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The houses of Scott and
Douglas, of Buccleuch and Queensberry, have long been connected by ties of
blood and friendship. Janet, daughter of David Scott of Branxholm, and Sir
James Douglas of Drumlanrig, by their marriage in the year 1470, became
the common ancestors of the two families. In later days these houses were
still more closely allied. Francis, son of James, Earl of Dalkeith, who
married Henrietta Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Rochester, inherited the
Dukedom of Buccleuch through his grandmother Anna. He in turn married Lady
Jane Douglas, eldest daughter of the second Duke of Queensberry, and thus
the third Duke of Buccleuch succeeded in 1810 to the Queensberry title as
well.
The name of Douglas has
inspired poets, dramatists, and historians, from Scott and Home downwards,
[“Douglas, a name
through all the world renoun’d –
A name that rouses like the trumpet’s
sound! –
Oft have your fathers, prodigal of life,
A Douglas followed through the bloody strife.”
- The
Tragedy of Douglas (Prologue.)]
to the most enthusiastic eulogies in prose and verse,
and an old rhymed saying, long common in the mouths of Scotsmen, declared
that –
“So many, so good as the
Douglasses have been
Of one sirname were never
in Scotland seen.”
An early biographer of the
Douglas family, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, traces
their pedigree as far back as the days of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, the
father of that monarch who pursued Moses with such malignant fidelity.
According to this historian, a certain Gathaleus was the general of
Pharaoh’s troops, who, with the assistance of his lieutenant Sayas,
succeeded in defeating the ever-hostile forces of the Ethiopians. As a
reward for this victory he was given the hand of Pharaoh’s daughter Scota.
Gathaleus and his bride journeyed to Portugal, where they were joined by
the faithful Sayas, and the descendants of these two families eventually
came to Scotland and founded the house of Douglas. [The History and
Martial Achievements of the Houses of Douglas, Angus, and Queensberry,
p. v. (Edinburgh, 1769.)] “I shall add no more,” says this old
chronicler, with an exhibition of self-restraint all the more commendable
in one who obviously possessed so exceptionally vivid an imagination, “but
give me Leave to ask all Christian Kings, Princes, and Noblemen, and the
Flatterers who have wrote their Genealogies, conquests, Exploits and
Battles, if they can produce a family equal in Nobility, antiquity, and
Valour to the House of Douglas?” “What family,” he asks, “ever did,
in Favour of their Country, what the Douglasses have done for the
Honour and Advantage of Scotland?” [Ibid., p.xix]
On the 10th of
March, 1720, Charles Douglas, 3rd Duke of Queensberry, a Privy
Councillor, and Lord of the Bedchamber to George I., married Lady
Catherine Hyde, second daughter of Henry, Lord Hyde, who afterwards
succeeded to the earldoms of Rochester and Clarendon.
Lady Kitty was already one
of the reigning toasts of her day. Her mother, a lovely woman whom Prior
has immortalised as Myra in his Judgment of Venus, bequeathed her
good looks to at least two of her eight children, - to Kitty, whose beauty
was no less famous than her eccentricities, and to Jane, the “Blooming
Hyde, with eyes so rare,” mentioned by Gay in the prologue to his
Shepherd’s Week.
It may be urged that Kitty,
Duchess of Queensberry, has no right to a place in these pages, since she
was not by birth a Scotswoman. Indeed, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was
malicious enough to suggest that she was not even a Hyde, but the daughter
of Lord Carleton, - a calumny for which there does not seem to be the
slightest justification. But if the duchess was not of Scottish birth, her
husband was a Scotsman, and she herself was such a well-known figure in
the society of the Scottish capital that the inclusion of her name in a
list of the notable Scottish women of the past may perhaps be pardoned.
Of the duchess’s early life
there is little record. It is said, on I know not what authority, that she
was at one period confined in a strait-waistcoat, and by her crazy conduct
in later years she certainly seems to have deserved, if she did not
actually obtain, an occasional dose of physical restraint. A whole chapter
could easily be filled with an account of her various eccentricities.
