Exit Lady Masham Page 7

  “While I was employed by the Duchess, I served her loyally.”

  I knew better than to get ahead of the Queen. In her good time she would ask me all the questions that she wished answered. Royalties are not like other persons. They are naturally suspicious, even of those whom they most wish to trust. From childhood they have been surrounded by masks.

  “What about after your employment had ceased?”

  “I was then in the service of Your Majesty. Does the Duchess suggest that my first duty was still to her?”

  The Queen grunted. “She says you deserted her for me.”

  “It was she who placed me in Your Majesty’s household. Did she mean my first duty still to be to her?”

  “She claims that having proved a deserter once, you may prove so again. That you are not to be trusted.”

  “Assuming me to be treacherous, to whom could I betray the Queen of England?”

  “To France. To my brother at St. Germain.”

  When the Duchess threw stones, she certainly picked large ones! But I wondered if even she would have made so reckless an accusation. Could it have been the Queen’s idea? I shuddered, recalling as a child being dragged by my brother Jack to see a man hanged and quartered for treason. I had screamed and closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears, but not before I had witnessed horrors that I still think of when I wake up in the early morning.

  “I have no friends in the court of St. Germain, ma’am. The Duchess has a sister there.”

  The Queen was silent for several moments. “I told her I was going to keep you,” she said at last.

  “Bless you, ma’am!”

  She looked at me in her steady, sad way. When I say there was something cowlike in that gaze, it sounds impossibly impudent. Yet there it was, the hurt, suspicious, resigned look.

  “You don’t want to leave me, child?”

  “Forgive me, ma’am.” I leaned over to press my lips upon her gouty hand. “I love Your Majesty. I love Your Majesty, God forgive me, more than I love my husband. More even than I loved my poor father.”

  It was true, and the Queen believed it. That was the whole secret of the rise of Abigail Hill. The Queen had become my life. People will say it is impossible to love a queen entirely for herself, that the desire to approach a monarch is too strong an urge not to pre-empt a good part of what might otherwise have been a natural affection. And then it may be argued that Queen Anne lacked the personality that would have inspired such devotion had she been born in a humbler sphere. These things may be valid, yet the love that was inspired in me, as a subject or a servant or even a nurse, was still a complete and abiding love. However it came, whencesoever it came, it was the force of my existence.

  “I shall not give in to the Duchess,” the Queen observed now. “I shall not give in, no matter how she rants and raves.”

  “Surely, once Your Majesty has made clear her decision not to discharge me, there need be no further discussion of the matter.”

  The Queen’s eyebrows rose. “You know your former mistress better than that, child. She does not style herself Mrs. Freeman for nothing.”

  “But Your Majesty can cease to be Mrs. Morley! She can be Mrs. Freeman’s sovereign again. Until the Duchess decides to accept Your Majesty’s decision!”

  The Queen sighed. “Mrs. Freeman is a wonderful woman. She has done a great deal for me. But she has used me sorely in recent years. I think no one who has seen us together could deny that.” Her voice rose suddenly to a near wail. “You can’t know, no one can know, what my life has been!”

  It was the sign that she wanted to talk, and I bowed my head to listen.

  “You see before you Anne, the Queen, and you are awed by my power. You think I have only to speak, to raise my hand, and it will be done as I say. You are too young to remember how swiftly my father lost his throne. One day he was reviewing his cheering troops on a white charger, doffing his plumed hat to my beautiful stepmother as she gazed down on him from her balcony at Whitehall, the undisputed master of three realms! And the next, he was fleeing in disguise, dropping the great seal overboard in the Thames. But even at that he was more fortunate than his father. He did not have to step out of the banquet hall of his palace to a scaffold on a cold winter morning and lay his sainted head on the block!”

  “Oh, ma’am, don’t even think of it!”

