[25] Coxe’s Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole.
CHAPTER IX.
The Duchess of Marlborough Throws for a Big Stake.
We now pass from the Prince’s political and financial entanglements to the softer theme of his love, or rather loves, for alas! there were several of them!
This subject, however, cannot be entered upon without a reference to one of two great ladies whose personalities overshadowed St. James’s at the time of Frederick’s coming to England. These were the Duchesses of Marlborough and Buckingham, near neighbours and rivals, one living at Buckingham House, which, as before stated, had been built amid a grove of trees celebrated for its singing birds—the site of the present Buckingham Palace—the other occupying a house bearing her name on the other side of the Park, which was pulled down to make room for the present Marlborough House, up till recently the residence of the Prince of Wales.
These two great ladies lived in fair amity, but had their little differences like the rest of womankind, of which the following incident is a fair sample.
The Duchess of Buckingham had had the misfortune to lose her son, who had died in Rome, and whose body she caused to be brought to England for sepulture in Westminster Abbey.
She sent across the Park to the widowed Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the hearse or funeral car on which the body of the great Duke had been borne to the grave some years before.
Sarah of Marlborough, in her none too refined manner, refused her request in the following terms:
“It carried my Lord Marlborough,” she replied, “and it shall never be used for any meaner mortal.”
This was hardly a consoling message to send to a sorrowing mother, but her Grace of Buckingham rose to the occasion even in her grief: