DIARY OF LADY COWPER.4- Tins Diary has been received with
a chorus of critical gratula- tion in which we find it somewhat hard to think ourselves forced to join. No doubt it is a genuine book enough, and of its kind a valuable contribution to the few original sources of modem British history. Lady Cowper, nee Mary Clavering, was for many years a "great political dame," a member of the Court of George L, a leading personage in the household of his ill-con- ditioned son .George Prince of Wales ; she heard of most things that occurred, and being herself a woman of much cleverness and solid integlity, she jotted them down without very much pre- judice or favour. What she says is probably very accurate, for the book overflows with unconscious evidence of her personal goodness, and is occasionally witty, and those who believe in "secret history" and think that Court gossip explains events,may find in her diary some little fresh material. But all that she has added to our direct knowledge is one more account, possibly the truest account, of the conflict between George I. and his son, the political intrigues that conflict fostered, the scenes or apprehen- sions of scenes which it caused in the Palace, and the ultimate for- mal reconciliation. That is not a very great contribution, for the drift of the facts was previously well enough understood, and the whole affair was in reality a Palace intrigue, into which very ha- portent politicians were from dine to time drawn. The real point of anecdotic interest, the cause of the fierce dislike between the King and his son, Lady Cowper does not explain, though she at- tributes it to Townshend's insolence, and the connection between their respective parties and English politics is supposed to be un- derstood, not described, except in assertions that the family quarrel weakened the Whigs, that if the Whigs went out the Tories would come in, that if the Tories came in they might bring over the Pretender. Evidently from her account the ruling spirit of the household opposition was the Princess, who first raised a party against the King, and then when reconciliation became prudent, sold the majority of her friends for a renewal of external Royal favour. Naturally as a member of the second household, Lady Cowper thought these quarrels and intrigues very im- portant indeed ; but we do not perceive that they made very- much difference to England, except so far as the spectacle of a disunited Court, with German favourites, German women, and weak ways, tended to increase the Jacobite ranks, and make the upper class and the mob doubt whether the pleasant, despotic, gentlemanly Catholic Stuarts were not more endurable than these constitutional, loutisb, Protestant Brunswickers. The middle class never had a doubt on the subject, and the Pretender found it im- possible even with an army to penetrate through the half-organized, half-discontented, but still hostile counties to. the capital. For the rest, the effect of Lady Cowper's book is to justify once more the unfavourable picture drawn by all contemporaries of this court, with its King who makes dirty jokes on the ambas- sadors' wives (vide page 43), and its Prince of Wales, who tells Lord Townsliend, when asking his aid to obtain a re- prieve for some of the peers sentenced to death for rebellion, Cat une de vos sottises," and the Princess who asks Mr. Craggs point blank whether or not "he had called her a bitch;" keeps her ladies standing till they are so ill that Lady Cowper, when her week isover, is compelled to go to bed ; gives her Maid of Honour, while complaining to Her Royal Highness of headache, three pages of a medical book to copy out, and, throws over her friends with- out scruple whenever it suits her interest, and where scenes of this kind seem to have been of almost constant occurrence. The Prince did not choose to let the Court doctor attend his wife, and as the Gecmans and English of the Court were at per- petual war, the Germans venting their insolence in a way which makes the reader believe that the courtiers had lost all English spirit, there was a fine "burly-burly." "The midwife had refused to touch the Princess unless she and the Prince would stand by her against the English 'Frows,' who, she said, were high dames, and had threatened to hang her if the Princess miscarried. This put the Prince into such a passion, that he swore he would fling out of window whoever had said so, or pretended to meddle. The Duchesses of St. Alban's and Bolton happened to come into the room, and were saluted with these expressions. Everybody's tone was now changed, and nothing was talked of but the Princess's good labour and safety. Nay, Lord Townshend, to show his readiness to comply, met the midwife in the outward room, and ran ,and shook and squeezed her by the hand, and made kind faces at hem; for she understood no language bat German. This I think the tip-top of all policy and making one's court." As a natural consequence the poor
* Diary of L•aly Cowper. Loudon: Johu Murray.
woman, with her attendants almost fighting over her bed, was delivered of a dead child—a dead Prince, as Lady Cowper, now acclimatized to Courts, actually calls the unborn babe.
