colors in which the portrait is painted by her niece, it must be allowed that, judged only by her own writings, Lady Mary Coke's nature is about as disagreeable an one, as a cold heart, a bad temper, excessive vanity, a defective education and the influence of a very artificial society could produce. If not a type, she presents a curious specimen of womankind, and, as the biographer says, "such a study for the observer of human character as a rare plant or animal would be for the naturalist." Her beauty had not been, like Lady Strafford's, undisputed; some allowed, some denied it; the dissenters declaring her neither more nor less than a white cat, a creature to which her dead whiteness of skin, unshaded eyebrows, and fierceness of eyes, did give a great resemblance. To make amends there were fine teeth, an agreeable smile, a handsome neck, well-shaped hands and arms, and a majestic figure. She had the reputation of cleverness when young, and in spite of all her absurdity, could not be called a silly woman; but she was invincibly wrong-headed, and her understanding lay smothered under so much pride, self-conceit, prejudice, obstinacy, and violence of temper, that you knew not where to look for it. In her nineteenth year Lady Mary Campbell, whose will, since her father's death, no one in her family dared to dispute, announced her intention to confer her hand upon the young Viscount Coke, the only son of the Earl of Leicester. She did not profess any affection for him and, after their engagement, treated him with a distant coldness and haughty disdain, indicative of downright aversion; but when questioned as to her feelings, thought it sufficient to reply, that it was her pleasure to marry Lord Coke. On a hitch occurring in regard to set tlements, she was quite prepared to break off the marriage, unless the proposed annuity of £2,500, besides £500 a year pin money, were secured to her. This difficulty overcome, she allowed herself to be led to the altar, assuming for the occasion, however, the demeanor rather of a martyr submitting to sacrifice, than of a bride voluntarily marrying the man of her choice. Lord Coke had borne this treatment with admirable good humor and patience, uttering no word of remonstrance or reproach; but no sooner had the marriage ceremony been completed than he proceeded to pay off the long score of insolence to which he had been subjected. Leaving his bride at the church door, he passed the wedding night in the com pany of his boon-companions, whom he entertained with a ludicrous description of the scene enacted at the wedding. The lady, he said, had assumed the airs of the tragic muse, and in the mood of King Solomon's Egyptian captive, “darting scorn and sorrow from her eyes," tearfully prepared to become the passive victim of abhorred embraces. She was completely taken aback, however, when instead of playing the part of an amorous tyrant, he coolly assured her that she had no advances on his part to apprehend, and that as he had more agreeable engagements to fulfil elsewhere, he begged to wish her a very good-night. No course of conduct could have been better calculated to mortify Lady Mary. The laugh had been turned against her, and she was very sensitive to ridicule. Her estimate of her personal attractions was an exaggerated one, and her vanity was now cruelly wounded by the bridegroom's cold indifference, and disregard of her charms. She was not at a loss, however, to discover the means of retaliation. Knowing that the Earl of Leicester had eagerly promoted his only son's marriage, with a view to securing the succession, she determined to disappoint these hopes by strictly maintaining the position which Lord Coke had assigned to her on her wedding day. From this resolution, neither threats nor persuasion could move her. She was a wife in name only, and such she would remain as long as they both lived. Outward appearances were for a time kept up, but during a visit to Holkham, father and son determined to put an end to a state of things which the old earl piously denounced as "contrary alike to the laws of God and man." Hereupon her resolute ladyship retreated to the citadel of her own apartments, which she persisted in defending against her besiegers, who finally converted her volun. tary seclusion into compulsory durance, demanded her keys, seized her papers, intercepted her correspondence, and prohibited all intercourse between the prisoner and her relations. These strong measures had not been adopted without legal opinion having been taken as to "whether a wife's obstinately refusing her husband his conjugal rights did not justify him in placing her under unusual restraint?" and from the result it is evident that a hundred and fifty years ago the law took a different view of mari tal privileges and wifely obligations, from that which has been recently enunciated in a case of a similar character. Lady Mary's family did not at first show any disposition to make themselves the champions of her cause; they seem, on the contrary, to have placed no faith in the grievances which she represented herself as having suffered at the hands of her husband. When, however, she had actually passed six months in a state of imprisonment, during which time the gates of Holkham were strictly closed against them all, the Duchess of Argyll began to apprehend that whatever her daughter's faults may have been, such treatment was not justifiable. Indeed, she went so far as, in a letter to Lady Dalkeith, to express her conviction that though Lord Coke had probably received provocation, the blame rested at least as much with him as with his wife; and that "if he had married a woman