  “I think of it constantly, child. The Stuarts’ heads were never secure. Think of my grandsire’s grandmother, the Queen of Scots! People talk of the divine right of kings! A divine right to decapitation; that’s what it sometimes seems to me. And if God were on the side of the Stuarts, would He be on mine? Am I not sitting on a throne that belongs rightfully to another? To my own little brother over the water whose birth I slandered? For Mary and I claimed he was a foundling, you know. Oh, yes, we did! We told people that my father’s Queen was not breeding, that a child had been smuggled into the palace in a warming pan. Will God forgive that if it is not true?”

  “Even if he be the true Prince,” I murmured, tempted to agree, but fearful that perhaps I was being tested, “his religion must bar him from the throne.”

  “And who is to decide that?” my mistress retorted in a petulant tone. “Parliament? Who gave them the right? If they have taken upon themselves to regulate the succession, to bar this person or that person, have we not an electoral crown?”

  “But surely, ma’am, they bar only Catholics.”

  “And suppose those Catholics are converted? Should not their claims revive? Suppose, when my brother comes of age, he elects to return to the Church of England? Should he not succeed me?”

  “Yes!” I could not help crying out my jubilant response.

  “So you are a Jacobite after all,” the Queen said, with a nod of satisfaction. “That was another thing the Duchess told me. But I don’t mind. I loathe the idea of a Hanoverian succession! Why should I leave my beautiful realms to a fat, stupid German who can’t speak two words of our language?” Indignation had now suddenly aroused the Queen, and there was a flash of fire in her dull eyes. “Consider this, Hill. They eliminate my father’s issue by my stepmother, as Roman Catholics. Very well. Who is next? The issue of my aunt Henriette, the poor poisoned Duchess of Orléans. These include all the Savoys. Out, as Romans! Very well. So they turn next to the issue of my great-aunt, the Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James I. There are forty-odd of these, including all the Condés. Out, as Romans! Until they come to my great-aunt’s youngest daughter, the Electress of Hanover, and there at last they stop. Is it well? The Electress and her son are not Romans, true, but neither are they Church of England! So why, having gone so far, not go one step further? Who is the next heir? The Duke of Somerset! A fine man, and English, too, the first of the whole motley lot who is, and a devout member of the Church of England, to boot. What perversity is it that makes Parliament, having romped all over Europe in search of a successor to my poor self, stop just short of one of their own body?”

  “Perhaps because the Marlboroughs don’t want a Tory.”

  “You have kept your eyes open,” the Queen said approvingly. “And now do you see why even a queen has to be afraid of the Churchills? They toppled my father! They convinced me that he would have brought all England back to Rome. But how do I know that now? And how do I know, if the Duchess does not have her way, that she will not summon the Captain-General back from Europe to clap me in the Tower?”

  I felt suddenly giddy at the idea that it was the Queen of England who was actually saying this to me! Could it be thus that history was made? Could the great Duke proclaim himself Lord Protector, like Cromwell? Could he drag my poor gouty mistress, with her soiled bandages, to the scaffold and have her head struck off? Surely, I could imagine what short shrift would be made of the wretched bedchamberwoman who had precipitated the crisis! But then I shook my head. The Queen was indulging in fantasy.

  “I don’t suppose I should be worth such a rumpus, ma’am.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,
Hill,” Her Majesty agreed. “If the Duchess really wanted to dethrone me, she would pick a greater issue than my bedchamberwoman. Which is why it is safe to resist her, about you, anyway. And I shall. But, oh, Hill, I did love that woman!” There were sudden tears in the Queen’s eyes. “Nobody can be a more wonderful friend than Mrs. Freeman when she is wonderful. But she must always have things her own way. Was ever a friend used as I have been used?”

  I was silent. It was not my function to traduce the Duchess. I could only marvel that Sarah should have used her great power so recklessly.

  “I tell the Duchess that she has no time for me these days,” the Queen continued sadly. “That she is understandably occupied with her children and the building of Blenheim. I don’t criticize her for that. But how can she not understand that I need someone who is more available? She has offered to spend more time at court. She has even offered to take over some of your functions. But, oh, Hill, can you imagine having your back rubbed by the Duchess? Why, she would break my spine!”

