Exit Lady Masham Read online

  Let me describe Sarah as she appeared to me then. Her skin was the purest alabaster, her eyes a flashing blue. Her nose, very regular, intensified one’s sense of her force of character; her lips, sensuous and beautifully molded, were cherry red and the least bit petulant. Her hair was golden, and she held her head slightly to the side as she took you in—usually to find you wanting. Her voice was rich and warm, except when it rose to harshness or even stridency. She was, in brief, a magnificent creature, more like a goddess sent from Olympia on some Jovian mission than a mortal woman.

  She seemed to forget me almost as soon as she had picked me up, but then she was the busiest creature in the world. Holywell House at St. Albans, to which I was now transported, was a bustle of activity, and Sarah was always on the rush between it and St. James’s Palace, where she was reputed to run the Princess Anne’s household as despotically as she did her own. I was soon found qualified to give lessons in English history to the Ladies Mary and Anne Churchill, good-, looking girls but spoiled and of imperious temper. It was not an easy task, but I found in time that I could manage it, and the servants, well aware of my relationship to their awesome mistress, treated me with respect. But best of all, I had my darling sister Alice, who acted as an assistant housekeeper, and we were allowed to invite our brothers to the house whenever they could come. Truly, I thought I had all I could ever want in life.

  I did not come particularly to Sarah’s attention again until I sickened with the dreaded smallpox. Let me solemnly record here that she saved my life. When none would go near me, the great lady herself sat by my bedside and held a bowl of ass’s milk to my lips. I am told that on one occasion she even declined to leave me at the urgent summons of the Princess. Whatever else I may have to record in these pages of Sarah Churchill, let me set down here and now that she had the greatest courage and generosity. Had God given her less pride and stubbornness, she would have been as good a woman as she is a great one.

  She sometimes came to the classroom to be sure that I was giving proper instruction in our national history. Having, with her husband and the Prince and Princess of Denmark, been actively on the side of Dutch William in the Glorious Revolution, she was an ardent supporter of the church and crown. But unlike the Princess Anne, who favored the Tory party, Sarah was a violent Whig who believed that England’s great mission was to unite Europe against the aggrandizement of Louis XIV. She was probably looking forward already to the day when her husband, as commander-in-chief, would make Queen Anne as feared and respected in the Old and New Worlds as the Sun King himself had ever been.

  I still had Jacobite leanings and said a quiet prayer at night for poor old King James, but it never would have occurred to me to create an issue with my splendid mistress, and I was perfectly willing to argue the cause of the Whigs to the girls, who didn’t much listen to me anyway. I tried to preserve such small political integrity as I had by concentrating on the facts of constitutional history.

  But now I must come to the master of the house—or perhaps the master of every house but his own. There is no man of our times about whom there have been more varying opinions than John Churchill. His worst enemies have gone so far as to accuse him of treason, driven by an avarice so fierce as to make him betray his own soldiers for silver. His lesser enemies qualify this position. No, they say, Marlborough never actually betrayed his country; he simply took money from the enemy without giving return. He was perfectly willing, according to these, to let King Louis pay for Blenheim Palace if King Louis had nothing better to do with his coins. But his partisans, of whom, despite everything that has happened, I remain one, insist hotly that he never took a penny that was not his legal due, and that, however rich he waxed in office, he would have been richer yet had his emoluments matched his merit.

  All agree that he was a great soldier; to some, the greatest in our history. He never lost a battle, and he is reputed to have fought his engagements with supernal coolness and apparent ease. He would ride through Armageddon, unscathed and unsweating, in full control of the action, determined, impassive, even courteous! He seemed to have been born without fear and without temper; he moved his men in the battlefield like chess pieces at a game in his club.