with a temper of an angle (sic) she would have been miserable with him." Written representations remaining unnoticed, her Grace, accompanied by Mr. Stuart Mackenzie and a solicitor, appeared at Holkham and, in presence of witnesses, formally demanded access to her daughter. This being refused an affidavit was presented to the judges of the King's Bench, and a writ of habeas corpus obtained requiring Lord Coke to produce his wife before the Spiritual Court on the first day of term in November. The scene is graphically described by Lady Louisa Stuart, who relates how her aunt appeared to swear the peace against her husband, and to institute an action for divorce on the ground of cruelty. The court was densely crowded by a fashionable audience of her friends and relations, while Lord Leicester and his son "having no great interest with respectable women, gathered together a numerous posse of lively, clever, wild young men. . . . All the rakes, and all the geniuses of the age, came to back Lord Coke, or to enjoy an exhibition in their eyes very diverting." It was far from diverting for poor Lady Mary, who in order to enlist the public sympathies appeared in court, "pale, feeble, and dressed almost in tatters," while her mother sat beside her crying bitterly, and Lady Strafford, who was subject to "the falling sickness," repeatedly fainted away. The petitioner appears to have held peculiar notions as to the character of legal evidence, and on being required to furnish particulars of the alleged acts of cruelty, with specification of time and place, would only give such vague answers as: "Oh, a thousand times every day; 99 "never was a human creature treated as I have been;" "my usage was most barbarous." In the end her accusations amounted to no more than that her father-in-law had called her "a piece of useless lumber, fit only to be locked up in a garret," and that her husband had struck her on the arm, torn her lace ruffles, and, on a certain occasion, finding her employed in reading Locke, "On the Human Understanding," told her that "he did not believe that she understood one word of the book," which was probably true, and that she was "an affected b- for her pains," which was undoubtedly rude. These uncorroborated acts of violence failed, in the opinion of the court, to afford grounds for a divorce. The case accordingly collapsed, and Lady Mary would have been left to the mercy of her enemies, but for the kind offices of Lord Hartington (afterwards fourth Duke of Devonshire), who induced Lord Coke so far to modify the sentence he had passed upon his rebellious wife, as to allow her to live unmolested in the country, on condition that she formally withdrew her charges against him, paid all the expenses of the lawsuit, engaged not to set foot within twenty miles of London, and waived her claim to a separate maintenance. In this unhappy position of a wife deprived of a wife's privileges, Lady Mary lived for five or six years upon very limited means under the roof of a mother with whom she could not agree. Her continued attempts to pose as a martyr failed to excite sympathy, and her friends grew weary of her persistent lamentations over her unmerited sufferings. But there were better times in store for her. Lord Coke, never much troubled with moral scruples, now considered himself free from every obligation imposed by matrimonial ties; and while he caused a strict surveillance to be exercised over the conduct of his wife, he himself plunged into a course of reckless profligacy and dissipation which undermined his health and brought him to an early grave. Thus, in her twenty-seventh year, Lady Mary emerged from her dull retirement and a state of constant fear and humiliation, into the unclouded atmosphere of tearless widowhood, with unrestricted freedom of action and the enjoyment of a large dowry. After the expiration of the full period prescribed for mourning a dead husband, 614 Lady Mary had the satisfaction of declin- | bolder mode of warfare. We are left in ing several and, finally, of accepting one proposal of marriage. This time a ducal coronet had been the prize competed for; the Earl of March the cost at which it had to be attained. The fashionable world was amazed to learn that this wild and profligate young nobleman, cousin and heir to the Duke of Queensberry, and himself in after life notorious as "old Q," should have entered into a matrimonial engagement, and that, too, with a lady known to have a high temper, indomitable strength of will, and tastes and habits so much at variance with his own. It is true that the proposed alliance was hailed by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry as the means of weaning their young kinsman from his evil courses, and converting him into a decent member of society; but Lord March showed himself little disposed to encourage such hopes. He openly proclaimed that he had never for a moment entertained any intention of marrying; but that Lady Mary, instead of rejecting the unlawful proposals he had made to her, as she had a right to do, had, on the contrary, led him on, and finally entangled him in matrimonial meshes. Matters had gone too far to allow of his withdrawing; but he ventured to hope that his betrothed would release him from these unwelcome bonds. To effect this object he now assumed much the same attitude towards her, that she, during her first engagement, had adopted towards Lord Coke. He rarely addressed his future wife in society; ignored her presence in public; spoke of her with studied disdain or indifference, and even went so far as to exhibit himself in places where they were likely to meet, as in the Park or at