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From the writings of
seventeenth-century historians one might imagine their world to have been
a stage devoted exclusively to the performance of melodrama. They have
invested their subject with all the conventional characteristics of that
sensational form of art. Their heroes and heroines are so heroic as to be
scarcely human; their villains and adventuresses are of the most lurid
type. To that front row of stalls from which they viewed the play, the
villain’s raven hair no doubt suggested the blackness of his heart; the
character of the adventuress seemed no less scarlet than her lips. The
very proximity of the spectator exaggerated the virtues or defects of the
various characters, as in a theatre it enhances the redness of the low
comedian’s nose and makes the “heavy father” still more ponderous.
If contemporary critics
were too close to the footlights, we, on the other hand, are certainly too
far off to appreciate the charm of subtle effects or delicate
characterisation. Distance may lend enchantment; it supplies perhaps the
advantage of a truer perspective. But to bring the scene closer there is
nothing left save to have recourse to the imagination, at best an
unsatisfactory opera-glass. Only in imagination can we note the emotions
of the principal actors or follow them beyond the limits of that narrow
proscenium within whose bounds history has confined their movements. Some
intimate diarist, and Evelyn or a Pepys, may bid us accompany him to the
players’ dressing-rooms behind the stage; even so, the knowledge that we
gain is but scanty, the glimpse too often misleading. For if the modern
historian is occasionally prejudiced in his views, how much more so must
the contemporary chronicler have been, living as he did in an age when a
fair, unbiased eye and an open mind were not considered qualifications
essential for the writer of history. While the essayist of today may twist
his facts into the shape he requires to prove a paradox – that Henry VIII.
was a perfect lover, or Mary Queen of Scots a model wife – he does not,
like the bygone historian, cherish any personal grudge which can only be
paid off at the expense of truth.
In the seventeenth century,
on the other hand, the chronicler did not suffer from the modern weakness
of being able to see both sides of a question. Consequently, whatever his
descriptions lost in fairness, they gained in strength. He painted his
patrons in broad, heroic colours; his foes he portrayed in harsh outline,
black as silhouettes, and with as little of suggestion or detail. Small
wonder, then, if we find it difficult to form any accurate mental picture
of many of the great personages of the past who are shown to us in such
exaggerated colours. A great deal has been written about some of them, and
yet how little do we really know of any single one. Take, for instance,
the case of Elizabeth, Duchess of Lauderdale, a woman who attained to
greater power and position than any other woman (not of royal blood) in
the whole history of Scotland. What do we learn of her private life, of
her real ambitions, of her best side, from the writings of her
contemporaries? Practically nothing. Bishop Burnet has, indeed, left a
very full sketch of her character as it appeared to him. But his drawing
is in many senses a caricature; it is everywhere coloured with the
author’s prejudice and personal spite. Since that time other writers have
for the most part been content to make slavish copies of the bishop’s
portrait, if anything deepening its shadows, certainly imbuing it with no
fresh colour.
It is idle to suppose that
a woman of so much character and determination, possessed of such ability
and strength of purpose, could have been altogether bad. There must have
been good points about her character which her contemporaries had neither
the grace nor the desire to see. Yet it is nowhere suggested that the
Duchess of Lauderdale was blessed with a single redeeming quality. It is
only when we search her private correspondence that we can discover a
faint trace of that softer side which nature did not deny to her any more
than to less hardened and unscrupulous individuals.
Elizabeth Murray was the
elder daughter of William Murray, 1st Earl of Dysart, by his
wife Catherine Bruce, a member of the Clackmannan family. Lord Dysart was
of comparatively humble birth, being the son of a Fifeshire minister.
Educated by his uncle, Thomas Murray, at one time tutor to Prince Charles,
he became in turn “whipping boy” to and intimate friend of the young
prince, who showed his gratitude to the victim of his vicarious
punishments by eventually appointing him to be one of his
gentlemen-of-the-bedchamber. Perhaps the memory of those early
flagellations which he had suffered in Prince Charles’s stead rankled in
William’s breast when he grew up. At any rate he repaid his master’s
kindness by selling his secrets to Parliament for a sum of forty thousand
merks, and in many other ways betrayed the trust which the King was so
unwise as to repose in him. William Murray was, in fact, an ignoble
character, unworthy of either confidence or affection, and his nature was
not in any way improved by his being created Earl of Dysart in 1643. One
single good quality he possessed. Though in his sober moments he was
outspoken and indiscreet, in his cups he became at once reticent and
reserved. Luckily, he was generally drunk.
Lord Dysart had planned a
marriage between his eldest daughter and her cousin Sir Robert Murray, one
of the most high-principled and capable men of his time. [A famous
scientist and first President of the Royal Society.] Elizabeth,
however, held other views on the subject of matrimony. She scorned Sir
Robert, and in 1647, married Sir Lionel Tollemache (or Talmash), the head
of an old and much-respected Suffolk family. Three years later, when her
father died, she succeeded to his title as Countess of Dysart. [It was
not until 1670, however, that the title was confirmed by royal charter and
settled on any of her issue whom she might appoint as heir.]
Historians inform us that
Lady Dysart was a very beautiful woman. And though they have a kindly
habit of attributing beauty to all women of title, their praise on this
occasion would seem to be based upon a solid foundation of truth. She was,
moreover, exceedingly witty, a vivacious talker, a keen observer, with an
acute mind and a still sharper tongue. Her education had certainly not
been neglected, for we are told that she had studied not only divinity and
history, but mathematics and philosophy as well. [Douglas’s
Peerage.]
Lady Dysart’s moral
character was not, unluckily, on a par with her mental qualities. Even in
an age when feminine frailty was the rule rather than the exception, she
gained an unenviable notoriety for the looseness of her conduct. With the
Duchess of Cleveland, [“A woman of great beauty, but most enormously
vicious and ravenous.” Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times,
p.62.] the Duchess of Portsmouth, and a score of other ladies of
undoubted beauty but doubtful reputation who flourished at the court of
Charles II., she helped to lower the general tone of public and private
life. And it was with the assistance and encouragement of such women that
Charles finally left the nation, as Roger Coke asserts, “more vitiated and
debauched in its manners than ever it was by any other king.”
Scandal linked Lady
Dysart’s name with that of many of the most prominent men of her day. It
was even said that Oliver Cromwell himself was not proof against her
blandishments. [May 12, 1677. . . went to visit the Duke and Duchess of
Lauderdale, at their fine house at Ham. After dinner her Grace entertained
me in her Chamber with much Discourse upon Affairs of State. She had been
a beautiful Woman, the supposed Mistress of Oliver Cromwell, and at that
time a lady of great parts.” – Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, p.49.
(1734.)] She was certainly on intimate terms with him, and while that
rigid old Puritan was in Scotland the safety of many of the countess’s
friends was due to her personal intercession. Among those who owed their
lives to such influences was John Maitland, 2nd Earl of
Lauderdale. He had been taken prisoner at Worcester, and, but for her
interference, would probably have perished on the scaffold. Lauderdale had
long been Lady Dysart’s lover, which was sufficient reason to account for
her interest on his behalf. But she seems to have been disappointed that
his gratitude for her favours was not as overwhelming as she expected, and
at the Restoration a coolness sprang up between the two which led to a
temporary break of some years’ duration in their intimacy.
On the death of Sir Lionel
Tollemache in France in 1669 the countess and Lauderdale were reconciled,
a fact which caused so much uneasiness to poor Lady Lauderdale that she
hastened to Paris, where she promptly died. One of the characters in Oscar
Wilde’s most brilliant farce declares that to express a desire to be
buried in Paris hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the
last; but; in spite of this, one may assume that the first Lady Lauderdale
was a very serious-minded and, indeed, a melancholy woman. Anne, daughter
of the 1st Earl of Home, had been systematically ill-treated by
Lauderdale ever since her marriage with him. He would certainly appear to
have been a most disagreeable husband. At one time he was making love to
the pious Lady Margaret Kennedy, [A keen Presbyterian, “whose religion
exceeded as far her wit, as her parts exceeded others of her sex.” – Sir
George Mackenzie’s Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland, p.165.]
a daughter of Lord Cassillis; at another the Countess of Dysart claimed
his undivided attention. Lady Lauderdale’s position was a difficult one,
but for many years she filled it with dignity and self-restraint.