  And yet he was not a cold man, as this latter description may imply. When I first knew him, he was not yet the famous warrior that he later became; he was still kept back only by the military jealousy of King William. He spent much of his time at home, bearing his enforced idleness with a quiet dignity and treating his children, whom he adored, with a kindness and familiarity rare in fathers of that day. If he had a reputation for being stingy with the household purse—and I cannot deny that he deserved it—he made up for it by the grave, unfailing courtesy with which he treated his servants, down to the lowest scullery maid.

  Everyone knows that he worshipped his wife. I cannot affirm it too strongly. He could not bear that she should suffer any pain, of mind or body. If she had even a mild headache, he would fret over her. It was strange to see this strong, silent man fussing about an obviously healthy spouse. It gave her a terrific power over him, for if he could not abide her discomfort, neither could he endure her wrath. The hero of Europe trembled before a shrew.

  But they certainly made a handsome couple. His strong, erect figure and splendid marble features, his large, serene, unblinking brown eyes were the perfect set-off for her greater animation, her sharp high notes and roving, flashing gaze. Neither would have had to look twice to find a willing partner in adultery, but everyone, friend and foe, agreed that neither ever did. Yet Sarah constantly taxed her poor faithful man with infidelity, and it is a matter of history that she sent him off on the Blenheim campaign so wretched at her accusations that it was a wonder he could even think of the enemy, let alone annihilate them. But what my reader may find hardest of all to credit is that she once made a scene over me!

  I used to see the then Earl of Marlborough almost daily at Holywell House. Like his wife, he sometimes came to watch his daughters at their lessons. But he never came when she was there. I suspect that he feared it might look as if he were interfering in a part of the household that was under her exclusive control. Milady was very strict in such matters. The daughters were her domain; the beloved young son and heir, Blandford, so soon, alas, to be lost to them, was his.

  One morning I began my lesson with Ladies Mary and Anne in this fashion: “Today we shall discuss the succession to the throne. If King William were to die, Lady Anne, who would be King of England?”

  “Nobody. The Princess Anne would be queen. Everyone knows that!”

  “Indeed? And her husband, the Prince of Denmark, what would he become?”

  “Nothing at all. He would continue to be nobody, just as he’s always been.”

  “I think we should try to be more respectful about members of the royal family. But very well. Prince George would be simply the consort of a queen regnant. But can you tell me this, Lady Anne? Why was King William king? Was not the late Queen Mary also a queen regnant? Why was he not in the same position as the Prince of Denmark?”

  Lady Anne now looked baffled. “I suppose because he made himself king. Is that right?”

  “Papa made him king!” Lady Mary exclaimed.

  “There was, it was true, a revolution, a glorious revolution,” I interjected hastily, to mute so dangerous a topic. “And King James, the father of Princesses Mary and Anne, abandoned his kingdom and fled with his son to France. So it became necessary for Parliament to change the succession. And Parliament provided that the Princess Mary and her husband should reign jointly.”

  But Lady Mary was not inclined to concede such power to mere legislators. “You forget, Mistress Hill, that King William himself, like his wife, was a grandchild of Charles I. His mother was a Stuart princess!”

  “Pardon me, Lady Mary, I do not forget that. It is perfectly true that he himself was next in line to the throne— after his wife and her sister. But it was Parliament that put him ahead of Anne. Otherwise,
would Anne not have become queen when her sister died?”

  “And a jolly good thing it would have been,” Lady Anne retorted. “At least she has the name for a queen.”

  “Anne, you’re such a silly!” her sister exclaimed. She turned on me sharply now. “I still think you’re wrong, Mistress Hill. I don’t care for King William, because he’s always been horrid to Papa, but it was Papa, and not Parliament, that made him king!”

  “Very well, Lady Mary. Let us examine your thesis. You maintain that King William is sovereign, independently of Parliament? Sovereign, that is, in his own right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then if he were to marry now…”

  “He’s too old!” Mary interrupted. “And too ugly!”

  “He’s not yet fifty,” I pointed out. “And as for his looks, I think it should not be difficult to find a willing bride for the King of England and Stadtholder of the United Provinces. So let me at least suppose His Majesty may marry and have a son. Who would succeed him?”

