《考研英语阅读理解100篇 高分版》 Unit 13 - TEXT TWO

Tracy Borman can tell a good story. Admittedly, her subject is a gift. But Henrietta Howard, mistress to George II, lived in the midst of a large cast of characters, many of them entangled in the complicated politics of 18th-century court life, and Ms. Borman handles them and their world with aplomb.
Though the 18th century is called the Age of Reason, it was anything but. Henrietta was born in 1689, a year after the balance of power in Britain shifted from monarch to Parliament. But this did nothing to shift the tyranny of men over women, and Henrietta's life was largely shaped by violent and unreasonable men. When she was eight, her father, the profligate and choleric squire of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, challenged a neighbour to a duel for impugning his valour. He was killed for his pains, leaving a wife, eight children and a pile of debts. Eight years later, perhaps hoping to help her now motherless siblings, Henrietta released her dowry money by marrying a cousin, Charles Howard, 14 years her senior.
It was a disaster. Charles turned out to be a compulsive gambler and wife-beater, and their lives descended into lodging-house flits and near-starvation. Then, aged 25, Henrietta made her own astonishing gamble. In 1714, when Queen Anne lay dying, she took herself and Charles off to Hanover, where George Louis, heir presumptive to the English throne, held court. There she joined throngs of other hopefuls, all jockeying for the notice either of George Louis, or his son, George Augustus, or his daughter-in-law, Caroline.
Henrietta's gamble paid off, though frying pans and fires come to mind. Her appointment as Woman of the Bedchamber to Princess Caroline meant long days of tedious and exacting ceremony, such as holding her mistress's wash basin on bended knee, a point that Caroline spitefully insisted on when Henrietta became her husband's mistress. Not that that was much comfort, either. The man was a boor, and dull with it. In any case, Henrietta never really supplanted Caroline. Being a royal mistress was, in this case, more a post than a romance. But it suited Henrietta in that it protected her from her husband—something the law denied her.
Henrietta was known for her discreet and even temper, but she must also have had sharp elbows. As Ms. Borman vividly shows, the court was a scandal-mongering, fickle place, driven by political factionalism and held at fever pitch by the royal family's own very public quarrels. This was the atmosphere Henrietta breathed. And yet she somehow managed to be liked. Even acid-tongued poet, Alexander Pope, described her as reasonable, good-humoured, witty and, above all, a friend.
Some of Ms. Borman's most engaging writing describes Henrietta's circle of friends—poets, writers and wits such as Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole—and the pleasure they all took in the design of her Palladian villa, Marble Hill at Twickenham. When her husband's death made it safe for her to retire, this was where she came: to entertain, to re-marry, to have a home. After a life of winging it, such hard-wrung domesticity feels almost heroic.
1. Tracy Borman is probably _____.
[A] a story teller
[B] a historian
[C] a novelist
[D] an autobiographer
2. According to the passage, 18th century is characterized by _____.
[A] the widespread notion of reason
[B] extensive violence among men
[C] irrationality underneath the overcoat of rationality
[D] the tyranny of men over women
3. The word “supplanted” (Line 5, Paragraph 4) most probably means _____.
[A] hated
[B] displaced
[C] threatened
[D] pleased
4. Henrietta chose to be a royal mistress because _____.
[A] she wanted to have a romance with the royal family member
[B] such a royal post helped her to climb up the social ladder
[C] she wanted to dodge her husband
[D] she could be exempt from Caroline's tedious ceremony
5. Henrietta must have had sharp elbows in order to _____.
[A] maintain good temper when serving the royal family
[B] survive the complicated disputes
[C] have herself accepted by all the people she met
[D] make friends with reasonable people