Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

Anne herself was no doubt little more than a puppet in the hands of successive politicians; but yet the struggle that took place around her at this unfortunate period—the maintenance by every wile of somebody who could influence her, the conflict for her ear and favor—shows her immense importance in the economy of public life. Queen Victoria is the object of universal veneration and respect, but not the smallest official in her government need fear the displeasure of the queen as the highest minister had to fear that of Anne, for whom no one entertained any particular respect. Yet there was little real power in the possession of the unfortunate woman who, badgered on all sides, and refused both peace and rest, sank slowly into disease and decay during the two years which followed the disgrace of the friend of her youth.

She had no longer an audacious Freeman to tell her unwelcome truths and tease her with appeals and reproaches; but it is probable that she soon found her soft-voiced Abigail, her caressing duchess (of Somerset) little more satisfactory; never was a head that wore a crown more uneasy. She held fast to the power which she had been persuaded she was to get into her own hands when she was delivered from the sway of the Marlboroughs, and for a little while believed it possible that she could reign unaided. But this was a delusion that could not last long; and her death was hastened, it is said, by a violent altercation between Harley and St. John, when the inevitable struggle between the two who had pushed all competitors out of place occurred at last. They wrangled over the staff of office in Anne’s very presence, overwhelming her with agitation and excitement. Apart from politics, the royal existence was dull enough. When Dean Swift was at Windsor, following Harley and waiting for the decision of his Irish business, we have occasional glimpses through his eyes which show the tedium of the court. “There was a drawing-room to-day,” he says, “but so few company that the Queen sent for us into her bedchamber, where we made our bows, and stood, about twenty of us round the room, while she looked round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready, and went out.” The same authority mentions her way of taking exercise, which was a strange one. “The Queen was hunting the stag till four this afternoon,” he says; “she drove in her chaise about forty miles, and it was five before we went to dinner.... She hunts in a chaise with one horse, which she drives herself, and drives furiously like Jehu, and is a mighty hunter like Nimrod.” Windsor’s great park and forest must have afforded room and space for some part at least of this course, and a hunt in August would need to have been confined to ground less cultivated than that of the smiling plain which skirts the castle hill on the other side. Queen Anne’s Ride and Queen Anne’s Drive are still well-known names in the locality where the strange apparition of the queen, solitary in her high chaise, and “driving furiously” after the hunt, must once have been a familiar sight.

The end of this poor queen’s life was disturbed by a new and terrible struggle, in which natural sentiment and public duty, and all the prepossessions and prejudices of her nature, were set in conflict one against the other. This was upon the question of the succession. The family of Hanover, the Electress Sophia and her son and grandson, had been chosen solemnly by Parliament as the nearest members of the royal race who were Protestants, and were recognized as the heirs to the throne in all public acts and in the prayers of the church. But to Anne the house of Hanover was of no special interest. She did not love the idea of successor at all. She had declared to Marlborough passionately that the proposed visit of the Hanoverian prince was a thing which she could not bear, and there was no friendship, nor even acquaintance, between her and relatives so far removed. But apart from all public knowledge, in the secret chambers and by the back-stairs came whispers now of another name, that of James Stuart, more familiar and kindly—the baby-brother about whom Anne had believed the prevailing fable, that he was a supposititious child, for whom she had invented the name of the Pretender, but who now in her childless decay began to be presented before her as the victim of a great wrong. Poor queen! she was torn asunder by all these contradictions; and if her heart was melting toward her father’s son, all the dull experience which she had acquired in spite of herself must have convinced her that this solution of the difficulty was impossible. Her life of late had been one long conflict; imperious Sarah first, then Harley and St. John quarrelling in her very presence-chamber; and when the door was shut and the curtains drawn and all the world departed save Abigail lying on a mattress on the floor to be near her mistress, here was the most momentous question of all. She who desired nothing so much as quiet and to be left in peace, was once again compelled to face a problem of the utmost importance to England, and on which she alone had the power to say a decisive word. Little wonder if Anne was harassed beyond all endurance. But those who pressed this question upon her waning senses were the instruments of their own overthrow. The powers of life worn out before their time could bear no more. The hopes of the Jacobite party were rising higher every day as the end drew near; but at the last she escaped them, having uttered no word of support to their cause; and in the confusion which ensued, George I. was peacefully proclaimed as soon as the queen out of her lethargy had slipped beyond the boundaries of any earthly kingdom.

The Marlboroughs, who had been living on the Continent since their disgrace, came back after this new change. The duke’s entry into London “in great state, attended by hundreds of gentlemen on horseback and some of the nobility in their coaches” a few days after, is reported by one of the chroniclers of the time. The duchess followed him soon after, and whether her temper and disposition had so far mended as to allow him to enjoy the peace he had so often longed for by the side of her he loved, he had at least a tranquil evening-time among his friends and dependents, and the grandchildren who were to be his heirs—for only one of his own children survived at his death. Duchess Sarah lived long after him.

