At the time of her first disagreements with the Queen, she endeavoured, as she asserts, through a friend, to remove those impressions against her which Anne had imbibed. She wrote long accounts of the malice of her enemies, and stated her own grounds of justification. On one point only did the Queen vouchsafe an observation. “When,” says the Duchess, “I had set forth the faithfulness and frugality with which I had served her in my offices, and had complained of the attempts made by the agents of her new friends to vilify me all over the nation, as one who had cheated my mistress of vast sums of money, her Majesty, on this occasion, was pleased to say, ‘_Everybody knows_ cheating is not the Duchess of Marlborough’s crime.’” After seven-and-twenty years’ service, the Queen, when the question as to her offences was urged by the Duchess, alleged none but that of inveteracy against “poor Masham;” “yet,” says the Duchess, “the ready invention of others, who knew nothing of my conduct, but whose interest it was to decry me, could presently find in it abundant matter of accusation.”[183] These gross calumnies, eagerly devoured by the credulity of party rage, determined the object of such unwarrantable censures, to write and publish something in her own justification, and produced a memorial, which for various reasons did not at that time see the light, but which the Duchess eventually wove into the form of that animated narrative, her “Conduct.” Her performance of her trust as mistress of the robes was attacked in libels, and charges of exorbitance and of peculation assailed her on all sides. Her explanation of the circumstances under which she exercised her office, completely exonerates her from these grave accusations. But, through her clear and business-like vindication, few readers of our day will care to follow her. Interspersed with inuendoes against Harley, who “hired his creatures to misrepresent her as no better than a pickpocket,” and interwoven with letters, and with compared accounts, between the expenses of Queen Mary and those of Queen Anne, the Duchess’s defence, on these heads, will readily be taken for granted. It appears that in 1712 she drew up a statement, which, for certain reasons, was not published. Horace Walpole, looking at the close only of her Vindication, as critics are wont to do, might well call it the “Chronicle of a Wardrobe, rather than of a reign.” Yet against such enemies as the Duchess encountered, it was essential to preserve, and to insist upon, those accounts of mourning and other expenses, of new clothes and old clothes, sums given for the decorous attire of the maids of honour after the Prince of Denmark’s death, coronation accounts, and other matters, which the calumniated Duchess was obliged to produce, to justify her integrity.