Horace Walpole, who, though he lived to alter his opinion, was not at one
time particularly fond of her, [“Thank God! The Thames is between me
and the Duchess of Queensberry!” – The Letters of Horace Walpole,
Edited by Peter Cunningham, vol. ii. p86. (1857.)] relates a typical
story of her Grace driving off post-haste to Parson’s Green to Lady Sophia
Thomas, bearing news, as she declared, of paramount importance. “What is
it?” asked the astonished Lady Sophia. “Why,” replied the duchess, “take a
couple of beefsteaks, clap them together as if they were for a dumpling,
and eat them with pepper and salt; it’s the best thing you ever tasted: I
couldn’t help coming to tell you!” [Ibid., p.161] And away she
drove back to town! (In this story the duchess reminds one of the
night-watchman in one of Max Adeler’s tales who used to wake people up in
the middle of the night to remark that bananas were the best bait for
cat-fish.) Walpole’s only comment on such conduct is that “a course of
folly makes one very sick!”
At a ball which the duchess
gave at Drumlanrig the guests were all assembled and the band had started
playing when the hostess suddenly declared that she was suffering from a
headache and could not bear the noise. The dancing was stopped then and
there, to the great disgust of the assembled company. Lord Drumlanrig had,
fortunately, some experience of his mother’s peculiarities, and knew how
to deal with them. He at once proceeded to seize the big armchair in which
the duchess was sitting, and ran it violently round the room two or three
times, saying that this was by far the best treatment for a headache.
Whereupon his mother realised the humour of the situation, admitted that
her temporary indisposition was cured, and graciously allowed the dance to
proceed.
The duchess always appears
to have found peculiar scope in the ballroom for a display of her
eccentricities. At a masquerade which she once gave at her house in
London, she had large notices containing regulations as to the conduct of
the dance posted all over the walls, turned half her guests out of the
house at midnight, kept the remainder to supper, and, in short, as Walpole
tells us, “continued to do an agreeable thing in the rudest manner
imaginable.” [The Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. ii. p.86.] On
this occasion, too, she insisted on dressing her husband up in Scottish
costume, which was then – it was only a few years after the Rebellion of
’45 – considered particularly offensive, if not openly disloyal.
She herself made a point of
wearing at all times the garb of a Scottish peasant woman, and was
curiously surprised at the uncomplimentary comment it evoked. [“Everybody’s
eye would strike them that my dress was exactly according to form,” she
writes, “if their ears had not been (by some ill accident or other) used
to hear it unjustly condemned.” – Letters to and from Henrietta,
Countess of Suffolk, vol. ii. p.99] On account of this habit of
hers and edict was issued forbidding ladies to appear at Court in aprons.
The duchess decided, however, to ignore it, and gaily presented herself at
the next Drawing-room attired in her usual simple dress, which, becoming
as it was, must have looked singularly out of place at St. James’s. The
lord-in-waiting on duty attempted to stop her at the door, explaining as
politely as possible that she could not be admitted in an apron. Whereupon
the duchess lost her temper, tore off the offending garment, flung it in
his lordship’s astonished face, and strode into the circle dressed in her
rustic gown and petticoat. Such conduct naturally gave rise to
unflattering criticism.
Again, when in her official
capacity as lady-in-waiting the duchess was present one day in the Queen’s
room while her majesty was dressing, she was suddenly so completely
overcome with the humour of the situation that she was obliged to creep
out of the window on hands and knees, in order to avoid giving way in the
royal presence to an outburst of indecorous laughter. Her breaches of
court etiquette were the result of light-heartedness and a frivolous
disposition; they were not due to lack of education or savoir faire
as in the case of her predecessor, Jane Warburton, Duchess of Argyll. [Jane
was maid of honour to Queen Anne and afterwards to Queen Caroline, and,
though well-born, was very indifferently educated. The removals of the
court from palace to palace were superintended by a state official known
as the “Harbinger.” On one occasion, when the ladies-in-waiting, on a
rumour of a sudden move to Windsor, were consulting together about their
baggage, “Well, for my part,” said Jane, “I shan’t trouble myself. Must
not the ‘Scavenger’ take care of us maids of honour?” Letters and
Journals of Lady Mary Coke, edited by the Hon J.A. Home, vol. iii.
