Abigail's Cousin (48 page)

The skin of
Mesnager's face became taut and more difficult to set into a smile
that belied his feelings. He said: "As your grace pleases."

The duke had
not finished with him however and leaned forward ignoring everyone
else to say: "Yet, sir, there is still one point that bedevils this
whole proceeding."

Mesnager now
calculated that far from coming away with more, he might even end
up with no treaty at all. He listened grimly to the duke and the
black patch covering Shrewsbury's left eye took on a Machiavellian
menace as he listened intently to his words:

"My mistress,
her majesty, is perturbed to understand, monsieur, that James, the
young Pretender, is domiciled at St Germain. Her majesty would like
your assurance that the young fop leaves your master's
domains."

Mesnager
stared at the speaker realising the fears expressed were those that
the marquis hoped would persuade the English to modify their
demands, but the uncompromising Shrewsbury would have none of it.
Mesnager looked at the documents on the far table and had an idea
and put it into words:

"But your
grace! These documents we sign today are preliminary. Who knows
that the Pretender will not leave of his own accord by the time of
the full treaty at some date, in the near future. My master talks
of Utrecht early in the New Year."

Shrewsbury
nodded at Mesnager's soothing words and then smiled though there
was little occasion for either party to notice each other's
demeanour as a noise occurred which prompted them both, as with the
company, to look in the direction of the sound. It had been a
scream. It was followed by a hollow sounding scramble succeeded by
a woman's voice:

"Not a fourth
time, Henry, unless you can catch me." There followed the sound of
hurrying feet and another instantly recognisable voice:

"I shall catch
you, Alice, never fear, if it's the last thing I do."

The King of
Hearts kicked aside a screen to reveal the end of a speaking tube
and shouted to anyone who would listen:

"Where does
this lead to?"

It was Prior
who answered: "Leave it to me your grace." As he spoke he opened
another small door and he could be heard chasing down bare wooden
stairs. The duke strode across the room and picked up one copy of
the preliminary treaty and invited Masnager"

"Come sir, let us to the signing table.
Have no fear, you will have Mr St John's signature also. He may be
the last to sign it though it is the last thing he does in this
world when I get through with him.
Come!"

Matt's Peace.
It was a shorthand for the preliminary peace negotiations leading
to the document signed by the plenipotentiaries from France and
England. When the Duke of Somerset heard of it from his wife who
was a close friend of the queen and therefore in daily contact with
the palace and therefore not unaware of the gossip among the
servants, he was stunned.

Rumours had circulated for weeks about the
comings and goings of French agents and he was pleased about the
prospect of no more war yet the manner of the negotiations had
shocked him. He and his fellow peers were more accustomed to the
fanfare of trumpets heralding the opening of talks between the
leading statesmen of the countries concerned, and of course the
statesmen concerned would be, among other things, courtiers,
certainly of noble blood, with the minor nobility at their behest
running in and out of a conference chamber t
o satisfy the statesman's whim.

Yet the rumour
gaining alarming and increasing currency seemed to point to
priests, to members of the lower house, to servants. Somerset lost
no time the following day in getting out his carriage at an early
hour in order to ride to Whitehall, and his action was duplicated
by other noble members of the House of Lords. Their bone of
contention and discussion concerned this rumour of Matt's Peace,
and what began to emerge as a concensus among them was that a stop
must be put to the whole proceedings.

It was expected that at some future date
the preliminary peace treaty would be put to Parliament for debate
and decision, meaning a vote, though caution needed to be exercised
as the rumour was afoot that the queen herself had
in
itiated the moves
towards peace

Some way must
be found for a motion to be debated and voted upon that would send
a clear signal to the peace-proposers that the preliminary peace
articles would not be approved thereby sparing the queen
embarrassment. Thereafter the leading lords would offer their
services to the queen and the true peace would be negotiated by the
real leaders of England. It was time to send the merchant
adventurers packing. The landed gentry had ruled England from time
immemorial; they must make a stand and reinstate themselves as the
only leaders in the country.

Meantime the
duke of Shrewsbury was keeping his own council; nobody suspected
him of any complicity in the affair as widely known was his
impatience with the whole political scene. Just after the turn of
the century he had travelled to Rome on doctor's orders spending
several years there resisting and actually refusing all pleas to
return. When at last he had decided to come back it was more to
please his new wife, Adelhida, daughter of the marquis Palleoti of
Bologna, though on arrival he was distressed to learn the court
ladies of the home counties regarded his new duchess with scorn for
her 'foreign manners'.

Sarah, the
duchess of Marlborough, whom he hoped might have shown some feeling
for her described her openly as ill-bred, ignorant and flighty. His
own prospects of gaining reacceptance back into public life were
dealt a blow when a letter he had written home was made public. In
it he promised that had he a son he would as soon bind him to a
cobbler as a courtier, or to a hangman rather than a statesman.

At the time it
was a genuine 'cri de coeur' of a politician whether at court or in
Parliament, especially in the light of the shocking revelations
about the secret Treaty of Dover between Charles II and Louis XIV
whereby in return for a gift of 200,000 gold louis, French troops
would forcibly impose Catholicism upon an unwilling English people.
The earl of Danby, its arch exponent, paid the price for
Parliamentary displeasure at Charles' revenge upon England, with
his head. The Duke of Shrewsbury as one of the 'immortal seven' who
had invited William of Orange to invade England might well have
felt himself vulnerable in the event of a Jacobite restoration.

