s motives which had brought about her disgrace would be
disclosed. Whilst the timid Anne grew terrified at these menaces, the
formidable Sarah remained at St. James's, holding her head aloft and
dealing out bitter denunciations against her enemies the victorious
Tories.

When the Duke of Marlborough came back from Flanders, during the
Christmas holidays, he met with the coldest reception possible. The
usual motion of thanks to him had been dropped by his friends for fear
of its being negatived by the Tory majority. The new ministers, however,
waited upon him, promising that he should have all his present military
commands, and also the nomination of the generals who were to serve
under him. His wife had never ceased making efforts at court, by means
of "_one_ person" there, who happened to be in good favour with the
Queen, and to whom the Duchess wrote long accounts of the past,
justifying herself, and exposing the ingratitude, as well as malice, of
her enemies. All these accounts that gentleman read to Anne; but he
might as well have read them to a stock or stone. According to her
Grace, the Queen never offered a word, good or ill, except on one
particular point. Lady Masham and Harley had employed Swift and other
writers to accuse the Duchess of having grossly cheated her royal
mistress of vast sums of money; and on that occasion her Majesty was
pleased to say, "Everybody knows cheating is not the Duchess of
Marlborough's crime." Where there was so much received in what was
deemed an honourable as well as regular way,[50] there was no great
temptation to embezzle and cheat; and the Duchess was in all respects a
higher-minded person than her husband, in whom love of money became at
last the ruling passion to such a degree as to make him stoop to all
kinds of mean and paltry actions. The Duchess, as Mistress of the Robes,
boasts that she had dressed the Queen for nine years for thirty-two
thousand and some odd hundred pounds; and she asks if ever Queen of
England had spent so little in robes! "It evidently appears," says her
Grace, "that, by my economy in the nine years I served her Majesty, I
saved her near ninety thousand pounds[51] in clothes alone.
Notwithstanding this," continues the Duchess, "my Lord-Treasurer
(Harley) has thought fit to order the _Examiner_ (Swift) to represent me
in print as a pick-pocket all over England; and for that honest
service, and some others, her Majesty has lately made him a Dean."