Ranelagh, by the side of his acknowledged mistress, Madame Rena, an opera singer, who continued to live under his roof and to drive about conspicuously in a chariot emblazoned with his arms. Lady Mary, however, remained, as Lord Coke had done in similar circumstances, perfectly unmoved under these insults, probably, like him, biding her time to be revenged. She continued to smile upon Lord March with gracious dignity, made excuses for his irregularities and resented, as a reflection upon the honor of her future husband, all attempts at interference on the part of friends and relations, when these urged her to break off a marriage affording so little prospect of happiness. Disconcerted by this passive resistance to his manœuvres, Lord March adopted a the dark as to what actually occurred; He was nobly indifferent to public It was very And so, having played out his little comedy, he finally started for a Continental tour in company with Madame Rena.* It must be allowed that ambition had hitherto played a more prominent part than love in Lady Mary's matrimonial ventures, and to this ambition she now determined to give a different direction. The personal charms, social gifts, and high talents with which she believed herself to have been endowed by Providence would, she felt assured, find a more con genial and a wider field for their exercise and influence in the atmosphere of a bril liant court, than in any form of domestic life; and to the attainment of a commanding position in royal circles she accordingly determined to devote her future efforts. In the pursuit of this project the first person whose patronage and favor the proud and virtuous daughter of the house of Argyll now sought, was Lady Yarmouth; and to reconcile this with her It was a daughter of this lady, known as Maria Fagniani, who in 1798 married the third Marquess of Hertford, and was the mother of the fourth marquess, on whose death s. p. in 1870 the title passed out of the direct line. austere moral principles, she chose to assume that the intimacy between King George and his German favorite had been sanctified by a private marriage. But even if no such formality had taken place Lady Mary's reverence for royalty would have enabled her to condone the offence, since she considered kings to be exempt from the moral obligations imposed upon the vulgar; and that in such cases a woman might be allowed to plead the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign in extenuation of her transgression. Besides, Lady Yarmouth, though she still exercised much influence at court, was by this time a dull, dowdy, well-conducted, elderly woman, with no pretensions to wit or beauty. She was free, too, from the fault, so commonly ascribed to royal favorites, of interfering in affairs of State. Indeed, the only offence which the nation could lay to her charge was the putting up to public auction of places, titles, and ribbons; a practice which, probably on grounds of economy, the king fully approved. We are told that when, on one occasion, the lady boasted of having refused the offer of a very large bribe, his Majesty inquired: “And vy was you such a great fool?” So Lady Mary bowed low before the king's mistress, and conspicuously wore upon her beautiful arm a bracelet enclosing a lock of Lady Yarmouth's hair. If the young prince at first felt flattered by such homage, there was too little sentiment in his nature to allow of his continuing to appreciate an affection which gave no promise of bearing fruit, except at a price which he was by no means disposed to pay. Indeed, it may be doubted whether any one, except Lady Mary herself, viewed these relations in a serious light, though they afforded a fertile subject for joke and gossip in court circles. The Lady Augusta used to speak laughingly of "my sister Mary," and the graceless prince himself diverted his friends with coarsely expressed accounts of the pompous admiration of which he was the object, of my lady's alternate reserve and encouragement, and of her undisguised determination to become the wife of his bosom. The sudden death of the young prince, at Modena in 1767, was probably the greatest grief which Lady Mary Coke suffered in the course of her long life; though the parade she made of her lamentations is hardly consistent with genuine feeling, and the entries in her journal seem to indicate that sorrow for his loss was aggravated by suspicions of his constancy. For weeks after the tidings reached her she professes to have been almost entirely deprived of sleep, and the few snatches of repose vouchsafed to her were haunted by painful visions of a faithless prince : I dreampt of the duke; that I thought he took no particular notice of me, which surprised me. I dreampt again of the duke. I thought we were together in a church and both kneeling down, but that he got up and left me. No message by his servant! That he would not think of me when he was dying is indeed very extraordinary and what I could not have believed; but in a few days, if I hear nothing, it will then be out of doubt. The young princes, George the Second's grandchildren, were now growing to man's estate. Their aunt, the Princess Amelia, described them as "the best humored asses that ever were born;" but in Lady Mary Coke's eyes royal blood more than compensated for the want of intellectual or physical gifts, and the dignified court lady of thirty-two now lost her heart, or whatever represented that organ in her cold, well-regulated nature, to the Duke of York, a boy in his twentieth year, of "a little mean figure and a pale face," says Lady Louisa," with white eyebrows and eyelashes, and a certain tremulous motion