Sometimes she lived with her husband at their town residence on the east
side of Highgate Hill, where we find them entertaining Mr. Pepys and his
friends to supper; [“Went to my Lord Lauderdale’s house to speak with
him, and find him and his lady, and some Scotch people, at supper: pretty
odd company, though my Lord Brouncker tells me, my Lord Lauderdale is a
man of mighty good reason and judgement. But at supper there played one of
their servants upon the viallin some Scotch tune only; several, and the
best of their country, as they seemed to esteem them, by their praising
and admiring them: but, Lord! the strangest ayre that ever I heard in all
my life, and all of one cast. But strange to hear my Lord Lauderdale say
himself that he had rather hear a cat mew, than the best musique in the
world; and the better the musique, the more sick it makes him; and that of
all the instruments he hates the lute most, and, next to that, the
baggpipe.” – Pepys Diary, July 28, 1666.] at other times she
was separated from Lord Lauderdale, and writing to complain bitterly of
the dilapidations of her house and of her husband’s neglect. [Owing to
the number of books which Lauderdale kept stored on the top floor of his
house the countess’s bedroom ceiling was always threatening to fall in on
her head. (See Lauderdale Papers, vol. ii. p.203.)]
Lady Dysart had such an
influence over his affections, that, as Sir George Mackenzie tells us,
neither her age – she was then about forty-eight, though she did not look
it [“…nor was her wit less charming than the beauty of other women; nor
had the extraordinary beauty she possest whilst she was young ceded to the
age at which she was then arrived.” –Memoirs of the Affairs of
Scotland, by Sir George Mackenzie, p.218] – nor Lauderdale’s public
position, nor the advice of his friends, not “the clamour of the people,”
could prevent him from hurrying his second wife to the altar while his
first was scarcely cold in her coffin. This unseemly haste confirmed the
worst suspicions which the world had entertained regarding the relations
that had long existed between the two, and still further, if possible,
blackened their reputations. But in the face of general opposition the
Earl of Lauderdale and the Countess of Dysart were married in the parish
church of Petersham, Surrey, on the 17th of February, 1672. [The
following is the extract from the church register: “The ryght honorable
John Earl of Lauderdale was married to the ryght honorable Elizabeth
Countesse of Desert, by the Reverend Father in God (Walter) Lord Bishop of
Worcester, in the church of Petersham, on the 17th day of
Februarie 1671-2, publiquely in the time of reading the common prayer; and
gave the carpet, pulpit cloth and cushion.”] The wedding was
celebrated by their friends in Edinburgh with banquets and junketings,
while the castle guns fired as many salutes as upon the King’s birthday.
[Affairs of Scotland, p.218.]
Lauderdale was in many
respects a most remarkable man. At an early age he had arrayed himself on
the side of the Covenanters, and was by them sent to Westminster in 1643
as one of the Scottish commissioners whose business it was to induce the
king to renounce Episcopacy. In this he failed, and five years later
discreetly joined the king’s party and became one of the most violent
promoters of the “Engagement,” thus earning the hatred and suspicion of
the Presbyterians, whose cause he had once upheld so vigorously. “Sick of
the low farce of fanaticism,” said Mark Napier, “he threw his frayed and
greasy mask of covenanting religion into the grave of Argyle wit
irrepressible demonstrations of glee.” [Life and Times of John Graham of
Claverhouse, vol. ii. p.44] Like his second wife, Lauderdale was a
student of Latin and divinity, had a profound knowledge of history, and
was besides a master of Greek and Hebrew. Gifted, in addition, with a
marvellous memory, he could express himself in a vocabulary which was as
copious as it was rough. [Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times,
p.70.] Fountainhall goes so far as to call him the “learnedest and
most powerful minister of state in his age.”
