The System of the World

Marlborough House
MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, 4 AUGUST 1714

’Tis a notion in the pamphlet shops that Whiggish libels sell best, so industrious are they to propagate scandal and falsehood.

-FROM A LETTER TO ROBERT HARLEY, 1ST EARL OF OXFORD, QUOTED IN SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, Marlborough: His Life and Times, VOL. VI

THE LEVEE, OR RITUALIZED, semi-public getting-

out-of-bed-in-the-morning, was an invention of Louis XIV, and like many of the Sun King’s works was frowned upon by all right-minded Englishmen, who knew of it only from lurid yarns told of Versailles court-fops’ prostituting their daughters to wangle an invitation to hold a candlestick or carry a shirt at a levee of the Sun King. This was all Daniel knew of the subject as of nine of the clock on the morning of August 4th, when a messenger knocked him up at Crane Court to inform him that he, Daniel, was one of half a dozen who had been summoned to take part in the Duke of Marlborough’s first levee in London, which was going to commence in an hour’s time.

“But my own levee is not yet finished,” Daniel might have answered, wiping porridge from an unshaven chin. Instead he told the messenger to wait downstairs and that he would be along presently.

Marlborough House was invested by a crowd of several hundred Englishmen, the giddy-tired residue of an ecstatic Mobb that had sung the Duke through the streets of London yesterday: a Roman triumph thrown together on the spur of the moment by disorderly plebeians.

The Duke and his Duchess had reached Dover late on the 2nd. Yesterday had been devoted to an all-but-Royal progress through Rochester and other burgs lining the road to Londinium. So many of the Whig Quality had turned out to ride in the procession, and so many commoners had lined Watling Street, as to rouse suspicions in Daniel’s mind that the rumors spread for so long by the Tories were true: Marlborough was the second coming of Cromwell. Now, to his very first levee, he had invited Daniel, who could still remember sitting on Cromwell’s knee when he was a little boy.

Next to St. James’s Palace, which was getting to look like a heap of architectural elements flung into a bin, Marlborough House shaped up as a proper building. The fence around its forecourt was a giant iron strainer, stopping everyone except for Daniel. The excluded had formed drifts of flesh on the other side, and watched eagerly, faces wedged between bars. As Daniel was helped down out of the carriage, and walked to the front door, he wondered how many of the crowd knew who he was, and of his ancient connexion to the terrible Puritan warlord. Some of them had to be Tory spies, who would mark Daniel, and note the connexion instantly. Daniel guessed that he had been summoned here to send a message of a vaguely threatening nature to all Torydom.

Vanbrugh had been remodeling the place in the expectation that the Duke would settle in for a long stay. Much of this work was still in its most brute stages and so Daniel had to be conducted under scaffolding and between piles of bricks and of timbers by a member of Marlborough’s household. But as they got deeper into the building, it became more finished. The Duke’s bedchamber had been done first, and the renovations propagated outwards from there. Before the Grinling Gibbons custom-carved double doors, a maid handed Daniel a large silver bowl full of steaming water, swathed in towels so it would not burn his hands. “Set it down beside my lord,” he was instructed, and the doors were pulled open.

Like a beetle on a glacier the Duke of Marlborough sat in a chair in the white immensity of his bedchamber. Next to him was a table. The stubble on his scalp was dense: obviously it was Shaving-Day, and high time for it; as everyone had now heard, the Duke and Duchess had been held back in Ostend by contrary winds for a whole fortnight. Daniel, knowing no more of levees than any other Englishman, feared for a moment that he was about to be asked to lather the Duke’s skull and scrape off two weeks’ growth. But then he noted a valet standing by, stropping a razor, and understood, with immeasurable relief, that the blade-work would be left to a trained artisan.

Of the half-dozen who had been summoned to the levee, Daniel was the last to arrive-this much he could see even though his eyes were dazzled by August sunshine glancing off many tons of new plasterwork. So lofty was the ceiling that a Natural Philosopher could be forgiven for thinking that the festoons and friezes up along the ceiling had been carved from natural accumulations of snow and ice.

