She had no longer an audacious Freeman to tell her unwelcome truths and tease her with appeals and reproaches; but it is probable that she soon found her soft-voiced Abigail, her caressing duchess (of Somerset) little more satisfactory; never was a head that wore a crown more uneasy. She held fast to the power which she had been persuaded she was to get into her own hands when she was delivered from the sway of the Marlboroughs, and for a little while believed it possible that she could reign unaided. But this was a delusion that could not last long; and her death was hastened, it is said, by a violent altercation between Harley and St. John, when the inevitable struggle between the two who had pushed all competitors out of place occurred at last. They wrangled over the staff of office in Anne’s very presence, overwhelming her with agitation and excitement. Apart from politics, the royal existence was dull enough. When Dean Swift was at Windsor, following Harley and waiting for the decision of his Irish business, we have occasional glimpses through his eyes which show the tedium of the court. “There was a drawing-room to-day,” he says, “but so few company that the Queen sent for us into her bedchamber, where we made our bows, and stood, about twenty of us round the room, while she looked round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready, and went out.” The same authority mentions her way of taking exercise, which was a strange one. “The Queen was hunting the stag till four this afternoon,” he says; “she drove in her chaise about forty miles, and it was five before we went to dinner.... She hunts in a chaise with one horse, which she drives herself, and drives furiously like Jehu, and is a mighty hunter like Nimrod.” Windsor’s great park and forest must have afforded room and space for some part at least of this course, and a hunt in August would need to have been confined to ground less cultivated than that of the smiling plain which skirts the castle hill on the other side. Queen Anne’s Ride and Queen Anne’s Drive are still well-known names in the locality where the strange apparition of the queen, solitary in her high chaise, and “driving furiously” after the hunt, must once have been a familiar sight.