Brave, unscrupulous,
superstitious, [Napier declares that he believed implicitly in goblins
and witches. (See Life and Times of John Graham of Claverhouse,
vol. i. p.77.) In Baxter’s World of Spirits there is a letter from
Lauderdale in which he gives an account of a visit he paid to a convent at
Loudun in France, where the nuns were supposed to be possessed by spirits.
And in 1649 he went to Antwerp to see some witched exorcised, but was much
disappointed with the sport. (See C.K. Sharpe’s preface to Law’s
Memorials, p. cxi.)] an accomplished liar, of uncouth appearance
and boisterous manner, Lauderdale seemed little fitted for a court. Yet he
contrived to gain a complete ascendancy over Charles, and, after the
disgrace of Middleton [John, 1st Earl of Middleton.] in
1662, was appointed Secretary for Scottish affairs, and for twenty years,
until the arrival of the Duke of York, was virtual King of Scotland. His
looks were decidedly not in his favour. With long red hair that hung
wildly about his shoulders, and a tongue too large for his mouth, causing
him, as Burnet says, to “bedew all that he talked to,” [History of His Own
Times, p.70.] he fell far short of the generally accepted idea of a
wit or a courtier. Yet he was both the one and the other. And this
ungainly personage rapidly became one of the King’s especial favourites,
and assisted his royal master in the prosecution of those private amours
which were his Majesty’s principal occupation. [Kirkton, in his
History of the Church of Scotland (p.158), says that he was the King’s
“privado in his secret pleasures, in which office to keep himself in
favour he acted a most dishonourable part.”] On one occasion, when
owing to the burning of his fleet at Chatham and the successful retirement
of the Dutch, the King was especially depressed, Lauderdale adopted the
role of a seventeenth-century Herodias. Dressing himself in a woman’s
petticoat, he danced before his monarch with such vigour – if not grace –
as successfully to chase away the royal melancholy.
As a statesman Lauderdale
may have been vicious and untrustworthy, but, though Macauley refers to
him as a “ruffian,” he was not cruel. Law calls him a man of great spirit,
wit, and daring, who did more without the sword than ever Oliver Cromwell
accomplished with it; “a man very national, and truely the honour of our
Scots nation for witt and parts.” [Law’s Memorials, p.65.]
His firm suppression of the Covenanters, once his friends, and the
anti-conventicle Acts which he enforced for this purpose made him
unpopular; but he cannot be accused of an undue exhibition of tyranny
during his rule in Scotland. He had a violent temper, which occasionally
threw him into fits of passion resembling madness. At such times his charm
as a husband was even less noticeable than usual, and his second wife
found him no more tolerable than had her predecessor. [Writing to
Queensberry in 1678 Lord Rothes says: “The Duchess…says, it is not
huffing and ranting that does business; and cries when
she speaks of my Lord’s infirmity of falling into passion, when, God
knows, she is as guilty herself.” (Queensberry Papers.)] To
his inferiors he was insupportably haughty; to his superiors, like all
bullies, he cringed. Clarendon calls him “insolent, imperious, flattering
and dissembling,” fit for intrigues and experienced in the darkest
political designs, with “courage enough not to fail where it was
absolutely necessary, and no impediment of honour to restrain him from
doing any thing that might gratify any of his passions.” [History of the
Rebellion, vol. vi. p.9] In his violence and lack of scruple he was
a good match for his wife, and between the two they managed to incur an
amount of popular odium unique in Scottish history.
Soon after their marriage
the Earl and Countess of Lauderdale made a triumphal tour of Scotland.
They were everywhere received with that royal pomp and ceremony which was
then customary [“The nobility…in public processions, funerals etc.,
displayed a degree of pomp unknown in the present times. The Duke of
Queensberry, the King’s Commissioner, when coming to Edinburgh A.D. 1700,
was met by the magistrates about eight miles from the city, which he
entered with a train of near forty coaches and about 1200 horse.” –
Arnot’s History of Edinburgh, p.195.] and which they
particularly enjoyed. But though the Scottish people waved their flags and
bowed their heads before the new Commissioner and his wife, the national
heart remained singularly cold and unmoved by their arrival.
