FOOTNOTES:
[48] Bolingbroke says so in express terms: “The true cause (of the change of Ministry) was her discontent,” &c.—Secret Memoirs of Lord Bolingbroke, p. 18.
[49] Private Correspondence of the Duchess of Marlborough, vol. 1, p. 301.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DISGRACE OF THE DUCHESS.
The disgrace of the Duchess involved the fall of the Whigs. A few days after the scene at Kensington, Anne named two Tories to court appointments, and next dismissed successively all the Whigs from the Ministry—Boyle, Russell, Godolphin, and Walpole. They were replaced by Bolingbroke, Harley, the Earl of Jersey, and the Dukes of Ormonde and Shrewsbury. Anne spared only the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough—not from compassion but through fear. The irate Mistress of the Robes drove about London daily in her splendid equipage, and repeated at every visit she made that she would publish the Queen’s letters, and that some day the infamous motives which had brought about her disgrace would be disclosed. Whilst the timid Anne grew terrified at these menaces, the formidable Sarah remained at St. James’s, holding her head aloft and dealing out bitter denunciations against her enemies the victorious Tories.
When the Duke of Marlborough came back from Flanders, during the Christmas holidays, he met with the coldest reception possible. The usual motion of thanks to him had been dropped by his friends for fear of its being negatived by the Tory majority. The new ministers, however, waited upon him, promising that he should have all his present military commands, and also the nomination of the generals who were to serve under him. His wife had never ceased making efforts at court, by means of “one person” there, who happened to be in good favour with the Queen, and to whom the Duchess wrote long accounts of the past, justifying herself, and exposing the ingratitude, as well as malice, of her enemies. All these accounts that gentleman read to Anne; but he might as well have read them to a stock or stone. According to her Grace, the Queen never offered a word, good or ill, except on one particular point. Lady Masham and Harley had employed Swift and other writers to accuse the Duchess of having grossly cheated her royal mistress of vast sums of money; and on that occasion her Majesty was pleased to say, “Everybody knows cheating is not the Duchess of Marlborough’s crime.” Where there was so much received in what was deemed an honourable as well as regular way,[50] there was no great temptation to embezzle and cheat; and the Duchess was in all respects a higher-minded person than her husband, in whom love of money became at last the ruling passion to such a degree as to make him stoop to all kinds of mean and paltry actions. The Duchess, as Mistress of the Robes, boasts that she had dressed the Queen for nine years for thirty-two thousand and some odd hundred pounds; and she asks if ever Queen of England had spent so little in robes! “It evidently appears,” says her Grace, “that, by my economy in the nine years I served her Majesty, I saved her near ninety thousand pounds[51] in clothes alone. Notwithstanding this,” continues the Duchess, “my Lord-Treasurer (Harley) has thought fit to order the Examiner (Swift) to represent me in print as a pick-pocket all over England; and for that honest service, and some others, her Majesty has lately made him a Dean.”
Just at this moment, the Duchess thought herself obliged to appear at Court “on account of some new clothes which, as Groom of the Stole, she had by her mistress’s orders bought for her;” but the Queen charged the only friend her Grace had there to advise her, as from himself, not to come. It was scarcely possible, after this to think of retaining her office; and it appears that the Duchess, of her own accord, sent in her resignation. Lord Dartmouth, however, gives another version of the matter, as follows:—