g his reign. The Queen insisted that Lady
Marlborough, as she then was, should be dismissed from the Princess's
service. Anne was equally determined to keep her beloved friend about
her at all risks. This led to endless disputes and quarrels between the
royal ladies; and the little Duke of Gloucester became a fresh subject
of contention. When she was in town,

the Princess, who was a tender mother, passed much of her
time in the nursery of her heir.... Whenever the Queen heard
her sister was there she forebore to enter the room, but
would send an inquiry or a message to her royal nephew--"a
compliment," as it was called in the phraseology of the day.
The set speech used to be delivered by the queen's official
in formal terms to the unconscious infant, as he sat on his
nurse's knee; and then the courtly messenger would depart,
without taking the slightest notice of the Princess Anne,
although she was in the room with her child. Sometimes Queen
Mary sent her nephew rattles or balls, or other toys, all
which were chronicled in the _Gazette_ with great solemnity;
but every attention to the little Gloucester was attended
with some signal impertinence to his mother.[109]

For two years the little boy throve well in the good air of Kensington,
without any illness. But in the third year he was attacked by ague.
Fifty years before he would probably have been bled and reduced in every
way, and would speedily have died. But medical science was improving;
and a wonderful discovery had been made in far-off Peru. The ague was
cured by Doctor Radcliffe and Sir Charles Scarborough, "who prescribed
the Jesuit's Powder, of which the Duke took large quantities early in
the spring of 1694, for the same complaint most manfully."[110]

This Jesuit's Powder was none other than the famous Peruvian Bark, made
as we all know from the bark of the Chinchona trees, so-called by
Linnaeus after the Countess of Chincon, wife of the Viceroy of Peru. This
lady's cure in 1638 from a desperate fever, brought the quinine--the
"bark-of-barks" as its Indian name signifies--into notice, and gave the
world one of the most precious remedies we possess against disease.

This ague was the first, but by no means the last illness our poor
little boy had to endure; for all through his short life he was
delicate.

His faithful attendant, Jenkin Lewis, a young man who was tenderly
attached to him, has left