PEGGY O'NEALE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3441, 10 March 1932, Page 7

PEGGY O'NEALE

LADY OF PARTS. WOMAN WHO USED HER CHARM FOR POLITICAL POWER, s AMERICA'S POMPADOUR. Americans want a Scarlet Woman of politics for' their very own. They feel that France has had more than her share who pulled the strings while royal puppets danced and that England, with its Nell Gwynne, has one up on them.” Ninon Lenclos was ruling in Paris what time the Pilgrim Fathers set sail; Madame Pompadour pushed France into the Hundred Years War, and made and unmade royal favourites before the world had heard of George Washington; Madame Du Barry, coming back to France from England, had laid her head upon the guillotine while the American Republic was still tottering with tiny footsteps; and the mistresses of the Merry Monarch, with Nellie at their head, were bringing into the world the founders of some of our noble houses at a time when the early emigrants to North America were struggling with Redskins. Can America do nothing about it. Cannot she produce for the gaze of the world a figure to show that when it comes to women who use personal charms to wield political power, Democracy can hold its own with effete Royalty? Miss Queena Pollack answers the question with an emphatic affirmative, and, producing her in the “Mistress” describes her as:— The most famous political woman America ever knew whose name caused notoriety at every step throughout a long life, a Pompadour celebrated in story, but not in stone.

Interesting Career. I think she hardly justifies this panegyric, but then Miss Pollack has the true Transatlantic knack of making swans out of her geese. All the same, Pompadour or no, Peggy O’Neale had an interesting career centre of politics in Washington. She had good looks, and in a poem Allen Poe called her the most beautiful woman.” She had wit and courage—and she had three husbands, the last a ninteen-year-old youth, when she herself was sixty. She was the daughter of an innkeeper in Washington when Congress first assembled there, and the Capitol was still a village. Many of the members boarded at her father's inn, and that exuberant Irishman saw that she was petted and might make a brilliant match with a lawgiver, so: — Just as Pompadour was taught the arts with a view to conserving them for the king’s pleasure, Peg had them instilled into her by an over-fond father attention to the importance of elegrance of manners and excellence of mind by developing natural talents. After an attempted elopement at thirteen, she seems to have steered safely till she made a love match with a sailor; one Timberlake, to whom she bore a couple of children, but he took to drink, and the consequence was that: —

Peg’s independence, crushed under the interdependence of her voluntary marriage was reborn. When men now looked at her with doubly desirous eyes, hers sparkled coquettish answer. Timberlake was no longer the sole object of her devoted attention.

One of her admirers was her husband’s friend, General Eaton. All sorts of stories were circulated about them.

Various Husbands.

Anyhow, in due course Timberlake died during a voyage and his widow married Eaton. This made the scandal-mongers certain of their surmises, and when Jackson became President a deputation called to ask that Eaton should not be given Cabinet office, because of the reputation of his wife. Jackson’s answer was to make him Minister of War.

Peggy Eaton became the “Scarlet Woman of the Administration.” She was not received, and the position became such that the President set up a special inquiry, and collected ninety-odd pages of proof of her purity. She became a national problem, and a special Cabinet meeting was even called to discuss her character, when, despite the obstinacy of her accusers, the President announced that she was “chaste as a virgin." The time came when Eaton and the two Ministers into whose houses Mrs. .Eaton was received, felt compelled to resign their posts, whereupon President Jackson called upon the whole Ministry to resign. He “sacked the lot,” and put in their places a collection of nobodies.

In 1866 her husband died, leaving her 70,000 dollars—a comfortable fortune at that time. Three years later, at the age of sixty, she married an Italian dancing master—a gigolo,

we should call him nowadays, perhaps —forty-one years her junior. He gradually squandered her money, and seven years after their marriage-ran away with her granddaughter! Three years later, the marriage being dissolved, the young couple were legally joined, and so her husband became her grand-son-in-law. She was clearly an interesting woman — a little too brilliant and tempestuous, perhaps, to get along with comfortably every day—and she certainly caused a storm in-a-teacup political “crisis” over the question of her virtue. But this hardly made her a pompadour. Still, perhaps she is the neareßt that America can produce.