  The Queen relapsed now into silence, and I sat silently beside her, wondering at the difference between this harassed and kindly woman and the figure of Britannia on the ceiling above.

  9

  The next two years of my life were trying ones. I was almost constantly pregnant, having two daughters born within eleven months of each other, and I was the target of the unremitting campaign of hatred launched by the Duchess. She did not, it is true, subject me to any personal abuse or attack; when our paths crossed in court, she simply looked through me. But the poor Queen was continually harried by her appeals that I be dismissed, and there was no member of the cabinet or the royal circle whose ear did not ring with her lurid tales of my ingratitude, promiscuity and probable treason. When so much mud was flung, some of it was bound to stick, particularly where the assailant was the second lady of the realm.

  Of course, a good deal of what Sarah did was self-defeating. She gravely underrated not only the Queen’s innate stubbornness, but the extent to which the violence of her slander reinforced it. Sarah had none of her husband’s high sagacity as a fighter; she did not understand the danger of making her opponent desperate. She could not comprehend that a wise commander will always provide terms of surrender that are not too flagrantly humiliating. She could not see why, if she was right—and it never crossed her mind that she was not—the enemy should not throw down his weapons, fall upon his knees, make a full confession of his sins and bless the victor for chastising him! I began to realize, before the battle was half over, that my silence might be worth her violence and that the Queen might as much appreciate my never mentioning Sarah as she objected to Sarah’s seeming never to mention anything but me.

  My relations with my husband in this period were the best that we were ever to have. Later, as I shall have occasion to relate, his demands for wealth and promotion were to give me considerable trouble, but in these two years there was a suspension of the tension between us. He was apprehensive of what Sarah might accomplish against me in the battle, but, powerless to intervene, he was at least sensitive enough to perceive that he might do well to provide me with the moral encouragement of an unquarrelsome home. I saw him little in the daytime, but I could expect his company at night, except when my figure was too swollen.

  The Duchess was with the Queen a good deal more than had been her wont before her discovery of my favor. To avoid embarrassing confrontations, it was arranged that I should never be present when she was. Of course, she imagined that I was always hovering in the wings, and she would frequently raise her voice to make a slur on my character. But I had no desire to hear her insults, and as the Queen was naturally uncommunicative, I was more ignorant than the rest of the court of the progress of Sarah’s campaign. I was even the last to hear of her biggest strike: the removal of Harley as a secretary of state. He, as well as I, had become her target since he had deserted the war party to work for a negotiated peace.

  On one of my visits to Harley’s chambers I noted what I called his “heroism in the face of injustice” expression. I knew enough of my kinsman to learn that he assumed airs of tranquillity and high resolution in direct proportion to the rising success of his opponents.

  “They have arrested my confidential clerk,” he told me blandly.

  “Greg? Poor little Greg?” I had a vision of a mousy fellow who used to vanish into the recesses of the chamber whenever I called on his chief. “Whatever for?”

  “The great Sarah is in luck this time. Apparently ‘poor little Greg’ is neither so poor nor so little as we suspected. He got hold of a letter from the Queen to the Emperor, requesting the transfer of Prince Eugène to the Spanish front, and sent it to Versailles! Fortunately, at least for the national interest, it was intercepted.”

  “But, Harley, that’s treason!”

  “And we know the penalty for treason. Greg is now in the Tower. How long he had been in King Louis’s pay, I have no idea. The question for me is: What will he say on the rack? Whom will he try to incriminate?”

  “You take it very calmly.”

  “I take it the only way I can take it, in full confidence of my own innocence. The worst they can say of me is that I was careless to trust such a man.”

  “But he may invent anything under torture!”

  “He may indeed. I am in God’s hands. But even at best, I shall have to quit the ministry. I have already sent my resignation to the Queen. The Whigs can hardly allow a Tory to remain in the council after a blunder of this magnitude.”

  “You will leave me alone at court to face the Duchess?” I cried in dismay.