  “Why, the son, I suppose.”

  “But that’s just where I suggest you are wrong, Lady Mary. The Princess of Denmark would become queen, de jure, like her late sister.”

  Both girls at this condescended to show a mild surprise.

  “That would be funny, wouldn’t it?” Lady Anne surmised. “The King’s sister-in-law coming ahead of a Prince of Wales!”

  “And now do you see what I mean? Parliament has provided that Princess Anne shall take precedence over any issue of King William by a second marriage.”

  “I suppose that’s only fair,” Lady Mary commented. “Anne, after all, should have been queen since Mary died.”

  “Had Parliament not decided otherwise.”

  “I declare, Mistress Hill, you sound like a roundhead!”

  “But she’s right, girls, she’s quite right! You have a smart teacher.”

  I jumped up to greet Lord Marlborough, who had just entered the room. He walked slowly to where his daughters were sitting, smiling amicably, and ran his long fingers through Anne’s curls.

  “But, Papa, you must admit it’s all nonsense!” Lady Mary retorted. “Parliament jumping in to provide that people should rule who have no proper blood claim!”

  “Well, it happens I had something to do with that nonsense, Mary. It was the only way we could persuade the Princess of Orange to come over and take King James’s place. Oh, she was adamant! Her William had to rule with her and succeed her, and that was that!”

  “It seems to me it was a stiff price, Papa.”

  “We should all be bowing to the Bishop of Rome, my girl, if it hadn’t been paid!”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mary observed with a toss of her head. “But I do think it was a mistake to give all those horrid commoners the idea that they could fiddle with precedence. In the old days, if you had to get rid of a king you killed him. And kept on killing his heirs until you found the one you wanted!”

  Lord Marlborough burst out laughing. “Is that your definition of the divine right of kings, Mary? I never heard it put quite that way before!”

  Lady Mary jumped up to stamp an imperious foot. “Well, isn’t it better to settle these matters with your peers and not go begging to burghers?”

  “My, my, one would think that you issued from a long line of dukes and not a yesterday’s earl!”

  “Never mind, Papa. You will be a duke. And I don’t forget we owe your peerage to King James and not to Dutch William.”

  “Are you a Jacobite then, lass?”

  “Yes! And proud of it!”

  “After all, Papa,” exclaimed Lady Anne, with a sly wink at her sister, “isn’t King James our uncle?”

  “Your uncle, child? How is that?”

  “Well, isn’t he the father of Aunt Arabella’s children? And doesn’t that make him our uncle?”

  The girls always treated their father in this familiar fashion. They did not hesitate to fling in his teeth that his sister had borne four bastards to James II. They knew that their mother ruled him, and even though they also knew that she would vociferously take his side in any intergenerational dispute, they still believed that a man who could be bested by one woman could be bested by another.

  “I think that should conclude today’s lesson,” my lord exclaimed, and the girls hurried from the chamber, not because they had been dismissed, but because they were eager to leave class. Their father remained.

  “Let me ask you something in private, Mistress Hill,” he said now in a graver tone. “You have become a close observer of our household affairs. Would you be able to enlighten a worried husband as to the cause of his wife’s distemper? For three days now Lady Marlborough has maintained a total silence at meals.”

  I confess to my reader that this simple question created one of the high emotional moments of my life. That this great, good man, this brave, handsome man, this friend of monarchs, should be reduced to asking a plain, red-nosed governess to help him find the cause of his domestic misery filled my heart to bursting.

  “You are silent, Mistress Hill. Forgive me. I have embarrassed you.”

  “Oh, no, my lord! Not in the least. I think perhaps Lady Marlborough may be grieved that you seemed not to notice the anniversary of your first child’s demise.”

  “Ah,” he murmured softly. “So that is it. Poor little Henriette. Our first Henriette. What day, do you know, did the dear babe depart this world?”

