you might occasionally let your opinion be known on board this ship of fools!”

  Of course, I knew that Swift was cultivating my friendship as a means of access to my mistress, but I found his company irresistible. He even shared the ent
husiasm that I had inherited from my father for Mr. Shakespeare, and we had many discussions of the poet’s characters.

  One day we talked of Shakespeare’s kings and queens.

  “Do you find them real? You have had more occasion to view royalty from close quarters than a poor playwright ever could have.”

  “No,” I replied, after giving this a moment’s thought. “To put kings and queens on the stage as they are, you would have to show the etiquette, the ceremonial. It would be tedious. Shakespeare was quite correct to move his royalties rapidly across the boards. One forgives the error for the action. And then, too, his kings and queens speechify much more than monarchs do in life. Certainly Queen Anne and the late King William tended to silence. Who wants silent actors on stage?”

  “But do you find that the personalities of Shakespeare’s sovereigns correspond to what you have observed?”

  “There’s no queen in Shakespeare quite like ours, if that’s what you mean, Mr. Swift.”

  “What of royal counsellors, then?”

  I smiled. “There is no counsellor in Shakespeare quite like Mr. Harley, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Or in any play in any language!” he exclaimed with his rumbling laugh. “But are there no characters in our court like the Earl of Kent in King Lear, or Paulina in The Winter’s Tale? Counsellors who have the courage to speak up to their sovereign when he is wrong? Who can cry: ‘Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad!’”

  I reacted cautiously. “Surely, sir, you are not suggesting …”

  “That good Queen Anne is mad? No, God bless her, such treason could never fall from my lips. But does she have any around her who would dare speak up if she were? Are there any plain men in court? Or women?”

  “Remember what the Duke of Cornwall said about Kent’s plainness.” I paused, trying to recall the lines. Swift, of course, at once supplied them for me with his customary exuberance:

  “‘These kinds of knaves I know, which in their plainness

  Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends

  Than twenty silly-ducking observants

  That stretch their duties nicely.’

  “But distinquo,” he continued. “Cornwall is a tyrant who sees plainness as the mask of a man’s resistance to his tyranny. He knows that had Lear listened to Kent, Lear would still be king.”

  “And you suggest that the Queen may need a Kent?”

  “I suggest that every crown needs a Kent.”

  “Let us pray, then, that Her Majesty may never be in such dire straits as her mythical predecessor,” I said firmly, disliking the subject. “Shall we talk of other characters in Mr. Shakespeare? What about Irishmen?”

  “There are none. Except in Henry V, and that’s a libel.”

  He talked to me, as we became better friends, more and more about the war. I was interested in it, of course, and I sympathized, as what sentient woman would not, with the desirability of an early peace, but I preferred to hear him on literature or history or even on personalities at court, about whom he could be devastating. So he offered at last a kind of conversational exchange. He would descant, fascinatingly, on my adored Congreve, emphasizing the playwright’s utter immorality, pointing out that Mirabell, in The Way of the World, my favorite of the heroes, marries off his pregnant mistress to an unwitting friend, and then Swift would insist on my attending his argument that we were really fighting in Flanders for Dutch interests and that the war party was the dupe of the ancient policy of William III, who had always placed the Stadtholder ahead of the English monarch. Or if he delighted me with an account of how Wycherly managed to debase a theme of Molière, I had to pay for it by acknowledging the absurdity of the British fear of French domination in Spain, when our own candidate for the throne in Madrid was an Austrian archduke who was striving to unite Iberia with all the Germanies and restore the empire of Charles V!

  “Is that what you’re killing English youths for?” he would demand, hitting his fist against a table. And finally he would direct his attention, hypnotizing me with that stare that seemed to address me sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a senate, sometimes as an unruly mob, to the individuals who were profiting from the war. For there had to be such, he insisted. Somebody had to be gaining from it. And it was surely not the foot soldiers who died or were maimed, or the taxpayers who were gouged, or the poor who never cared for anything but sex and gin. Who could it be but those who were paid in the wages of money or glory? Or both? And who had greater such wages than the Marlboroughs?

  “You say the Duke has never been beaten, Mrs. Masham. It is true. And if we had a proper war, he’d be worth a kingdom to us. But what are victories in a fight that’s already been won? Must we go on until he has laid Europe in waste, and Blenheim is the greatest palace on the globe?”

