Exit Lady Masham Read online

  I decided that the truth was my only hope. I told my stony-faced, intently listening cousin the whole little story of her husband’s concern and of my reassurances. As each episode that I related was recognizably accurate and as the only inference to be drawn was one highly flattering to herself, she was in the end somewhat mollified. But she was very definite in her resolve that these colloquies should be discontinued.

  “I shall tell Lord Marlborough that he is to have no further private parlance with you. Look to it, girl! If I catch you again, out you go! For now, it’s very well. I accept your story.” She paused as she looked about at the scattered books and papers. “What a mess here! Clear it up, child. Clear it up!”

  3

  My little talks with the Earl of Marlborough were forgiven (if there was anything to forgive) but certainly not forgotten by his watchful spouse. Sarah decided that I had better be removed from temptation’s way, but as she was always scrupulously fair (by her own exceedingly prejudiced lights), and as she recognized that I had been guilty of no breach of duty to her, she was determined that I should not suffer in salary or position by my change. She decided to place me in the household of the Princess of Denmark, and thus it was that I became a bedchamberwoman to the future Queen of England.

  I had no personal acquaintance with the Princess until some time after her succession, which took place only a year after my employment. Her household, of course, was a very large one, and my position in it was lowly. In a less exalted milieu I should have been considered a chambermaid, but royalty sheds dignity over the most menial tasks. At Versailles, I have been told, a duke is not ashamed to bring a prince his chamber pot. Princess Anne was dressed, and her face and hands washed, by ladies of title. I saw her frequently, for I had regular duties to her wardrobe, but I never approached her person. She struck me as a solid, stolid, rather sullen-looking woman of middle age, very intent on the minutiae of her hourly existence, who never seemed to look beyond her immediate presence at the great world about her. Yet she had beautiful sad eyes that seemed to view her servants and courtiers with a faint apprehension, perhaps even a faint distrust.

  It was enough for me to know that this woman had lost seventeen babies for my heart to forgive her any distaste that she may have manifested for the obsequious humanity that pressed so closely about her. Her husband, Prince George, would have been almost an attractive man had he been more lively and less stout. Unlike his wife, he was cordial to all, but one received the impression that he did not distinguish between the people at whom he grinned. He looked very much what he was reputed to be: a prince of small mind and kind heart who sought only to keep out of the way. His sole function had been to supply an heir to the throne, and he had been made painfully aware that he had failed, though presumably through no fault of his own.

  The Princess and her late sister, Queen Mary, had quarreled bitterly over the former’s stubborn refusal to dismiss Lady Marlborough, whom Queen Mary had hated, and this quarrel had led to a great reduction in the honors and perquisites of the Denmarks, and even to the withdrawal of their guards, but after Mary’s death it had not been feasible for King William, sickly himself, to treat the heir apparent so contemptibly, and there had been some revival of their splendor. When the great day came, and Princess Anne found herself sovereign at last, there was no attempt by her household to disguise their rejoicing. In the course of the next year I found that I became as familiar with the palaces of Kensington, Windsor, Greenwich and Hampton Court as I had been with Holywell House or St. James’s. But that has been the story of my life: either hovels or castles—with very little in between.

  The court of the new Queen was a curious combination of magnificence and simplicity, of awesome regality and an almost middle-class plainness. On the one hand, Queen Anne was very particular about her prerogatives; she revived many ancient ceremonials, and seemed to relish the bowing and scraping and walking backward that Dutch William had affected to despise. She even restored the long-abandoned custom of touching those afflicted with the King’s Evil, or scrofula, which disease was purported to vanish at the royal touch. But on the other hand, she could never quite overcome her native shyness, and she loved to hole up in the smallest and stuffiest suites that her vast palaces offered. Anyone having an audience in one of these and finding the Queen in a plain bedchamber robe, swathing her gouty hands in dirty bandages, would find it difficult to believe that he was in the presence of the poet Pope’s “Great Anna, whom three realms obey.” Yet, as soon as she spoke, her majesty of manner and sweet low voice helped to remove the initial impression. She was never a person to be taken for granted, as a number of statesmen learned to their sorrow.