p.423] Lady Mary Coke, in her Journal, gives an account of an
afternoon call paid on her in 1768 by the Duchess of Queensberry, who was
then an elderly woman. Lady Mary happened to remark that she had heard of
her Grace dancing at a ball at Gunnersbury, but had not had the pleasure
of seeing her. “You may see me now,” said the old lady, and immediately
proceeded to skip round the room with amazing agility. [Ibid., vol. ii.
p.345]
The duchess’s practice of
wearing clothes which were unsuited to her rank and position often got her
into trouble at other places besides the Court. She once arrived at a
military review dressed in her customary garb, and on trying to approach
the duke was rudely pushed back into the crowd by one of the sentries who
had naturally failed to recognise the great lady so disguised. Her fury at
this insult was only appeased when her husband promised that a sound
flogging should be administered to every man of the guard as a lesson in
the folly of judging by appearances.
To the end of her life the
duchess remained loyal to the fashion in dress which was in vogue when she
was a girl, and flatly declined to make any change in her costume. Being a
singularly handsome woman, she could afford to be eccentric on this point.
Whitehead the poet, to whom she declared that the frequent alteration in
feminine fashions was merely a lure to catch male attention, admitted this
when he wrote the following verse in reply:-
“Your Grace will contradict
in part
Your own assertion, and my
song,
Whose beauty, undisguised
by art,
Has charmed so much, and
charmed so long.”
The lively Kitty was always
in the very best of spirits –“the cheerful Duchess,” Gay called her [“Yonder
I see the cheerful duchess stand,
For friendship, zeal,
and blithesome humours known.”] – and
combined a strong sense of humour with great tenderness of heart. Many of
her friends had experience of her kindly nature. When old Lady Lichfield
was stricken with blindness, the duchess would go and sit by her bedside
night after night, cheering the invalid with her amusing society and that
ceaseless flow of gossip and anecdote with which her conversation
sparkled. Though a sweet-tempered woman as a rule, there was one thing
that never failed to rouse her righteous indignation. “I declare to you,
she writes in one of her letters to Dean Swift, “nothing ever enlivened me
half so much, as unjust ill-usage, either directed to myself or to my
friends.” This hatred of injustice and oppression caused her to become
involved in the case of the poet Gay when his play Polly was
prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain. She warmly espoused the cause of the
dramatist, and consequently both she and the duke fell into dire disgrace
in high quarters.
Gay had scored a huge
success by his Beggar’s Opera, which was acted in London for
sixty-three nights – a long run in those days – and afterwards scored a
similar triumph in the provinces. The Italian Opera, then at the height of
its popularity, unable to compete with Gay’s rival production, was forced
to close its doors. Such was the enthusiasm evoked by the Beggar’s
Opera that (according to Pope’s notes to the Dunciad) “ladies
carried about with them the favourite songs of it in fans, and houses were
furnished with it in screens.” The actress who took the part of Polly rose
from obscurity to fame, rapidly became the favourite of the town, and her
pictures were engraved – this was long before the days of pictorial
post-cards! – and sold in great numbers. But when the play was published,
certain puritanical persons, notably Dr. Herring, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury, condemned it as vicious and likely to prove subversive of
public morality. The fact that the hero was a highwayman and that he went
unpunished, was, in the eyes of these critics, a distinct encouragement of
vice. When, therefore, Gay wished to produce a sequel entitled Polly,
the authorities declined to license it. The forbidden play was
consequently published by private subscription in 1728, and the Duchess of
Queensberry exerted herself violently on the author’s behalf, even going
so far as to solicit subscriptions within the sacred precincts of St.
James’s. Writing to Swift on the subject of the unsuccessful efforts made
by the duchess to have the embargo removed from his play, Gay says that
she was allowed to have shown “more spirit, more honour and more goodness,
more understanding and good sense” than was thought possible in those
times. [The Works of Jonathan Swift, edited by W. Scott, vol. xvii.