The Earl of Lauderdale had
always pretended to despise wealth, but the rapacity of his countess, to
whose passion or caprice he was entirely subservient, seems to have been
sadly infectious. At her instigation he set himself to raise money be
every possible method, while she herself offered all the places in the
Scottish government for sale, and levied large contributions wherever she
went. She even threatened the magistrates of Edinburgh with divers
penalties unless they made her a suitable gift of money, and by similar
means managed to amass vast sums. So corrupt did the administration become
in Lauderdale’s hands that no political aspirant could obtain advancement
or hold public office unless the Commissioner’s wife had first of all been
handsomely bribed.
Though extortionate,
covetous, and greedy, Lady Lauderdale did not, like Lady Margaret Douglas,
[Sister of the first Duke of Queensberry. She was so penurious that she
dressed in rags, and so anxious to amass money that she would sit all day
long on the bank of the river Annan, carrying people across on her back
for the modest sum of a halfpenny a head. (See Law’s Memorials, p.
lxxxi.)] hoard her gold, but spent it on pleasures or luxuries with a
reckless and extravagant hand. Then, when her store was exhausted, like
Oliver Twist or the daughters of the horse-leech she clamoured loudly for
more. Much of her money and her husband’s was spent in beautifying her
property at Ham, in Surrey. The house on this estate, which had been built
in 1610, belonged for a long time to the Tollemache family. It was
afterwards altered and entirely refurnished by the Lauderdales, who spared
no expense to ensure its comfort and magnificence. [In 1672 King
Charles granted the manor of Ham in fee to the Lauderdales and to the
Countess (or Duchess as she then was) of Lauderdale’s heirs by her first
husband. (The Environs of London, by Rev. D. Lysons, vol. i.
p.173.)] Evelyn, who visited the place in 1678, has left a description
of it which in its eloquent enthusiasm is strangely suggestive of the
prospectus of a modern house-agent, comparing it favourably with the
finest villas in Italy; “the house furnish’d like a greate Prince’s” (he
says); “the parterres, flower gardens, orangeries, groves, avenues,
courts, statues, perspectives, fountaines, aviaries, and all this at the
banks of the sweetest river in the world, must needes be admirable.” [Evelyn’s
Diary, August 27, 1678.]
It was with sums wrung from
the unwilling citizens of Edinburgh that the Commissioner and his lady
were enabled to decorate and improve Ham House; and the Scottish people
were not slow to realise this fact and to resent it. The general hatred
which the countess’s rapacity evoked in Scotland was still further
increased when she started to meddle in private as well as public affairs.
She spoke of her acquaintances with a licence which was unpardonable,
embroiled her husband with all his best friends, from the Earl of Argyll
to Sir Robert Murray, and even brought about a quarrel between Lauderdale
and his brother, Lord Hatton. So busy was she, indeed, in her
interferences, that people began to ask sarcastically whether there were
not one Commissioner at Edinburgh, but two.
In 1672 Lauderdale was
created a duke, an honour which pandered still more to the vanity of his
duchess, but which he only lived ten years to enjoy. His wife’s
determination to be treated with the respect due to a queen added indeed
another touch of bitterness to the universal dislike which she inspired.
At the opening of Parliament she ordered chairs to be placed on the floor
of the house, so that she and her ladies might sit and listen to the
speeches in comfort. [Affairs of Scotland, p.219] Such a privilege
had never been claimed by any woman before her time, and this not very
unreasonable request was soon magnified into an exhibition of pride, which
only served to increase her unpopularity.
The duchess’s unsavoury
reputation provided lampoonists with abundant material. She was the
subject of any number of coarse rhymes and ballads. A bowdlerised version
of one of the least offensive of these – a parody of a popular song called
“Black Bess” – is given in Maidment’s Second Book of Scottish Pasquils.
[Page 23.]
“She is Besse of my heart,
she was Besse of old Noll;
She was once Fleetwood’s Besse, now she’s Bess of Atholle;
She’s Besse of the Church, and Besse of the State,
She plots with her tail, and her lord with his pate.
With a head on one side, and a hand lifted hie,
She kills us with frowning and makes us to die.