She was sixty-two when he died, but, nevertheless, in spite of temper and every other failing, was still charming enough to be sought in marriage by two distinguished suitors—one of them that proud Duke of Somerset whose first wife had supplanted her at court. She answered this potentate in the only way consistent with the dignity of a woman of her age and circumstances; but added, with a noble pride which sat well upon her, that had she been but half her age, not the emperor of the world should ever have filled the place sacred to great Marlborough. It is a pity we could not leave her here in the glow of this proud tenderness and constancy. She was capable of that and many other noble things, but not of holding her tongue, of withdrawing into the background, or accepting in other ways the natural change from maturity to age. Her restless energies, however, had some legitimate outlet. She finished Blenheim, and she wrote innumerable explanations and memoranda, which finally shaped themselves into that “Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough from her first Coming to Court,” which is one of the most interesting of all mémoires pour servir. This was published in her eighty-second year, and it is curious to think of the vivacious and unsubdued spirit which could throw itself back so completely out of the calm of age into the conflicts and the very atmosphere of what had passed thirty years before. And she did her best to prepare for a great life of Marlborough which should set him right with the world. But her time was not always so innocently employed, and it is to be feared that she wrangled to the end of her life. The “Characters” of her contemporaries which she left behind are full of spite and malice. There was no peace in her soul. A characteristic little story is told of her in an illness. “Last year she had lain a great while ill without speaking; her physicians said she must be blistered or she would die. She called out, ‘I won’t be blistered and I won’t die!’ and apparently for the moment kept her word.” She lived long enough to be impaled by Pope in verses which an involuntary admiration for this daring, dauntless, impassioned woman makes us reluctant to quote. She survived almost her entire generation, and was capable of living a hundred years more had nature permitted. She was eighty-four when she succumbed at last, in the year 1744, thirty years after the death of the queen.

Chapter III

THE AUTHOR OF “GULLIVER”

THERE are few figures in history, and still fewer in literature, which have occupied so great a place in the world’s attention, or which retain so strong a hold upon its interest, as that of Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick’s. It is considerably more than a century since he died, old and mad and miserable: a man who had never been satisfied with life, or felt his fate equal to his deserts; who disowned and hated (even when he served it) the country of his birth, and with fierce and bitter passion denounced human nature itself, and left a sting in almost every individual whom he loved; a man whose preferment and home were far from the center of public affairs, and who had no hereditary claim on the attention of England. Yet when the English reader, or he who in the farthest corner of the New World has the same right to English literature as that which the subjects of Queen Victoria hold,—as the American does—from the subjects of Queen Anne,—reads the title at the head of this page, neither the one nor the other will have any difficulty in distinguishing among all the ecclesiastical dignitaries of that age who it is that stands conspicuous as the dean. Not in royal Westminster or Windsor is this man to be found; not the ruler of any great cathedral in the rich English midlands where tradition and wealth and an almost Catholic supremacy united to make the great official of the church as important as any official of the state—but far from those influences, half as far as America is now from the center of English society and the sources of power, one of a nation which the most obstinate conservative of to-day will not hesitate to allow was then deeply wronged and cruelly misgoverned by England, many and anxious as have been her efforts since to make amends. Yet among the many strange examples of that far more than republican power (not always most evident in republics) by which a man of native force and genius, however humble, finds his way to the head of affairs and impresses his individuality upon his age, when thousands born to better fortunes are swept away as nobodies, Swift is one of the most remarkable. His origin, though noted by himself, not without a certain pride, as from a family of gentry not unknown in their district, was in his own person almost as lowly and poor as it was possible to be. The posthumous son of a poor official in the Dublin law-courts, owing his education to the kindness, or perhaps less the kindness than the family pride, of an uncle, Swift entered the world as a hanger-on, waiting what fortune and a patron might do for him, a position scarcely comprehensible to young Englishmen nowadays, though then the natural method of advancement. Such a young man in the present day would betake himself to his books, with the practical aim of an examination before him, and the hope of immediate admission through that gate to the public service and all its chances. It is amusing to speculate what the difference might have been had Jonathan Swift, coming raw with his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, shouldered his robust way to the head of an examination list, and thus making himself at a stroke independent of patronage, gone out to reign and rule and distribute justice in India, or pushed himself upward among the gentlemanly mediocrities of a public office. One asks would he have found that method more successful, and endured the desk and the routine of his office, and

“got on” with the head of his department, better than he endured the monotony and subjection, the possible slights and spurns of Sir William Temple’s household, which he entered, half servant, half equal, the poor relation, the secretary and companion of that fastidious philosopher? The question may be cut short by the almost certainty that Swift could not have gained his promotion in any such way; but his age had not learned the habit of utilizing education, and he was one of the idle youths of fame. “He was stopped of his degree,” he himself writes in his autobiographical notes, “for dullness and insufficiency, and at last hardly admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is called in that college speciali gratia.” Recent biographers have striven to prove that this really meant nothing to Swift’s discredit, but it is to be supposed that in such a matter he is himself the best authority.