  Her coronation was the apotheosis of the Marlboroughs, now named Duke and Duchess. They seemed to carry all before them. John was appointed Captain-General of the allied armies in Flanders, in charge of the great coalition against Louis XIV, who had had the hubris to place his grandson on the throne of Spain as Philip V, and Sarah was named Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stole, in undisputed command of the royal household. As the first victories of the War of the Spanish Succession began to roll in upon us, it was commonly said that Sarah, who ruled both the Queen and the man who was defeating the armies of Europe’s greatest King, had more power than any ruler in history. Indeed, I wondered if I had not left the greater service when I joined that of the Denmarks.

  But I was content. I liked the anonymity of palaces. All I had needed was a job that I could handle and a quiet post from which to observe the passing scene. I asked no more. It was a relief to be away from the all-seeing gaze of Sarah, for, oddly enough, she spent little time at court. She seemed able to discharge her duties just as well from her own domiciles, and life in the royal palaces, except when there was a great court function, bored her. She made no pretense of her dislike of the Queen’s warm chambers and was forever pushing open windows and fanning herself. She seemed to be growing increasingly impatient with her mistress’s slowness and methodical nature. Seldom can two such close friends have been temperamentally so unlike. And certainly seldom has a royal favorite taken so little trouble to curry royal favor.

  My first conversation with the Queen occurred when, in the illness of her trusted maid, Mrs. Danvers, I was delegated to bring her fresh bandages. It was on a long summer afternoon at Windsor, when she was having severe twinges of gout. As I was turning away, after spreading the bandages on the table by the armchair where majesty was sitting, I stiffened in surprise to hear the soft low voice address me by name.

  “Hill, will you stay, please.”

  “What may I do for Your Majesty?”

  “When you were engaged to serve in my household, do I not recall that the Duchess described you as her kinswoman?”

  “Your Majesty’s memory is correct.”

  “I like to think I know what goes on in court. Tell me, how are you related to the Duchess?”

  “I have the honor to call her cousin, ma’am.”

  “But how close a cousin?”

  “My mother was her father’s sister.”

  “You mean your mother was a Miss Jennings?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But then you and the Duchess are cousins-german! I had no idea it was so close a kinship.”

  “The Duchess does me great honor to recognize it at all, ma’am. My family were but poor folk.”

  “Well, I’m sure the Duchess is very kind. But cousins-german! Well, well, that does surprise me.”

  That was all that was said, but thereafter the Queen took more notice of me, addressing me by name and summoning me to her chair to bid me fetch this or that. Even the smallest notice of a menial arouses instant jealousy in a royal household, and I should have preferred my former obscurity had it not been for the encouragement of Mrs. Danvers, who adored the Queen with a selflessness rarely found in palaces.

  “Never mind the others, Hill,” she told me brusquely. “If Her Majesty likes your company, stick to Her Majes
ty.”

  The next step that I made in royal favor was when the Queen, who now professed a liking for my voice, asked me to read to her. When this proved satisfactory, I started to spend at least two hours a day with her. I read ministers’ reports, ambassadors’ letters, salutations from other sovereigns, novels and even plays. Sometimes the Queen would be so silent that I feared she had gone to sleep. Sometimes she had.

  But my mistress and I did not enter into what I may be so bold as to designate a “relationship” until the day I made the suggestion that I might ease the pain in her hands. I had been reading from one of Sir John Vanbrugh’s comedies when a little moan from the Queen indicated that I might as well stop. What I next uttered was probably the most important speech of my life. Yet I promise my reader that I had no purpose in mind but to assuage the sufferings of a woman who had been kind to me.

  “May I respectfully offer a suggestion to Your Majesty? That might ease the pain?”

  “By all means, my dear. Anything you could do in that line would be deeply appreciated.”

