Thornton Hall

“ And when the quaking Duke presented himself before his brother as he was moodily walking in his palace garden, George was in no mood to accept quietly any addition to his burden of worries.
No sooner had the King read the ill-spelled, clumsily-worded note which the Duke shamefacedly placed in his hand than his anger blazed into flame. "You idiot! You blockhead! You villain!" he shouted, purple in face and hoarse with passion. "I tell you that woman shall never be a Royal Duchess—she shall never be anything." "What must I do, then?" gasped the Duke, quailing before the Royal outburst. ”

“ As a young girl the Lady Sarah needed no such rich dower as was hers to commend her to the eyes of wooers. From the Fanes she inherited a full share of the beauty for which their women were noted, and to it she added many charms of her own. She had a figure, tall, commanding, and of exquisite grace, eyes blue as violets, a luxuriant crown of dark hair, and a complexion pure and beautiful as a lily.
It is little wonder that a young lady so dowered with gold and good looks should attract lovers by the score, all anxious to win so fair a prize. ”

“ He was, indeed, a man after her own heart, the beau ideal of a cavalier; a lover, like herself, of pomp and splendour, a past-master of the arts of pageantry and pleasure, and the owner of a tongue as skilled in the language of adroit flattery as in the use of honeyed words. Such was Robert Dudley who loved his Queen; and such the Queen who returned undisguised admiration for flattery, and love for love. ”

“ To such a child cradled in a palace and hedged round by ceremonial, Sarah Jennings, with the superabundant health and vitality of a country-bred girl, was an ideal playmate; and before many days had passed the timid, clinging Princess was the very slave of the vivacious, romping, strong-willed daughter of the squire. Thus was begun that union between the strong and the weak, which in later years was to make Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, virtual Queen of England, while her childish playfellow, Anne, wore the crown. ”

“ It was destined, however, that a prize which had so long eluded the handsomest gallants in England should fall at last to one of the most insignificant of all Charles's courtiers, a man who had neither good looks, intellect, nor character to commend him to a lady's favour. Such a gilded nonentity was Charles Stuart, Duke of Richmond and of Lennox, who, having buried two wives, now began to cast envious eyes on the maid-of-honour whom his Sovereign could not win. ”

“ That a maiden so dowered with charms and riches should have an army of suitors in her train was inevitable. A lovely wife who would one day inherit nearly a million of money was surely the most covetable prize in England; and, it is said, the bewitching heiress had more than one coronet laid at her feet before she had well left her school-books. But to all these offers, dazzling enough to a merchant's daughter, Elizabeth turned a deaf, if dainty ear. "It is not me they want," she would laughingly say, "but my father's money. I shall live and die, like the good Queen, my namesake, a maid." ”

“ But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose morals—the gaunt girl, with her plain, sallow face, was a vision of beauty. ”

“ But even Dublin was no suitable market for such peerless beauties, Mrs Gunning decided. Through her they had the blood of the Plantagenets in their veins; and no man less than a Duke or an Earl—certainly not an Irish squire or impoverished lord—was a fitting match for her daughters. And so to England and London they were carried, flushed with their conquests, leaving broken hearts behind them, and heralded across the Channel by many a sonnet singing their beauty. ”

“ So George made her Baroness of Glastonbury, Countess of Feversham, and Duchess of Kendal. And, to crown her ambition for such baubles, he induced the pliant German Emperor to make her a Princess—of Eberstein. Thus, with coffers overflowing with ill-gotten gold, her towering head graced with a dazzling variety of coronets, this grim idol of a King, who at sixty was as much her slave as in the twenties, was the proudest woman in England, patronising our own Duchesses, and snubbing Peeresses of less degree. ”

“ But if Lady Sarah's shyness had cost her the King's favour, her beauty and girlish grace quickly won for her another Royal friend—none other than George's grandson and heir to the throne, then a handsome boy little older than herself, and at least equally diffident. Every time the young Prince saw her he became more and more her slave, until his conquest was complete. He was only happy by her side; while she found her dogs and squirrels more entertaining company than the King-to-be.
Lady Sarah was now blossoming into young womanhood. Every year added some fresh touch of beauty and grace. ”

“ At sight of the fair Nightingale in the Assembly Rooms this hero of many conquests was himself laid low. He was frantically in love, and before many days had passed vowed that he would shoot himself if his charmer refused to smile on him. Her coldness only fanned his ardour; and his persecution reached such a pitch that in her alarm she appealed to young Sheridan for help.
Nothing could have been more fortunate for the young lover than such an appeal and the necessity for it. ”

“ The Bath season was England's carnival, when cares and ceremonial alike were thrown to the winds, when the pleasure of the moment was the only ambition worth pursuing, and when even the prudish found a fearful joy in playing hide-and-seek with vice.
But although the fairest women in the land flocked to Bath, by common consent not one of them all was so beautiful and bewitching as Elizabeth Ann Linley, the girl-nightingale, whose voice entranced the ear daily at the Assembly Rooms concerts as her loveliness feasted the eye. ”

