This subject, however, cannot be entered upon without a reference to one of two great ladies whose personalities overshadowed St. James’s at the time of Frederick’s coming to England. These were the Duchesses of Marlborough and Buckingham, near neighbours and rivals, one living at Buckingham House, which, as before stated, had been built amid a grove of trees celebrated for its singing birds--the site of the present Buckingham Palace--the other occupying a house bearing her name on the other side of the Park, which was pulled down to make room for the present Marlborough House, up till recently the residence of the Prince of Wales. These two great ladies lived in fair amity, but had their little differences like the rest of womankind, of which the following incident is a fair sample. The Duchess of Buckingham had had the misfortune to lose her son, who had died in Rome, and whose body she caused to be brought to England for sepulture in Westminster Abbey. She sent across the Park to the widowed Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the hearse or funeral car on which the body of the great Duke had been borne to the grave some years before. Sarah of Marlborough, in her none too refined manner, refused her request in the following terms: “It carried my Lord Marlborough,” she replied, “and it shall never be used for any meaner mortal.” This was hardly a consoling message to send to a sorrowing mother, but her Grace of Buckingham rose to the occasion even in her grief: “I have consulted the undertaker,” she rejoined, “and he tells me I can have a finer for twenty pounds.” The two seem to have outrivalled one another in pride and arrogance, and both affected to despise the House of Hanover, though they at times dissembled and attended the drawing-rooms “over the way,” which they considered doing the King and Queen an exceeding honour, and perhaps it was. Both were enormously wealthy, she of Buckingham posing as an adherent of the House of Stuart, and no doubt using some of her wealth to support it, although it is said that she was mean enough to allow the pall covering the unburied coffin of James the Second in Paris to fall into rags, though she was in the habit of going there to weep over it. “I believe I may sometime or other have complained of Sir Robert Walpole’s treatment of me,” observed Sarah Duchess of Marlborough to her friend and dependent Dr. Hare in one of her letters, “but I never went through with it, believing that it was not easy to him.” If the Duchess had reason to complain of that distinguished statesman in that month of August, 1726, in which she wrote, she had considerably more reason to do so a few years later, when he wrecked one of her pet schemes as completely as he had that of Her Majesty the Queen of Prussia concerning Prince Frederick, which latter endeavour had, perhaps, set the brains of the astute Sarah working on the very same subject.