Exit Lady Masham (16 page)
"What do you expect?" I would ask him. "One doesn't end world conflicts overnight."
"Overnight! Over decade! It's easy to see that none of your loved ones is rotting in a Flanders ditch!"
"My brother Jack is going to Canada."
"Aye, but it's not so bloody there. The poor savages whom the French pay have only arrows to meet our bullets."
The great event that pushed the peace party into the lead was the stabbing of Harley by the mad Frenchman Guiscard, who did not comprehend how valuable his intended victim was to the beleaguered Sun King. When I visited my wounded friend in his bed of pain, he murmured to me: "I'm not accusing Swift of arranging this, but he would have been entirely capable of it!"
What he meant was that the attempted assassination had been just what was needed to hoist him into the public eye in a sympathetic light. When he recovered, the Queen, without fear of violent repercussions, was able to nominate him Lord Treasurer and create him Earl of Oxford and Mortimer.
It was not an easy time for me. The task set for me by the new First Minister and his friend Swift became more and more exhausting. Everything they did was now aimed at the dismissal of Marlborough. I had to be always on the alert with the Queen, watching for the opportune moment at which to slip into the conversation one of their carefully selected anecdotes about the Captain-General's political ambition. I could not risk seeming too insistent; I could not afford to be a bore; and I had to be sure that my ammunition, when discharged, would not simply create a gap that the Duchess of Somerset could fill with her own explosive material. Add to all of this that I was pregnant again, the fourth time in three years, that my little boy was constantly ill and that I was suffering from chronic colds and headaches!
And then, just when a truce seemed actually within our grasp, the House of Lords, by a tiny majority, legislated that no peace could be negotiated that did not encompass the removal of the French King's grandson from the throne of Spain. Even if, by a miracle, we could induce Louis XIV to attempt to depose his grandson, Philip V, the latter had now sufficient backing from the Spanish people to resist his awesome ancestor.
Swift was beside himself. I had never seen him so agitated. He seemed almost irrational. He called on me at Kensington, summoning me from the chamber of my sick son, to accuse me of abandoning the cause for selfish reasons. When I burst into tears, he relented only enough to offer me his peculiar form of sympathy.
"I'm sorry about your boy, but to me it's one life against thousands!"
When I say that I did not at once throw him out of my chamber, you will realize the hold that man had on me! He proceeded now to tell me of Harley's plan to persuade the Queen to create twelve new peers for a Tory majority in the Lords.
"You will have to fight the Somersets every step of the way, Abbie!" he warned me. "They will struggle to the death against anything that degrades the peerage."
I did not know the full extent of the threatened degradation until the next morning, when Masham burst into my bedroom while I was reading
The Spectator.
He was grinning broadly.
"Have you seen Harley's list of the new peers?"
"No. Is it out?"
"Don't tell me I'm ahead of you for once! St. John is to be Lord Bolingbroke."
"An earl?"
"No, only a viscount. Our new Lord Oxford is not tempted to swell the Elysian fields of earldom in which he now so happily romps."
"St. John will resent that. How can Harley be so shortsighted?"
"Don't forget he has the Queen to cope with. She can be very stingy with her peerages."
"Who else is named?"
"The rest are all barons."
"That makes sense. Why should Her Majesty create earls and viscounts when barons have an equal vote?"
"That is precisely the way Oxford put it to me."
"You seem very intimate with him these days."
"Oh, we imbibe together!"
"I don't think you should encourage that weakness in him, Mr. Masham. It's bad enough in anyone, but a crime in a minister."
"A crime? Pray speak more gently of your benefactor."
"
My
benefactor! What do I owe Harley? The obligation, it seems to me, is quite the other way round."
"The Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, in his infinite wisdom, has seen fit to include your humble servant's name in the proposed list. Greetings, Baroness Masham of Oates!"
I crumpled
The Spectator
in my agitation and pulled my sheet about me to warm my now shivering shoulders.
"But that's absurd!" I cried. "I can't be a peeress! Her Majesty will never hear of it. A baroness wouldn't be permitted to do the things in her bedchamber that I do."
