Duke of Newcastle and Fortune’s enmity

The Duke of Newcastle and Fortune’s enmity is a dispute over the price of resisting worldly fortune and the meaning of honorable conduct. Recounted by the Duchess of Newcastle and argued before an assembly of spirits, the conflict pits Fortune’s demand for recognition against the Duke’s preference for Prudence and Honesty. The Empress’s effort to arbitrate brings the opposing accounts into view, but it does not secure a judgment or a peace.

Origins and Competing Claims

The Duchess tells the Empress that the Duke and Fortune have been enemies for as long as she has been his wife, and that the Duke has said Fortune crossed him in all things from as far back as he could remember. The Duchess hopes to obtain help for him, not because she wishes him to depend on Fortune, but because she wants him to have no powerful enemies.

Fortune gives the dispute a different origin. Standing on a golden globe at the hearing, she claims the Duke has always been her enemy because he preferred Honesty and Prudence, slighted her favors, and resisted her power in defense of his innocence. In her account, the injury lies not only in his choices but in his refusal to treat her as an authority deserving deference. She regards his preference for moral principles as an affront that justifies her hostility.

The Duke’s Choices and Their Consequences

Speaking for her absent husband, the Duchess rejects the charge that he acted from personal contempt. She presents his conduct as a principled choice: he could not entrust his reputation—the thing he valued above his life—to Fortune, whom she says did not support the honest and honorable. Unable to take both sides, he chose the one consistent with his conscience, nature, and education. The Duchess insists that he nevertheless remained respectful toward Fortune and did not try to injure her favorites.

That loyalty to principle has, in her account, brought severe worldly costs. The Duchess says Fortune opposed the Duke in several battles, sometimes in direct personal encounters, and eventually overcame him. She cast him into exile, left him in misery, ruined his estate, and took away most of his friends. Even when Fortune favored people who had opposed her, the Duchess says, she continued to frown on the Duke. His request is modest by comparison: that the power which has been his enemy in the past become his friend in the future.

Honesty gives the conflict a moral history rather than treating the Duke’s misfortunes as a single reversal. She says she fostered him from childhood, cultivating his ties to Gratitude, Charity, and Generosity; Prudence taught him Wisdom and the rules of Temperance, Patience, and Justice. Honesty then sent him into the world of action, where Observation guided him and he formed a friendship with Experience. This education, she argues, made him fit for both Heaven’s blessings and Fortune’s favors. Fortune’s deeper grievance, in Honesty’s view, is that the Duke would not flatter her: he neither despised her nor submitted to her unjust demands, but respected her only as far as honor and conscience allowed.

The Attempt at Arbitration

The hearing grows out of the Duchess’s request that the Empress reconcile her husband and Fortune. The Empress first considers sending a lawyer to plead the Duke’s case, but warns that Fortune might bribe one and that the Duke might then lose. She instead proposes that each side select a friend and that they seek a judge capable of deciding impartially. The Duchess doubts the parties can agree without an umpire; the Empress admits that an impartial judge is difficult to find, imagining that only Heaven could provide one.

The Duke names Prudence and Honesty as his advocates. With the Duchess and the Empress, they travel to the Blazing-World, where the Empress calls on spirits to help arrange a settlement. The spirits describe Fortune as so inconstant that she might agree to hear the case and then refuse to sit through it. Their efforts nevertheless persuade her to participate. Fortune chooses Folly and Rashness as her friends; after difficulty, the company agrees that Truth will hear and decide the dispute. The Duchess and the Empress attend the hearing, although the Duke himself is absent.

Fortune’s accusation and the Duchess’s defense make the hearing a contest over interpretation as much as an account of events. Fortune treats the Duke’s resistance as hostility; the Duchess recasts it as fidelity to reputation and conscience. Honesty supports that defense by distinguishing principled respect from flattery and submission. Her account places the Duke’s treatment of Fortune within a sustained education in virtue, not a refusal to acknowledge Fortune’s power.

Collapse and Unresolved Outcome

The arbitration fails before Truth can deliver a sentence. After Honesty finishes her plain account, Fortune finds it rude and refuses to wait for Truth’s judgment; she leaves in anger. The assembly therefore produces no ruling on whether Fortune wronged the Duke or whether his resistance justified her opposition. The Empress and Duchess are distressed that their intervention has achieved so little.

The exchange also exposes a disagreement among the Duke’s own advocates and allies. Honesty rebukes the Duchess for wanting Fortune’s favor, suggesting that the wish implies distrust in divine blessings. The Duchess weeps and denies both distrust of God and reliance on Fortune: she only wants her husband to have no powerful enemies. The Empress then reproves Honesty for lacking Prudence’s discretion. Honesty is briefly embarrassed, but the two personifications soon become friends again. The episode thus closes not with a settlement between the Duke and Fortune but with a sharper distinction between asking for protection from an enemy and placing trust in that enemy’s favor.

The Duchess later returns to her husband’s world with Prudence and Honesty. The spirits promise to continue trying to make peace between Fortune and the Duke, but the account leaves that reconciliation in the future. The enmity remains unresolved, and the hearing’s final emphasis falls on the limits of mediation when Fortune will not submit to judgment.