P.269 (Edin., 1814)]
So anxious was the duchess
to secure a licence for her poet that she even offered to read the play to
King George in his closet, so as to satisfy his Majesty that there was no
harm in it. But the King laughingly declined this offer, saying that he
would be delighted to receive her Grace in his closet, but hoped to amuse
her there better than by the literary employment she proposed. [Ibid.,
vol. xvii. P.199]
At last, owing to her
continued importunity, the duchess was forbidden to appear at court. This
punishment she accepted with her usual cheerfulness. When Lord Hervey said
to her that, now she was banished, the palace had lost its chief ornament,
“I am entirely of your mind,” she replied. [The Autobiography and
Correspondence of Mrs. Delaney, edited by Lady Llanover (1862), vol. i.
p.199] And to the Vice-Chamberlain, whose duty it was to inform her
that his Majesty had reluctantly determined to dispense with her society,
she wrote a most spirited and characteristic letter. “The Duchess of
Queensberry is surprised and well pleased,” she wrote, “that the King hath
given her so agreeable a command as to stay from Court, where she never
came for diversion, but to bestow a civility on the King and Queen; she
hopes by such an unprecedented order as this is that the King will see as
few as he wishes at his Court, particularly such as dare to think or speak
truth. I dare not do otherwise, and ought not nor could have imagined that
it would not have been the very highest compliment that I could possibly
pay the King to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house,
particularly when the King and Queen both told me that they had not read
Mr. Gay’s play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own
words, rather than his Grace of Grafton’s, who hath neither made use of
truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either
for himself or his friends.” [Autobiography of Mrs. Delaney, vol. i.
p.194.]
The Duke of Queensberry
also sided with Gay in this affair, and showed his disapproval of the
position taken up by the King by resigning all his appointments. Including
that of Vice-Admiral of Scotland. He shortly afterwards attached himself
to Frederick, Prince of Wales, then in opposition to the King, and was
appointed one of his Royal Highness’s Lords of the Bedchamber.
The persecuted Gay was
invited to take up his quarters with the Queensberry family, and spent the
remainder of his life under their protection. At “Jenny’s Ha’,” a famous
Edinburgh tavern opposite Queensberry House, the poet might often be seen
in the company of Allan Ramsay and other congenial cronies. The duke
undertook the management of his financial affairs; the duchess nursed him
when he was ill, and both of them treated him, as he says in one of his
letters, as though he had been their nearest relation or their dearest
friend. [Swift’s Works, vol. xvii. P.268.] He became
secretary to the duchess, and no doubt helped her to manage the little
theatre which she had fitted up in Queensberry House, where dramatic
performances were frequently given for the entertainment of her guests.
In 1739, ten years after
the Polly affair, the duchess once again came into collision with
the authorities, when she headed a party of intrepid ladies who
successfully stormed the gallery of the House of Lords. The Peers had
unanimously resolved to exclude ladies from a gallery which had long been
assigned to their use, but was now kept for members of the House of
Commons. But a number of fearless dames, led by the Duchess of Queensberry
in person, presented themselves at nine o’clock one morning at the door of
the House and peremptorily demanded the right of entrance. Sir William
Saunderson, the official on duty, politely informed the deputation that
the Lord Chancellor had issued an order forbidding their admittance, and
that it was consequently impossible for his to let them in. Vainly did the
duchess cajole and wheedle; the obdurate Black Rod declined to change his
mind. When at last she tried the effect of threats, Sir William lost his
temper and said that “By G-! they should never enter the House!” The
duchess replied with equal indignation that “By G-! they would, in
spite of the Lord Chancellor and the whole House of Peers!” Sir William
reported this altercation to the Chancellor, and it was determined to keep
the doors shut, and thus starve the ladies into submission or induce them
to give up and go home. These inexorable females were not, however, to be
got rid of so easily. They sent out to an adjacent cookshop, procured a
supply of provisions, and manfully stood their ground from nine in the
morning till five o’clock at night. By this time, of course, a huge crowd
had gathered to watch the fun, and, while some of its members jeered at
the ladies, others urged them to continue the siege, and even encouraged
them by thumping loudly upon the doors of the House. Seeing that violent
methods were not likely to prove effective, and having perhaps more regard
for decorum than those modern “suffragettes” whose methods they to a
certain extent anticipated, the duchess and her friends determined to
accomplish their purpose by means of a ruse. They accordingly made up
their minds to keep perfectly silent for the space of half-an-hour – a
task which would tax the powers of endurance of the least garrulous of
their descendants. At the end of this period the Chancellor, unaccustomed
to such self-control on the part of the fair sex, came to the conclusion
that the besieging party had gone home. He thereupon ordered the door to
be opened, and the ladies, who had been awaiting this opportunity with
exemplary patience, rushed in immediately, took possession of the gallery,
and celebrated their victory in a thoroughly feminine and illogical
fashion by interrupting the debate with laughter and conversation.
[Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by Lord
Wharncliffe, vol. ii. p.37. (1861.)]
When Gay died, [A.D.
1732. (“Unpensioned with a hundred friends.” –The Dunciad.)] the
duchess, who had long been his best friend was very deeply affected. “It
is not possible to imagine the loss his death is to me,” she wrote, “but
as long as I have any memory, the happiness of ever having such a friend
can never be lost to me.” [Swift’s Works, vol. xviii. P.151.]
And again, two years later, “I often want poor Mr. Gay,” she says; “his
loss was really great, but it is a satisfaction to have once known so good
a man.” [Life of Alexander Pope, by P. Carruthers, p.300. (1862)]
The poet died in the Duke of Queensberry’s house, and was honoured by a
magnificent funeral at his patron’s expense. On his tomb in Westminster
Abbey was engraved, by his own express desire, the famous if frivolous
couplet from one of his letters to Pope:-
“Life is a jest, and all
things show it;
I thought so once, and now
I know it.”
And the duchess induced the author of the Dunciad
to write a suitable epitaph for the monument which she erected in the
Abbey to her favourite’s memory.
The Queensberrys were
eventually pardoned for their share in the affair of Gay and his forbidden
drama, and in 1747 we hear of the duchess once more attending the Court.
[Autobiography of Mrs. Delaney, ii. p.469.] She was also present at
a royal party given in 1749 by the Duke of Cumberland at Richmond, where
Walpole met her, “in the middle of all the principalities and powers,” in
her usual “forlorn trim, white apron and white hood.” [Walpole’s
Letters, ii. p.161.] When George III. ascended the throne the
reinstatement of the Queensberrys to royal favour was complete. The duke
regained his seat on the Privy Council, and was appointed Keeper of the
Great Seal of Scotland, and, later on, Lord Justice-General. The Queen
paid a visit to the duchess, who in turn appeared at a Drawing-room – for
the first time for forty years – in such high spirits that she could not
resist committing many minor breaches of court etiquette.
The excitement occasioned
at this time by the famous “Douglas Cause” was shaking society to its very
foundations. Public feeling ran high, especially between the kinsmen and
supporters of the houses of Hamilton and Douglas, who were now called upon
to range themselves behind the chiefs of their respective families. When
the Duke of Douglas died in 1761, his estates, devolved upon his nephew
Archibald, the only surviving son of Lady Jane Douglas. But the Duke of
Hamilton, suspecting that this was a suppositious child, endeavoured to
assail his claims, and affirmed that Archibald was not the son of Lady
Jane at all. The case lasted for seven years, and during this time the
excitement as to the issue of the trial was intense both in Edinburgh and
London. Home, the dramatist, attributes the failure of his play, The
Fatal Discovery, to the lack of public interest in anything but the
Douglas Cause, [Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle, p.509] his
former tragedy, Douglas, having been so popular as to evoke from an
excited Scotsman in the gallery the celebrated remark: “Whaur’s your
Wullie Shakespeare noo?” The Douglas Cause was indeed for a long time the
only topic of conversation in Edinburgh, and elicited the most violent
expressions of opinion from quite unexpected quarters. The old
Dowager-Countess of Stair, one of the most interesting characters in
Edinburgh society, round whose personality Walter Scott built his story of
Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, was as staunch a supporter of the Douglas
family as the Duchess of Queensberry herself. In the evidence adduced at
the trial was an account given by Sir John Stewart of Castlemilk of Lady
Stair coming into a room in the Duke of Hamilton’s house with a letter in
her hand from the Earl of Dundonald in which he accused her of saying that
the children of Lady Jane Douglas were fictitious. The old lady was
terribly excited, and struck the floor three times with her stick, with
every stroke calling the Earl a “d------d villain.” [This Lady Stair
must not be confused with Margaret, Viscountess Stair, who died in 1692,
and was suspected by the public of possessing necromantic powers. She,
too, was an eccentric woman, and ordained in her will that her body should
not be buried, but should stand upright in her coffin, promising that as
long as it remained in that position the Dalrymples should continue to
flourish. (See Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland, vol. iii.
