Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/254

240 break her bondage. Anne was a woman of a really good-natured disposition, but indolent, self-indulgent, and, in consequence, of a corpulent and gouty frame. She was always anxious, if possible, to soothe the two furious factions of whig and tory, by which the peace of her life, like that of her predcessor, was rent to fragments. Her constant exhortation in her speeches to them was to come to terms of accord for the good of the country. She abhorred all cruelty, and never would, if she could avoid it, sign a warrant for any one's execution. Yet her mild temper was so far overruled that, during her reign, Defoe, the immortal author of "Robinson Crusoe," had his ears cut off, besides having to stand thrice in the pillory; and Edmund Curl, the publisher, lost first one ear, then the other, and lastly the remains of both. But these barbarities were not with the good-will of Anne; whilst, on the other hand, kept as she was, by a most insolent virago, in poverty, she gave one of the most munificent gifts ever made by a monarch—the tenths and first-fruits to the poor clergy; and achieved the most beneficial national event which any monarch had yet done—the union of the kingdoms.



The time was now approaching, however, for her liberation from the heavy yoke of Sarah of Marlborough. This said Sarah, originally Sarah Jennings, had not only taken care of herself but of her daughters. One she had married to the son of lord Godolphin, the prime minister; another to the earl of Sunderland, whom she had forced on the queen as lord privy seal, and afterwards secretary of state, in which offices he soon was guilty of gross peculations. Besides this, the all-engrossing duchess had planned, whenever she should resign her offices in the household, to fix her daughters in them, with salaries and perquisites of from six to eight thousand pounds a year.

But the duchess, in the midst of power and pride, had still for some time felt the ground mysteriously gliding from under her feet. The suspicion that there was some one who had got to the ear of the queen in spite of all her vigilance, broke upon the duchess and her party; but for some time thay were totally at a loss to conceive who it could be. The duchess suggested that it might be George Churchill, the favourite of the prince of Denmark; but Marlborough himself rejected this idea, saying that the queen certainly had such a poor opinion of his brother George that she never spoke to him. Light, however, as to the true source began to break. Mrs. Danvers, who thought she was dying, and whose daughter had been made a bedchamber woman instead of one Mrs. Vain, whom the duchess wished to put in, sent for the duchess, and implored her after her death to let her daughter retain her place. In this conversation Mrs. Danvers spoke a great deal against Mrs. Hill — or Miss Hill, as Abigail would now be called — and of her secret enmity to the duchess. This turned the thoughts of the jealous duchess towards her niece; and a circumstance soon satisfied her that she had discovered her secret enemy. The duchess says—"Being with the queen, to whom I had come very privately by a secret passage from my lodging to the royal bedchamber, on a sudden this woman, Abigail, not knowing I was there, came in with the boldest and gayest air possible; but, upon the sight of me, stopped, and immediately asked, making a most solemn curtsy, 'Did your majesty ring?' and then went out again. This singular behaviour needed no interpreter now to make it understood."

The whole fury of the impetuous duchess was at once turned on her niece, whom she had so unluckily for herself introduced into the royal household. She describes her as being the daughter of one Hill, a merchant of London, who had married her own aunt, one of two-and-twenty children; that this Hill had ruined himself, and that application had been made to her to assist the family; that she took Abigail first into her own house, and then put her into the place of a bedchamber woman to the queen, never suspecting in the poor girl a most fatal rival, destined to become lady Masham, and the queen's favourite as absolute as she was now herself. The duchess also placed the other sister as laundress in the family of the young duke of Gloucester, and after his death got her a pension of two hundred pounds out of the privy purse. One of the boys she got into the customs, and the other, known by the familiar name of "honest Jack Hill,"