"Then you must quit them."
"Quit them? But I don't want to quit them! They are the whole basis of my friendship with the Queen!"
"You had better get another basis, then. For Lady Masham is what you're going to be, lass, and that's that. My Lord Treasurer has spoken."
"But the Queen has not spoken."
"And
you
haven't spoken to the Queen. Is that what you mean?"
"You always absurdly exaggerate my influence with her."
"Do I now? And how did your brother Jack get command of that Canadian expedition, I'd like to know? Through his military reputation?"
"Jack deserved that," I cried, stung. "Jack has proved him
self a brave and capable officer. And his engagements have been with the enemy, not with sluts in the streets of Windsor!"
"Hoity-toity! But I know your opinion of me. You'd forgo the pleasure of being a peeress to keep me from being a peer. But get this straight, Mrs. Masham. You shall
not
speak to the Queen. That's an order from your husband!"
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. It was no time to lose my composure. "Let me try to explain," I said in a calmer tone. "You know that I have been trying to help Lord Oxford and St. John with the Queen. It has involved my putting myself in opposition to the Marlboroughs. In view of my obligations to the Duchess and my sincere admiration of the Duke, this has been a source of some anguish to me. Surely you can see that I must not profit by their fall? Would you even wish to yourself? Would you want people to say that Sam Masham shot down their hero for a peerage?"
Masham's face became mottled with anger as I spoke. When I had finished, he broke into a loud jeering laugh, a kind of bray. "Well, if that isn't gall! To build up your scheming into a noble sacrifice for world peace! Look, I
know
you, Abigail Hill! I'm married to you. Are you so lunatic as to believe I'd swallow all that? Do you think I can't see that your whole life has been dedicated to the destruction of the Marlboroughs? Because you can never forgive the Duchess for being the great lady who found you in the gutter and was fool enough to pull you out! Or the Duke for not responding to your stale virginal lust!"
Even at such a moment I was able to reflect that the only truly appalling aspect of his charges was that he believed them. It was not what I was that made me feel suddenly ill; it was what I had married.
"Very well," I murmured. "There is no use in any further discussion."
"You'll just disobey me and go to the Queen? And request that I be taken off the list of peers; is that it?" Masham's smile was now sly. "Don't you think you had better first ask what I shall do?"
"What will you do, Mr. Masham?"
"I also shall go to the Queen. And I shall tell Her Majesty how Robert Harley and his minions have trained you from the beginning in your bedchamber duties. How you report back your conversations with your supposed mistress to your actual masters. How Mr. Swift instructs you how to rub the royal back and St. John how to swab the royal hands; how ..."
"And how do you suppose Her Majesty will react to the person who so illuminates her?" I interrupted him.
"Harshly, no doubt. She will have no further use for either Masham."
"So you'll cut off your nose to spite your face?"
"No, my girl, I'll cut off
your
nose!" he replied with a dreadful shriek of laughter. "That shiny red proboscis that butts into everybody's business but its own!"
I was cornered. I doubted that he would really go to the Queen, or even that he would succeed in getting an audience if I opposed it, but how could I take the chance? It was not the ruin of my own favorâI was beginning to think that might be a blessed reliefâit was the prospect of the pain that his lies would inflict on my poor mistress. The little sheltered corner that I had tried to build in her stormy life would be smashed to bits.
"And suppose I do as you say?" I asked. "How do I know that you won't want to be a marquis next week? Or even a duke?"
"Because a barony will quite content me. A barony and the few little business ventures that Harley and St. John like quite as much as I do."
At the hand-washing the following morning, the Queen looked at me in mild reproach.
"I suppose this will be the last of your ablutions, Lady Masham."
"Oh, ma'am, may I crave a favor?" I had decided to dramatize my point by falling to my knees. "Promise me that I may retain my old functions! If there were any way I could dissociate myself from my husband's title, I would, but there is no way. Yet surely Your Majesty, as the fountain of honor, may prescribe the court duties of her peers. Let me beg that mine may continue!"