p47.) To this Lady Stair is attributed the witty reply to Graham of
Claverhouse, (commonly pronounced Clavers), the persecutor of the
Covenanters, who had been inveighing against John Knox. “Why are ye so
severe?” asked the old lady. “Ye are both reformers. He gained his
point by clavers (talk) while you attempt to gain yours by Knocks!” (Sir
Walter Scott tells this story in Old Mortality, making old Lady
Elphinstone the heroine of it.)]
The claims of Archibald
Douglas were finally upheld by the House of Lords, and the Duchess of
Queensberry signalised this family triumph by giving a ball to all her
supporters in her house in London. This entertainment was a very
magnificent and successful affair. Lord Camden, the Lord Chancellor,
invited himself, and afterwards wrote to the duchess asking permission to
come in person and thank her for having sent an invitation to his wife and
daughters, who were unable to be present. To this request the duchess sent
the laconic reply: “Catherine Queensberry says ‘Content upon her honour,’”
that being the form of assent given by the Peers at the close of the great
case. [Lady Mary Coke’s Journal, vol. iii. p.40]
The duchess was not always
so polite to those of her guests who tried to thrust their society upon
her. She once told Lady Di Egerton, daughter of the Duchess of Bridgwater,
that she would give a dance in her honour. But when the ball invitations
were sent out, none reached the expectant Lady Di. Thereupon some member
of the girl’s family wrote to her Grace to point out this neglect, which
was obviously and oversight, and received the following stinging reply:-
“The advertisement came to
hand: it was very pretty and very ingenious; but everything that is pretty
and ingenious does not always succeed: the Duchess of Q. piques herself on
her house not being unlike Socrates’s; his was small and held all his
friends; hers is large, but will not hold half of hers; postponed, but not
forgot; unalterable.” [Walpole’s Letters, ii. p.241]
The Duchess could, indeed,
be extremely rude if she thought that the conduct of her acquaintances
required correction. Her comments could be as biting, as caustic, and as
satirical as those of old Lady Rosslyn herself. [Lady Rosslyn was “at
home” to her friends one afternoon when a rather notorious woman was
announced. Immediately several of her guests rose to go. “Sit still, sit
still,” said the old lady, “it is na catching!”] When paying an
afternoon call, if in her opinion the tea-set of her hostess was too
extravagant, the duchess would upset it on the floor, as though by
accident, and break it. Ladies who came to see her in Scotland, dressed in
their best clothes, would be taken for long walks through the dirtiest
lanes she could find, and at the end of the afternoon the duchess would
suddenly seat herself on a convenient manure-heap and invite her guests to
sit beside her, which some of them, out of sheer fright, consented to do.
At Queensberry House, in
the Canongate, Edinburgh, and at Drumlanrig Castle, in Dumfriesshire, the
duchess spent much of her time. Both houses had been built by the first
duke, and eccentric individual, who only slept one night at Drumlanrig,
and is said to have left the bills for the building of that place tied up
with an inscription: “The Deil pyke out his een that looks therein!” [Chambers’s
Traditions of Edinburgh.] In connection with Queensberry House –
where, after Prince Charlie’s victorious entry into Edinburgh during the
’45, the loyal officers were imprisoned, and which is now a Refuge for the
Destitute – a horrible story is told of the idiot son of James, 2nd
Duke of Queensberry, one of the main instruments in carrying out the Union
of England and Scotland. On the day that the Bill for the Union was
passed, all Edinburgh went to the Parliament Close to hear the result of
the debate. The idiot Lord Drumlanrig was left behind, with nobody to look
after him but a little scullery-boy. On the return of the family to
Queensberry House, they were horrified to discover the wretched maniac
engaged in cooking the boy, whom he was roasting on one of the kitchen
spits.
The duchess was devoted to
her Scottish homes, but did not altogether approve of Scottish manners.
