POPE'S " LADY SUFFOLK."
ALATELY published " Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian Preserved at Blickling Hall, Norfolk," throws a new ray of light on the character of the celebrated Lady Suffolk, Pope's " Court Lady," who was commonly considered to be the mistress of George II., but whose reputation was never universally acknowledged to be lost. In her own day she counted, even among courtiers, many fervent believers in her virtue, whose faith the newest page of history certainly tends to justify. Born in 1681, a daughter of Sir Henry Hobart, she was married when very young to Charles Howard; afterwards sixth Earl of Suffolk, whom Hervey describes as " wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, and extravagant." He seems to have been a madly jealous person, and very unkind to his wife. Shortly after their marriage the pair visited the Hanoverian Court, where Mrs. Howard obtained the favour of the Electoral Princess Caroline of Anspach. On the accession of George L she was appointed one of the Bedchamber Women to the new Princess of Wales, and her husband Groom of the Bedchamber to the Prince. She soon became, as Swift tells us, "the great favourite of the Court of Leicester Fields, which is a fact that of all others she most earnestly wishes might not be believed." The apart- ment of the Bedchamber Woman-in-Waiting shortly was, writes Croker, "the fashionable rendezvous of the most celebrated wits and beauties." Into this brilliant circle the "Suffolk Correspondence" affords at least a glimpse. Swift and Pone and Gay were constantly there, as well as Walpole
more witty, than Mrs. Howard, but no one, we are told, had her charm. Magnetism is a quality which cannot be com- pletely analysed ; it is as indescribable as it is irresistible. In her case it seems to have been connected with peculiarly quick sympathies, and, strange as it may sound in the circumstances, with a peculiar steadfastness. Of that much- belauded vice which men in general assign to women in particular, caprice, she had none. Walpole said that "her strict love of truth and her accurate memory were always in unison " ; and also that her eyes "showed her character, which was grave and mild." Pope wrote of her :- " I know, a thing that's most uncommon, (Envy be silent, and attend !) I know a reasonable woman, Handsome and witty, yet a friend.
Not warp'd by passion, awed by rumour, Not grave through pride, or gay through folly— An equal mixture of good humour, And sensible soft melancholy."
Lord Peterborough in a charming little poem which begins- " I said to my heart, between sleeping and waking,
Thou wild thing, that always art leaping or aching"—
addresses her in much the same language :— " 0 wonderful creature a woman of reason !
Never grave out of pride, never gay out of season."
While Swift, whose" Character of the Hon. Mrs. Howard" is not wholly laudatory—is not, indeed, without that touch of venom which he seldom excluded from his writings—admits that her ascendency among her acquaintance was due to her insight and judgment rather than to her beauty or wit. " There is no politician who more carefully watches the motions and dispositions of things and persons at St. James's- house, nor can form a language with more imperceptible dexterity to the present situation of the court She can gather timely intelligence without asking it, and often when those from whom she receives it do not know that they are giving it to her, but equally with others admire her sagacity." The fact that she obtained no favours or posts for her friends, though she never refused to try, angered Swift. " If she had never seen a court, it is possible she might have been a friend," be writes ; but " she is upon the whole an excellent companion for men of the best accomplish- ments who have nothing to ask." His opinion was that as her good fortune increased her character would deteriorate.
Her " talents as a courtier will spread, enlarge, and multiply to such a degree, that her private virtues,• for want of room and time to operate, must be folded and laid up clean like clothes in a chest."
Generally speaking, one judges a man or a woman to some extent by his or her friends, but in the case of Lady Suffolk this is not possible. She had intimate friends among every type of character. They wrote to her upon all subjects and from every point of view. They gossiped, they confided, they talked nonsense, they grumbled, they made love. They were never tired of writing, and of writing about themselves. Lady Suffolk's replies are much less entertaining than her friends' letters ; indeed, as we read we become more and more sure that her charm did not lie in her pen, but in her personality. No one seems to doubt for a moment that she will be interested in his or her smallest affairs. She had the wide sympathy which comes only by nature, and the complete indulgence which an intimate knowledge of a bad world will often produce in a good woman,—a quality which, while it attracts, is as like to a vice as a virtue, delivering, as it does, from pharisaism and hypocrisy, yet destroying the keen edge of that delicate sense of right and wrong which can only exist in a certain atmo- sphere of moral severity. To begin with Lord Chesterfield— Mr. Stanhope, as he then was—perhaps her most amusing correspondent. He is as witty as we should expect, and as cynically indifferent to the character his own letters give him. He tells how he obtained a reputation for Christianity among his tenants by the conversion of a black boy whom he persuaded to "renounce his likeness" in the midst of a crowded congregation, and explains with many pleasantries how hard it is to nurse his gouty father without the consoling hope of his speedy death. Swift writes caustic letters about Royalty and Courts, full of pin-pricks and unkind insinua- tions about Lady Suffolk's position at St. James's too subtly interwoven to bear piecemeal quotation. Lady Hervey, the celebrated " Molly Lepel," whose fair fame scandal does not touch, who " knows Latin but conceals it," talks on paper like a cultivated woman of to-day, primarily, she says, to divert herself, because " yon are the best anti-stupiditas ' I know." Gay and the eccentric Duchess of Queensberry, the mother of " old Q.," indite joint epistles for the double purpose of chaffing one another and entertaining their correspondent. Poor little Gay, with his sweet nature, his pretty wit, and his somewhat despicable dependence, is generally in a con- dition of wanting something, some vague remunerative post such as Lady Suffolk might procure for him. She never, however, bestowed anything upon him but sensible advice. " Your head," the says, " is your best friend ; it would clothe, lodge, and wash you ; but you neglect it." Another most prolific correspondent is Lord Peterborough. Almost all his letters are love-letters, very stilted and passionless in style, which provoked equally stilted and very snubbing replies. It has been thought that the whole corre- spondence was no more than a literary exercise on either side. This aristocratic old seaman and diplomatist, described by Swift as "the ramblingest lying rogue on earth," like a good many other such people, certainly made a most edifying end, and we see in his last letter to Lady Suffolk how great was his inner respect for the woman with whom it had amused him to carry on a literary flirtation. He is on his deathbed when he writes, and has been solacing some weary hours with a book about Julian the Apostate. " With what majesty does the Emperor meet his fate !" we read ; "showing how a soldier, how a philosopher, how a friend of Lady Suffolk's ought to die."
