Exit Lady Masham (2 page)

But it cannot be only that the more dramatic figures tend to obscure the drones; it must be more than that. History is a kind of rite; we read it in the faith that what went before will help us to visualize what may come after, and even to hope that what may come after will be for our betterment. We do not care to dwell unduly on the casualties and costs of wars; we prefer to emphasize what our Gallic cousins call "
gloire.
" We feel that
gloire
may be somehow the soul or pulse of the nation, and if that be the case, what cost can be too great?

Robert Harley, later Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Henry St. John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, and Abigail Hill, later Baroness Masham, had very little to do with
gloire.
That may be why we have been so rapidly erased, or at least obscured, in the annals of this island's history. And I am beginning to persuade myself that Lord Hervey is right; that that is all the more reason I should set down my recollections.

Certainly, I have the time. My husband shoots all day and drinks all night. He is faithful enough to our
modus vivendi;
we rarely talk, but we also rarely quarrel. My son is busy with the farm across the way, he calls only on Sundays. I never entertain now, so the neighbors have ceased to invite us out. And then, too, when I was young, I used to dream that one day I should be a writer!

Yet I have the feeling, the odd feeling deep down inside me, that my words will be so much spray, evaporating on the weatherbeaten but stubbornly enduring monuments of John and Sarah Churchill.

I
was one of four children, two boys and two girls, and I was born in London in the year 1680. So much has happened to our island since that day, eight years before good William and Mary stripped Mary's father, the proselytizing papist, James II, of his crown, and two decades before we were engaged, under her sister Anne, in an all-out war against the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, that it is difficult for young people now to realize that at my birth we were ruled by a charming and amiable concealed Catholic, Charles II, who, unlike his fanatical younger brother and heir, believed in living and letting live where religion was concerned and in buying peace abroad and affluence at home by the simple expedient of taking bribes from the Sun King. Happy days!

My father, William Hill, was a successful merchant in the city, and my mother, born Jennings, was one of the many siblings of Sarah Churchill's father. We grew up in a handsome brick house in Chelsea in an atmosphere of ease and letters—my parents had a literary bent that I pride myself on having inherited—but all came to a sudden end in the nineties, when my poor father, after a series of reverses, became a bankrupt. The humiliation of poverty proved too much for his proud soul; he pined away and died, and my mother, who seemed to live only in him, soon followed. Alice and I and Jack and Frank, none of us yet twenty, had to fend for ourselves as best we could. There were uncles and aunts enough but none willing to support so large a brood, except with advice. I was finally placed in the household of a Lady Rivers in Kent.

The job was called a chambermaid's, but a laundress was what in fact I was. It was a lonely, cold house, and I had no friends and no opportunity to make any. I missed my sister and brothers bitterly, and my only diversion was a rare trip to London to see them. Alice was also a laundress, but the boys had done better, as boys in our situation always do. Frank was a page in the household of the Prince of Denmark, and Jack was in the army.

Queen Mary II had died, and her husband, the Prince of Orange, now William III, was reigning alone, as reluctantly legislated by Parliament when she had stipulated that she would accept the crown of her dethroned father, King James, only on the condition that her dour Dutch consort reign jointly with her. No one had thought he would survive her, but he had, and her sister had been deprived of her royal right for several years. Now, however, William's health was failing, and everybody looked forward to the day when the Princess of Denmark (as the heiress apparent was styled) should become a thoroughly English Queen Anne.

My parents had been of the Jacobite persuasion and used in private to toast poor old King James across the water, hounded from his throne, as my father put it, by his "pelican" daughters. But as Sarah Churchill, now Countess of Marlborough, was the intimate friend and supposed ruler of the allegedly passive Princess Anne, it seemed as if the Hills would have more to gain from the surviving pelican than from her exiled sire. Everyone expected the Marlboroughs to dominate the coming reign.

But could we poor Hills expect anything from a cousin so exalted? I had learned not to mention my relationship to Sarah to other members of Lady Rivers's household. On the one occasion that I had done so, it had been greeted with peals of laughter as a very good joke. And indeed how could anyone be expected to believe that a laundress was cousin-german to the second most important woman in England? There were times when even I could hardly believe it myself; when I was convinced that all the pleasure in the world to which I could ever look forward would be to read books in my time off and see my brother Jack advance in the army. For Jack was the one of us who was handsome enough and brave enough to succeed on his own. Perhaps one day he would marry an heiress who would allow me to be her housekeeper. Anyway, I could dream.

I shall never know what it was that put Sarah in mind of me, but when she was visiting in Penshurst Palace nearby, she drove over to call upon Lady Rivers. The old steward, who had always despised me as "too fine for my station," came with gaping mouth to the laundry to tell me to change my skirt and report to the drawing room.

"Milady Marlborough desires to speak with you, gal!"

When I arrived in the indicated chamber, discreetly garbed in gray, Lady Rivers, with some embarrassment, retired to leave me alone with this magnificent cousin whom I had never seen.

"I've come to take you away with me, Abigail Hill! I should have done so before, had I known to what a sad position you had fallen. You shall be a member of my household, and if you are as well read as your sister tells me, you shall have a chance to become governess to my daughters."

"Then you have seen my sister Alice, Cousin?" I exclaimed in happy astonishment.

"She, too, is now a member of my household. Since last week. I have decided to do something about all the Hills!"

My heart almost burst at the vision of being reunited with Alice and freed from menial labor. At that moment I would have gladly died for Sarah Marlborough.

"Oh, madame! How can I ever thank you?"

"By being a good girl and a good governess," Sarah replied brusquely. She was evidently not one who cared for gushing. "And now I suggest you pack your things and come up to London with me. Lady Rivers has been so good as to agree to your leaving immediately."

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?"