The eccentric Duchess of Buckingham, “mad with pride,” was also wont to attend the drawing-rooms at Leicester House, not because she had any affection for the Prince and Princess of Wales--on the contrary, she hated the Hanoverian family, and was always plotting against them--but because she thought that by going she would annoy the King. She was the acknowledged daughter of James the Second, by Katherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, and she was inordinately proud of her Stuart ancestry, though Horace Walpole, who was among her enemies, declares that her mother said to her: “You need not be so vain, daughter, you are not the King’s child, but Colonel Graham’s”. Graham’s daughter, the Countess of Berkshire, was supposed to be very like the duchess, and he himself was not unwilling to claim paternity, though she stoutly denied the suggestion. “Well, well,” said Graham, “kings are all powerful, and one must not complain, but certainly the same man was the father of those two women.” On the other hand, James the Second always treated the duchess as his child, bestowed upon her the rank and precedence of a duke’s daughter, and gave her leave to bear the royal arms with a slight variation. She first married James, Earl of Anglesey, and later became the third wife of the magnificent John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, and survived him. At Buckingham House the wealthy duchess lived in semi-regal state, and she made journeys to Paris, which were like royal progresses, to visit the church where lay the unburied body of James the Second, and to weep over it. She refused to visit Versailles unless the French Court received her with the honours due to a princess of the blood royal, which, of course, were not granted her. She had her opera box in Paris decorated in the same way as those set apart for crowned heads, and she sometimes appeared at the opera in London in royal robes of red velvet and ermine. On one occasion, when she wished to drive through Richmond Park, she was told by the gatekeeper that she must not pass as the road was reserved for royalty. “Tell the King,” she cried indignantly, “that if it is reserved for royalty, I have more right to go through it than he has.” She was inordinately vain, and had a great love of admiration and society, always wishing to see and be seen.