  What could I say? I hated it when people attacked my former patrons. I had suffered too much from the Duchess to be able to join in any criticism of her conduct without appearing vengeful, and my admiration of the Duke was a private part of myself that I wanted to keep away from the world. I had made him, in my Holywell days, into a kind of household god, and he belonged on a mantel in my heart that I had no wish to expose to the sweeping hand of this would-be house cleaner. For would not the vision of those shattered fragments on the floor confirm what was already beginning to be a dim suspicion that my noble idol might be made of clay?

  Obviously, I was being groomed for a mission. I began to feel like a schoolchild on a spring day. Out of doors, shimmering through the open windows of my classroom, was the verdant, inviting countryside of my new life. I yearned to be allowed to fling my lesson books into my desk, slam down its top and run out to the fields to play. But only if my teacher would release me of his own accord. I was held, rooted, by that presence.

  The reader by now may be curious as to the exact nature of my feelings for Jonathan Swift. Certainly he was never in the least amorously inclined toward me. He used to say that I reminded him of a landlady of his in Ireland, one Mrs. Malolly, and although he was never specific on the nature of Mrs. Malolly’s looks, I pictured her as a red-nosed laundress. And I? What did I feel about him? Well, can a woman be in love with a mind? I never had the carnal desires for Swift that I initially had for Masham. Yet I would have followed him across the African desert. I wanted … how can I put it? I wanted somehow to be a part of him. I wanted to obliterate Abigail Masham and be all Swift. I was like an Eastern mystic whose idea of Nirvana is to blend with the godhead. Swift made the life around me, even the splendors of Windsor, seem unreal, quaint.

  Perhaps I may give the reader some inkling of what I mean if I relate the conversation that enlisted me at last in his great project. We were standing in a window embrasure during one of the Queen’s levees at Greenwich, watching the red-sailed barges on the river.

  “You have surmised that there’s something I want of you, Abigail.”

  It was the first time he had called me that. It was like him not to ask my leave.

  “I have been dreading it, Jonathan.”

  “One dreads an invitation to live. The semi-death of our fellow men seems vastly preferable. But a few, a very few, pick up the challenge. I dare to hope that you will be one of them.”

  “And what has given you that hope?”

  “An affinity between us. I believe you have felt it.”

  “Something of the sort, perhaps.”

  “We are observers, you and I. We stand apart and watch the others play their parts. Somersets and Marlboroughs, even Queen Anne herself, God bless her sullen soul. Look at her now, the poor dear mistress of our destinies!” I followed his eyes to where the Queen was sitting, bored and disconsolate, the end of her folded fan resting against her lips, listening to a Scottish divine who seemed to be offering her a private sermon. “Oh, yes, we see them, you and I! And we see them without envy, too. That is where we differ from the rest. We might be visitors from another planet. But we are in danger of the sin of pride. The pride that takes refuge i
n a passive superciliousness. It could damn us.”

  “It seems to me that you are active enough. Your words are everywhere. We hear you. We read you.”

  “My words reach everywhere but where they are most needed.”

  “You mean the Queen. Well, she did read you, in your tale of the tub, and she won’t do so again. That was your fault.”

  “That is why I can reach her only through you.”

  I sighed, but I knew it was no use. “What must I do for you, Mr. Swift?”

  “I have but a small favor to ask of you, Mrs. Masham. Simply that you put an end to a great war.”

  He smiled, but the fixed stare in which he embraced me was not amused.

  “Is that all? And how must I do it?”

  At once now he exploded into his theme. “It will be through the Queen, of course. The Queen is the key to the salvation of Europe. I have studied every official act of her reign. She has used her power rarely, but whenever she has done so, it has been decisive. With the patronage of the Treasury she could have a Tory House of Commons. With the creation of a handful of new peers she could have a Tory House of Lords. Then she need fear no repercussions when she dismisses Marlborough and negotiates a peace directly with King Louis!”

  “Assuming that is what she wants to do.”

  “But she does want to. She abominates the war! You know that. What must be overcome is her inertia. Oh, Abigail, I have studied you, as I have studied the Queen. The puzzle is solved if you are only willing. And you will have played a glorious role in history!”

  “You mean a kind of inside-out Joan of Arc? With you as St. Michael to bid me tell the armies to throw down their arms? It doesn’t sound like such a glorious role. And, anyway, I don’t think I care for glorious roles.”

  “Do you think I’m such a fool as to tempt you with worldly fame? Do you imagine I don’t know you better? I only want you to go on with your own private game. Your own little drama, played out in the theater of Abigail Hill, with Abigail Hill as author, actress and audience!”