An Account of the Conduct., together with; The Other side of the Question. Concerning The Dowager Duchess of Marlborough

An Account of the Conduct

The volume is in very good to excellent condition internally, with generally clean pages, clear print and ample margins throughout. There is a little slight and occasional foxing. The volume is bound in mid-18th century calf, contemporary to the time of publication. The binding is in very good condition, with a strong book-block and hinges that hold firmly by the cords (the leather upon the front hinge is cracked; the leather upon the rear hinge remains intact). The boards are mildly scuffed and the edges show mild to moderate wear. The original morocco label is lacking; the gilt remains relatively fresh, with only slight fading.

The other side of the Question

The volume is in excellent condition internally, with generally clean pages, clear print and ample margins throughout. The title page is a little dusty and toned. There is a little slight and occasional foxing. The volume is bound in mid-18th century calf, contemporary to the time of publication. The binding is in very good condition, with a strong book-block and hinges that hold firmly by the cords (the leather upon the front and rear hinges is cracked, but the cords remain quite strong). The boards are only very mildly scuffed and the edges and corners show mild to moderate wear. The original morocco label is lacking; the gilt remains relatively fresh, with only slight fading. There are two vertical hairline creases upon the spine where the leather has begun to crack; however, the sewing remains very strong and the integrity of the book-block is essentially unaffected.

In other words both shelf ready but handle with care.

On ‘An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough’

Francis Harris has written an account of the 1742 ‘Conduct’ for the British Library, in which she states the following:

“SARAH, Duchess of Marlborough’s self-justifying narrative of her years at Court, An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough attracted a considerable amount of attention at its first publication in 1742, and has since frequently been used as an historical source. For not only had she been the wife of one of Queen Anne’s chief ministers and the close associate of several others, she was also the intimate for many years of the Queen herself, and an active figure in Whig politics in her own right.

The Duchess made it clear that the Conduct was compiled, not from her recollections in old age, but from writings of a much earlier date. Three of these are specifically mentioned in the introductory paragraphs: an account of ‘the unhappy differences between Queen Mary and her sister’, which she had written about forty years before for Bishop Burnet’s wife; a defence of the management of her Court offices under Queen Anne, drawn up after her dismissal in 1711, with a view to publication; and a narrative of her political conduct and her loss of Queen Anne’s favour, composed with ‘the assistance of a friend, to whom I furnished materials’.

“Having fulfilled an intention of more than thirty years’ standing, the Duchess rested Content: ‘I have done what I had great pleasure in’, she remarked when taxed with criticisms of the Conduct, ‘vindicated myself by incontestable proofs from the vile aspersions that had been thrown upon me by the rage of parties.’ “But this, of course, is what she had not done. As attempts at self-defence, her various narratives make disturbing, and even pathetic reading. Their sheer quantity, and the ‘curious orderly incoherence’ of those of her own composition, have been plausibly cited by one biographer as evidence of a mental disturbance amounting to paranoia.
In their obsessive and often irrelevant detail there is much that is unintentionally more damaging to herself than the original ‘aspersions’ ever could have been. If there were no other evidence, her accounts of her confrontations with Queen Anne, for example, would make the reasons for her loss of favour only too clear.

“Yet the same qualities which make the narratives ineffective as self-defence contribute to their interest as history, and whatever the psychological compulsion behind her outpourings, the Duchess had witnessed and participated in much that was worth recording. It was with the instinct of an historian, and not simply as a friend and partisan, that Burnet had urged her to complete the account of her years at Court. He
was sure, as his wife had reported, that ‘it would be very valuable.’”

On the Other Side of the Question.

An intriguing and amusing document of court politics in 18th century Britain: this volume, packaged as the work of “A Woman of Quality” but in fact written by the Grub Street author James Ralph, was intended as a refutation of “An account of the conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Malborough, from her first coming to court, to the year 1710”, a memoir documenting the meteoric rise of Sarah Jennings in becoming the Duchess of Malborough, close friends (though they later fell out) with Queen Anne and one of the most influential women of her day, written at the dictation of the Duchess by the historian Nathaniel Hooke. Between these two works, one has in effect a fight between two noblewomen being ghostwritten by two male authors of modest means. In spite of this, the snobbery of Ralph’s text is amusingly palpable, “But the World will by no means be persuaded to endure, that you should set up your own Statue in the Place of hers, who raised you out of the Dust, if I may be allowed to borrow a pointed Phrase of your own; and without whom, ’tis more than possible, Posterity would never have known that such a Person as your Grace, a Daughter of Mrs. Jennings, ever had a Being.” James Ralph was an American-born poet and historian who first came to London with his friend Benjamin Franklin, and was satirised in Pope’s Dunciad.