The Stark County Democrat

Select Story.

THE FALL OF A GREAT FAMILY.

There is nothing particularly pathetic that we know of for Americans in the story which comes to us from England of the complete financial ruin of the great ducal house of Marlborough. The London papers announce without a word, so far as we have yet seen, of comment, that the Duke of Marlborough has been obliged to succumb to the burden of his financial obligations. He has sold his house in town, a stately mansion in that stateliest of London's old aristocratic squares, celebrated in the homely old rhymes which Dr. Johnson used to repeat with so much delight:

"When the Duke of Leeds shall married be
To a fine young lady of high quality,
How happy will that gentlewoman be
In his Grace of Leeds' good company
She shall have all that's fine and fair
And the best of silk and satin shall wear.
And ride in a coach to take the air.
And have a house in St. James's square."

His Grace of Marlborough will no longer have a house in St. James's Square. His noble palace of Blenheim, near Woodstock, England's gift to the hero who humbled the Grand Monarque, cannot be sold. But it is to be shut up, and turned over to the care of servants; and the head of the great family of Spencer-Churchill, John, seventh in the succession of his titles from the first and world-famous Duke and Prince, is about to "retire to the Continent," like a "lame duck from Lombard street, or a crippled corn merchant from Mark lane, or a "fellow that hath losses" on the Derby. This matters little, indeed, to us; nor very much, perhaps, so far as her immediate interest in the actual house of Marlborough is concerned, to England. The contempt with which the clever and vindictive old Duchess Sarah regarded most of her fellow creatures has been avenged upon the direct heirs of the rank which her great husband won with his sword, and sought in vain to buttress forever with his purse. Of the five noblemen who have borne the titles of Duke of Marlborough in England and Prince of Mindelheim in the Holy Roman Empire, since Duchess Sarah's lovely but wilful daughter, Henrietta, was empowered by a special act of Parliament to take and transmit them, not one has made himself personally valuable either to his family or to his country. Henrietta, as everybody knows, was a headstrong beauty who would have been beaten at a first bout in a spelling tournament by any New England girl of six of our day. She took a lively interest, it is true, in literature, as impersonated in the airs and grace of "Mr. Congreve," and after that perfumed poet and man of fashion died and left her in his will ten thousand pounds as token of his admiration and regard, she took the trouble not only to have a monument put up for him in Westminster Abbey, but to write an epitaph for it herself, recording the "honor and the pleasure she had taken in his company."

"What pleasure she may have had in his company," said her bitter old mamma, when she was told of it, "I cannot say; but I am sure no honor."

Henrietta's second son, who succeeded her, in his grandmother's lifetime was a mere tool in the hands of his clever sister Lady Anne Bateman, who put him in the charge of the most astute and most unscrupulous man of his times, Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland. Lord Holland made a Walpole man of him without his knowing it, and taught him, as he taught his own illustrious son, the rival of Pitt, all the fashionable localities of the age. Duchess Sarah bore no love for this to the man whom she never spoke of excepting as "the Fox who has stole my goose;" and though she knew that "her goose" had gone so far as to mortgage her jointure in her lifetime, she contemptuously excused him, as a poor creature "who did not know right from wrong," and who "would probably come at last to sell his vote to the Treasury for a pension." Of course the successors of the brilliant Duke, none have made themselves specially notable in any way excepting perhaps, the bibliomaniac father of the present Duke, who more than once drove booksellers almost to Bow street by his acquisitiveness; and the present nobleman himself, who cut quite a figure during his father's lifetime as Marquis of Blandford, in the front rank of evangelical Toryism, until he was extinguished in a memorable contest for the representation of Middlesex by the caustic and merciless Mr. Bernal Osborne, who threw the crowd about the hustings into convulsions of laughter by quoting against him:

"A man may many pious texts repeat,
And yet religion have no inward seat.
'Tis not so plain as the old Hill of Howth
A man has got his belly full of meat
A man may cry 'Church! church!' at every word
Because he talks with victuals in his mouth;
With no more piety than other people,
A daw's not reckoned a religious bird
Because it keeps a cawing from the steeple!"