We cannot leave the subject of the " Letters " without quoting some of the new ones from Lord Buckinghamshire just published in the " Report " before us. The most enter- taining are written to his aunt, Lady Suffolk, while he was Ambassador at St. Petersburg. He writes very intimately and fully of things little and great, as a son might write to a mother, and apologises for frivolous details, saying : " You think this idle stuff, but you like I should write often, and I like to write to you, and the unavoidable consequence of our two likings must be just such stuff as this." Occasionally, however, Lord Buckinghamshire is as serious as he is intimate. " I sometimes," he says ruefully, " am a little deficient in faith upon matters of Religion, and more frequently of patience (or indurance, shall I call it ?) in the affairs of this world I was born with a disposition to doubt and to fret—original punishment for any sins I could probably commit."
The " Report " contains also a remarkable conversation between Lady Suffolk and Queen Caroline at the time of the downfall of the former, which " goes far," as we read in the preface, " to support the belief of her friends, to which Horace Walpole refers while he dissents from it, that Lady Suffolk's connection with the King was confined to pure friendship.' " Lady Suffolk tells Queen Caroline that, considering the open proofs she has received from the King of his disfavour, she feels she has no course open to her but to retire from Court. The Queen expresses great surprise. " Child, you dream ! " she exclaims. " How has he shown his displeasure ? Did I receive you as if you were under mine ? " " No, Madam," she replies, "if your Majesty had treated me in the same manner the King did, I could never again have appear'd in your presence," Caroline continues her efforts towards conciliation. Lady Suffolk, she is sure, has taken undue umbrage. " You are very warm," she remonstrates, " but, believe me, I am your friend, your best friend. You don't know a Court." Lady Suffolk, however, will not be appeased. " I fear, Madam, if I have not acquir'd knowledge in twenty years I never shall now," she says. "I beg it may be permitted me," she goes on, " to speak of the King as of a man only who was my friend. He has been dearer to me than my own brother, so, Madam, as a friend I feel resent- ment at being ill-treated and sorrow to have lost his friend- ship." The Queen still maintains that the whole thing is a matter of passing irritation. " Lady Suffolk, I daresay if you will have a little patience the King will treat you as he do's the other Lady's, and I suppose that would satisfy you." " No Madam," is the succinct reply, which does not, however, appear to anger Caroline in the least. Once more she begs her to remain in the Royal household, promising to influence the King to forego his mysterious displeasure. "I never will be forgiven an offence I have not committed," cries Ladi Suffolk. Lady Albemarle." The Qneen tries to reason with her upon another score. " Upon my word, Lady S., you don't consider what the world will say. For God's sake, con- sider your character. You leave me because the King will not be more particular to you than to others."
Lady Suffolk's answer is worthy of the woman who was not "awed by rumour." "Madam, as to my character, the world must have settled that long ago, whether just or unjust." A more dignified role than Lady Suffolk played throughout this interview it would be hard to imagine, and it certainly leaves upon the reader an impression of honesty in every sense of the word. As to the immediate cause of her disfavour with the King historians differ. Probably it may have been nothing else than her increasing deafness. The King wanted some one who could amuse him, sympathise with him, give him ideas, of which he had not too many, and serve him as a funnel whereby he could receive the thoughts of better heads. Lady Suffolk was interested alike in the affairs of State and the petty gossip of the Court, just as she was friendly alike with politicians, men of letters, and women of fashion. Her deafness, which for years had not been serious enough to inter- fere much with her conversation, became latterly an inevitable drawback. She had cultivated a friendship—supposing it to have been no more than a friendship—with a selfish, hard- hearted, worldly man because he was a King, and she deserved to suffer; but she suffered with dignity and self-command. She was, no doubt, a woman to whom the opinion of the world was supremely indifferent, and the atmosphere of a Court supremely delightful. There are many men and a few women who care only for their own good opinion,— it is on this supposition alone that we can excuse her tolera- tion of Swift's hints. The key to her conduct may perhaps be found in the letter she wrote to Mr. Berkeley, to whom, after Lord Suffolk's death, she was in middle age happily married. "There was no company at the tea-table on Tuesday but what most people hate to keep, but for whom I have so particular a respect and regard, that upon her appro- bation for every action of my life, my ease and happiness has and must always depend."
The conies scandaleuses of the period, taken in conjunction with her recorded words and the attitude of her friends, suffice neither to condemn nor to clear Lady Suffolk. Lady Hervey said in writing to her : "I think I have sometimes known the world judge right, but I am sure never knew you act wrong." The words refer ostensibly to a smaller matter than the virtue of her correspondent, but the larger issue must have been, we think, in the writer's mind. The circumstantial evidence may be against Lady Suffolk, but the a priori moral evidence is strongly on her side.
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