The Duke was in a dressing-gown of something that gleamed and whispered, and his neck had been swaddled in miles of linen in preparation for the shaving. It was as far from Puritan severity as one could possibly imagine. If there were any Tories without, on Pall Mall, who phant’sied that Daniel had come to pass the torch to the next Cromwell, a moment’s glimpse into this room would have extinguished their fears. If Marlborough had come back in triumph to take over the country, he’d do so not as a military dictator but as a Sun King.

Marlborough half rose from his chair and bowed to Daniel-who nearly dropped the bowl. The other five participants in the levee-candle-holders, shirt-bearers, wig-powderers, mostly Earls or better-bowed even deeper. Daniel could still see little, but he could hear snickers as he staggered the last few yards.

“Dr. Waterhouse does not yet know about what was found in Baron von Bothmar’s lock-box to-day,” the Duke hazarded.

“I confess utter ignorance, my lord,” Daniel said.

“The Hanoverian ambassador, Bothmar, brought with him a lock-box that was to be opened upon the death of Queen Anne. It contained orders from his majesty as to how the Realm was to be administered until such time as his majesty could come here to receive the crown, orb, and sceptre,” explained the Duke. “This morning it was opened in the presence of the Council, and read out. The King has named twenty-five Regents to act in his stead until he arrives. You, Dr. Waterhouse, are one of the twenty-five.”

“Bollocks!”

“Oh, it is quite true. And so when we bow to you, my lord, it is to acknowledge your authority as a Regent. You, and your two dozen colleagues, are the closest we have, just now, to a Sovereign.”

Daniel had never been addressed before as “my lord,” and certainly had never guessed that the first person ever to do so would be the Duke of Marlborough. It required some presence of mind not to spill the bowl. But he brought it home, with the help of a guiding hand from the valet, and stepped back, his formal duties completed. The valet rolled a sponge into the bowl, wrung it out, and placed it on the Duke’s head like a soppy crown. The Duke blinked a rivulet out of his eye, elevated his chin, and commenced going through some papers that were on his lap-for apparently one of the attractions of the levee was watching the great man read his mail.

“Grub Street must be ten miles long now,” the Duke remarked, tossing aside one newspaper after another.

“You may soon wish it were a good deal shorter.”

“As may you, Dr. Waterhouse-your new prominence shall make you a Butt for innumerable Shafts.” Marlborough had now cocked his head back so that soap would not run into his eyes, which placed him in the odd position of not being able to see into his own lap. He was groping through the papers there, golden cuff-tassels flailing, occasionally holding something up at arm’s length. “Ah,” he announced, finding today’s Lens, “I give you this, Dr. Waterhouse. Just now, I was reading it aloud to these gentlemen, as we waited for the late arrival-you may read it yourself.”

“Thank you, my lord, I am sure ’twas vastly more amusing than having me here on time.”

“On the contrary, my lord, it is we who ought to amuse you,” said the Duke, and jerked in his chair as the razor planed off a ridge of scar-tissue. His noggin had acquired more than its share of high and low relief as he had overseen the deaths of several hundred thousand English, French, and other soldiers in the wars against Louis XIV. They now lurked below a fortnight’s stubble like shoals under a murky tide, unseen Hazards to the blade’s Navigation.

“What is it I am to read, my lord?” Daniel inquired, reaching out to accept the proffered newspaper.

Marlborough’s eyes-which were uncommonly large and expressive-strayed for a moment to Daniel’s hand. People did not, as a rule, bother to look at Daniel’s hands-nay, neither the left nor the right. They had the full complement of fingers, they had not been branded in the Old Bailey, and they were unadorned-as a rule. But today Daniel wore, on his right hand, a simple ring of gold. Never having worn jewelry before, he was astonished at how this object caught people’s attention.

“A Meditation upon Power,” Marlborough answered, “second page.”

