Lady Mary Wortley Montague Part 4

"A woman that adds nothing to a man's fortune ought not to take from his happiness. If possible I would add to it; but I will not take from you any satisfaction you could enjoy without me."

"If we marry, our happiness must consist in loving one another: 'tis princ.i.p.ally my concern to think of the most probable method of making the love eternal."

"There is one article absolutely necessary--to be ever beloved, one must be ever agreeable."

"Very few people that have settled entirely in the country but have grown at length weary of one another. The lady's conversation generally falls into a thousand impertinent effects of idleness, and the gentleman falls _in_ love with his dogs and horses and _out_ of love with everything else."

And so on.

Possibly if Lady Mary had had less brains and more pa.s.sion, if she had not so calmly worked out the permutations and combinations of married life, the alliance might have been more successful. She, with all her intelligence, did not seem to realise that matrimony is not an affair of rules and regulations, of aphorisms and epigrams, nor that the lines on which husband and wife shall conduct themselves to a happy ending can be settled by a study of vulgar fractions.

Anyhow, the plunge was at last taken--with some not unnatural trepidation on the part of the twenty-three-year-old bride. On Friday night, August 15, 1712, she wrote to Montagu:

"I tremble for what we are doing.--Are you sure you will love me for ever? Shall we never repent? I fear and I hope. I forsee all that will happen on this occasion. I shall incense my family in the highest degree. The generality of the world will blame my conduct, and the relations and friends of ---- will invent a thousand stories of me; yet, 'tis possible, you may recompense everything to me. In this letter, which I am fond of, you promise me all that I wish. Since I writ so far, I received your Friday letter. I will be only yours, and I will do what you please.

"You shall hear from me again to-morrow, not to contradict, but to give some directions. My resolution is taken. Love me and use me well."

The wedding licence is dated August 16, and the marriage took place in a day or two.

The bride had the active a.s.sistance of her uncle, William Feilding, who may have been present at the ceremony; and the full sympathy of her brother, Lord Kingston, who, however, did not accompany her, perhaps deeming it impolitic to quarrel with his father.

The family must have thought that Lord Dorchester would examine Lady Mary's papers, for her sister, Lady Frances destroyed all she could find, including, unfortunately, a diary that Lady Mary had kept for several years.

CHAPTER IV

EARLY MARRIED LIFE (1712-1714)

An uneventful existence--Montagu's Parliamentary duties take him to London--Lady Mary stays mostly in the country--Correspondence--Montagu a careless husband, but very careful of his money--Later he becomes a miser--Lady Mary does not disguise the tedium of her existence-- Concerning a possible reconciliation with her father--Lord Pierrepont of Hanslope--Lord Halifax--Birth of a son, christened after his father, Edward Wortley Montagu--The mother's anxiety about his health--Family events--Lady Evelyn Pierrepont marries Baron (afterwards Earl) Gower--Lady Frances Pierrepont marries the Earl of Mar--Lord Dorchester marries again--Has issue, two daughters--the death of Lady Mary's brother, William--His son, Evelyn, in due course succeeds to the Dukedom of Kingston--Elizabeth Chudleigh--The political situation in 1714--The death of Queen Anne--The accession of George I--The unrest in the country-- Lady Mary's alarm for her son.

The records for the first years of the married life of Edward and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are scanty indeed. From the wedding day until 1716, when they went abroad, Lady Mary's life was, for months together, as uneventful as that of the ordinary suburban housewife. Montagu's parliamentary duties took him frequently to town, and kept him there for prolonged periods, during which he certainly showed no strong desire for her to join him. Lady Mary, indeed, spent most of the time in the country. Sometimes she stayed at the seat of her father-in-law, Wharncliffe Lodge, near Sheffield; occasionally she visited Lord Sandwich at Hinchinbrooke; for a while they stayed at Middlethorpe, in the neighbourhood of Bishopthorpe and York. From time to time they hired houses in other parts of Yorkshire. The honeymoon lasted from August until October, 1712, when Montagu had to go to Westminster.

The first letter of this period is dated characteristically: "Walling Wells, October 22, which is the first post I could write. Monday night being so fatigued and sick I went straight to bed from the coach." It starts:

"I don't know very well how to begin; I am perfectly unacquainted with a proper matrimonial stile. After all, I think 'tis best to write as if we were not married at all. I lament your absence, as if you were still my lover, and I am impatient to hear you are got safe to Durham, and that you have fixed a time for your return."

Marriage made Lady Mary more human. She no longer dwelt upon the various points that in her maidenhood days she had thought would be conducive to happiness in matrimonial life; she was now, anyhow for the moment, in love with her husband, or at least persuaded herself that this was the case, and was at pains to inform him of the fact.