of the eye, that was far from adding to its beauty." He, moreover, already Second daughter of Frederic, Prince of Wales, showed precocious symptoms of the profli- afterwards Duchess of Brunswick. According to Lady Louisa Stuart the practice of styling the female memgate habits and the vulgar taste for practi-bers of the royal family "Princess," had been imported cal jokes and horse-play, for which he was from Germany on the accession of the house of Hannotorious throughout his brief and inglo- English habits, probably in a spirit of opposition to his over. The Prince of Wales, who studiously affected rious career. On the occasion of the prince's funeral she descended into the vault to weep and pray beside the coffin, and this loud-voiced thoroughly German father, revived the old English But Lady Mary held peculiar views, and custom by calling his daughters "Lady," considering had he possessed the beauty of Adonis, France, or the "Infanta" of Spain) than that of this a more dignified title (like the "Madame" of and the accomplishments of the Admira-"Princess," so common on the Continent, and there ble Crichton, she could not have treated him with a more profound reverence, or a greater devotion. so far from being confined to royal persons. But Queen Charlotte, deeply imbued with German etiquette, induced George the Third to re-establish the title which still remains in use. grief lasted a long time. The mention of The failure of the happiness which Lady Mary had successively sought in an alliance with a future earl, a future duke, and an actual prince of the blood had left her sorely wounded. 66 'I was not born to be happy ; the same ill-fortune which attended me in early life pursues me still," she writes in her journal at this time; but she was not altogether discouraged yet, for when Lord Bessborough, in showing her over his magnificent house, had expressed the hope that she would consent to become its mistress, she, while professing the greatest respect and regard for his lordship, came to the conclusion that she "might do better," even if she had not been "still too much attached to the memory of the PERSON who is gone, to think of any other engagement." Had her Grace of Argyll danced a reel in church her daughter could not have been more scandalized: "Happy was I when they got into the coach," she says, and when she was able to apologize for her mother's misconduct, on the ground of her advanced age and the retired life she had led for so many years. The two princesses were probably far more disposed to laugh at Lady Mary's agitation and "hurryd spirits" than to resent the freedom of their hostess, the simple, good-natured "Duchess Jenny," of whose bad manners we shall hear no more; for a few weeks later the journal records how, on receiving the tidings of her mother's death, "I lay in bed twelve hours in the hopes of composing my spirits, and though I sought distraction in reading I found that I could not amuse myself." Then follow platitudes on life and death, full details as to the funeral which should be conducted on a scale befitting the rank of the deceased, and the touching remark that it was "a very melancholy office to be obliged to open the draws of any person who is just dead." For nearly a whole fortnight the journal contains no record of "Lu parties," or even of the domestic cribbage. Years passed, and Lady Mary Coke still failed to "do better." No suitor worthy of her notice was found daring enough to descend into the abbey crypt, and to resuscitate the heart buried in the PERSON'S tomb. To make matters worse, other women, boasting not one tithe of her pretensions, succeeded in advancing themselves. There was evidently something wrong in the social system. Of the fate that awaited her in a future state, she had no fears or misgivings; but how came it that in this life merits, like hers, did not meet with their reward? The same year that carried off the PERSON deprived Lady Mary of her mother, for whom she entertained but little affection, and whom she had ever treated with scant respect. Those blunt manners, and that utter want of due reverence for exalted rank which, to the last, continued to characterize her Grace, were not to be excused or forgiven. What is to be done with a woman who does not know how to efface herself in presence of royalty? Imagine the agony of mind which poor Lady Mary must have suffered during a scene which she describes in a long and pathetic letter to her sister, on the occa-reflections:sion of the Princess Amelia and the Duchess of Brunswick honoring her mother with a visit, and when the latter "quite forgot that they were princesses, or that there were any forms due to them. ... She went before them into every 'Pray Maram, observe my pretty deer, my turkeys, and my sheep. Did you ever see anything like them? room.... but Maram, I must show you my bed-chamber' (and in she walked before them); here is Pug's bed; and this is my little dressing-room; pray look at that chair; pray set down in it.'" In 1769 the following entry in the journal gives expression to these melancholy Duchess of Kingston; infamy seeming to I make no doubt of Miss Chudleigh being prosper, while virtue appears under a cloud, neglected and oppressed. Who is considered by the world for being virtuous, or for acting a nobly disinterested part? Does such conduct gain anything but the satisfaction of one's own conscience? I have experienced neglect of all kinds, from my most intimate acquaintances, and even from those who call themselves my friends; yet I have only been unfortunate, which I find, of all others, the most inexcusable fault. The Miss Chudleigh who forms the text |
