Life
Arabella was the child of Sir Winston Churchill (an ancestor of the Prime Minister of the same name) and Elizabeth Drake. Her brother was John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. The Churchill's loyalty to the royal household was ardent; and their only feeling about Arabella's seduction by King James II seems to have been a joyful surprise that a so plain girl had attained such high preferment.
She began her relationship with James, then Duke of York, around 1665, while he was still married to Anne Hyde. Arabella became the duchess's lady-in-waiting in that year, and gave birth to two children during Anne's lifetime. Churchill was described as a "tall creature, pale-faced, and nothing but skin and bone." She often displayed the quick wit and lively intelligence which bound James to her through ten years and four children. Some time after 1674, she married Charles Godfrey and had three more children. They lived happily together for 40 years. Godfrey died in 1714, at the age of 67.
Read more about this topic: Arabella Churchill (royal Mistress)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“With liberty and pleasant weather, the simplest occupation, any unquestioned country mode of life which detains us in the open air, is alluring. The man who picks peas steadily for a living is more than respectable, he is even envied by his shop-worn neighbors. We are as happy as the birds when our Good Genius permits us to pursue any outdoor work, without a sense of dissipation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)