As she grew to womanhood Margaret became filled with the desire to play maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, chiefly because she had heard that the queen in her poverty had not the same number of ladies as in her prosperity. After much persuasion her mother allowed her to leave home, and she joined the Court at Oxford, and soon afterwards met William Cavendish, who was her senior by nearly thirty years. They married, and the battle of Marston Moor forced them into exile. Obliged to return to England, so that she might raise funds, she wrote one or two volumes of _Poems_ and _Philosophical Fancies_, successors to another grotesque work entitled _The World's Olio_. These were the first three of ten immense folios, treating of every imaginable subject, and most slipshod in grammar and style, that she gave to the world, tenderly regarding them, in the absence of any other offspring, as her children. [Illustration: WELBECK ABBEY] The Lives of the duke and of herself are, however, the only productions remembered nowadays. Of the first, Charles Lamb says: "There is no casket rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel"; but Pepys, who lived at the same time as the noble authoress, described it as "the ridiculous History of the Duke, which shows her to be a mad, conceited, rediculous woman, and he an asse to suffer her to write what she does to and of him". Her own memoir is charmingly and unaffectedly egotistical. She tells us: "I fear my ambition inclines to vainglory, for I am very ambitious, yet 'tis neither for beauty, wit, title, wealth, or power, but as they are Steps to raise me to Fancies Tower, which is to live by remembrance in all ages.... My Disposition is more inclined to Melancholy than Merry, but not crabbed or peevish Melancholy, but soft, melting, and contemplating Melancholy, and I am apt rather to weep than to laugh." Always fearing that she might be mistaken by posterity for her husband's first wife, she gives an elaborate explanation at the end of the book, so that all in after years might accredit her with intellectual magnificence. Although she met with much ridicule at the Court of Charles the Second, being satirized particularly by the libertine poets Etherege and Sedley, the fulsome praise of men of considerable intellect was lavished upon her, and even the sedate and usually truthful Evelyn, after a lengthy enumeration of the great women of history, flattered her with the assurance that all of those summed up together only divided between them what she retained in one! A curious story is told of her appearance with a train-bearer in the chamber of Catherine of Portugal. As this was a breach of Court etiquette, she was forbidden to repeat it, and resented the reproof by wearing at her next appearance a train of satin and silver thirty yards long, with the end supported by four waiting-ladies in the ante-room.