Yielding to
the pleadings of his new wife, Charles Talbot consoled himself that
there would be a post for him under a queen well disposed towards
him but on reaching these shores, found there was little scope for
a neutral. Yet little by little he did find a niche though he was
to become accustomed to filling it via the back stairs of St James
Palace. He found someone, sharing his interest, in being diverted
by horse racing, gambling, cockfighting, and unlike Robert Harley,
he was not averse to a game of cards as it tended to bring out his
natural 'joie de vivre' even when losing more than he could afford.
He was quoted as saying: "I have lived in four courts and this is
the first time I've seen statesmen going up the back stairs."

He was to
benefit from one discovery of the queen that unofficial channels
could bring forth the desires she had set her heart on which was
often not in accordance with the advice of her ministers. It was
certainly useful to Robert Harley who was also fond of the back
stairs coming to realise the duke's value as an ally in the upper
house where he had few friends.

It was
Shrewsbury who backed up Robert Harley's choice of envoy to France
to replace the earl of Jersey. Hitherto the queen had steadfastly
refused to countenance Mathew Prior in the post citing his 'mean
extraction', but being won over by Shrewsbury. His eventual reward
came by being appointed ambassador in waiting upon the outbreak of
peace between England and France.

His colleagues
in the House of Lords had other ideas. The dukes of Somerset,
Argyle, Newcastle and others decided that unless they acted now,
they might never regain their former influence losing out to the
lower House so they conceived a motion to lay before parliament to
the effect that no peace could be contemplated where any part of
the West Indies would be retained by the House of Bourbon.

Matt's Peace
was a quid pro quo treaty balancing English and French interests
and should the Lords' motion be carried, the treaty would need to
be renegotiated. This was the object of the motion laid before the
House by Daniel Finch, the earl of Nottingham. Those concerned
considered they were being particularly clever in presenting the
motion in the presence of the queen herself for after opening
Parliament, the queen traditionally, at that time, remained in the
chamber when the opportunity was taken to present and pass a motion
praising the queen or her government.

It was a pleasing if innocuous custom. The
lords however took the decision to replace this harmless motion
with that of Daniel Finch. It was carried by 62 votes to 54.
It did cause the queen some
embarrassment to the extent of her being unsure whose arm she would
accept in the traditional ritual of being conducted from the
chamber. On returning to St James Palace, she immediately sent for
the earl of Oxford to vent her displeasure and yet he proved
remarkably sanguine comforting her majesty by telling her that by
revealing their hand, the lords had placed themselves, at her
mercy. What was Robin the trickster up to?

In previous
years the queen had suffered at the hands of the over-mighty Whig
Junto in forcing upon her unacceptable ministers or ambassadors,
or, through a resignation, her plans had been altered. She recalled
with particular chagrin the occasion in 1708 when the Duke of
Somerset had occasioned political and personal hurt. Being a
staunch Anglican she had little regard for the Commons regarding it
as the home of Dissenters and unbelievers, yet of late, she had
even less regard for the House of Lords. She would show them. Her
first act of revenge was to call to her presence her personal
secretary, William Legge, the earl of Dartmouth, who had been one
of the 62 in that vote.

His fellow
peers praised him believing the queen had come to her senses and
wanting him to recommend a suitable candidate for new peace
negotiations. He was in for a shock. The queen calmly drew from her
pocket a sheet of paper upon which were the names of twelve
commoners and ordered him to draw up warrants of ennoblement for
each. When he expressed his undoubted surprise, she kindly asked
him whether he had any doubts of its legality going on to say she
had made far fewer lords than her predecessors. He, Dartmouth and
other like minded lords, had afforded her the opportunity to
rectify the omission.

One of the
twelve was a certain, Samuel Masham whose wife would become Lady
Abigail Masham, of Langley Marsh, Buckinghamshire. On the 31st of
December, 1711, the London Gazette announced the simultaneous
creation of the twelve peers. Abigail, on hearing the news, cast
her mind back on a day in 1697 when a gauche 27 year old woman had
been accepted into Princess Anne's household as a bedchamber-woman.
Later the queen was to beg her to stay on in her household as a
dresser which she deemed more in keeping with her elevated
position.

Such a rise
was unprecedented and has never been emulated in the history of the
royal household.

England, in 1709, united with Scotland, by
agreement with France, left the War of the Spanish Succession in
1712 leaving its former allies, the Netherlands, Prussia, Denmark,
some German states and Austria to fight on alone.
In the subsequent peace treaty
England did well gaining more territories, including Gibraltar.
Unnoticed, a significant event took place in 1712 when Thomas
Newcome developed the first steam engine and thereby, in the words
of Professor Lovelock, launched the modern age of technology, named
by the Victorians, the Industrial Revolution.

Of the subsequent fortunes of the
Mashams
, little can be
gleaned from the historical record. Abigail’s brother Brigadier
Hill commanded a failed expedition against French Canada returning
to dismantle Dunkirk according to the Treaty of Utrecht; then he
too disappears from the historical record. The Duke of Marlborough
was forced to leave the country in order to escape from prosecution
for peculation i.e. diverting state funds for his own use. The
charge was dropped by the Whigs who won the election of 1715, the
year which saw the death of Queen Anne and the accession of King
George I. On his return from abroad, the duke and Sarah moved into
Blenheim Palace awarded him by Parliament and a grateful nation
after Marlborough’s victory on the field of Blenheim against the
combined armies of France and Bavaria in a war instigated by Louis
XIV, the so-called War of the Spanish Succession.