"Your prayer is granted, my dear," my mistress replied, at once placated. "If Masham has any objection to his wife's having such humble tasks, he can discuss the matter with
me
!"
The other women of the bedchamber tittered at this, and I kissed Her Majesty's hand and assured her that Masham was only too proud to have me serve her in the very humblest capacity.
"We are sure of it," the Queen continued in her most complacent tone. "And we look forward to fewer interruptions in your schedule of duties. For your husband's is not the only elevation of the day. Another friend of yours has accepted promotion. Not as a peer, to be sure, but in the church. Mr. Swift will become a dean of cathedral."
I arose, clasping my hands in excitement and dismay. "At St. Paul's, ma'am?"
"Well, no. Not St. Paul's. We could hardly consider a man of his published views in quite so public a post. No, Mr. Swift has accepted the deanship of St. Patrick's."
My heart fell. "And may I ask where St. Patrick's is, ma'am?"
"Where its name suggests. In Dublin. Where Mr. Swift comes from. And where he will be happy to return. I think it most appropriate."
It was thus that the soul-destroying message was delivered! Her Majesty's blandness was disingenuous.
"Will he be leaving soon, ma'am?"
"As soon as my Lord Oxford, who seems strangely dependent on his advice, can spare him."
A few weeks later, the House of Lords, fortified by the dozen new members, including Baron Masham, voted in favor of the negotiation of a peace that would not have to guarantee a non-Bourbon monarch in Madrid. And then, even while we were still rejoicing, the Queen had one of her seizures. For two days it looked as if she might not survive. I hardly left her bedside. One night, when Lord Oxford, as Harley must now be called, was in the royal bedchamber with me, the doctors and nurses posted just out of hearing distance, the following historical interchange took place:
OXFORD
: We have every reason to hope for Your Majesty's early recovery. However, it behooves great rulers to be prepared for all contingencies. I therefore urge Your Majesty immediately to dismiss the Duke of Marlborough from his command.
THE QUEEN
(faintly): If I should die without dismissing him, Lord Oxford, what do you apprehend he would do?
OXFORD
: He would peddle the crown of England to the Elector of Hanover and to your half brother, and sell it to the one that paid him most!
THE QUEEN
: That is a grave accusation, Lord Oxford.
OXFORD
: None knows it more than I, ma'am.
THE QUEEN
: And you, Masham, poor faithful Masham. Do you agree?
ABIGAIL
: God forgive me, ma'am!
THE QUEEN
(after a faint groan): You have all been too much for me. Very well! Dismiss him, Lord Oxford! But don't come blubbering to me, any of you, if the French come across the Channel and raise King Louis's lilies on the great tower of Windsor!
T
he Queen recovered, but this did not save the Duke of Marlborough, who was dismissed from his military offices on the last day of 1711. Negotiations were immediately opened for peace. As France was hurting badly, and as everyone now accepted Philip V as King of Spain, there seemed no reason that the great war should not come at last to an end. I suppose I should have been happy, but I had an uneasy foreboding. There was something about the setting of the Marlborough sun that seemed to doom us all to live in the dusk of glory.
I had never much valued glory. Indeed, I had done my little best to be rid of it. But I had had no inkling of what it might be like to live in a world without it. Milords Oxford and Bolingbroke, almost at once, began to seem small chattering figures in the absence of the warrior they had tumbled. In fact, we all began to resemble nothing so much as clownish stagehands fumbling about a darkened scene, pulling at props that we could not quite distinguish in our desperate effort to rearrange the visual effect before the next curtain that would arise ... on what?
The only man who could have got us through was Swift. The Queen had said that he would stay as long as Lord Oxford needed him, but I feared, now that the Treasurer and St. John were frankly at odds, that Swift would be damned in the eyes of at least one of them for being a friend of the other. When he asked me to walk with him in the gardens of Hampton Court on a damp gray morning when no one else was out of doors, I knew that it would be to say farewell.
"But are there no deanships here?" I cried. "Surely London can't be so small."
"None to which the Queen would appoint me."