The proud, imperious Countess writhed under the disgrace of her lord; and the world might also assign another reason for her distress, and for the passionate expression of her dislike towards his enemies, and towards those of the Lord Treasurer, which even in her latter days dictated the pages of her personal narrative. Amongst the political enemies of Lady Marlborough, the most celebrated, and the least scrupulous, was the celebrated Dean of St. Patrick. Swift, who patronised the authoress of the “Atalantis,” the infamous Mrs. Manley, and who procured that most abandoned woman remuneration from the Tories, for the imprisonment which she sustained for some of her lampoons,[258] has adopted one of her falsehoods gravely, and as a matter of acknowledged fact, into his “Remarks upon the four last years of Queen Anne’s reign.” In his character of Lord Godolphin, he says: “His alliance with the Marlborough family, and his passion for the Duchess, were the cords which dragged him into a party which he naturally disliked, whose leaders he personally hated, as they did him.” This assertion, in which the reputations of two persons are sacrificed by a side-blow, alludes to a report prevalent during the prosperous years of Lady Marlborough’s life, and called into being by that very prosperity. It originated with Swift’s tool, Mrs. Manley, or, as she chose to call herself, Rivella, who was subsequently employed by the Tory party in their periodical, “The Examiner,” after Swift had relinquished his part in it: but he has not blushed to acknowledge that he supplied this disgrace to her sex with much of the venom poured out upon the Whigs, in that noted publication.[259] By the agency of Mrs. Manley, a rumour was spread abroad reflecting on the nature of that friendly connexion between the Marlborough family and Godolphin, which a closer tie afterwards cemented. An intrigue of the grossest character was described, by the pen of that wretched woman, as having taken place between the Lord Treasurer and the Countess of Marlborough; whilst even her devoted husband was alleged to have been acquainted with it, and to have connived at it for purposes of his own interest, and from party motives.[260]