  “The seventeenth, sir.”

  “The seventeenth, just so. Three days ago. Thank you, Mistress Hill.”

  “If I may offer a suggestion, sir, why do you not bring Lady Marlborough a trinket that would have been ready on the seventeenth—had some wretched shopkeeper not botched the job?”

  The grave eyes glittered. “Such as?”

  “Well, you might have one of the miniatures of the child reset. And bring it to her tomorrow.”

  “Or this afternoon!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Bless you, Mistress Hill!”

  And so began a curious relationship between my humble self and the great Earl. It became a silent pact between us that I should warn him of any reason I had to suspect that his spouse was displeased with him. Sometimes, of course, Sarah, who was not renowned for her diffidence, would announce in ringing tones to her husband—and to any of the household that happened to be within hearing—just what it was that had aroused her anger or suspicion. But at others she would retreat into sullen silence, and it was this that he dreaded most of all.

  Other women were the most usual cause of Lady Marlborough’s wrath. The Earl had only to be decently civil to a not ugly female, or simply to comment on her appearance, and his wife would flare. It was certainly no compliment to one of my sex to have been selected by Sarah to work in Holywell House!

  “But I don’t even remember which of the ladies at dinner was Mrs. Bartlett,” Lord Marlborough might protest to me.

  “You don’t recall the redhead, my lord?”

  “Oh, that one. My wife should be casting comedies at Drury Lane. She has an eye!”

  But my reader may not be so much interested in the scraps of conversation with which I attempted to keep the great man abreast of his wife’s suspicious imaginings as in what was going on in my poor mind and heart. What did I feel when I found myself alone with Lord Marlborough, discussing a matter of the deepest personal concern to him?

  I cannot say that I fell in love with him. I would not have dared to. Can one fall in love with a god? Of course, we read in mythologies that mortal women had such experiences and got turned into trees or cows because of the gods’ attentions. I should have been quite happy to be turned into any bit of flora or fauna for the privilege of being for a single day the welcomed tenant of Lord Marlborough’s heart, but I did not have the temerity to dream of such a thing. I knew that even as a young penniless officer he had been able to lure the Duchess of Cleveland, reigning beauty of her day, from the very bed of the “merry monarch” and sire upon he
r a babe that Charles II had reared as his own bastard. How could such a titan, even had he not given his whole heart to Sarah, cast a moment’s glance at the likes of me?

  Cousin Sarah’s imagination, however, at least in this respect, was more copious than my own. She could step into her husband’s shoes and fancy him sniffing after every female on the premises, including the poor governess. And then, in her own oddly democratic fashion, she would not scruple to use the same weapons against the governess that she would have used against another Duchess of Cleveland.

  Sarah appeared one morning at the doorway of her daughters’ classroom, erect and menacing, when her husband and I were having one of our talks.

  “Will you leave us, Lord Marlborough!” she called out harshly. “You have no business that I wot of in the children’s room!”

  At which the bravest man in Europe rose and fled. Had he not been John Churchill, I might have used the term “scuttled.” But always a tactician, he covered his retreat by leaving a morsel that the hungry predator could be counted on to devour before going after him.

  “Well, Mistress Hill, is this how you repay my kindness? Is this your thanks for being saved from the pox?”

  “I do not follow you, milady.”

  “What do you think you’re doing with my husband, hussy? Do you want to find yourself pregnant and back in the streets?”

  “Surely Your Ladyship doesn’t accuse Lord Marlborough of seeking to debauch his wife’s poor kin?”

  The passionate injury in my tone gave even her a moment’s pause, and she reappraised me now with a candid stare. “Well, you’re no beauty, that’s sure. But one can never tell what may strike a man’s wayward fancy. King James ran after all the plainest faces in court. It was a known thing. Oh, I don’t underestimate any female, Hill, when it comes to His Lordship! Tell me, then. What was he talking to you about?”