The Duchess was, as it has been said, enormously rich, powerful, and, in addition, exceedingly ambitious, so enterprising, indeed, in this latter respect that she made a bold bid to make her grand-daughter, Lady Diana Spencer, Queen Consort of England. It came about in this wise: Though the Prince of Wales had established himself as a kind of power by his alliance with Bolingbroke and his party, yet he had gained nothing by it financially. The King remained perfectly obdurate on the subject of increasing his allowance, and meanwhile the sum of the Prince’s debts mounted higher and higher. The story of the Prince’s embarrassments very soon travelled across that little space of thoroughfare dividing St. James’s Palace from Marlborough House, and reached the ever open ears of the Duchess Sarah, always ready to hear any news from “over the way” the residence of “neighbour George” as she was in the habit of calling him. The wily old Duchess must have brooded long before she took her next step; old diplomatiste as she was, it was a matter that could not have been entered upon without the deepest thought. It was about the boldest step “Sarah Jennings” had ever taken. When she had settled the matter in her mind, she sent a message to the Prince of Wales and asked him to favour her with an interview. No record of this most interesting meeting has, unfortunately, been preserved; one would have liked to have seen a detailed account of it in Doddington’s diary, but there is nothing of it there. There is no doubt, however, what was the nature of the interview; the wonderful old stateswoman there and then offered the Prince her favourite grand-daughter Lady Diana Spencer in marriage, and with her the sum of one hundred thousand pounds, which she no doubt calculated would come in very handy to the Prince in his involved condition. It is necessary to make a comparison between the status of Lady Diana and that of the lady--the daughter of a petty German Prince--whom the Prince eventually married to understand that the Duchess’s offer was not by any means so outrageous as one would imagine. Indeed, there are those who think that Lady Diana’s birth and position, combined with her wit and beauty, were far superior to those of the German Princess. Lady Diana was the youngest daughter of Charles, Earl of Sunderland, by Anne, daughter of the great Duke of Marlborough and Sarah his wife, and was undoubtedly a young lady of exceptional wit and beauty.