FAMOUS LADIES OF THE ENGLISH COURT.*

Tars is an interesting and very readable book, which would have been even better reading if the author could have laid aside her polemical tone. Mrs. Richardson has made studies of the characters of a dozen great ladies who shone at different periods of English history by their beauty, their charm, their talent, and their wit. And, in the case of one or two of them whose good name has been questioned, her read- ing and her instinct have brought her to the conclusion that the slur was undeserved. /Joni soit qui mall! penseis a motto sufficiently dear to the majority of English men and women to make the kinder view of characters of history readily acceptable. But Mrs. Richardson makes a mistake when she mixes up the biographer's task with that of the advocate of female emancipation. Whether they were innocent or cor- rupt, women like the Duchess of Richmond, of Charles IL's Court, and Lucy Lady Carlisle, who warned the Five Members of the plot to arrest them by violence, are not to be acquitted or excused upon the ground that in their day "woman's sphere was more restricted, her activities more constrained," than they are in our own day, and that, there- fore, it is small wonder if they "succumbed so often and so unblushingly to the temptation of treading their way to personal distinction and social fame by the ladder of men's passions." The fact is that if there is any one general moral. to be drawn from the study of the careers of great ladies of all times, it is one that makes for the truth that character is really independent of social movements and organised con- ditions. It is because the great lady is born freer of artificial and conventional restrictions than her bourgeoise sister that she is generally so much more interesting to read about. The world of men and affairs has always been open to such women ; how they have borne themselves in it has been purely a question of personal character,—a truth that could not be more signally exemplified than by the striking variety of ways in which the heroines of these twelve papers did actually bear themselves.

In Bess of Hardwick, the subject of the first paper, we get the character of the imperious shrew, the governing woman, magnificent, harsh, masterly, and successful. The story of her four marriages, beginning with the dying man Barlow. whom she found staying, like herself, as a guest at Lady Zouch's and volunteered to nurse—with the result that he married her, and in the course of a very few months left her a rich widow under fifteen, and, advancing on a rising scale of wealth and distinction, until at last she became Countess of Shrewsbury—makes of itself a record of triumphant achieve- ment. But even more wonderful than her talent for getting eligible husbands was her power of endearing herself to them. With Sir William Cavendish she lived on affectionate terms till he died. Sir William St. Lo, who robbed his own children of their lawful inheritance in order to enrich her children by Sir William Cavendish, addressed her in conjugal corre- spondence as "My own more dearer to me than I am to my- self " ; and Lord Shrewsbury, in the early days of his union • Famous Ladies of the English Court. By Mrs. Aubrey Richardson. With 83 Illustrations. London ; Hutchinson and Co.

with her, wrote that "of all earthly joy that had happened unto him, he thanked God chiefest for her,"—" for with you I have all joy and contentation of mind, and without you death is more pleasant to me than life if I thought I should be long from you." But the domestic life of Lord and Lady Shrewsbury was more than commonly strained by the gaoler- ship of Mary Queen of Scots, which Elizabeth put upon them.

Their Royal mistress dealt niggardly with them, and they suffered financially, and Lady Shrewsbury was not the woman to bear mulcting with resignation. She intrigued with the friends of Queen Mary, and screened herself to Queen Elizabeth by pretending that the disloyalty was on her

husband's side, and that she as his wife was not less wronged than Elizabeth as his Queen. It was of Bess of Hardwick

that it was said after her death, by way of consolation to Lord Shrewsbury, "There is but one shrew in the world, and every man bath her."

Between Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury and Elizabeth the Queen there is a sufficient likeness of character to sug- gest that this was the type proper to the time. But the Elizabethan period gives us also Lady Mary Sidney, the mother of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Countess of Pembroke, a woman who embodies the ideal of the great lady who is also the pious, loving, modest and womanly, wife, mother, and friend. When she was at Court, the courtiers of both sexes gave her the name of "Mother." Her son Philip wrote of her : "For myne owne Parte, I have had onely Lighte from her," and a delightful letter, addressed by her to him when he was a twelve-year-old boy, is one of the best of many good extracts given in this book. Other letters written by Lady Mary to Edmund Molyneux, her husband's secretary and representative at Court, throw an amusing light on the manners of the time. Sir Henry Sidney, at the time Lord- Deputy of Ireland and Lord-President of Wales, was to pay an official visit to the Queen at Hampton Court, accompanied by his wife, and for sole accommodation one "very little' bedchamber was allotted to them. Lady Mary was ill. She had never recovered her health since an attack of smallpox caught while nursing the Queen in the same malady; and she thought that considering her sickness, and the "multitude of Irish and Welsh people that follow" Sir Henry and want audience in his room, one chamber was not enough. Accord- ingly she writes to beg that interest may be made to get some kind of office for her husband to do business in:—

" My lodging, you see, being very little and myself continually sick, and not able to be much out a my bed. For the night- time, one roof, with God's grace, shall serve us ; for the daytime, the Queen will look to have my chamber always in readiness for her Majesty's coming thither ; and though my Lord himself can be no impediment thereto by his own presence, yet his Lordship, trusting to no place else to be provided for him, will be, as I said before, troubled for want of a convenient place, for the dispatch of such people as shall have occasion to come to him. Therefore, I pray you, in my Lord's own name, move my Lord of Sussex for a room for that purpose, and I will have it hanged and lined for him with stuff from hence."

