Exit Lady Masham Page 11

  “And Jonathan Swift as stage manager!”

  “Well, I hope I shall have some function. Even if only a small one. I shall prompt you.”

  I was suddenly exhausted, depleted, by all of this sparring. “I fear I am not up to it, my friend.”

  “But will you consider it?” The Queen had risen to depart, and we turned now to face her. I prepared to curtsy. “For her sake I” Swift whispered. “Don’t you want to help her to greatness?”

  I dipped into a deep curtsy as the Queen turned to the door. Her eye had caught mine; it directed me to go to her. “Very well, sir. I shall consider it.”

  I knew there was no point in my telling him the extent of the sacrifice that he was asking of me. He would simply have contrasted it to the conglomerate suffering in a single day on the bloody plains of Flanders or on a sinking frigate at sea. But I was still bitter. My fidelity was the single diamond in the simple headband of my life, and he was asking me to change it for one of paste.

  14

  Well, suppose I were to take it on? How should I begin?”

  I asked this question one night as I sat with Swift, Harley and St. John in my parlor at Kensington after supper. Masham was playing loo with a group in the next room; the sound of their laughter drifted in to us.

  “Oh, when we turn to action, we turn to St. John,” Swift replied promptly. “He has it all worked out.”

  “We start with the Duchess.” St. John’s long handsome features seemed to coalesce into a point in the sudden intensity of his planning. “Once we have toppled the Duchess, the Duke should be easy game. The moment she is dismissed, she will make such a clamor he will hear it, all the way from Flanders. Her letters, her messengers, her agents, will plague him night and day. And it will not only prove his annoyance; it will be his agony. For the man is hag-ridden! He adores his ranting spouse. Mark my words, he will desert his post and come galloping home to have it out with the Queen!”

  “Poor man!” I exclaimed. “Shouldn’t we remember his military responsibilities?”

  “Shouldn’t we remember the men who die daily, sacrificed to his ambition and greed?” Swift demanded sternly.

  “But what can I tell the Queen about the Duchess that she doesn’t already know?”

  St. John rubbed his hands. “Ah, we shall supply you with all of that, Mistress Masham. You shall have all the poisoned arrows you can use.”

  “They mustn’t be lies, you know.”

  “They shan’t be! You shall be the judge of everything you are to use. Is that not so, Swift? Milady Duchess is too great a target to be brought down with fibs. She is big enough—God bless her or damn her—to be fought with truth. Did I say arrows? Say cannonballs. Cannonballs of all the outrages she has perpetrated on England and the English people!”

  I think I would have given up there and then had Swift not looked at me with that peculiar combination of approval and mockery that was my soul’s undoing.

  “It isn’t, Abbie, as if we were seeking to reduce the Marlboroughs to any sort of disgrace or penury,” Harley now put in, in his milder tone. “Even if the Duke should lose his command, he would still have the fortune he has amassed in the war and Blenheim Palace to enjoy it in.”

  “And a loving wife to come home to,” St. John added sardonically. “At least he seems to consider her that. In his boots, I’d fly to the steppes of Russia!”

  “And don’t forget the glory!” Swift exclaimed. “He will retire as the greatest soldier in our history. Undefeated, as you are always pointing out, Abbie! How do you know we won’t be doing him a favor by preserving his record? Isn’t Lady Luck bound to turn on him? Doesn’t he owe the Furies at least one defeat?”

  “Ah, but you’re all wrong!” I cried, rising in anger. “If you want to do him in for the sake of peace, say so. But don’t try to tell me it’s for his own good!”

  “Mrs. Masham is right,” Swift interposed, holding up a hand. “There is no room here for smallness or spite. Nor is there any need to denigrate a mighty warrior or his spouse. Let us approach our task in the noble spirit of Brutus, by killing boldly, not wrathfully. Let us carve up Marlborough as ‘a dish fit for the gods’!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Swift,” I murmured.

  “And now to work,” he continued in a brisker tone. “We have word that the Duke, who is as great a master of the wrong moment in politics as he is of the right one in war, is sending the Queen his request that he be named Captain-General for life. It might be helpful if Mrs. Masham were to let Her Majesty know some of the names that our Tories in Parliament have been calling him.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Cromwell, for one,” Harley put in.

  “King John II!” St. John exclaimed with his shrill laugh.

  “Do you want Her Majesty to have a fit?”

  “But that’s just where we need you, Abbie,” Harley explained. “You will know how to administer the dose so that it is effective without being fatal.”

  “There is also the Duchess’s muttered threat to publish the Queen’s letters to her,” Swift pursued. “This should hardly be agreeable news to Her Majesty.”

  “But if you tell her that,” St. John objected, “she might find a way to stop the Duchess. Wouldn’t it be better to let the letters come out, and then the Queen would really have a fit!”

  “But that would be painful for Her Majesty,” I reproved him. “My first duty must always be to her, must it not?”

  There was a noticeable silence among the three men before Swift gave me an emphatic “Yes!”

  “I have another idea,” St. John pursued. “My spies tell me there’s a young Whig in the Commons, one Eggers, who proposes to make the passage of the Queen’s civil list contingent on the discharge of Mrs. Masham.”

