MARLBOROUGH’S DUCHESS (314 pp.)—Louis Kronenberger—Knopf ($5.75).

Authors who “understand women” may do so because they have learned first to understand men—and to know what a woman must contend with in her particular time and society. Author Louis Kronenberger, TIME’S theater critic and an authority on 18th century Britain, knows that Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was one of the toughest, tetchiest, worldliest women of her time—but also that the time itself was one of treachery and double-dealing, an age in which England was “almost plagued with brilliance, and swollen with ambition.” It was the era of Swift, Defoe, Newton, Wren, Pope —but it was equally an era of savage religious fanaticism, corruption and shameless nepotism (men, said Sarah, anticipating William Gilbert’s Sir Joseph Porter, came “to be Admirals without ever having seen water but in a basin”).

In this underworld, shy, sickly, dowdy and dull Princess Anne—later Good Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs—groped for a hand to guide her.She turned to one of her childhood friends, Sarah Jennings, and found that her hand was dexterous, hard and tipped with eagle’s claws.

“This dull dumpling of a princess,” says Author Kronenberger in his first-rate biography, “adored Sarah for her looks, her quick mind, her unfettered personality; this inveterate stickler for form would put aside for Sarah the one great advantage she possessed, her rank.” After they were married (Anne to Prince George of Denmark, Sarah to dashing young Colonel John Churchill, future Duke of Marlborough*), Sarah, at. the Queen’s suggestion, addressed her royal mistress as “Mrs. Morley,” became herself “Mrs. Freeman.” Their husbands, joining in this playacting, were cast as “Mr. Morley” and “Mr. Freeman.”

New Broom. Together, the Freemans and the Morleys led a life that was dramatic, intimate and unique in the annals of British monarchy. Almost annually, Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman became dutifully pregnant, suffered the usual miscarriages and infant deaths, played godmother to each other’s surviving offspring. On the great day in 1702 when the newly proclaimed Queen made her first grand entrance into Parliament, she did so with Sarah Churchill as her attendant and John Churchill marching in front, carrying the great sword of state. And after Churchill’s victory over the French at Blenheim, everyone knew the lines:

And Anne shall wear the crown but Sarah reign . . .

Churchill shall rise on easy Stuart’s

fall,

And Blenheim’s tower shall triumph

o’er Whitehall.

Sarah did indeed reign at court as Groom of the Stole, Mistress of the Robes, Keeper of the Privy Purse. Soon, Arnie’s entourage swarmed with Sarah’s relations, including cousin Abigail Hill, a penniless gentlewoman who had sunk to the role of “dust broom” (as Sarah put it) to a titled lady. What happened next seems, as Author Kronenberger says, “too much in the flashy traditions of the theater to have happened in real life.” Slowly, week by week, Abigail, the dowdy waif, replaced Sarah as the dowdy Queen’s bosom friend—largely because Sarah had become haughty and downright rude to the Queen. When Sarah at last discovered that the ungrateful “dust broom” had swept her off the royal doorstep, she pelted the Queen with abuse, venting her spleen in “thunderclaps of fury and rage.” Before a horrified crowd, she quarreled with her on the very steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Historic Reply. Marlborough, returning tired and sick from campaigning, tried to heal the breach—only to find that he, too, had had his day. Just as the Queen would have no more of Sarah, so would the war-weary nation have no more of John. “Mr. & Mrs. Freeman” were no more: they had been reduced to the status of a common duke and duchess.

Yet Sarah’s grandeur reached perfection in the years that followed her fall from favor. “That B.B.B.B. old B.* the Duchess of Marlbh” (as the architect of Blenheim Palace, Sir John Vanbrugh, described her) outlived not only her husband, but Anne, Anne’s successor (George I) and most of her own children. Widowed at 62, she rejected offers of marriage from an earl and from the proud Duke of Somerset. Marlborough had loved her passionately (tradition has it that on coming home from the wars, he would “pleasure” her even before he had taken off his boots), and Sarah’s reply to Somerset has gone down in history. “If I were young and handsome as I was,” she wrote, “instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never have the heart and hand that once belonged to John, Duke of Marlborough.”

Modern Outlook. “Almost every anecdote concerning her is an encounter,” says Author Kronenberger, and Marlbo-rough’s Duchess is so rich in anecdotes that it becomes a series of unforgettable encounters. There are anecdotes in the grand manner—such as old Sarah marching into the law courts to forbid the sale of one of the Duke’s presentation swords, crying: “Shall I suffer the sword which my lord would have carried to the gates of Paris to be sent to the pawnbroker’s and have the diamonds picked out one by one?” There are anecdotes of the ‘ stamina and courage that made her beloved in old age—as when she trudged determinedly in George II’s Coronation procession and “seized a drum from a drummer and blithely sat down on it [to rest].” Once, when the doctor whispered to an assistant, “She must be blistered or she will die,” he heard the 80-year-old matriarch bellow back: “I won’t be blistered and I won’t die!”

In his great biography of Marlborough, Winston Churchill spoke of Sarah’s “detached, disdainful, modern outlook upon life”; she resembled, he said, the sort of woman busy “in the public and social agitations of our own day.” Author Kronenberger seems to agree with that view. “She was not at all, by happy standards, a great woman,” he concludes, but she was forever so “inextinguishably herself” that she “persists even now.” Moreover, she was like a great landmark in England’s history—the last example of a nation that was changing “from a society of thieves to a nation of shopkeepers.”

-Great -great -great -great -great -great -grandfather of Sir Winston.-Four times bloody old bitch.

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