“It sounds meet, if I am as powerful as you say. Pray, who wrote it?”

“That’s the thing,” said Marlborough, “the extraordinary thing. There is a chap who goes by the nom de plume of Peer-”

“He wrote it!?”

“No, but he has discovered in the Clink a Blackamoor, a most remarkable specimen. He is not, of course, a sentient being-but he possesses the singular gift of being able to write and speak exactly as if he were one.”

“I have met him,” Daniel said. His eyes had finally adjusted to where he could make out the byline DAPPA. He glanced up at the Duke, then glanced away, as a thick bead of blood was coming out in front of his right ear and coursing along his jaw-line to stain the linen beneath his chin. The Duke jerked again. “Have a care, sirrah, I did not come hither to perish of lockjaw.”

Daniel scanned the other five attendees, who favored him with excruciating smiles of a sort he’d not seen directed his way since he had been semi-important in the court of James II.

The Duke was bald again. Two valets were hovering behind him with rags, occasionally darting in to stanch gore. The Duke found a hand-mirror, held it up for a moment, and grimaced. “My word,” he said, “is this a shaving or a trepanning?” He set the mirror down hastily, as if a lifetime of musket- and sword-battles had hardly prepared him for this. There was a lot of mail in his lap-more than Daniel received per decade-and it was taking him some time to find what he was looking for. Daniel studied the Duke curiously. John Churchill had been the most beautiful young man in England, perhaps even in Christendom. The divine unfairness endured even now unto the Duke’s sixty-fifth year. He was old, doughy, bald, and bleeding, but he actually did have a noble countenance-far from being true of all nobles-and his eyes were as large and beautiful as ever, unmarred by the sagging flesh and writhen brows that so oft made old Englishmen fearsome to behold.

“Here it is!” he announced, and whacked a letter against his knee a few times, as if this were necessary to get its words stacked up in the correct order. “From your fellow Regent!”

“My lord Ravenscar was also on Bothmar’s list?” Daniel asked, for he had already spotted the handwriting and the seal.

“Oh my word, yes,” said Marlborough, “odds-on favorite to be the next Lord Treasurer, you know. For who knows more about the workings of Bank, Mint, ’Chequer, and ’Change than Ravenscar?” He scanned the letter from Roger. “I shall not read it all,” he assured them. “Greetings, congratulations, et cetera-and he invites me and Mrs. Churchill to attend a soiree at his house on the first of September.” He lifted his eyes from the page and gazed at Daniel, a trace befuddled. “Do you think it is decent to have a party so soon after the Queen’s death, my lord?”

“A month of mourning shall have elapsed, as of September the first, my lord,” Daniel tried, “and I’ve no doubt it shall be a tasteful affair, duly restrained-”

“He promises right here to make his volcano erupt!” This elicited titters from the hitherto silent Five.

“Whilst mourning our late Queen, we must not omit to celebrate our new King, my lord.”

“Oh, well, since you put it that way, I do believe I will attend,” said the Duke. “I’ve never seen the famous Volcano, you know.”

“It is said to be worth the trip, my lord.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. I shall post an answer presently to the Temple of Vulcan. But if you should happen to see my lord Ravenscar, perhaps at one of the meetings of your Regency Council, you will tell him, won’t you?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Splendid! Now, may I arise, or shall it be necessary to cauterize my wounds?”

With the head-shaving, Daniel’s direct relevance to the levee had ended. The Duke shifted his attention to others, whose roles it was to present him with shirt, wig, sword, amp;c. Each of these phases led to some chit-chat that was of essentially no interest to Daniel. Indeed, much of it was incomprehensible, because it was about people whom Daniel didn’t know, or whose identities he could only guess at, as the Duke was referring to them by their Christian names, or in even more oblique ways. Nevertheless, Daniel had the clear sense it would be bad form to excuse himself. He was offered a chair on account of his age, and accepted it. Time passed. His eye drifted to the newspaper.