The news of the securing of the dowry hastened the coming of the bridegroom. On the 7th of November 1732 he arrived at Greenwich, and thence proceeded to Somerset House. His intended wife, when she heard of his arrival, was in no hurry to meet him, but went on at her harpsichord, surrounded by a number of opera-people. The Queen spoke of him as ‘that animal!’ The nuptials were to have been speedily solemnised, but the lover fell grievously sick. When the poor ‘groom’ fell sick, not one of the royal family condescended to visit him, and though he himself maintained a dignified silence on this insulting conduct, his suite, who could not imitate their master’s indifference, made comment thereupon loud and frequent enough. They got nothing by it, save being called Dutch boobies. The princess royal exhibited no outward manifestation either of consciousness or sympathy. She appeared precisely the same under all contingencies; and whether the lover were in or out of England, in life or out of it, seemed to this strong-minded lady to be one and the same thing. There was no one whom the postponement of the marriage more annoyed than it did the Duchess of Marlborough. She was then residing in Marlborough House, which had been built some five-and-twenty years previously by Wren. That architect was employed, not because he was preferred, but that Vanbrugh might be vexed. The ground, in which had formerly been kept the birds and fowls ultimately destined to pass through the kitchen to the royal table, had been leased to the duchess by Queen Anne, and the expenses of building amounted to nearly fifty thousand pounds. The duchess both experienced and caused considerable mortifications here. She used to speak of the King in the adjacent palace as her ‘neighbour George.’ The entrance to the house, from Pall Mall, was, as it still is, a crooked and inconvenient one. To remedy this defect, she intended to purchase some houses ‘in the Priory,’ as the locality was called, for the purpose of pulling them down and constructing a more commodious entry to the mansion; but Sir Robert Walpole, with no more dignified motive than spite, secured the houses and ground, and erected buildings on the latter, which, as now, completely blocked in the front of the duchess’s mansion. She was subjected to a more temporary, but as inconvenient, blockade when the preparations for the wedding of the imperious Anne and her ugly husband were going on. Among other preparations a boarded gallery, through which the nuptial procession was to pass, was built up close against the duchess’s windows, completely darkening her rooms. As the boards remained there during the postponement of the ceremony, the duchess used to look at them with the remark, ‘I wish the princess would oblige me by taking away her _orange chest_!’