LORD CONINGSBY TO THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH.[[427]]
December 11, 1712.
The shortest day of the year dates this letter, and to me the most melancholy, because it is the first after I heard of thirty-nine’s (Marlborough’s) leaving the kingdom (under God) he had saved. I who have not a friend left, now he is gone, (yourself excepted,) have this only comfort, that I am sure his greatest enemies on the side of the water where he now is, will be much kinder to him than many of the pretended friends he left behind him have been for some years past. They have, however, their full reward, and being true Irishmen, by cutting the bough they stood upon themselves, have fallen from the very top of the tree, and have broke their own necks by their senseless politics of breaking his power, who alone had acquired by his merits interest enough to support theirs. Though I know more of this than any man now alive, yet I shall never make any other use of it but to beg that you, during his absence, will never trust to anything they, or any one they can influence, shall either say or do, since, to my certain knowledge, they were ever enemies to you and yours; and so thirty-nine (Marlborough) knows I have told him long; and if I had been so happy to have been credited, others had travelled, and not dear thirty-nine (Marlborough.) But past time is not to be recalled. God preserve him wherever he goes.
It is time to return my thanks for the paper I have received about the chaplain, and to assure you that now thirty-nine (Marlborough) is gone, there is nobody behind him in this kingdom more heartily concerned for the happiness of you and yours, &c.
LORD CONINGSBY TO THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH.[[428]]
Letters of Lord Coningsby to the Duchess of Marlborough, after the death of the Duke. (Referred to in vol. ii.)
Hampton Court in Hertfordshire, Oct. 14, 1720.
I received with the greatest pleasure imaginable your grace’s commands, as I shall ever do to the last moment of my life, and obey them with a readiness as becomes one to do, who, with all his faults, has not those fashionable ones of fickleness and insincerity, which the dear Duchess of Marlborough has, to my knowledge, so often met with in this false world.
I am sure your grace is overjoyed to hear the Duke is so well, and the more so because it is truth beyond contradiction, that as we owe our liberties to him, so he, under God, owes his life to the care and tenderness of the best of wives.
My dearest girls order me to present their duty to your grace, and their services to Lady Dy and Lady Hun.
There is not upon the face of the earth anybody that is more than I am, and ever will be, &c.