The Nobles and Barons, the
Burrows and Clowns,
She threaten’d at home, e’en the principall townes;
But now she usurps both the sceptre and crown,
And thinks to destroy with a flap of her gown.
All hearts feel excited wherever she comes,
And beat night and day, lyke Gilmour his drums.
Since the King did permit
her to come to Whytehall,
She outvies Cleveland, Portsmouth, young Frazer [Daughter of the King’s
physician, afterwards Countess of Peterborough.] and all;
Let the French King but drop down his gold in a cloud,
She’ll sell him a bargain, and laugh it aloud.
If the Queen understood, what of her Besse did say,
She would call for Squire Dun [The hangman] to bear her away.”
The Duchess of Lauderdale’s
biographers have had some difficulty in finding epithets sufficiently
abusive to apply to “poor Besse.” Mark Napier calls her a “daughter of
Satan,” [Life and Times of John Graham of Claverhouse, vol. i. p.364.]
and Bishop Burnet – the “old-clothes man of History” – is as scathing and
more explicit in his denunciation. Yet there was a time when the worthy
bishop could be numbered among the duchess’s most devoted parasites. In
her honour he even composed some execrable verses in which she was
referred to as an “angelic power in human mould,” and likened to a whole
choir of heavenly cherubs. [Catalogue of Scottish Writers, p.56.]
The reverend prelate’s infatuation was short-lived. He was perhaps annoyed
that the Duchess of Lauderdale had not obtained for him that accelerated
preferment for which his soul yearned. This, however, would not be enough
to embitter him as completely as his writings suggest. His quarrel appears
to have been principally with her husband. In 1674 we find the latter
advising the King to dismiss Burnet, who had been tactless enough to
interfere in the quarrel which was then raging between the Dukes of
Lauderdale and Hamilton. Lauderdale’s treatment of Lady Margaret Kennedy
was another cause of offence to the bishop. He had flirted with that
devout lady for some considerable time. She had even resided with him at
the Abbey of Holyroodhouse – being the only woman living beneath his roof
– and he had actually courted scandal by going openly to her room in his
nightgown. But Lady Dysart’s entrance upon the scene caused his attitude
to change, and when the death of his first wife made such a step possible,
he showed no inclination to lead Lady Margaret to the altar. She thereupon
married Bishop Burnet instead, [Lady Margaret was the first of Burnet’s
three wives.] and with all the fury of a woman scorned, at once
proceeded to incite her husband to devise a plot against the Commissioner.
In this Burnet was unsuccessful. The failure of this conspiracy added
still further to his dislike of the Lauderdale family, and he availed
himself of his “History” as the only adequate means of revenge.
Shortly after his elevation
to a dukedom, Lauderdale seems to have grown tired of a life of
extravagance, and, at his own request, his pension was reduced from L.60
to L.10 a day. “I swear it will be much easier for me to live at L.10 then
L.50,” he writes in 1674; “by the great one I am no gainer, and I am
deadly weary of being mine host to all Scotland.” [Law’s Memorials,
p.59] He had always been overfond of the pleasures of the table,
and towards the end of his life his greed increased to such an extent that
he is said to have consumed a whole sheep daily, eating and drinking being
now his only exercise and delight. [See “God’s Justice exemplified
in His Judgements upon Persecutors.”] In his old age Lauderdale became, in
consequence of these continual orgies, extremely corpulent and unwieldy.
This was a source of great annoyance to him. As if to add to his
discomfort, the King withdrew all his pensions, and cast off his now
helpless and half-paralysed adviser, while his wife began to treat him
most unkindly. She is even accused of having purposely hastened his death
[“Discontent and age were the chief ingredients of his death,” says
Fountainhall, “if his Duchess and physicians were free of it.” (Queensberry
Papers.)] which took place on the 24th of August 1682, when he
was in his sixty-seventh year. “The Duchess of Lauderdale hath crowned her
kindness to her late lord,” writes Sir George Mackenzie to the Duke of
Queensberry, two days later, “by urging him to drink the waters [at
Tunbridge Wells,], which all foretold would kill him; and so it hath
fallen out accordingly.” [Queensberry Papers.]