  “My father suffered as Your Majesty does. I discovered that if I had two basins, one with near-boiling water, and one with cold, and plunged his hand first in one and then the other, and then massaged it hard, he experienced some relief.”

  The Queen at once gave instructions for the fetching of these necessary things, and the treatment commenced. There was no talk now of majesty being touchable only by the fingers of peeresses; the poor suffering lady was only too anxious for my experiment. Happily it worked, and with the relief that I brought the Queen came further intimacy. Soon I was admitted to the bedchamber and allowed to rub the royal neck and back. My fingers were evidently as soothing as my voice, for I now became a kind of nurse as well as reader.

  As soon as the royal entourage saw that I had established myself, all outward signs of jealousy ceased. I had now become a person to be reckoned with, to be cultivated rather than undercut. But the court must have been surprised at how little I changed. No honors were thrust upon me. The Queen accepted my ministrations placidly, with kind words and grateful smiles. But our conversations remained totally matter-of-fact. Any other woman with a good reading voice and a manipulative hand could have taken my place.

  The reader may find it difficult to credit that it was the Duchess herself who paved the way for my further favor. She summoned me to her apartments at Windsor one morning and received me with her pleasantest smile, which, I may say, was a very pleasant one.

  “I am delighted to hear, Cousin Abigail, of your success with the Queen! I have just been talking with Her Majesty, and I told her that I had depended on her unerring judgment of people to lead her in time to a recognition of your merits. I had been afraid, had I pushed you forward, that she would think I was doing a favor for a kinswoman. But now that she has found you, I can claim the credit of having put you in her way. You are just the person, my dear, to suit the Queen. You have cultivation, discretion and patience.”

  I listened, astonished. Was Sarah sincere? There could be no doubt of it. She was incapable of even a minor deceit. If she wanted to hide something, silence was the only way she could accomplish it, as her husband had learned to his pain. The explanation, as I soon made out, of her willingness to share with me any portion of her favor with the Queen was twofold. In the first place, it never occurred to her that she was sharing it. She conceived of my functions as so lowly and nurselike that I could never aspire to the high, free intellectual and spiritual friendship that existed between “Mrs. Morley” and “Mrs. Freeman.” Was it even imaginable that a humble, plain bedchamberwoman could be a rival to the wife of the Captain-General? And secondly, she needed me. The Duchess of Marlborough needed Abigail Hill? How could that be?

  Well, this was how it could be. The Duchess was bored with the Queen. She wanted to enjoy her great position and wield her power in the company of peers and statesmen and generals. She liked the busy world of London, where she could confer with the Whig leaders and preside at parties where the wit and fashion of the day convened. And, to do her justice, she missed her family, too; she wanted to spend more time with her handsome, bright children. Life in the small, stuffy chambers where the Queen liked to sit all day, playing cards or reminiscing about the past or giving instructions to gardeners, was anathema to her. There had even been times when I had wondered if frustration at court had not engendered an actual dislike in the Duchess for her mistress. I had once seen her take up a pair of the Queen’s gloves that she thought were her own and then fling them down, muttering with a shudder: “Ugh! I almost put that woman’s gloves on!” Of course, the Duchess, who, like many healthy persons, had a horror of illness, was probably thinking of the poor Queen’s gouty hands, but some of her feeling about the ailment may have passed into her attitude toward the victim.

  “You can be of some assistance to me, my dear,” my cousin now continued. “You can be my eyes at court when I am away. Let me know at once if you see anyone gaining undue favor with Her Majesty!”

  This promise I was able to give her with absolute sincerity, and we parted in the friendliest fashion.

  I was soon made aware by the Queen’s increased cordiality that the Duchess had in truth spoken highly of me. I believe that my mistress was sufficiently afraid of—or in awe of—the Duchess so that she hesitated to take any new intimate without her sanction. I do not mean to imply by this that the Queen was a weak woman—this memoir, if anything, should prove the contrary—but of two courses of action, one that pleased and one that displeased the Duchess, she preferred the former. She liked peace above all things, and peace with Sarah came at a certain price.

