Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne — John Shaqi
Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen AnneOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
History
Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Addison, Joseph, 1672-1719; Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 1665-1714; Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731; Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745
And now it being quickly known that the quarrel was made up,
nothing was to be seen but crowds of people of all sorts flocking
to Berkeley House to pay their respects to the prince and princess;
a sudden alteration which I remember occasioned the half-witted
Lord Carnarvon to say one night to the princess as he stood close
by her in the circle, “I hope your highness will remember that I
came to wait upon you when none of this company did,” which caused
a great deal of mirth.
Meanwhile, the little boy, the heir of England, interposes his quaint
little figure with that touch of nature which always belongs to a child,
in the midst of all the excitement and dullness, awakening a certain
interest even in the solitary and bereaved life of William, and filling
his mother’s house with tender anxieties and pleasures. He was sickly
and feeble from his childhood, but early learned the royal lesson of
self-concealment, and was cuffed and hustled by the anxious cruelty of
love into the use of his poor little legs years after his contemporaries
had been in full enjoyment of their liberty. It is characteristic of the
self-absorbed and belligerent chronicler of the princess’s household,
whose narrative of all the quarrels and struggles of royal personages
is so vivid, that she has very little to say about either the living or
dying of the only child who was of such importance both to her mistress
and to the country. His little existence is pushed aside in Lady
Marlborough’s record, and but for a little squabble over the appointment
of the duke’s “family,” which she gives with great detail, we should
scarcely have known from her that Anne had tasted that happiness of
maternity which is so largely weighted with pains and cares. But the
story of little Gloucester’s life, as found in the more familiar record
of his waiting-gentleman, Lewis Jenkins, is both attractive and
entertaining. The little fellow seems to have been full of lively spirit
and observation, active and restless in spite of his feebleness, full of
a child’s interest in everything about him, and of precocious judgment
and criticism. Some of the stories that are told of him put these gifts
in a startling light. “Who has taught you to say such words?” his mother
asks him when the child has been betrayed into innocent repetition of
the oaths he had heard from his attendants. The boy pauses before he
replies. “If I say Dick Dewey,” he whispers to a favorite lady, “he will
be sent down-stairs. Mama, I invented them myself,” he adds aloud. The
little being moving among worlds not realized, learning to play his
little part, taking his cue from the countenances round him, forming his
little policy in the twinkling of an eye, could not have had a better
representative. His careless indifference to his chaplain’s religious
services, but happy learning of little prayers and verses with the old
lady to whom he takes a fancy, his weariness of lessons, yet eager
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