Neither England nor the Tory party have lost much then by the withdrawal of the Duke of Marlborough from public life and English affairs. Nor is the ruin of this conspicuous house entirely unexampled even in recent English story. Without going back so far as Humphrey Bigod, Duke of Norfolk, who was solemnly deprived by an English Parliament of his dignities for his poverty more than four centuries ago, and sent to die abroad a pauper in Flanders, we have had several instances within our own time of the pecuniary ruin of great personages in the British realm. The catastrophe of Stowe, once the grandest palace of the peerage, was chronicled a quarter of a century ago, with much impressive moralizing, in the London Times; the superb extravagance of the magnificent young Marquess of Hastings revived in our day the tradition of the second Villiers and of Philip, Duke of Wharton; and the head of the ancient house of Fane hangs now about the outskirts of the English turf like a ghost in pain.

The peculiarity of the Marlborough collapse seems to be that, so far as is known it is an illustration of the old Hebrew law which visited the sins of the fathers upon the children. The present Duke of Marlborough, not only before but since his accession to the title and the encumbrances of his forefathers, has been a model to the social proprieties. His ducal motto seems to throw back the responsibility of his mishaps upon a long buried past. "Fiel, pero desdichado"— "faithful but unfortunate"—not only recalls the fetterlock of the "Black Knight" in "Ivanhoe," but revives the memory of that curious will of the Duchess Sarah, in which the intense personality of that most decided dame was so sharply incarnated. The Duchess Sarah, like her husband, the great first Duke, was a shrewd handler of money. Coxe, who wrote the history of the soldier of Blenheim, has preserved a letter in which the Duke writes to a financial friend: "I beg pardon for troubling you, but I am in a very odd distress—too much ready money. I have fifty thousand more next week; if you can employ it in any way you will do me a very great favor." The Duchess Sarah was as full of "ready money" and as prompt to have it well "employed" as her lord; and when she came to make her will in 1744 she took the greatest possible pains to settle her property in such a way as to save it, if possible, from utter waste and dispersion. Her favorite grandson, John, first Earl Spencer, was not much wiser than his brother Charles, third Duke of Marlborough, but she tied him up. She left the bulk of her vast property, valued then at £30,000 sterling a year—of estates in Surrey, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdon (including the old Hampden property), Bedfordshire, Northampton, Staffordshire (the old Fauconberg property), Leicester, Hertfordshire and Norfolk—to Lord Marchmont and her lawyer, in trust for this grandson John, whose custom it was when he went about London streets drunk to give only guineas to his chairmen, thinking it low and vulgar to use silver money. She fixed upon these estates, it is true, a charge of £3,000 a year during their minority to each of the sons of her grandson Charles, and of £1,500 a year during life to their wives. These charges have inured, curiously enough, to the advantage of the ducal branch. The Duchess's grandson Charles had three sons, and her great-grandson George, the fourth Duke, two sons. But the second son of Duke Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill, married a sister of the Duke of St. Alban's in 1762 and she lived till 1812, drawing thus her £1,500 a year from the younger branch for fifty years. George, the fourth Duke married Lady Caroline Russell in 1762, and she died in 1811, drawing her £1,500 a year for forty-nine years. George, the fifth Duke, married in 1791, a daughter of the Earl of Galloway, who died in 1841, having drawn her £1,500 a year for fifty years.

It really looks like a preconcerted joke of destiny. But in spite of all this the younger branch of the Earls Spencer has grown steadily wealthier and more powerful, giving notable and able men to England, and founding that famous library at Althorp with which in its more recent history, if we mistake not, one of the very first law firms of the New World has been closely connected. Yet John Spencer, first Earl of the name, as we have already indicated, was really no better than his ducal brother Charles. Why are these things thus? Or is there, after all, no moral lesson at all to be drawn from these quips and cranks of Fate? Be this as it may, one of the grandest and proudest names in English history now stands sadly, and, so far as now appears, forever eclipsed. The pension of £5,000 a year—a sum equal to our Presidential income before our Congressmen thought fit to double it by way of securing a proportional increase in their own emoluments—which was granted a hundred and sixty years ago by England to the hero of that day, is still secured to his descendant. But this will only suffice to maintain the ducal state in a mild Continental eclipse. Are we to say with the stern predestinarians of old, that the money loving Marlborough, the only prototype, so far as we know, with Soult, of our own accumulative Chief Magistrate among the famous soldiers of modern history, has "been punished where he sinned," though in the person of his innocent descendant? Or shall we rather feel with Wordsworth, when we read of this calamity overtaking so bright a fame and so high an estate, that