Bolingbroke formed a scheme which proved equally unavailing, to rescue him from impending ruin. His superior influence with Lady Masham, and his correspondence with the Pretender, had secured him, as he believed, the favour of the Queen: yet he courted the Whig party, and resolved to avail himself again of that support which had been his earliest stay—the friendship and co-operation of the Duke of Marlborough. The Duke had been expected, several times during the last year of Queen Anne’s reign, to arrive in England. At one time it was said that St. James’s, at another that Marlborough-house, was in preparation for his reception. As affairs drew on towards the crisis, both Whigs and Tories solicited Marlborough to add his influence to their wasting strength. The Duke had been accused of having entered into an amicable and political correspondence with both parties; but from this charge he has been ably and effectually vindicated.[215] Throughout the political conflicts which had agitated the court of England since he had left her shores, Marlborough had maintained a steady correspondence with his friends, but had expressed a firm refusal to deviate from those principles which had occasioned his exile, or to approve of the peace of Utretcht, or to abandon his desire for the Hanoverian succession. Acting as a mediator between the Electoral Prince and the party well affected to him in England, he distrusted the sincerity of Harley’s pretended exertions, and resolutely decided that he would hold no intercourse with a minister of whose hollowness he had already received many proofs. Nor was the Duchess less determined never to pardon the injuries which she conceived herself and her husband to have received from Harley. All offers of his aid, all attempts to lend to him the influence which Marlborough’s military and personal character still commanded, were absolutely rejected. At the court of Hanover, the Duke and Duchess saw, as it were, reflected, the cabals of their native country. The year 1714, marked by other signal events, witnessed the death of the Electress Sophia, at a moment when the Elector was hesitating whether to accept an invitation from the Hanoverian party in England, to repair to that country, and to take his seat in the House of Lords as Duke of Cambridge, the writ to which title he had recently received. The Electress died in May; her sudden decease having been hastened, it was supposed, by her anxiety that Prince George should make the important journey to which he had been solicited. The earnest hope of this accomplished and ambitious Princess had been, to have “Sophia, Queen of England,” engraved on her tomb; and she missed this object of her desires only by a space of two months.