  In our sessions now, when I rubbed my mistress’s aching limbs, she would often talk to me about herself: her childhood, her lost infants, her happiness with the Prince. Sometimes this would take the form of a monologue, as it was not always easy for me, busy with my hands, to respond. The Queen liked to emphasize that I was not missing much in the married state; that it was at best a lottery in which she herself had been a rare winner. It was in one of her discourses on this subject that I made the astonishing discovery that she may have been as much a Jacobite as myself!

  “Few of the Stuarts were happy in wedlock, Hill. My sister thought she was, but it was only at the price of giving in to her husband in everything, including letting him run her kingdom for her. And as for my poor stepmother, Mary of Modena, what a time she had with my unfaithful father! Even though she was young enough to be his daughter, and radiantly beautiful, too. When she was first told that she was to wed the heir presumptive to the throne of England, do you know what she said? She asked: ‘Where is England?’ That was how the Italians educated their princesses! Well, she knows where England is now, to her sorrow, poor dear, looking across the stormy Channel from her exile. I am no hypocrite, Hill, when I tell you that my heart sometimes smites me to recall what my sister and I did to King James and his wife. Maybe that is why neither of us had a child who lived. Maybe it is God’s hand. Don’t marry, Hill, if you can avoid it!”

  “I can’t say that I’m overwhelmed with offers, ma’am.”

  “Stay with me, child. I’ll look after you.”

  I allowed myself a sentimental gesture at this, for I was becoming very fond of my mistress. I silently kissed her hand.

  I should not give the impression that Queen Anne was always indoors. She loved to hunt, not on horseback, which, with her figure and ailments would have been impossible, but wedged securely into a specially constructed chaise with two enormous wheels and a fast horse whose reins she handled herself. In this she could follow the hunt across country with remarkable speed, to the great concern of the outriders that tried to keep apace with her. She was very proud of this accomplishment, and when her ladies and bedchamberwomen gathered on the terrace at Windsor to watch her departure, she would turn to wave her whip at us.

  On the day that I saw her scan the row of faces on the parapet and smile when she recognized mine, I kn
ew that my favor was special.

  4

  I had observed Mr. Robert Harley, one of the two Secretaries of State, as he went to and from the Queen’s audience chamber. He was reputed to be a master politician and had been Speaker of the House of Commons, a zealous Tory who nonetheless sought accommodation with the Whigs. But my real reason for noting him was that he was my kinsman, a cousin-german of my father. He was not related, I might point out, to the Duchess, who was my mother’s niece. I remembered seeing him at my parents’ house in the days of our prosperity; he was considerably older, however, than I and would most likely not have remembered a plain, younger female cousin, particularly after her father’s business failure had rendered any future intercourse with the Hills a source of probable pleas for help. I should never have presumed to remind Mr. Harley, in the day of his present greatness, that he had such a connection as a bedchamberwoman.

  However, he did remember me. Of course, I was not so naive as not to realize that any creature, however low, who has the smallest access to the sovereign is of interest to a minister. One had heard of the humble old Nanon, maid to Madame de Maintenon, who was cultivated by the greatest peers of France. But when Mr. Harley chose to notice me, he did it so charmingly that I could have forgiven him any motive.

  He approached me after a service in the chapel of St. James’s House and made a ceremonious little bow.

  “I do not suppose Mistress Hill remembers an old cousin, but I am bold enough to claim her.”

  “Oh, Mr. Harley, I had not the courage to remind you! A member of the council!”

  “The honor is all mine, my dear. The court goes to Windsor on Friday. I shall have rooms there, in the round tower. I expect sometimes of an evening to assemble a little group of congenial souls. We shall have good wine, and, I hope, good talk. It will be an escape from the rigors of court life. May I flatter myself with the hope that you will be one of us?”