  “You’re not serious!” I cried.

  “You don’t know how badly the Whigs have it in for you, Abigail,” St. John insisted. “You may think you don’t interfere in politics, but try to tell them that! They are convinced that you are sitting by the Queen’s chair night and day, pouring pacifist treason into her ear. Well, you may as well be hanged for a sheep, my friend!”

  “And this Mr. Eggers—he’ll really do this?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Some wiser heads in the party are shutting him up. But we have a spy in the Marlborough faction who thinks he can spur Eggers into defying them and making his motion.”

  “And why in the name of heaven should we want that?”

  “Because the motion’s bound to be defeated, and the Queen will hear of it and suspect the Duchess of trying to control her household!”

  “But that’s outrageous!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “It’s nothing but a cheap trick!”

  “But it’s true!” St. John insisted. “The Duchess wants Eggers to make the proposal. Only she hasn’t the means of getting at him as efficiently as we have. Is it wrong to help your enemy do what she’s trying to do?”

  Swift, seeing my expression, suggested that I had had enough and that they should leave. He lingered, however, for a few minutes after Harley and St. John had gone, to reassure me.

  “I know this is difficult for you, Abigail. I never thought it was going to be easy. But I pride myself on my judgment of people. I am sure that you will go through with anything you undertake.”

  He kissed my hand and departed, while I said nothing. Who knows what small weight may tip the balance of our scales in favor of a particular solution? My mind was a tumult of conflicting ideas when I looked up to see Masham standing in the other doorway. He had been watching Swift and me and was smiling sardonically. It was obvious that he had been drinking and losing at cards, a combination that always soured his now usually effervescent spirits.

  “I see there are compensations in not being wed to a beauty,” he exclaimed with a rude laugh. “It spares me the pain of suspecting Mr. Swift of lewd intentions!”

  15

  I had not realized how different it would sound for me to take the initiati
ve with the Queen until I was actually on the point of doing so. I then found myself immediately paralyzed. But the Queen, who noticed everything in her immediate surroundings, at once observed that my lips had opened and closed.

  “You have something to tell me, Masham?”

  I took a quick breath. “I have never presumed to speak to Your Majesty of the Duchess of Marlborough. That is, unless Your Majesty broached the subject.”

  “And you have something to say of her now?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Something that is consistent with your loyalty to her as a kinswoman?”

  Now what in God’s name had made the Queen say that? What in my tone could have so quickly betrayed a new impetus in my approach to the problem of Sarah? Surely royalty had to be gifted with keener senses than others.

  “Something that is certainly consistent with my loyalty to Your Majesty.”

  “Proceed.”

  “The Duchess is telling people that she plans to publish her correspondence with Your Majesty.”

  This was followed by a long pause. The Queen’s breathing may have been the least bit heavier.

  “No doubt she wishes to place me in an unfavorable light,” I continued. “She will no doubt try to establish how greatly she enjoyed Your Majesty’s confidence before I came to court.”

  “But will the correspondence not show that the Duchess was possessed of my confidence for several years after you were in my service?”

  “Very probably, ma’am.”

  “Then its sudden loss would not seem inevitably attributable to your influence.”

  I was baffled. Why was the Queen’s tone so antagonistic? Then it occurred to me that she may have been frightened.

  “I did not mean to imply, ma’am, that there is anything to apprehend from the publication of the letters. But it does not seem to me an act of friendship on the Duchess’s part.”

  “No, Masham. It does not seem so to me, either.”

  “Had I been so fortunate as to receive any letters from Your Majesty, I should have cut my hand off before giving them to a printer!”

  “Thank you, Masham. I know I can trust you.” I breathed in relief as the old warmth returned to the Queen’s tone. “The only reason you have no letters from me, my dear, is that I have the good fortune to have you always with me.”

  “Then I hope I may never have to receive an epistle from Your Majesty.”

  The Queen sat for several minutes now in silent thought. I presumed she was endeavoring to recall the different topics of her long correspondence with the Duchess.

  “You don’t suppose, Masham…?”

  “What, ma’am?”

  “You don’t suppose…? No, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t dare!”

  “If there’s something the Duchess wouldn’t dare, ma’am, I’d be interested to hear of it.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t dare put the foul construction on my friendship with her that … that…”

  “That she had the effrontery to place on Your Majesty’s kindness and condescension toward my poor self?” As I found my lines in this new role, I felt something like exhilaration. Swift had been right! I could do it. “But it is precisely what she will do! That is why I have nerved myself to bring this horrid matter to Your Majesty’s attention.”

  The Queen’s distress was now pitiable. She clenched her fists and raised them slowly up and down. “But surely she would recognize that any such construction must shame her as well? And she has her husband to consider. A husband whom she loves and reveres.”

  “And a husband who is under her utter domination. A husband who would not venture to reproach her, even in the bottom of his heart, if she were to burn down his beloved palace at Blenheim!”

  “That is true, quite true.” The Queen nodded, frowning. “But, even leaving the Duke aside, would the Duchess not be too proud to allow other persons—particularly other ladies—let us say other duchesses —draw from her letters the construction that she draws? For, after all, such an odious relationship would of necessity—would it not—involve two persons?”

