The result proved the truth of this prediction; and when, some years afterwards, the Queen, harassed and intimidated by turns, sank under the pressure, not of public business, but of party rancour, the value and good sense of the Duchess’s warnings became manifest.

“Whereas,” adds the plain-spoken favourite, “you might prevent all these misfortunes by giving my Lord Treasurer and my Lord Marlborough (whom you may so safely trust) leave to propose those things to you which they know and can judge to be absolutely necessary for your service, which will put it in their power to influence those who have given you proofs both of their being able to serve you, and of their desiring to make you great and happy. But rather than your Majesty will employ a party-man, as you are pleased to call Lord Sunderland, you will put all things in confusion; and at the same time that you say this, you employ Sir C. Hedges, who is against you, only that he has voted in remarkable things, that he might keep his place; and he did so in the last King’s time, till at last, when everybody saw that he was dying, and he could lose nothing by differing with that court; but formerly he voted with those men, the enemies to the government, called Whigs; and if he had not been a party-man, how could he have been a secretary of state, when all your councils were influenced by my Lord Rochester, Lord Nott, Sir Edward Seymour, and about six or seven just such men, that call themselves the heroes of the church?”

The anathemas of the Duchess were not without effect. Sir Charles Hedges, dismayed at the vigorous opposition set up against him, deemed it, eventually, more prudent to retire, than to be turned out of his post; and, in the winter of 1706, Lord Sunderland was appointed to succeed him.[[71]]

Queen Anne had now thrown herself, to all appearance, wholly into the hands of the Whig party, who, from her childhood, had appeared to her to be her natural enemies. Yet still she cherished a secret partiality to her early counsellors, and exhibited a reluctance to consult with her ministers on any promotions in the church.

“The first artifice of those counsellors was,” says the Duchess,[[72]] “to instil into the Queen notions of the high prerogative of acting without her ministers, and, as they expressed it, of being Queen indeed. And the nomination of persons to bishoprics, against the judgment and remonstrances of her ministers, being what they knew her genius would fall in with more readily than with anything else they could propose, they began with that; and they took care that those remonstrances should be interpreted by the world, and presented by herself, as hard usage, a denial of common civility, and even the making her no Queen.” Such is the account given by this violent partisan of the secret power by which her friends were finally vanquished.

To operate on her Majesty’s fears, and to gain popularity among a numerous portion of the people who deemed the Whigs inimical to the church establishment, an outcry was raised that the church was in danger. Marlborough and Godolphin were regarded as deserters from the great cause, and the press was employed in attacking the low church party, in terms both unscrupulous and indelicate.

That celebrated libel, entitled, “The Memorial of the Church of England,” the author of which has been already specified, was published at this critical juncture; “a doleful piece,” as the Duchess calls it, “penned by some of the zealots of the party.” This was among the first and most scurrilous efforts of those who hoped by invective and slander to produce a deep impression on the public mind. It was dedicated to the Duke of Marlborough, as being considered still the strength of a party which he had not explicitly renounced: and was forwarded to him in the midst of his campaign on the Ische. To his great mind the aspersions of the anonymous party were too contemptible to merit a moment’s serious indignation. The vehemence of passionate indignation is, on such occasions, the ebullition of minds of an inferior stamp. The injustice and invective which scarcely drew forth an angry exclamation from Marlborough, produced a feverish heat in the warm temperament of the Duchess.

“In this camp,” writes the Duke to Lord Godolphin, his bosom friend and confidant,[[73]] “I have had time to read the pamphlet called ‘The Memorial of the Church of England.’ I think it the most impudent and scurrilous thing I ever read. If the author can be found, I do not doubt but he will be punished; for if such liberties may be taken, of writing scandalous lies without being punished, no government can stand long. Notwithstanding what I have said, I cannot forbear laughing when I think they would have you and I pass for fanatics, and the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Jersey for pillars of the church; the one being a Roman Catholic in King James’s reign, and the other would have been a Quaker, or any other religion that would have pleased the late King.”

To the Duchess he calmly writes:—

“Tirlemont, Sept. 7.