matron in full maturity: a better idea of her character
may be won from the effigy lying on the tomb she erected for herself in
All Saints' Church at Derby. There one sees a face not unbeautiful, but
cold and masterful in the extreme.

It was her grandson, William, first Duke of Newcastle, who first gave
lustre to Welbeck, and perhaps, after all, he owed most of his celebrity
to an intellectual wife, known in Restoration days as "Mad Madge of
Newcastle". Few pictures of domestic life in the seventeenth century are
more pleasing than that given by this lady in the short account of her
girlhood, which opens her fantastical autobiography. Born the youngest
of Sir Thomas Lucas's eight children, in a large country house near
Colchester, she was trained under a system of education originated by
her mother. The daughters, of whom there were five, were not kept
strictly to their schoolbooks, but rather taught "for formality than
benefit". Singing, dancing, music, reading, writing, and embroidery were
their accomplishments; but Mistress Lucas, who was left a widow soon
after the birth of Margaret, cared not so much for dancing and fiddling
and conversing in foreign languages as that they should be bred modestly
and on honest principles. In London, where they migrated for the season,
they would visit Spring Gardens, Hyde Park, and similar places, and
sometimes attended concerts, or supped in barges on the river.

As she grew to womanhood Margaret became filled with the desire to play
maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, chiefly because she had heard
that the queen in her poverty had not the same number of ladies as in
her prosperity. After much persuasion her mother allowed her to leave
home, and she joined the Court at Oxford, and soon afterwards met
William Cavendish, who was her senior by nearly thirty years. They
married, and the battle of Marston Moor forced them into exile. Obliged
to return to England, so that she might raise funds, she wrote one or
two volumes of _Poems_ and _Philosophical Fancies_, successors to
another grotesque work entitled _The World's Olio_. These were the first
three of ten immense folios, treating of every imaginable subject, and
most slipshod in grammar and style, that she gave to the world, tenderly
regarding them, in the absence of any other offspring, as her children.

[Illustration: WELBECK ABBEY]

The Lives of the duke and of herself are, however, the only productions
remembered nowad