Queen, (to whom I had gone very privately from my lodgings to the bedchamber,) on a sudden this woman, not knowing I was there, came in with the boldest and gayest air possible; but upon sight of me stopped, and immediately changing her manner, and making a most solemn courtesy, Did your Majesty ring?' and then went out again."

This behaviour needed now no further explanation. The Duchess perceived too late that she was supplanted; and she was resolved that Mrs. Masham should quickly know that her injured benefactress was undeceived. She wrote, therefore, with her usual promptitude and sincerity, the following candid, but at the same time moderate letter to her rival. Godolphin, whom she consulted upon all occasions, probably pruned it into the following careful form.

"Since the conversation I had with you at your lodgings, several things have happened to confirm me in what I was hard to believe--that you have made me returns very unsuitable to what I might have expected. I always speak my mind so plainly, that I should have told you so myself, if I had had the opportunity which I wished for; but being now so near parting,

think this way of letting you know it, is like to be the least uneasy to you, as well as to

"Your humble servant,

"S. MARLBOROUGH."

To this letter no immediate reply was returned; for, doubtless, Mrs. Masham had, on the other hand, her advisers. The Duchess in vain waited all the day at Windsor, after sending her letter, in expectation of a reply. Mrs. Masham was, however, obliged to consult with her great director, before she could frame an answer on so "nice a matter." It was, indeed, no easy point to explain, that a poor relation, only a dresser, as the Duchess remarked, and she a groom of the stole, should conceal from a relation to whom she owed everything, that affair which most concerned her; whilst the Queen, who, for thirty years had never disguised one circumstance from her faithful Freeman, should be led into the plot.

The primary origin of her disgrace she imputed, when time had cooled her resentments, to her efforts to establish the Whigs in the Queen's favour. The immediate source of the quarrel was the successful endeavour of Mrs. Hill to supplant the cousin, to whom she professed to owe great obligations. For, as the Duchess affirms, even when every word she spoke had become dis

tasteful to Anne, and when every step she took was canvassed in the Queen's closet, still the Queen declared she was not in the least altered, whilst Mrs. Masham professed the deepest gratitude.*

At length an answer was sent, the whole construction and style of which proved it, in the opinion of the Duchess, to be the production of an artful man, who knew perfectly well how to manage the affair. To Harley she imputed a deceptive and plotting character of mind, which by others was termed prudence. "His practices," as the Duchess called them, "which were deemed fair in a politician, were now fully understood by the two great men, Marlborough and Godolphin, who were their object. To him, therefore, the Duchess attributed the cautious, polite, and submissive letter, in which, expressing her grief at her Grace's displeasure, and her unconsciousness of its precise cause, the careful Abigail sought to draw forth an explicit declaration of the cause of the Duchess's chagrin, by inquiring who had been her enemy upon this occasion. But she addressed one whose prudence was, stronger than her passions.

in this instance,

The Duchess as

sured her cousin that her resentment did not proceed from any representations of others, but

* Coxe, Papers vol. xlv. p. 13.

from her own observation, which made the impression the stronger; and she declined entering further into the subject by letter.*

The Duchess of Marlborough was now, therefore, at open variance with her cousin. Towards her Majesty she stood in a predicament the most curious and unprecedented that perhaps ever existed between sovereign and subject. The amused and astonished court beheld Anne cautiously creeping out of that subjection in which the Duchess had, according to her enemies, long held the timid sovereign.

"The grand inference," says the authoress of the Other Side of the Question,' addressing the Duchess in her days of almost bed-ridden sickness, after the publication of the Conduct,' "that your grace draws from all this is, that you are betrayed. But those of the world are rather such as these,—that the Queen was captive, and you her gaoler; that she was neither mistress of her power, nor free to express her own inclinations; that she was so far overawed by a length of oppression, as to dread the very approach of her tormentress; that she was forced to unbosom herself by stealth; and that she durst not venture upon a contest with your grace, even to set herself free from your insupportable tyranny."†

* Conduct, p. 190.

Other Side of the Question, p. 311.

There was, doubtless, considerable justice in these bitter and insulting reproaches, heaped upon the Duchess when, by a late vindication of her life, she had drawn her enemies from their long repose. That all the real affection which the friendship of Morley and Freeman could boast, existed on the side of the Queen, is probable. Such was the opinion of their contemporaries. It was in the decline of her influence that the Duchess began to be querulous upon the subject of those little omissions of attention which pride and habit, not real, hearty attachment, rendered necessary to her happiness. It sounds strange to find a monarch excusing herself to a subject for not inquiring after her health directly upon the arrival of that lady from a sea-bathing place; yet such apologies as it neither became Anne to make, nor the Duchess to exact, are to be found in their published correspondence.*

The Duchess, according to the opinion of one of her confidential friends, Mr. Mainwaring, was totally deficient in that "part of craft which Mr. Hobbes very prettily calls crooked wisdom." "Apt," as she herself expresses it, "to tumble out her mind," her openness and honesty were appreciated, when at an advanced age, and after she

* Private Correspondence, vol. i. p. 63. + Ibid. p. 105.

MS. Letter, British Museum.