"I have not been very long in this family; and I fancy myself in that described in the 'Spectator,'" the letter of October 22 continues. "The good people here look upon their children with a fondness that more than recompenses their care of them. I don't perceive much distinction in regard to their merits; and when they speak sense or nonsense, it affects the parents with almost the same pleasure. My friendship for the mother, and kindness for Miss Biddy, make me endure the squalling of Miss Nanny and Miss Mary with abundance of patience: and my foretelling the future conquests of the eldest daughter, makes me very well with the family.--I don't know whether you will presently find out that this seeming impertinent account is the tenderest expressions of my love to you; but it furnishes my imagination with agreeable pictures of our future life; and I flatter myself with the hopes of one day enjoying with you the same satisfactions; and that, after as many years together, I may see you retain the same fondness for me as I shall certainly mine for you, and the noise of a nursery may have more charms for us than the music of an opera.

[_Torn_] "as these are the sure effect of my sincere love, since 'tis the nature of that pa.s.sion to entertain the mind with pleasures in prospect; and I check myself when I grieve for your absence, by remembering how much reason I have to rejoice in the hope of pa.s.sing my whole life with you. A good fortune not to be valued!--I am afraid of telling you that I return thanks for it to Heaven, because you will charge me with hypocrisy; but you are mistaken: I a.s.sist every day at public prayers in this family, and never forget in my private e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n how much I owe to Heaven for making me yours. 'Tis candle-light, or I should not conclude so soon.

"Pray, my dear, begin at the top, and read till you come to the bottom."

Montagu, for his part, was somewhat careless as regards correspondence--for which offence she rebuked him more than once, but in the most flattering manner.

"I am at present in so much uneasiness, my letter is not likely to be intelligible, if it all resembles the confusion of my head. I sometimes imagine you not well, and sometimes that you think of it small importance to write, or that greater matters have taken up your thoughts. This last imagination is too cruel for me. I will rather fancy your letter has miscarried, though I find little probability to think so. I know not what to think, and am very near being distracted, amongst my variety of dismal apprehensions. I am very ill company to the good people of the house, who all bid me make you their compliments. Mr.

White begins your health twice every day. You don't deserve all this if you can be so entirely forgetful of all this part of the world. I am peevish with you by fits, and divide my time between anger and sorrow, which are equaly troublesome to me. 'Tis the most cruel thing in the world, to think one has reason to complain of what one loves. How can you be so careless?--is it because you don't love writing? You should remember I want to know you are safe at Durham. I shall imagine you have had some fall from your horse, or ill accident by the way, without regard to probability; there is nothing too extravagant for a woman's and a lover's fears. Did you receive my last letter? if you did not, the direction is wrong, you won't receive this, and my question is in vain.

I find I begin to talk nonsense, and 'tis time to leave off. Pray, my dear, write to me, or I shall be very mad."

Montagu was, not to put too fine a point on it, a careless husband. Not only did he neglect to write to his wife, but he neglected, or forgot, to keep her adequately supplied with money. She had more than once to remind him of this. "I wish you would write again to Mr. Phipps, for I don't hear of any money, and am in the utmost necessity for it," she told him in November, 1712. Montagu, even at this time a well-to-do man, found it difficult to part with his money. A couple of years later, Lady Mary had again to say to him: "Pray order me some money, for I am in great want, and must run into debt if you don't do it soon." Even in these days Montagu evidently had begun to be miserly. With all his riches, he never spent a crown when a smaller sum would suffice, and during most of his life he, as Sir Leslie Stephen put it, "devoted himself chiefly to saving money."

In the winter of 1712, Lady Mary, who was with child, suffered much from ill-health, and this was to some extent aggravated by intense boredom, although of that boredom she wrote good-humouredly enough.

"I don't believe you expect to hear from me so soon, if I remember you did not so much as desire it, but I will not be so nice to quarrel with you on that point; perhaps you would laugh at that delicacy, which is, however, an attendant of a tender friendship," she wrote to her husband from Hinchinbrooke at the beginning of December, 1712.

"I opened the closet where I expected to find so many books; to my great disappointment there were only some few pieces of the law, and folios of mathematics; my Lord Hinchinbrook and Mr. Twiman having disposed of the rest. But as there is no affliction, no more than no happiness, without alloy, I discovered an old trunk of papers, which to my great diversion I found to be the letters of the first Earl of Sandwich; and am in hopes that those from his lady will tend much to my edification, being the most extraordinary lessons of economy that ever I read in my life. To the glory of your father, I find that _his_ looked upon him as destined to be the honour of the family.

