“The Duke of Marlborough was made so uneasy at the end of the Queen’s reign, by turning men of service out of the Army to put in Mr. Hill and Mr. Masham over the heads of people improperly, that Mr. Walpole was employed to show the Queen how detrimental to her service such steps must be. He had many opportunities of doing it. The Duke of Marlborough having obtained of the Queen that Cardonnel should be Secretary of War as a reward for his services, when the war was ended, which he hoped would be soon, and the Queen having allowed Mr. Cardonnel to kiss her hand upon that promise, but to let him go over with the Duke of Marlborough, that campaign or another, if the war happened to be not concluded. Mr. Walpole was so low then that he executed this place for Mr. Cardonnel, and attended the Duke of Marlborough when he was in England with a bag of writings like Mr. Cardonnel. He managed it so that to make the Duke of Marlborough believe that he had done all he could with the Queen, and at the same time gained all the points Mrs. Masham had desired for her husband and brother; and I had incontestable proofs afterwards that Mr. Walpole had acted this double part to oblige Mrs. Masham, and the Duke of Marlborough at that time had no reason to believe he could be so false.
“Sir Robert also had a great obligation to me; for by my interest wholly he was made Treasurer of the Navy when Sir T. Lyttleton died, though there were solicitations from many people for that employment, whom they thought it of more consequence to oblige. But I prevailed, and he had then only a small estate, and that much encumbered. And I have letters of acknowledgment to me, in which he says ‘he is very sensible that he was entirely obliged to me for it.’
“Notwithstanding which at the commencement of his great power with the present family, he used me with all the folly and insolence upon every occasion, as he has treated several since he has acted as if he were King, which would be too tedious to relate.
“I am not sure that some account of this has not been given before. But if it has the truth is always the same. And it is no great matter, since what I write is only information of the historian to give character.
“For being perpetually interrupted, it is impossible to remember what I may have formally written on these subjects.”
All of which above tends to show that in her old age Duchess Sarah had grown testy, and not forgetful of her old enemies.
CHAPTER X.
The Beautiful Vanilla.
An early marriage with a beautiful girl such as Lady Diana Spencer would probably have been the best thing which could have happened to the young Prince of Wales; it would possibly have obliterated the scars of his old love for his cousin Wilhelmina, which wounds certainly broke out again at a later period, and it might have kept him from disgraceful liaisons; at any rate it would have left him without excuse for them. The first of these affaires du cœur, began in a flirtation and ended in a tragedy as so many of these unfortunate attachments do. Who knows its beginning? Perhaps a kiss in the dark corridors of St. James’s Palace!
The object of it was Miss Anne Vane (the “beautiful Vanilla”), daughter of Gilbert, 2nd Lord Barnard, a maid-of-honour to the Queen, and sister to the 1st Lord Darlington.
This young lady was possessed of much beauty, but is not credited with cleverness as we understand it, which was all the worse for her, as she found herself among a set of unscrupulous courtiers, such as Lords Harrington and Hervey, the latter of whom was not at all above boasting of conquests over the opposite sex which he had not achieved, if such a word can be used in connection with the meanest act on earth.