  “The Duchess would not have to suggest the existence of a relationship, ma’am. She would merely have to suggest the offer of one. She, after all, will select which letters are to be printed, and what parts of which letters.”

  “Meaning that she can juxtapose the coolest expressions in hers with the warmest in mine?”

  “Your Majesty puts it exactly.”

  The Queen’s voice rose to a wail. “Oh, Masham, what can I do? Is there no remedy?”

  “Of course there is. I should not have agitated Your Majesty with this news had I not had one.”

  “But what can it be? I can hardly put her in the Tower!”

  “That would indeed be drastic. No, I have a simpler plan. Dismiss the Duchess at once from her posts at court! That will necessitate her accounting for all her acts and transactions as keeper of your purse. It will then be in order for Your Majesty to impound all papers and correspondence that the Duchess has received from Your Majesty in the period of her office.”

  The Queen stared. “That would be proper?”

  “I suggest it would even be routine.”

  “I see. Yes, I do see. Well, well.” The Queen drummed with her fingers on the arm of her chair. “But to dismiss her from her posts! What an uproar there will be. And the Duke! What will he do?”

  “I suggest that even the Duke will have to recognize that his sovereign has the right to regulate her own household.”

  “I suppose he will. But even so. Should I not be concerned, in demanding an accounting, that I may be aspersing the honor of his wife?”

  “Not at all, ma’am. A fiduciary is expected to account.”

  “Privately, perhaps. But not with impounding of papers!”

  “The Duchess has been entrusted with large funds of the crown. She should welcome a public acquittance.”

  “Perhaps she should. But seizing her letters!”

  “Your letters, ma’am.”

  “Aye, but letters I gave her, Masham! When I loved her. When she was my dearest friend!”

  Was it sudden jealousy that made me say what I now said? “Your Majesty should not forget that while the Duchess has been drawing thousands of pounds from the royal purse, she has been dispensing a fortune on the construction of Blenheim.”

  A severe silence followed; the ends of my mistress’s lips drooped. “The Duchess of Marlborough has many faults, Masham. But nobody, to my knowledge, has ever accused her of peculation.”

  I pause here, for the Queen’s very just reproof marked the beginning of a change in our relations. I had not intended to imply anything more than that the Duchess, in her highhanded and imperious way, might have on occasion, without felonious intent, jumbled some royal coins with her own. But that is not the point. The point is that I had for the first time moved from the defensive to the offensive in my battle with Sarah, and that the Queen had now taken this in. Hitherto I had been the docile and consoling chambermaid, elevated in private to the position of adopted “niece,” a kind of kitten to whom the mistress may say anything, but from whom not much is expected beyond a purr. Such kittens may be loved, perhaps even more than cats are. But when they grow up, they must expect to be treated as cats.

  At that moment I longed to return to my old position in the Queen’s affections. I knew that I was giving up a unique relation, one where mistress and kitten loved each other, intensely and uncritically. No one else, I am convinced, had ever held that relation with Anne Stuart. I may even have given her a support sorely needed in her heavy duties. But there was now not only my sense of Swift’s expectant eyes on me when we next should meet; there was the question whether it were not already too late to retract. Could I go back?

  For not only was the Queen’s attitude toward me changing; mine toward her was. She was already ceasing to be the kindly, sentimental, homely, confiding “aunt”; she was becoming the shrewd, suspicious, stubborn monarch, who
was only too well aware that her precarious rule depended on balancing one faction against another. Oh, yes, she might care for me still, need me still, particularly as she detested new faces in her immediate circle, but her caring and needing would be more like what she had felt for my cousin. Or was even that presumptuous of me? Perhaps it was! Had there not been a line drawn between myself and the great Duchess in the Queen’s reproof to me about the need for an accounting? Was it not possibly the origin of the distinction since made so implicitly in the public mind between the favorites of the first and second halves of the reign: the bossy but splendid figure of Sarah, drawn, so to speak, against a tapestried background of cannonfire and charging cavalry, and the drooping little shape of Abigail, slipping into the royal presence to take the chamber pot and lurking to purloin the royal favor? The Queen herself may have dimly subscribed to the theory that an era of pygmies had been substituted for one of giants.

  These impressions, misty at the time, began their process of clarification almost immediately after the conversation above described, when the Duchess of Somerset entered the chamber with two of Her Majesty’s ladies-in-waiting and formed a seated circle for the royal tea.

  The Duchess leaned forward excitedly, as one burdened with a great piece of news. “I was so thrilled to hear that Your Majesty is going to make the Duke of Marlborough Captain-General for life!”

  The Queen was at once her inscrutable self. “Where did you hear that, Duchess?”

  “I hear it everywhere!” The Duchess clasped her hands, as if in ecstasy. “I think it so marvelously underscores the greatest relationship of our time. The general of glorious victories and the royal mistress who had the wisdom to bestow her confidence upon him. Not only for today, but for any number of tomorrows! What parallel is there for it? Elizabeth and Essex, perhaps?”

  We all smiled, including the Queen, who remarked: “I hope the Duke may be spared that fate, Duchess.”