Lord Chesterfield, in holding up the Duke of Marlborough as a model of good breeding and irresistible elegance and suavity, thus touches upon the fact of his being under pecuniary obligations to the imperious Duchess of Cleveland. “He had,” says his lordship, “most undoubtedly an excellent, good, plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone would probably have raised him but something higher than they found him, which was page to King James the Second’s queen. There the graces protected and promoted him; for while he was an ensign in the Guards, the Duchess of Cleveland, then favourite mistress of the King, struck by those very graces, gave him five thousand pounds; with which he immediately bought an annuity of five hundred pounds a year, of my grandfather Halifax, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortune.”[35] Upon this slender annuity, thus disreputably obtained, the hopes of Churchill and of the young object of his affections depended. Sarah appears to have been capricious and undecided in her conduct during the progress of their engagement, which lasted three years.[36] The cause of these variations of feeling has been assigned to the opposition made by Sir Winston and Lady Churchill to their son’s forming a union so far below their expectations; but it may be referred to various other sources. The high-minded Sarah must have been often offended and wounded, in the nicest feelings, by the past irregularities of Churchill’s life. Those irregularities were renounced, it is true, upon his engagement with her, and his honourable and well-toned mind was recalled to a sense of that beauty which attends purity of conduct, and its power to dignify characters even of a common stamp. But the effects of his past conduct were found in the bitterness and jealousy of those by whom he had been hitherto flattered,[37] and by whom doubtless the defects of his moral character may have been grossly exaggerated. Sarah may have intended to prove the constancy of her accomplished lover, when, hearing that his parents destined him to become the husband of a young lady of superior fortune to her own, though of less beauty, she petulantly entreated him “to renounce an attachment which militated against his worldly prospects;” and adding many reproaches, pungent as her pen could write,—and in the vituperative style she had few equals,—she declared that she would accompany her sister Frances, then Countess of Hamilton, to Paris, thus finally to end their engagement. Her address to the honour, to the heart of Churchill, was not made in vain; he answered her by an appeal to her affection, and by earnest remonstrances against her cruelty, and a reconciliation was the result.[38]