After her husband’s death
the duchess developed that passion for litigation which sometimes assails
wealthy old ladies who have nothing better to do with their time and money
than spend them in courts of law. The Records of the Lords of Session are
filled with accounts of the various suits brought by the duchess against
her family and friends. Most of her energies would appear to have been
directed to accomplishing the ruin of her brother-in-law Hatton, who had
now succeeded to the earldom of Lauderdale. Hatton was already in trouble,
for in this same year he was charged with embezzling money from the Mint
of which he was then keeper. By this accusation he was publicly disgraced,
and his sister-in-law’s persistent litigation added to his misfortunes. In
1670 she had tried to arrange a marriage between her eldest daughter
Elizabeth and Hatton’s eldest son. The latter, however, did not fancy the
duchess as a mother-in-law, and politely declined the proposal. On this
account she hated him, and paid off her grudge against the son by
impoverishing the father. She was, as Burnet says, violent in everything
she did, “a violent friend, but a still more violent enemy,” as Hatton
found to his cost.
She had long ago persuaded
her late husband to settle the whole of his estates upon her. Among them
was the property of Duddingston, near Edinburgh, which had been presented
to her by the duke. In order to effect the purchase of this place,
Lauderdale, with his wife’s consent, had raised the sum of £7000 upon her
estate of Ham. After the duke’s death, she sued his heir for the recovery
of this money, though she still clung like a leech to the property. The
whole question as to the legal possession of the Lauderdale estates was
finally brought before the Lords of Session. Lord Pitmedden, [Sir
Alexander Seton] on the earl’s behalf, argued very justly that to
force a man to ratify the deeds giving away the whole of his property to
his sister-in-law, when he could not succeed, was to give him “stones
instead of bread, and a scorpion instead of a fish”; and declared that
such legacies as the late duke’s should not be encouraged, as they exposed
old men to the danger of becoming the victims of unprincipled and greedy
wives. “Lauderdale is loth to be reproached,” he added,” that his family
is extinguished and killed by the hand of a woman.” [The Decisions of the
Lords of Council and Session. (Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall.) (1759)
Vol. i. p.323.] Finally, as a means of settling the affair, the
duchess was called upon to take a solemn oath that she had never
personally undertaken the debt upon her house at Ham. This she agreed to
readily enough, light-heartedly committing perjury, as was afterwards
proved by the King, who declared that she acknowledged to him personally
her undertaking of this particular debt. A lie or two one way or the other
did not matter very much to the duchess, more especially if a sum of money
depended upon it. [“Shall an estate acquired without conscience by lost
by it? but she is as mean spirited in adversity as she was insolent in
prosperity.” (From the MSS of Sir Frederick Graham, Bart., at Netherby
Hall.)]
A more amusing case, which
she also won, was that in which she sued Sir James Dick of Priestfield for
the value of three swans. Five of these animals, belonging to Sir James,
had settled upon the loch at Duddingston. The duchess immediately claimed
them as her property, and proceeded to remove them. She killed two f the
birds and sent them to her friend General Drummond, [William Drummond,
afterwards 1st Viscount Strathallan, who was among the
prisoners captured at Worcester in 1651. A pasquil of the day accuses him
of being one of the duchess’s lovers.] who was ill, in order that “in
his sickness their skins might warm his heart.” The remaining three she
locked up at Duddingston. The indignant Sir James Dick retorted by
breaking into her house and retrieving the swans, much to the duchess’s
irritation. When the case came into court the judges decided in her
favour, and Sir James was reluctantly forced to return his swans to
Duddingston.
The duchess’s love of going
to law soon grew to be a subject of popular jest. When Wycherley was
adapting Molière’s Le Misanthrope, [The Plain Dealer was the
title of the English play.] he introduced two new characters, that of
Jerry Blackacre and his mother. Old Mrs. Blackacre, described in the stage
directions as “a petulant, litigious widow, always in law,” is generally
supposed to have been intended as a caricature of the Duchess of
Lauderdale.
