The poor Queen was not long destined to enjoy her partialities in peace. When the preference which Harley had received from the Queen declined, or rather when he had offended Lady Masham, that mercenary favourite could then discover and disclose to others, that the “Dragon,” as Harley was called in derision by her and her familiar associates, had been the most “ungrateful man” to the Queen, and “to his best friends, that ever was born,” and had been “teasing and vexing the Queen without intermission for the last three weeks.”[210] The same lady draws a mournful picture of the annoyances, importunities, and almost unkind usage, with which the poor Queen was assailed, by those whose party spirit she had fostered by her own vacillations. The Tories beheld with dismay the undoubted decline of the Queen, and hailed each transient improvement in her health with undue elation. In the latter years of her life, political tergiversation became so common as scarcely to excite surprise. “Lord Nottingham,” says Swift, “a famous Tory and speechmaker, is gone over to the Whig side; they toast him daily, and Lord Wharton says, it is Dismal (so they call him from his looks) will save England at last.”[211] “The least disorder that the Queen has,” says Swift, writing, in 1714, to Lord Peterborough, “puts us all in alarm; and when it is over, we act as if she were immortal.”[212] Harassed by political rivalships, each combatant, “the Dragon,” and Mercurialis, (Bolingbroke,) being resolved, as it was said, to die hard, the Queen and the Duchess of Somerset were supposed to entertain the notion of there being no “Monsieur le Premier,” but that all power should reside in the one, and profit in the other. “Never,” wrote Dr. Arbuthnot to Dean Swift, “was sleep more welcome to a weary traveller than death to the Queen. It was frequently her lot, whilst worn with bodily suffering, to be an agitated and helpless witness of the bitter altercations of the Lord Treasurer Harley and of her Secretary for Foreign Affairs. It was her office, good-naturedly to check the sneers of the former, and to soothe the indignant spirit of Bolingbroke. In their mutual altercations ‘they addressed to each other such language as only cabinet ministers could use with impunity.’[213] Yet the Dragon held fast with a dead grip the little machine, or in other words, ‘clung to the Treasurer’s staff.’”[214] To the disgrace both of Harley and Bolingbroke, if anything could disgrace politicians so venal, they each had recourse, in their extremity, to men of totally opposite principles to those which they had long professed. Harley addressed himself to Lord Cowper, and to the Duke of Shrewsbury, whose popularity with those who favoured the house of Hanover was greatly increased by his late conduct in Ireland. But neither of these influential personages would link themselves to the equivocal measures and falling fortunes of Harley.