1727 ‘I’m always pleased to hear from You (Dear Sister)’, she wrote to the Countess of Mar, ‘particularly when you tell me you are well … Air, Exercise and Company are the best med’cines, and Physic and Retirement good for nothing but to break Hearts and spoil Constitutions’.
Even from this shortest of extracts, it’s clear that Lady Mary was a practised prose stylist, somewhat brisk in the expression of her sympathies. In fact she was the epistolary champion of her age. Her letters from Turkey, to which her husband had been posted as ambassador, offered a classic account of Muslim manners and customs. She was also skilled at portraits in paint, and an early advocate of inoculation against the smallpox, a disease that had marred her own legendary beauty.
Alexander Pope clearly adored, then loathed her, libelling her as ‘Sappho’ in his various verse satires – probably because he suspected she had mocked his affliction, Pott’s disease or TB spine – behind his hunchback. ‘Sapho enrag’d crys out your Back is round’, and ‘Poxed by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate’, were his complaint and his revenge.
But this was a letter to cheer her sister up, and how better to do that than by relating ‘the most diverting Story about Town at present’. It seems that ‘a Tall, musical, silly, ugly thing … called Miss Leigh’ paid an unexpected and unwelcome call on Betty Titchburne, Lady Sunderland’s sister. Not long after she arrived they heard ‘a violent rap at the door, and someone vehemently run up stairs’. Miss Titchburne ‘seem’d much surprised and said she believ’d it was Mr Edgecombe, and was quite amaz’d how he took it into his Head to visit her’.
The moment Edgecombe entered the door, Miss T. introduced Miss L. as an accomplished keyboard player, and would she oblige the two of them?
Miss Leigh very willingly sat to the Harpsichord, upon which her Audience decamp’d to the Bed Chamber, and left her to play … to her selfe. They return’d, and made what excuses they could, but said very frankly they had not heard her performance and begg’d her to begin again, which she comply’d with, and gave them the opertunity of a second retirement.
Again profuse apologies; again Mr Edgecombe pleaded: ‘if she would play Godi [‘Godi l’alma’, an air from Handel’s Ottone], it was a Tune he dy’d to hear, and it would be an Obligation he should never forget.’ A furious Miss L. replied that ‘she would do him a much greater Obligation by her Absence’, running down the stairs and telling the story so fast that ‘in 4 and twenty hours all the people in Town’ had heard it.
‘I send you a novell instead of a Letter’, she concluded, ‘but as it is in your power to shorten it when you please by reading no further than you like, I will make no Excuses for the length of it.’ Whether the unhappy countess was cheered by the anecdote has not been recorded.