In the midst, however, of this prosperity and quickly growing greatness, the same crushing calamity which had previously fallen upon Anne, overwhelmed these companions of her life. Their only son, a promising boy of seventeen, died at Cambridge, and both father and mother were bowed to the dust. The queen’s letter on this occasion expresses her sense of yet another melancholy bond between them. It is evident that she had offered to go to her friend in her affliction. “It would be a great satisfaction to your poor unfortunate faithful Morley if you would have given me leave to come to St. Alban’s,” she writes, “for the unfortunate ought to come to the unfortunate.” With a heavy heart Marlborough changed his will, leaving the succession of the titles and honors, so suddenly deprived of all value to him, to the family of his eldest daughter, and betook himself sadly to his fighting, deriving a gleam of satisfaction from the thought that other children might yet be granted to him, yet adjuring his wife to bear their joint calamity with patience, whatever might befall. She herself says nothing on this melancholy subject. Perhaps in her old age, as she sat surveying her life, that great but innocent sorrow no longer seemed to her of the first importance in a record crossed by so many tempests--or perhaps it was of so much importance that she would not trust herself to speak of it at all. The partizans of the exiled Stuarts were eager to point out how both she and her mistress had suffered the penalty of their sin against King James and his son, by being thus deprived of their respective heirs. It was a “judgment”--a thing dear to the popular imagination and most easily concluded upon at all times.
It would not seem, however, that this natural drawing of “the unfortunate to the unfortunate” had the effect it might have had in further cementing the union of the queen and the duchess. The
little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute
began to be apparent shortly after, though not at first showing itself by any lessening of warmth or tenderness. The existence of a division of opinion is the first thing visible. “I cannot help being extremely concerned that you are so partial to the Whigs, because I would not have you and your poor unfortunate faithful Morley differ in the least thing. And, upon my word, my dear Mrs. Freeman,” adds Queen Anne, “you are mightily mistaken in your notion of a true Whig. For the character you give of them does not in the least belong to them.”
