Читать книгу The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne онлайн

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In case this testimony should not be considered sufficient, another contemporary criticism shall be produced, namely, that of a certain Mr. Pepys, who kept a diary, and wrote in it on the 18th of March, 1667 (the same year in which the Master and Dons of St. John’s wrote their letter quoted above)—“Staid at home reading the ridiculous History of my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife; which shows her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an asse to suffer her to write what she writes to him and of him”. Probably an estimate of the Duchess’s book, about half-way between that of the Dons and that of the diarist, would not be very far from a just one.

A serious drawback to most biographies is that they begin with the dull subject of family history and end with the dreary one of death; and, of the two, the latter frequently affords less dreary reading than the former. Happily, in the present instance, pedigree can be almost dispensed with; for it would be an insult to the reader to suppose him ignorant of the history of so celebrated a family as that of Cavendish, which, as Burke observes, “laid the foundations of its greatness originally on the share of Abbey lands, obtained, at the dissolution of the monasteries, by Sir William Cavendish”. This Sir William Cavendish left two sons who had issue; the eldest of these, William, became first Earl of Devonshire, and the younger, Sir Charles of Welbeck Abbey, was the father of William Cavendish (the chief subject of these pages), who became first Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.