o serve when his wife was dismissed--to see him
continue to hold command of the troops under the Ministry which had
sprung out of a bed-chamber squabble, and which was sure to thwart him
in all his measures. His enemies have generally accounted for this by
assuming that the Duke's avarice was at the bottom of it; but his lady
assigns very different reasons. "The Duke of Marlborough," she says,
"notwithstanding an infinite variety of mortifications, by which it was
endeavoured to _make_ him resign his commission, that there might be a
pretence to raise an outcry against him, as having quitted his Queen's
and his country's service merely because he could not govern in the
cabinet as well as in the field, continued to serve yet another
campaign. All his friends here, moved by a true concern for the public
welfare, pressed him to it, the confederates called him with the utmost
importunity, and Prince Eugene entreated him to come with all the
earnestness and passion that could be expressed." These were certainly
powerful inducements, and they may have mingled (together with that
passionate fondness for a fine army which every good general must
contract) with Marlborough's love of money.

Mr. Hallam says, with strong and proper feeling, "It seems rather a
humiliating proof of the sway which the feeblest prince enjoys even in
a limited monarchy, that the fortunes of Europe should have been changed
by nothing more noble than the insolence of one waiting woman and the
cunning of another. It is true that this was effected by throwing the
weight of the crown into the scale of a powerful _faction_; yet the
House of Bourbon would probably not have reigned beyond the Pyrenees but
for Sarah and Abigail at Queen Anne's toilette."[53]

[53] Hallam--Constitutional History.

The Queen, altogether unmindful of her former warm attachment to her
Mistress of the Robes, overjoyed to find herself free, wrote, with her
own hand, the dismissal of the Duchess, and gave herself up to her
enemies.

The Duchess, quite beside herself with chagrin and fury, only thought of
some means or other of revenge. As a first step she demanded payment of
the arrears of her pension--a boon she had with great high-mindedness
refused on Anne's accession. But that was not all. When she was about to
quit the sphere of her palace triumphs, she gave directions for the
removal of the locks from the doors and the marble chimney-pieces she
had put up at her own cos