Whether they were granted a second room or not, Mrs. Richardson does not definitely tell us, but Lady Mary's second letter on the matter ends : "Bat when the worst is known old Lord Harry and his old Moll will do as well as they can in parting like good friends the small portion allotted our long service at Court." Sir Fulke Greville praised the "ingenious sensible. ness " of Lady Mary's mind, and wrote prettily about the effects of her illness upon her beauty :—" She was a woman by descent of great nobility, so was she by nature of a large ingenuous spirit. Whence, as it were even racked with native strengths, she chose rather to hide herself from the curious eyes of a delicate time than come upon the stage of the world with any manner of disparagement, the mischance of sickness having oast such a kind of veil over her excellent beauty as the modesty of that sex doth many times upon their native and heroical spirits." Less of picturesque detail and circum- stance belongs to the paper on the younger Mary Sidney, who became Countess of Pembroke. All the pretty, beautiful, and "conceited" things the poets said of her are quoted, and an intelligible account is given of her life of learned and stately retirement. But why does Mrs. Richardson use such a rugged gzereion of the immortal epitaph ? Is it possible that- . Death ! ere thou karst such another,"

is to supersede, as the authentic reading, the much better line—

"Death, ere thou haat slain another"?

Lady Anne Clifford, the pupil of the poet Daniel, is a type of another kind of great lady, also of unspotted virtue. She commanded respect and friendship, but failed to make her- self beloved in matrimony. Twice married, first to the Earl of Dorset, and secondly to Philip Earl of Pembroke, she was not happy with either husband. Mrs. Richardson character- ises her rather happily as "a saintly egoist ; taking pride in the punctilious fulfilment of the tasks of a self-appointed destiny, and seeking not only to control, for their advan- tage, the lives of others, but to memorialise the fact that she was, in a sense, the fairy godmother of their lives." The individuality she was a little over-jealous of, was an interesting one. Her tastes were refined, whole- some, and useful. She restored her family seats, and con- sidered, in the doing of it, the advantage that it "sets the poor to work, thus curing idleness, as well as supplying their indigency." Ascetic and self-denying in her own dress and diet, she provided liberally, and even magnificently, for her household. She built monuments to her parents and to the poets she loved ; had a special fancy for making herself "memorable to her friends" by the expressiveness of her gifts ; and, above all, did "more and more fall in love with the contentments and innocent pleasures of a country life, which humour of mind I do wish with all my heart, if it be the will of Almighty God, may be conferred on my posterity that are to succeed me in these places, for a wise body ought to make their own home the place of self-fruition and the comfort- ablest part of their life." When asked to go to Court after the Restoration, her reply was : "If I should go to those places, new so full of gallantry and glory, I ought to be used as they do ill-sighted or unruly Horses, lest I should see and censure what I cannot competently judge of, be offended myself, or give offence to others."

Other women who come into the book are Penelope Lady Rich — Sir Philip Sidney's " Stella " — in telling whose story Mrs. Richardson gives prominence to the early attachment for Charles Blount (afterwards Earl of Devonshire) which was probably the ground of Stella's coldness to Astrophel, as it was certainly the cause of Lady Rich's unfaithfulness to her husband ; Anne Countess of Sunderland, who corresponded with John Evelyn about religion and with Henry Sidney on politics and gal- lantry, and entertained her friends by summoning to her house after dinner " artists " of the class now relegated to "Barnum and Bailey,"—fire-eaters who devoured brimstone and hot coals and melted beer-glasses ; and Frances Stewart, the beautiful, childish, audacious kinswoman of Charles the Second, for whose sake he almost divorced Katharine of Braganza, and whom he loved with sufficient disinterestedness to visit her after her marriage to the Duke of Richmond, when she was ill in bed with smallpox. Frances Stewart was the model from whom the "Britannia" of the Restoration coinage was designed, and her image, with modifications, still lives on our modern coppers.

Of Lucy Countess of Carlisle, it was said that though "she more willingly allowes of the conversation of Men than of

Women, yet when she is amongst those of her own sex, her discourse is of Fashions and Dressings, which she bath ever so perfect upon herself, as she likewise teaches it, by seeing her." Mrs. Richardson draws with lively temper the pointed contrast between this brilliant and versatile woman, who was in turn the Egeria of George Villiers Duke of Buckingham, of Strafford, and of Pym,—and her sister, the Countess of Leicester, "essentially a homely woman•

to whom only the personal and domestic appealed." In painting the portrait of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, the part of the Queen is taken with more sympathy than we should have expected. The author is of opinion that in judging of her relations with the dominating Sarah, people do not, as a rule, take anfficiently into account the " religious- ness of Anne and the utter godlessness of the Duchess of Marlborough."

A particularly interesting chapter, rich in quotations from Pope, Swift, Gay, and Horace Walpole, is devoted to Mrs. Howard, afterwards Countess of Suffolk. bedchamber woman to Caroline of Anspach, a favourite of George II. The per- trait of Isabella Marchioness of Hertford is sparkling and vivacious ; and the story of Lady Sarah Lennox—her early romance as the sweetheart of George III., the disaster that broke up her life as Lady Sarah Banbury, and her recovery of character as the wife of Colonel Napier and the mother of the three Generals Napier—is told with sympathy and respect. Mrs. Richardson mentions that in many cases she has had access to papers as yet unpublished, and we gather that a memoir of Lady Sarah with interesting letters is likely soon Vo appear.

Altogether this is, at we said in the beginning, a pleasant and profitable book. We hope, however, that if Mrs. Richardson writes more studies of great ladies, she will avoid phrases like "a vivid mentality" when describing their intellectual attributes. Neither should she say of men that they are all "great babies." Expressions of this sort are blots upon a style which has its own merit of considerable briskness and vivacity.