"I walked yesterday two hours on the terrace. These are the most considerable events that have happened in your absence; excepting that a good-natured robin red-breast kept me company almost all the afternoon with so much good humour and humanity as gives me faith for the piece of charity ascribed to these little creatures in the Children in the Wood, which I have hitherto thought only a poetical ornament to that history.

"I expect a letter next post to tell me you are well in London and that your business will not detain you long from her that cannot be happy without you."

Even in these early days of marriage Montagu seemed to have no love for domestic life, and often he stayed in London when he could have been in the country with his wife, or had her with him in town. "As much as you say I love the town, if you think it necessary for your interest to stay some time here, I would not advise you to neglect a certainty for an uncertainty? but I believe if you pa.s.s the Christmas here, great matters will be expected from your hospitality: however, you are a better judge than I am." So Lady Mary wrote from Hinchinbrooke in the first week of December. She did not disguise from him the tedium of her existence.

"I continue indifferently well, and endeavour as much as I can to preserve myself from spleen and melancholy; not for my own sake; I think that of little importance; but in the condition I am, I believe it may be of very ill consequence; yet, pa.s.sing whole days alone as I do, I do not always find it possible, and my const.i.tution will sometimes get the better of my reason. Human nature itself, without any additional misfortunes, furnishes disagreeable meditations enough. Life itself to make it supportable, should not be considered too near; my reason represents to me in vain the inutility of serious reflections. The idle mind will sometimes fall into contemplations that serve for nothing but to ruin the health, destroy good humour, hasten old age and wrinkles, and bring on an habitual melancholy. 'Tis a maxim with me to be young as long as one can: there is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth; those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity, which make all the happiness of life. To my extreme mortification I grow wiser every day than other [sic]. I don't believe Solomon was more convinced of the vanity of temporal affairs than I am; I lose all taste of this world, and I suffer myself to be bewitched by the charms of the spleen, though I know and foresee all the irremediable mischiefs arising from it. I am insensibly fallen into the writing you a melancholy letter, after all my resolutions to the contrary; but I do not enjoin you to read it: make no scruple of flinging it into the fire at the first dull line. Forgive the ill effects of my solitude, and think me as I am,

"Ever yours."

There was still hope in the hearts of Lady Mary and her husband that it might be possible to effect a reconciliation with Lord Dorchester. Since apparently the Marquess was not directly approachable by either of them, they perforce had to seek an intermediary. Such an one, they trusted at one time, would be one of Lady Mary's relatives, Lord Pierrepont of Hanslope. To this matter there are many allusions in the correspondence, "The Bishop of Salisbury writes me word that he hears my Lord Pierrepont declares very much for us," Lady Mary wrote from Hinchinbrooke early in December to her husband in town. "As the Bishop is no infallible prelate, I should not depend much on that intelligence; but my sister Frances tells me the same thing. Since it is so, I believe you'll think it very proper to pay him a visit, if he is in town, and give him thanks for the good offices you hear he has endeavoured to do me, unasked. If his kindness is sincere, 'tis too valuable to be neglected. However, the very appearance of it may be of use to us. If I know him, his desire of making my Father appear in the wrong, will make him zealous for us. I think I ought to write him a letter of acknowledgment for what I hear he has already done." Very shortly after, however, it appears that Lord Pierrepont was a broken reed upon which to rely. "I did not expect," Lady Mary said bitterly, "that my Lord Pierrepont would speak at all in our favour, much less show zeal upon that occasion, that never showed any in his life." You cannot put it plainer than that.

One who did really endeavour to bring about the resumption of friendly relations was Montagu's cousin, Charles Montagu, first Baron Halifax of Halifax, who was afterwards created first Earl of Halifax.

To judge from Lady Mary's comments, sometimes when Montagu did write it had been better he should not have done so.

"I am alone, without any amus.e.m.e.nts to take up my thoughts. I am in circ.u.mstances in which melancholy is apt to prevail even over all amus.e.m.e.nts, dispirited and alone, and you write me quarrelling letters,"

she rebuked him on one occasion.

"I hate complaining; 'tis no sign I am easy that I do not trouble you with my head-aches, and my spleen; to be reasonable one should never complain but when one hopes redress. A physician should be the only confidant of bodily pains; and for those of the mind, they should never be spoke of but to them that can and will relieve 'em. Should I tell you that I am uneasy, that I am out of humour, and out of patience, should I see you half an hour the sooner? I believe you have kindness enough for me to be very sorry, and so you would tell me; and things remain in their primitive state; I chuse to spare you that pain; I would always give you pleasure. I know you are ready to tell me that I do not ever keep to these good maxims. I confess I often speak impertinently, but I always repent of it. My last stupid letter was not come to you, before I would have had it back again had it been in my power; such as it was, I beg your pardon for it."