Walpole, or the court, bought it when it came out in book form. The Duchess of Marlborough gave £100 for a single copy, and the Duchess of Queensberry solicited subscriptions for it within the very precincts of St. James’s, and at a drawing-room went round the room and asked even the officers of the King’s household to buy copies of the play which the King had forbidden to be played. The King caught her in the act, and asked what she was doing? She replied: “What must be agreeable, I am sure, to one so humane as your Majesty, for I am busy with an act of charity, and a charity to which I do not despair of bringing your Majesty to contribute”. The King guessed what the charity was, and talked the incident over with the Queen, who so resented the duchess’s action, which she rightly guessed was aimed more particularly at herself, that the King’s vice-chamberlain was sent to request her not to appear at court again. The vice-chamberlain’s message was verbal; but the duchess immediately wrote a spirited reply:-- “The Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that the King hath given her so agreeable a command as to stay from Court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility on the King and Queen; she hopes that by such an unprecedented order as this is, that the King will see as few as he wishes at his Court, particularly such as dare to think or speak truth. I dare not do otherwise, and ought not, nor could have imagined that it would not have been the very highest compliment that I could possibly pay the King to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house, particularly when the King and Queen both told me that they had not read Mr. Gay’s play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own words rather than his Grace of Grafton’s, who hath neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends.”