She had no children by her
second husband, but had already presented Sir Lionel Tollemache with
eleven, only five of whom, however, survived their infancy. To these she
was warmly attached, and they no doubt had many opportunities, denied to
others, of seeing the brightest side of her character. Two of them, at
least, resembled their mother. Lionel, her eldest son, who sat for many
years in the English House of Commons, and finally became Earl of Dysart,
was as grasping and covetous as the duchess. Mrs. Manley, in that very
old-fashioned work, The New Atlantis, calls him “an old curmudgeon”
who kept a house “like the Temple of Famine.” [Secret Memoirs and Manners
of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis,
vol. iii. p.230.] So miserly was he, she declares, that he used to
leave home early in the morning, for fear lest any friend should drop in
to breakfast. His whole idea was to save money, and to this end he would
“weigh out Provisions to his Family, and seal up his Oven, that the hungry
Domesticks might not pinch wherewith to appease the Cravings of Nature,
from his number’d loaves.” [Ibid., vol. ii. p.210.]
The duchess’s two remaining
sons were in every way superior to Lionel. Thomas Tollemache, the elder of
the two, was a soldier who distinguished himself on many fields of battle.
He eventually died of wounds received at Brest in 1693, in an engagement
with the French when 800 men fell out of the 900 employed in the attack.
His younger brother William entered the navy, and was a source of
continual anxiety to the duchess. At the age of seventeen he had the
misfortune to kill the second son of the Earl of Southesk in a street
brawl in Paris. Only the influence of his mother saved him from a
punishment much more severe than the heavy fine which was eventually
imposed upon him. Of all her children William was the favourite. He is
perpetually and most lovingly mentioned in her correspondence with
Archbishop Sharp, who looked after the boy at one time when he was ill. [See
the Lauderdale MSS. in the British Museum.] His mother’s
solicitude on the subject of William’s health is shown by the tender care
with which she prescribes the most drastic remedies for his cure, and
explains in minute detail the exact medical treatment he is to undergo.
After her son’s recovery the duchess’s gratitude to the archbishop gives
abundant proof of the sincerity of her maternal devotion. Here, at any
rate, we can find something for which to commend her.
Of her two daughters,
Elizabeth, the elder, married Archibald, Earl (and afterwards 1st
Duke) of Argyll. The marriage did not turn out happily. Elizabeth
inherited her mother’s shrewish temper, and after a short time she and her
husband agreed to separate. The younger daughter, Catherine, was more
fortunate, being twice happily married, first to Lord Doune, and
subsequently to John, 15th Earl of Sutherland.
As the duchess grew older,
she gradually lost most of her friends. Death and her scathing tongue
swept them away out of her reach. With them, too, vanished that wit and
vivacity which had rendered her bitterest satire pardonable. And from
being a fiery, pugnacious woman all her life, she suddenly became a
tolerant, melancholy, and even devout old lady. “I am well assured,
whenever my time shall end in this life,” she writes to one of her sons,
“it will be an end to an Age of as many troubles as ever any one in my
circumstances has suffered. And I trust in the Lord, as I am weaned from
the world, so I shall be fully happie when I am out of it.” [Letter
written on December 9, 1685, among the MSS. in the British Museum.]
Financial matters still
continued, however, to hold her interest and engage her thoughts. Eighteen
months before her death she sends her “most Deare Lyonell” a letter
entirely filled with instructions as to the disposition of her money. She
is particularly anxious that all arrears owed by her at Michaelmas shall
be paid, “that I may not lessen my credit In the Least or [be] exposed to
the censure of not keeping my word, which would trouble me in the Highest
Degree.” [Ibid.] It was then a little late perhaps for the duchess to be
worrying about keeping her word. Her past record proved that the act of
breaking faith had never troubled her overmuch, and only the imminence of
death can have awakened within her bosom this tardy sense of honour.
She died on the 4th of June, 1698, and was
buried in Petersham churchyard, though no monument marks her resting-place
there. Whatever her failings may have been – and they were no doubt
numerous – it is an indisputable fact that no stateswoman – to use a term
which Disraeli borrowed from Swift – has ever taken part in the domestic
and political administration of Scotland with half the ability or the
power displayed by Elizabeth, Duchess of Lauderdale. |