“ The daughter of an Irish nobleman played to perfection her new and exalted rôle of Princess. "No woman of her time," says Lord Hervey, "performed the honours of her drawing-room with such grace, affability, and dignity." And, in spite of George's frowns, the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the Duchess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress, was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court all the greatest in the land. ”

“ Never had maid been so cruelly treated by man! After spurning Churchill for months, returning nothing to his ardour and homage but a disdainful shoulder or a gibe, the moment he dares to turn his eyes on any other divinity she is the most outraged woman who ever staked happiness on a man's constancy. But at least her anger served the purpose of bringing Churchill back to his allegiance more promptly than smiles could have done. ”

“ As for the mother, weary and disillusioned, she rambled aimlessly and miserably about the Continent until, after nine years of unhappiness, death came to her at Paris as a merciful friend. Such was the sordid close of a life that had opened as fairly as any that has fallen to the lot of woman.
And what of the child who drew from her mother royal and ducal strains, and from her father the blood of stablemen and peasants? At the Rouen convent she grew up to girlhood, perfectly happy, among the nuns she learned to love. ”

“ Seldom has a woman's spell worked such quick magic—never has the love it gave birth to proved more loyal and enduring.
But Sarah Jennings was no maid to be easily won by any man—even by a lover so dowered with physical graces and so invested with the halo of romance as John Churchill. She knew all about his heroism on battlefields; she knew also of that little incident in a palace boudoir, and of many another youthful peccadillo of the gallant young colonel. ”

“ Three weeks before Maria Gunning blossomed into a Countess her younger sister Betty had been led to the altar under much more romantic conditions, after one of the most rapid and impetuous wooings in the annals of Love. A few weeks before she wore her wedding-ring, the man who was to win her was not even known to her by sight; and what she had heard of him was by no means calculated to impress her in his favour. The Duke of Hamilton, while still young, had won for himself a very unenviable notoriety as a debauchee in an age of profligacy. ”

“ The marriage day had actually been fixed when a letter was placed in Lady Jean's hand, when on her way to the Court—a letter in which the Earl claimed his release as he no longer loved her. That the letter was a clever forgery never occurred to Lady Jean, who was so crushed by it that it is said she fled in disguise to France to hide her shame and her humiliation. Such was the tragic ending to Lady Jean's first romance, which gave her such a distrust of man and such a distaste for matrimony that for thirty years she vowed she would listen to no avowal of love, however tempting. ”

“ It would have been strange if this blue-blooded "rolling-stone" had been a normal man, since he had for mother that most wayward and eccentric woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who dazzled England by her beauty and brilliant intellect, and amused it by her oddities in the days of the first two Georges. This grandson of the Duke of Kingston, and great-grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich was "his mother's boy"—with much of his mother's physical and mental charms, and more than her eccentricities, as his story abundantly proves. ”

“ And yet, before she had worn her Countess's coronet a year, she had made herself notorious, even in Charles II.'s abandoned Court, for passions which would ruthlessly crush any obstacle in the way of their indulgence. Lover after lover, high-placed and base-born indifferently, succeeded one another in her fickle favour, as Catherine the Great's favourites trod one on the heels of the other, each in turn to be flung contemptuously aside to make room for a more favoured rival. ”

“ A member of an ancient family, whose women had ever been distinguished for their virtue as its men for their valour, the Chelsea infant was destined to shock Society by the laxity of her morals as she dazzled it by her beauty and charm, and to make herself conspicuous, in an age none too strait-laced, as an adventuress of rare skill and daring, and as a profligate in petticoats. ”

“ If on that day Squire Richard had been told that his baby-girl would live to wear a Duchess's coronet and to be the bosom-friend and counsellor of a Queen of England, he would have laughed aloud; and yet Fate had this and more in waiting for Sarah Jennings in the years to come. The Squire himself professed to be no more than a plain country-gentleman, who knew as much as any man about horses and the management of acres, but knew no more of courts and coronets than of the man in the moon. ”

“ When Barbara Villiers was enslaving Charles by her opulent charms, the queen of his many mistresses, Frances Stuart was growing to beautiful girlhood, an exile at the French Court, with no dream or care of her future conquest of a king. Her father, a son of Lord Blantyre, had carried his death-dealing sword through many a fight for the first Charles, a distant kinsman of his own; and, when the Stuart sun set in blood, had made good his escape to the friendly shores of France, where he had found a fresh field for his valour. ”

“ Brougham was himself a constant and a welcome guest, and the men he met there ranged from Prince Louis Napoleon, then an exile without a prospect of a crown, and the Duke of Wellington to Albert Smith and Douglas Jerrold—so wide was the net of Lady Blessington's hospitality. And all paid the same glowing tribute, not only to their hostess's loveliness but to the warmth of heart, which was one of her greatest charms. ”