The single object of all with whom she came in contact seems to have been to get some advantage for themselves, and even Lady Cowper, though she held the Princess's kiss of" mach more value than riches," still struggled for the "Key," and becomes not a little acid when she finds she is not to have it. She was by far the best of the household, and takes great' credit to herself for resisting the importunities of her relatives, who all wanted " placee," and bullied her dreadfully because she did not procure.them, though her husband wasted his private patronage as Lord Chancellor in a vain endeavour to satisfy their ideas of their own.merit, but the mass were a thoroughly contemptible set, always intriguing, or telling fibs, or doing betises- of some kind. Madame Kielmansegge, for example, sends by Lady Cowper a present to the Princess, because the Princess bates her, and Madame hopes by making Lady Cowper her envoy to induce the Princess to hate her too. Lady Bristol asks Lady Cowper to slander Mrs. Coke as an adulteress, because Mrs. Coke stands in the way of her ambition to become Mistress of the Robes. Mrs. Darcy begs her to. get Lady Howard made a Bedchamber woman to the Princess, she being then the mistress of the Prin- cess's husband. Thin request, however, after all, was not so very extraordinary, for the Princess did as Queen tolerate the woman about her, and told Lady Cowper the following story of Lady Kilmansegge, her father-in-law's mistress, as extremely amusing :—" Madame Kielmansegge had been told that the Prince had said that she had intrigued with all the men at Hanover. She came to complain of this to the Princess, who replied, she did not believe the Prince had said so, it not being his custom to speak in that manner. Madame Kielmansegge cried, and said it had made her despised, and that many of her acquaintance had left her upon that story; but that her husband had taken all the care he could to vindicate her reputation ; and thereupon she drew forth out of her pocket a certificate under her husband's hand, in which he certified, in all the due forms, that she had always been a faithful wife to him, and that he had never had any cause to suspect- her honesty. The Princess smiled, and said that she did not doubt it at all, and that all that trouble was very unnecessary, and that it was a very bad reputation that wanted such a support. I believe it is the first certificate of the kind that was ever given." Very soon after this we find Walpole acknowledging that the Duchess of Kendal (a German woman named Schulenaburg) really governed England :—" Walpole tells Lord Cowper that he would not wait upon Duchess. of Kendal till things were far advanced; that now he intended it, and that her interest did everything ; that she was in effect as much Queen of England as ever any was ; that he did everything by her." Lord Nottingham is angry with Lord Halifax because he delays giving a rich place to his son-in-law, Sir Roger Mostyn, " till an account is made up that is depending between him and the Government " :—" This morning I sent early to Baron Bemstorff, to desire to see him. He had requested me to give hint notice if Mrs. Oglethorpe was recommended to my mistress, and withal to give him notice of another piece of intelligence, which was, that Mrs. Kirk (widow of that Mr. Kirk who killed Conway Seymour) was recommended by the Duchess of St. Alban's for a bedchamber woman. I told him what both those ladies were ; that Mrs. Kirk had managed all the intrigue between Lady Mary Vere and the Duke of Ormond, took care of the child, was manager of all the intrigues of the Oxford family, had an ill reputation as to herself, and had been the Duke of Somerset's mistress. Bernstorff took down their names, and promised to speak, about them." The whole Court seems tainted with vulgarity, and in the Princess's household there is sometimes a lack of the most common respect. There are several entries of this kind,:—" About the middle of August, Lord Sunderland began his journey. He had been at Hampton Court to take leave ; and in the gallery the Princess and he had so loud a conversation that the Princess desired him to speak lower, for the people in the garden would hear, to which he answered, 'Let them hear!' The Princess added, 'Well, if you have a mind, let 'ern; but you shall walk next the windows, for in the humour we both are, one of us must certainly jump out at the window, and I'm resolved it shan't be me.' One may easily guess by this sample what the rest of the conversation was." People of fashion were, however, brutal-mannered, though Lady Cowper tells one story of a man who must have been a courtier, no one else being able to secure pardons, which is, we trust, an exaggeration :—" Mrs. Collingwood wrote to a friend in town to try to get her husband's life granted to her. The friend's answer was as follows I think you are mad when you talk of saving your husband's life. Don't you know you will have five hundred pounds a year jointure if he's hanged, and that you won't have a groat if he's saved? Consider, and let me have your answer, for I shall do nothing in it till then.' The answer did not come time enough, and so he was hanged." The King hates his son to such a degree that he asks if" the Whigs could not come back without him," sits at the reconciliation " disnaved, pale, and speaking in broken sentences," and at the subsequent reception "one could not help thinking 'twas like a little dog and cat—whenever the dog stirs a foot, the cat sets up her back, and is ready to. fly at him." All life looks common when seen through a microscope, but in this case, as in that of all other memoirs of the period, there are no redeeming colours. Nobody does anything great, or pleasing, or even ordinarily good-natured, and as for the virtues, they seem to have disappeared or taken refuge with Lady Cowper herself. She was good,—good wife, good mother, good friend, and good servant, and consequently she died in sorrow and gloom produced by the death of her husband, but aggravated by.the slights which the Princess, then become Queen, passed upon her.
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