In the ensuing year, 1711, the Duke of Marlborough was dismissed from all his employments; and with this event the Duchess’s account of her conduct closes. The influence of the French, the existence of strong prepossession in favour of the Pretender among most of the ministers, with the exception of Harley, and the necessity of sacrificing to the desire of a peace the general who had always opposed that measure, were the inducements, in the opinion of the Duchess, to this act on the part of the Queen. It was executed with as little feeling as could well be imagined. Historians have compared this act of ingratitude to the conduct of Justinian to Belisarius. The dismissal was written by the Queen herself, and in reply she received from Marlborough a calm, respectful, dignified, but fruitless remonstrance.[188] At the close of her “Vindication,” the Duchess makes the following observation to the nobleman to whom that work was addressed.[189] “Thus, my lord, I have given you a short history of my favour with my royal mistress, from its earliest rise to its irrecoverable fall. You have seen with admiration how sincere and how great an affection a Queen was capable of having for a servant who never flattered her. And I doubt not but your friendship made some conclusions to my advantage, when you observed for how many years I was able to hold my place in her regard, notwithstanding her most real and invariable passion for that phantom which she called the church—that darling phantom which the Tories were for ever presenting to her imagination, and employing as a will in the wisp to bewilder her mind, and entice her (as she at last unhappily experienced) to the destruction of her quiet and glory. But I believe you have thought that the most extraordinary thing in the whole fortune of my favour, was its being at last destroyed by a cause, in appearance so unequal to the effect,—I mean Mrs. Abigail Hill. For I will venture to affirm, that whatever may have been laid to my charge of ill behaviour to my mistress, in the latter years of my service, is all reducible to this one crime—my inveteracy to Mrs. Masham. I have, indeed, said that my constant combating the Queen’s inclination to the Tories, did in the end prove the ruin of my credit with her; and this is true, inasmuch as without that her Majesty could never have been engaged to any insinuations against me.”