The life of the household of dependents at Moor Park, where young Swift attended Sir William’s pleasure in the library, while the Johnsons and Dingleys, the waiting-gentlewomen of a system which now lingers only in courts, hung about my lady, her relatives, gossips, servants, is to us extremely difficult to realize, and still more to understand. This little cluster of secondary personages, scarcely at all elevated above the servants, with whom they sometimes sat at table, and whose offices they were always liable to be called on to perform, yet who were all conscious of gentle blood in their veins, and a relationship more or less distinct with the heads of the house, is indeed one of the most curious lingerings of the past in the eighteenth century. When we read in one of Macaulay’s brilliant sketches, or in Swift’s own words, or in the indications given by both history and fiction, that the parson,—perhaps at the great house,—humble priest of the parish, found his natural mate in the waiting-maid, it is generally forgotten that the waiting-maid was then in most cases quite as good as the parson: a gently bred and well-descended woman, like her whom an unkind but not ignoble fate made into the Stella we all know, the mild and modest star of Swift’s existence. It was no doubt a step in the transition from the great medieval household, where the squire waited on the knight with a lowliness justified by his certainty of believing himself knight in his turn, and where my lady’s service was a noble education, the only school accessible to the young gentlewomen of her connection—down to our own less picturesque and more independent days, in which personal service has ceased to be compatible with the pretensions of any who can assume, by the most distant claim, to be “gentle” folk. The institution is very apparent in Shakspere’s day, the waiting-gentlewomen who surround his heroines being of entirely different mettle from the soubrettes of modern comedy. At a later period such a fine gentleman as John Evelyn, in no need of patronage, was content and proud that his daughter should enter a great household to learn how to comport herself in the world. In the end of the seventeenth century the dependents were perhaps more absolutely dependent. But even this, like most things, had its better and worst side.

That a poor widow with her child, like Stella’s mother, should find refuge in the house of her wealthy kinswoman at no heavier cost than that of attending to Lady Temple’s linen and laces, and secure thus such a training for her little girl as might indeed have ended in the rude household of a Parson Trulliber, but at the same time might fit her to take her place in a witty and brilliant society, and enter into all the thoughts of the most brilliant genius of his time, was no ill fate; nor is there anything that is less than noble and befitting (in theory) in the association of that young man of genius, whatsoever exercises of patience he might be put to, with the highly cultured man of the world, the ex-ambassador and councilor of kings, under whose auspices he could learn to understand both books and men, see the best company of his time, and acquire at second hand all the fruits of a ripe experience. So that, perhaps, there is something to be said after all for the curious little community at Moor Park, where Sir William, like a god, made the day good or evil for his people according as he smiled or frowned; where the young Irish secretary, looking but uneasily upon a world in which his future fate was so unassured, had yet the wonderful chance once, if no more, of explaining English institutions to King William, and in his leisure the amusement of teaching little Hester how to write, and learning from her baby prattle—which must have been the delight of the house, kept up and encouraged by her elders—that “little language” which had become a sort of synonym for the most intimate and endearing utterances of tenderness. No doubt Sir William himself (who left her a modest little fortune when he died) must have loved to hear the child talk, and even Lady Giffard and the rest, having no responsibility for her parts of speech, kept her a baby as long as possible, and delighted in the pretty jargon to which foolish child-lovers cling in all ages after the little ones themselves are grown too wise to use it more.

