“I have consulted the undertaker,” she rejoined, “and he tells me I can have a finer for twenty pounds.”
The two seem to have outrivalled one another in pride and arrogance, and both affected to despise the House of Hanover, though they at times dissembled and attended the drawing-rooms “over the way,” which they considered doing the King and Queen an exceeding honour, and perhaps it was.
Both were enormously wealthy, she of Buckingham posing as an adherent of the House of Stuart, and no doubt using some of her wealth to support it, although it is said that she was mean enough to allow the pall covering the unburied coffin of James the Second in Paris to fall into rags, though she was in the habit of going there to weep over it.
“I believe I may sometime or other have complained of Sir Robert Walpole’s treatment of me,” observed Sarah Duchess of Marlborough to her friend and dependent Dr. Hare in one of her letters, “but I never went through with it, believing that it was not easy to him.”
If the Duchess had reason to complain of that distinguished statesman in that month of August, 1726, in which she wrote, she had considerably more reason to do so a few years later, when he wrecked one of her pet schemes as completely as he had that of Her Majesty the Queen of Prussia concerning Prince Frederick, which latter endeavour had, perhaps, set the brains of the astute Sarah working on the very same subject.
The Duchess was, as it has been said, enormously rich, powerful, and, in addition, exceedingly ambitious, so enterprising, indeed, in this latter respect that she made a bold bid to make her grand-daughter, Lady Diana Spencer, Queen Consort of England. It came about in this wise:
Though the Prince of Wales had established himself as a kind of power by his alliance with Bolingbroke and his party, yet he had gained nothing by it financially.
The King remained perfectly obdurate on the subject of increasing his allowance, and meanwhile the sum of the Prince’s debts mounted higher and higher.
The story of the Prince’s embarrassments very soon travelled across that little space of thoroughfare dividing St. James’s Palace from Marlborough House, and reached the ever open ears of the Duchess Sarah, always ready to hear any news from “over the way” the residence of “neighbour George” as she was in the habit of calling him.
The wily old Duchess must have brooded long before she took her next step; old diplomatiste as she was, it was a matter that could not have been entered upon without the deepest thought. It was about the boldest step “Sarah Jennings” had ever taken. When she had settled the matter in her mind, she sent a message to the Prince of Wales and asked him to favour her with an interview.