One practice in particular – equally prevalent at that time in England –
she especially detested. This was the dangerous and unattractive habit
which some of her guests indulged in of conveying food from their plates
to their mouths with a knife in place of a fork. “I have not met with any
one in this country,” she writes to Lady Suffolk, in 1734, from Edinburgh,
“who doth not eat with a knife, and drink a dish of tea.” [Letters
to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, vol. ii. p.67. (1824.)
Gay wrote to Swift in 1727, when the latter had been invited to Amesbury,
begging him for the duchess’s sake to put his fork to all its proper uses,
and “suffer nobody for the future to put their knives in their mouths.” [Swift’s
Works, xviii. P.137.] Swift, in replying, asked Gay to tell her
Grace that he always thought of her when he dined, although it was
difficult to obey her injunctions when the forks had only two prongs and
the sauce was not “very consistent.” He received many invitations to stay
with the duchess – a “lady of excellent sense and spirits,” as he tells
Pope – whom he had not seen since she was a girl of five; but was never
able to avail himself of them. Kitty and her secretary used to collaborate
in a most amusing correspondence with Swift. Gay would concoct the main
body of the letter, to which the duchess added a piquant postscript. She
was always pressing her correspondent to pay her a visit, declaring
herself convinced that hostess and guest would get on well together. “The
duke is very much yours,” she writes, as a further inducement to the
convivial dean, “and will never leave you to your wine!” – a
reference probably to a habit of the parsimonious Pope, who would produce
a pint of wine for two guests, help himself to a couple of glasses, and
then retire, saying, “Gentlemen, I leave you to your wine!” [Life of
Alexander Pope, p.409.]
In 1731 we find the duchess
once more urging Swift to visit her. “I only love my own way,” she says,
“when I meet not with others whose ways I like better. I am in great hopes
that I shall approve of yours; for, to tell you the truth, I am at present
a little tired of my own. I have not a clear or distinct voice, except
when I am angry; but I am a very good nurse, when people do not fancy
themselves sick… Pray set out the first fair wind, and stay with us as
long as ever you please… If I do not happen to like you,” she adds, with
characteristic candour, “I know I can so far govern my temper as to endure
you for about five days.” [Swift’s Works, xvii. p.409] Later
on in the same year she again writes to him, with the assurance that
though she is “neither healthy nor young,” she manages to keep up her
spirits and lives as simply as possible. She has no objection to his
talking nonsense, she declares, provided he does it on purpose; for “there
is some sense in nonsense, when it does not come by chance.” [Ibid.,
xvii. p.407.] In spite of these constant lures, Swift declined to
renew his early acquaintance with the duchess, save through the
unsatisfactory medium of the post.
As a girl the beautiful
Kitty had wrung a thousand eulogistic verses from the pens of all the
poets of the day, from Pope,
[“The exactest tricks of
body or of mind,
We owe to models of an
humble kind.
If Queensbury to strip
there’s no compelling,
‘Tis from a handmaid we
must take a Helen.”
-Moral Essays.]
to Congreve. Prior described her début in society in a
poem which is as well known as anything he wrote:-
THE FEMALE PHAETON
Thus Kitty, beautiful and
young,
And wild as colt untam’d,
Bespoke the fair from
whence she sprung,
With little rage inflam’d:
Inflam’d with rage at sad
restraint,
Which wise mamma ordain’d;
And sorely vext to play the
saint,
Whilst wit and beauty
reign’d:
“Shall I thumb holy books,
confin’d
With Abigails forsaken?
Kitty’s for other things
design’d,
Or I am much mistaken.
“Must Lady Jenny frisk
about,
And visit all her cousins?
At balls must she make all
the rout,
And bring home hearts by
dozens>
“What has she better, pray,
than I,
What hidden charms to
boast,
That all mankind for her
should die:
Whilst I am scarce a toast?
“Dearest mamma! for once
let me,
Unchain’d my fortune try;
I’ll have an Earl as well
as she, [Lady Jane Hyde married the Earl of Essex.]
Or know the reason why.
“I’ll soon with Jenny’s
pride quit score,
Make all her lovers fall;
They’ll grieve I was not
loos’d before;
She, I was loos’d at all.”
Fondness prevail’d, mamma
gave way;
Kitty, at heart’s desire,
Obtain’d the chariot for a
day,
And set the world on fire.
To this Horace Walpole, who
in later life took a kindly view of the duchess, added an extra verse:-
“To many a Kitty, Love his
car
Would for a day engage;
But Prior’s Kitty, ever
young,
Obtained it for an age.”
He describes her in 1773,
when she was an old woman, as looking “more blooming than the
Maccaronesses,” and says that by twilight she would be mistaken for a
young beauty of an old-fashioned century rather than an “antiquated
goddess of this age.” [Walpole’s Letters, vol. v. p.477.] He
was drinking her Grace’s health one day, and by way of a toast said that
he wished she might live to grow ugly. “I hope then,” she replied at once,
“that you will keep your taste for antiquities.” [Autobiography of Mrs.
Delaney.]
At the age of seventy the
duchess was still so young at heart that she was always to be seen
wherever there was a lighted candle, and would go ten miles to a party.
And to the end of her life she continued those eccentricities of dress and
conduct which rendered her such a conspicuous figure wherever she went.
Like old Lady Stair, the first person in Edinburgh to keep a black
servant, the duchess had a negro page-boy whom she taught to ride and
fence, and indeed spoilt in every conceivable way.
There is a picture of her
as a milkmaid by Jervas in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which
depicts her as a remarkably handsome woman, and though she contracted
smallpox in her youth, that then universal disease left no mark upon her
complexion. In her old age neither beauty nor high spirits forsook her. We
may get some idea of the clothes she was in the habit of wearing from a
description given by Mrs. Delaney. [Autobiography, ii. p.147.] In
this we read that the duchess’s dress was of “white satin embroidered, the
bottom of the petticoat brown hills covered with all sorts of
weeds” – (except, of course, widow’s weeds) – “and every breadth had
an old stump of a tree that ran up almost to the top of the petticoat,
… round which twined nastersians, ivy, honeysuckles, periwinkles,
convolvuluses and all sorts of twining flowers which spread and covered
the petticoat, vines with the leaves variegated as you have seen them by
the sun…” and so on. She must, in fact, have looked more like a cross
between a hothouse and a herbaceous border than a woman of fashion, and it
is not to be wondered at that her appearance formed the subject of general
comment.
The Duchess of Queensberry
had two children, neither of whom survived her. Henry, Earl of Drumlanrig,
her eldest son, was a soldier who served in two campaigns under the Earl
of Stair, and in another under Charles Emanuel, King of Sardinia, when he
particularly distinguished himself at the siege of Coni. In 1747 he
obtained a commission authorising him to raise a regiment of Highlanders
for service in Holland. His death was a tragic affair which affected his
mother profoundly. In 1754, a short time after his marriage, he was
travelling to Scotland in company with the duke and duchess and his
newly-wedded bride, when, owing to the accidental discharge of a pistol,
he shot himself, and succumbed almost immediately. His death was followed
two years later by that of his younger brother Charles.
The duchess lived till the
year 1777, when, if we are to believe Walpole, [Letters, vi. p.461.]
she died of a surfeit of cherries. He compares her death to that of the
old Countess of Desmond who “died of robbing a walnut tree,” and declares
that the duchess’s beauty at the age of seventy-seven was as extraordinary
as that of the countess at one hundred and forty. [Walpole declares
that at the coronation of George III. she still “looked well in her
milk-white locks,” and that “her affectation that day was to do
nothing preposterous.”]
The character of this
remarkable woman, who is said to have exercised a strong influence over
Pitt and the other statesmen of her day, cannot be better indicated than
by a quotation from one of her own letters.
“If any body has done me an
injury,” she says, “they have hurt themselves more than me. If they give
me an ill name (unless they have my help) I shall not deserve it. If fools
shun my company, it is because I am not like them; if people make me
angry, they only raise my spirits; and if they wish me ill, I will be well
and handsome, wise and happy, and everything, except a day younger than I
am, and that is a fancy I never yet saw becoming to man or woman, so it
cannot excite envy.” [Swift’s Works, xviii. P.70.] |