Jonathan Swift left Ireland, along with many more, in the commotion that succeeded the revolution of 1688—a very poor and homely lad, with nothing but the learning, such as it was, picked up in a somewhat disorderly university career. Through his mother, then living at Leicester, and on the score of humble relationship between Mrs. Swift and Lady Temple, of whom the reader may perhaps remember the romance and tender history,—a pleasant association,—he was introduced to Sir William Temple’s household, but scarcely, it would appear, at first to any permanent position there. He was engaged, an unfriendly writer says, “at the rate of £20 a year” as amanuensis and reader, but “Sir William never favoured him with his conversation nor allowed him to sit at table with him.” Temple’s own account of the position, however, contains nothing at all derogatory to the young man, for whom, about a year after, he endeavored, no doubt in accordance with Swift’s own wishes, to find a situation with Sir Robert Southwell, then going to Ireland as secretary of state. Sir William describes Swift as “of good family in Herefordshire.... He has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and kept all my accounts as far as my small occasions required. He has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a very good current hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good friends, though they have for the present lost their fortunes,” the great man says; and he recommends the youth “either as a gentleman to wait on you, or a clerk to write under you, or upon any establishment of the College to recommend him to a fellowship there, which he has a just pretence to.” This shows how little there was in the position of “a gentleman to wait on you,” of which the young suitor need have been ashamed. Swift’s own account of this speedy return to Ireland is that it was by advice of the physicians, “who weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his health,” which he was young enough to have endangered by the temptations of Sir William’s fine gardens; a “surfeit of fruit” being the innocent cause to which he attributes the disease which haunted him for all the rest of his life.

His absence, however, from the Temple household was of very short duration, Sir Robert Southwell having apparently had no use for his services, or means of preferring him to a fellowship, and he returned to Moor Park in 1690, where he remained for four years. It was quite clear, whatever his vicissitudes of feeling might have been, that he identified himself entirely with his patron’s opinions and even prejudices, and was

a loyal and devoted retainer both now and afterward. When Sir William became involved in a literary quarrel with the great scholar Bentley, young Swift rushed into the field with a jeu d’esprit which has outlived all other records of the controversy. The “Battle of the Books” could hardly have been written in aid of a hard or contemptuous master. Years after, when he had a house of his own and had entered upon his independent career, he turned his little rectory garden into a humble imitation of the Dutch paradise which Temple had made to bloom in the wilds of Surrey, with a canal and a willow walk like those which were so dear to King William and his courtiers. And when Temple died, it was to Swift, and not to any of his nephews, that Sir William committed the charge of his papers and literary remains. This does not look like a hard bondage on one side, or any tyrannical sway on the other, notwithstanding a few often-quoted phrases which are taken as implying complaint. “Don’t you remember,” Swift asks long after, “how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of temper for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons?” But these words need not represent anything more than that sensitiveness to the aspect of the person on whom his prospects and comfort depend which is inevitable to every individual in a similar position, however considerate and friendly the patron may be. The hard-headed and unbending Scotch philosopher, James Mill, was just as sensitive to the looks of his kind friend and helper in the early struggles of life, Jeremy Bentham, in whose sunny countenance Mill discovered unspoken offense with an ingenuity worthy of a self-tormenting woman. It was natural indeed that Swift, a high-spirited young man, should fret and struggle as the years went on and nothing happened to enlarge his horizon beyond the trees of Moor Park. He was sent to King William, as has been said, when Temple was unable to wait upon his Majesty, to explain to him the expediency of certain parliamentary measures, and this was no doubt intended by his patron as a means of bringing him under the king’s notice. William would seem to have taken a kind of vague interest in the secretary, which he expressed in an odd way by offering him a captain’s commission in a cavalry regiment,—a proposal which did not tempt Swift,—and by teaching him how to cut asparagus “in the Dutch way,” and to eat up all the stalks, as the dean afterward, in humorous revenge, made an unlucky visitor of his own do. But William, notwithstanding these whimsical evidences of favor, neither listened to the young secretary’s argument nor gave him a prebend as had been hoped.

Four years, however, is a long time for an ambitious young man to spend in dependence, watching one hope die out after another; and Swift’s impatience began to be irrestrainable and to trouble the peace of his patron’s learned leisure. Although destined from the first to the church, and for some time waiting in tremulous expectation of ecclesiastical preferment, Swift had not yet taken orders. The explanation he gives of how and why he finally determined on doing so is characteristic. His dissatisfaction and restlessness, probably his complaints, moved Sir William,—though evidently deeply offended that his secretary should wish to leave him,—to offer him an employ of about £120 a year in the Rolls Office in Ireland, of which Temple held the sinecure office of master. “Whereupon [says Swift’s own narrative] Mr. Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the Church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take Holy Orders.” This arbitrary decision to balk his patron’s tardy bounty, and take his own way in spite of him, was probably as much owing to a characteristic blaze of temper as to the somewhat fantastic disinterestedness here put forward, though Swift was never a man greedy of money or disposed to sacrifice his pride to the acquisition of gain, notwithstanding certain habits of miserliness afterward developed in his character. Sir William was “extremely angry”—hurt, no doubt, as many a patron has been, by the ingratitude of the dependent who would not trust everything to him, but claimed some free will in the disposition of his own life. Had they been uncle and nephew, or even father and son, the same thing might easily have happened. Swift set out for Dublin full of indignation and excitement, “everybody judging I did best to leave him,”—but alas! in this, as in so many cases, pride was doomed to speedy downfall.