But Elizabeth Chudleigh was not to be long baulked in her ambitious designs. Though her charms had grown too opulent and were faded--for she was now near her fiftieth birthday--she was able to count among her slaves the aged Duke of Kingston, an amiable and weak old gentleman of enormous wealth, and with one accommodating foot already "in the grave." Wife, or no wife, she now made up her mind to be a Duchess at last. She appealed to Lord Bristol, the husband from whom she had so long been estranged, to divorce her, even going so far as to offer to qualify for the divorce by an open and flagrant act of infidelity; but his lordship only shrugged a scornful shoulder. Still, not to be thwarted, she brought a suit of jactitation of marriage, and, by a lavish use of bribes and cajolery, got a sentence from the Ecclesiastical Court which at last set her free. Within a month she had blossomed into "the most high and _puissante_ Princess, the Duchess of Kingston," thus realising her childish ambition. For four and a half years the Duchess was a dignified pattern of all the virtues. The passions of youth had lost their fires; the scenes of revelry and coarse dissipation to which they had given birth were only a memory. She would yet die in the odour of sanctity, however tardy. But storms were brewing, and the Duke's death, in 1746, precipitated them, though not before she had had another fling with the riches he left to her. Throwing aside her widow's weeds, she flung herself again--old, obese, and faded as she was--into a round of dissipation which shocked and disgusted even London, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of the "quality," until she was glad to escape from the storm of censure she had brought on her head. She bought a magnificent yacht and sailed away to Rome, where Pope and Cardinal alike conspired to do her honour; and was only saved from eloping with a titled swindler by his arrest and later suicide in prison. It was while in Rome that news came to her that her late husband's heirs were planning a charge of bigamy against her, with a view to setting aside his will in her favour. Her exchequer was empty for the time; but, presenting herself before her banker, pistol in hand, she compelled him to provide her with funds to enable her to return to London--to find all arrangements already made for her trial in Westminster Hall on a charge of bigamy. Public opinion was arrayed against her; she was received with abuse, jeers, and lampoons. Foote made her the object of universal ridicule by a comedy entitled, "A Trip to Calais." But the Duchess metaphorically snapped her fingers at them all. She was no woman to bow before the storm of ridicule and censure. She openly defied it to do its worst. Her splendid equipage was to be seen everywhere, with the autocratic Duchess, serene, smiling, contemptuous.