  “I shall be right behind you, Abigail! In almost daily conference. You will be my eyes and ears at court. It is not only the Duchess we will be fighting. It is the whole brutal, senseless war!”

  Had the Duchess taken advantage of this moment, when she had stripped me of my principal support, who knows whether she might not have carried the day? My poor mistress was beginning to weary of the battle; she might have given me up to achieve at least domestic peace. But I verily believe that Sarah was at times a madwoman.

  “Poor little Greg” was put through the appalling tortures that were still used to extract the names of co-conspirators from those wretches accused of high treason. Yet for some arcane reason no amount of racking could induce him to incriminate Harley. His agony was a vivid example to me of the stakes for which the Whigs were playing. One did not lightly drop out of a race such as I was engaged in. It was like one of those sports contests which we had learned about from Spanish accounts of the ancient Mexicans, where the losing team were massacred for the delectation of the mob.

  There were so many ways that the Duchess could have prevailed! It almost seemed as if she enjoyed the sport of heightening her hurdles. Had she appealed to her old intimacy with “Mrs. Morley,” admitting and apologizing for her neglect of the Queen in recent years; had she dropped her political arguments and invective and concentrated on the bond between two bereaved mothers of such promising sons as Blandford and Gloucester; had she sounded the note of solidarity that must have existed between two women who had risked their very necks in the Glorious Revolution, who knows if the bedchamberwoman, having no share in either the nostalgia or the glory, might not have been dismissed? But no, Sarah had to have my head, so to speak, as a matter of right. The Queen must not only give me up; she must admit she had been wrong!

  The Duchess now went so far as to suggest to the Queen that her relationship with me was an unnatural one. One day my mistress, grim-faced, handed me a letter to read.

  “I don’t know if your stomach’s strong enough, Masham, to digest that!”

  It would have been a shocking epistle for any woman to write to another, let alone to her sovereign. The Duchess did not hesitate to stoop to quotations from scurrilous ballads hawked about the public houses of London. She assailed the Queen’s “strange and unaccountable passion” for a woman that she, Sarah, had taken “out of a garret.” And she conclude
d on this note: “Nor can I think that having no inclination for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours!”

  I knelt down before the Queen and kissed her hand.

  “Send me away, ma’am dear,” I begged in tears. “Let me go far from the court. Do not keep me here to bracket Your Majesty’s name with such filth.”

  “I shan’t let you go, Masham. There can be no idea of that now. Play the harpsichord! Play me something that will take away the stench of that epistle!”

  ***

  The next time that I saw my magnificent cousin was when she burst in on the Queen to announce the Duke’s triumph at Oudenarde.

  “I don’t know if Your Majesty will consider my news worthy of interrupting so delightful a tête-à-tête. But word has just been received that my husband has won another glorious victory!”

  The Queen gave her a level stare. “Do we know the casualties?”

  “Not the figures, no. My lord writes that they were heavy. Heavier, I am glad to say, for the enemy than for us. Your Majesty’s victories are not bought for nothing.”

  The Queen’s hands flew to her temples. “Oh, when will all this terrible bloodshed cease!”

  “Is that Your Majesty’s reaction to a victory that will make her the first sovereign of Europe?”

  “First sovereign of a graveyard,” my mistress muttered in a voice that only I could hear. But when the Duchess asked her to repeat it, she waved her away.

  This was bad enough, but worse was to come.

  The victory procession to the thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral was to start from St. James’s Palace, where I, though more than eight months pregnant, was still on duty. As the Duchess was very much present in all the preparations, including the dressing of the Queen—it seemed more her jubilee, indeed, than her mistress’s—I had been excused. I was surprised, therefore, when an usher scratched on my door to tell me that I was wanted in the royal presence immediately. When I came to the Queen’s bedchamber, the other ladies, evidently in obedience to an earlier command, withdrew. My mistress, looking tired and worried in her great royal ermine robe, was seated before a table on which some of the crown jewels in open cases were arrayed.