Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

It therefore came as a surprise, the following Sunday, to learn that the Duchess of Newcastle’s carriage had rolled into Palace Yard with little ceremony, as he, Samuel Pepys, had been at church in Hackney.

He missed her, too, at the annual celebration for the Order of the Garter — the processions, the feasts — she in a flowered gown, a petaled hat of roses, he in the Navy Office dealing with accounts. Then came May Day and the park was like a circus. The air was thick with hawthorns, cakes, and shit. “Mad Madge,” someone cried from the crowd, at last. “Mad Madge,” someone repeated, as her black-and-silver carriage came roaring down the path. Black stars on white cheeks. “The whole story of this lady is a romance,” he wrote in his diary that night.

And so, when Sir George Berkeley announced at a recent meeting of the Royal Society that the Duchess of Newcastle hoped to visit — that he had dined with her at Newcastle House and that she hoped to be invited —Pepys, a gentleman member, had been pleased, curious and pleased, even as the news caused a collective groan in the room. They were a new organization, after all, still working to make their name. Putting aside all that she had written — her attacks on their work — there was no telling what she would do. They’d all heard the stories: the crowds, her breasts at the theater, the slight she’d given the queen. They could easily imagine the mocking ballads the next day at the pub. Yet she was a duchess, was favored by the king. Debate followed, pro and con. Until, whether out of loyalty or real friendship to the duke, the aristocratic members urged the invitation be sent.

So she’d arrived, twenty minutes late — so she sits there still.

Hooke has finished and the room awaits her reply. But the duchess only sits, looking into the device. That hat is too much, Pepys thinks — still, her shape is fine. At last, she lifts her head. What ingenious remark will she make? “Gentlemen,” she says, “I am all admiration.” She rises from her chair. “I am all admiration,” she says again. She nods, stiffly, as if wishing them well. She looks to Lord Brouncker, who stands, surprised, and leads her to the door.

“A mad, conceited, ridiculous woman,” Pepys writes that night in his diary. She was pretty enough for forty-three, but what a disappointment. She said nothing at all worth hearing. “I do not like her at all.”

William sits in a chair beneath the portrait of his first wife, who is quiet as a pearl, the moon. Margaret is quiet, too. She looks peaceful, though she’d returned in a state. “I said nothing!” she’d cried in the entranceway, unsteady as on a ship. “I don’t understand,” he’d answered, coming to find his wife. She’d wept there on the tiles with her hand against a wall. He’d coaxed her into a chair, persuaded her to take some wine.

She’s calm now, exhausted. There was nothing she could have done. It was only a pretty performance. “It was only more chatter,” she says.

Once, beside a brook, she’d created whole worlds with the tip of her leather boot. She was Margaret, Queen of the Tree-people, and her brothers had built her castles of ropes in the elms. Something had mattered so much — an argument about a bird? She’d watched her own enormous shadow as she’d marched across the fields.

“They will say I failed or that I’m a fool.”

“My dear,” William says, “the honor was theirs.”

Out in the garden, it pours.

Days later, the Dutch fleet enters the Thames. London panics. The papers move on from the duchess to the war. She and William ride north, in haste. The city slides from view, replaced by farms, then hills, then woods. And though she does not know it yet, she will never leave Welbeck again. She’ll continue to read widely, correspond widely, too. She’ll write a well-received biography of William, a second book of plays. And she’ll pay to reissue her Blazing World with its critiques of the Royal Society and its wild fancy intact.

She calls for the carriage. She makes her daily tour. Through the grounds, into the village, past the children, into the woods. The day is nearly done. The sky is a yellowish pink, the snow a mirror, a yellowish pink beneath. Even the village cottages have taken on a glow, sheep like pearls in pinkish snow. Out the carriage window she sees ancient oaks, the wet black earth, and thinks of the orchard in Antwerp — the same black earth, wild and dark, but nothing else is the same. She thinks of the orchard in Antwerp — and she’d been dressed as a bee! “Let’s be off,” William had whispered, but she’d just then spotted the queen dressed as an Amazon. “Let’s get out of this place,” he’d said, guiding her through the busy castle and back into the air. There were the stars, still dotting the sky, the lanterns on their hooks. And there was Christina, Queen of Sweden, stepping into a carriage. There was her ankle, her foot. “What a lovely party,” said a pretty girl who’d passed them on the stairs.

Now Lucy arrives to prepare her for bed. She unbraids, untwists her mistress’s hair. “What shall we speak of?” one lady asks the other. “Aren’t they lovely?” says the other of the roses in a vase.

At last she is alone. Another day is done. In her nightgown, in her slippers, Margaret opens the book: “It is a Description of a New World , not such as the French man’s World in the Moone; but a World of my own Creating, which I call the Blazing-World : The first part whereof is Romancical , the second Philosophical , and the third is merely Fancy , or (as I may call it) Fantastical ; which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall account my self a Happy Creatoress ; if not, I must be content to live a melancholly Life.”

ONE WINTER MORNING, SHE WENT OUT FOR A WALK. THE YARD WAS A blank sheet of snow. The sky was curious — more a sea than a sky — and she walked into the woods in breeches and riding boots. When they found her, hours later, she was sitting alone on a garden chair, leaning to one side.

It was 1673. She was forty-nine. She was survived by her husband and her many Paper Bodies. Through them she would live on, she hoped, in many ages and many brains.

William was unprepared. He never imagined he’d outlive her, his blushing, awkward wife. With her body laid out below and villagers filing through, he sat alone in her chamber amid her gowns and books. They lifted her casket into a carriage, which lumbered up the drive.

After resting in the reception hall at Newcastle House one night, Margaret made her final tour through London’s clamorous streets. Mourners and the curious followed. No one shouted. Church bells tolled. Her husband could not be there, too old to make the trip, but her favorite sister, Catherine, walked beside her all the way. She was laid to rest in the Cavendish family vault.

William died three years later, almost to the day.

They are buried together in Westminster Abbey. The inscription above their bodies reads: “Here lies the loyal Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess, his second wife, by whom he had no issue: her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble family: for all the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous. This Duchess was a wise, witty and learned lady, which her many books do well testify; she was a most virtuous and a loving and careful wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries, and when he came home never parted from him in his solitary retirement.”

This is a work of fiction. To readers interested in historical biography, I recommend Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen and Kathleen Jones’s A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 .