On the following day the Duke was visited by the foreign ministers, by many of the nobility and gentry then in the metropolis, and by numerous military men. He was sworn of the privy council, and once more appeared in the House of Lords, where he took the oaths of allegiance. But, on the prorogation of parliament to the twelfth, he retired to Holywell-house, there to conquer the vexation and disappointment which his exclusion from the regency undoubtedly occasioned him. On this occasion, the spirit of Lady Marlborough displayed itself, with a magnanimity and sound discretion which redeemed her many faults. Bothmar, the Hanoverian minister, visited the Duke in his retreat, and sought to apologise for the omission of his illustrious name from among the distinguished statesmen who were appointed lords justices. The Duke listened to these excuses with his usual courtesy, but he wisely adopted the advice of the Duchess, and declined at present again holding any official appointment. “I begged of the Duke of Marlborough, upon my knees,” relates the Duchess, “that he would never accept any employment. I said, everybody that liked the Revolution and the security of the law, had a great esteem for him, that he had a greater fortune than he wanted, and that a man who had had such success, with such an estate, would be of more use to any court than they could be to him; that I would live civilly with them, if they were so to me, but would never put it into the power of any king to use me ill. He was entirely of this opinion, and determined to quit all, and serve them only when he could act honestly, and do his country service at the same time.”[226] Six weeks elapsed between the death of Queen Anne and the arrival of her successor. On the sixteenth of August, the King embarked at Orange-Holder, and landed two days afterwards at Greenwich. Every ship in the river saluted the royal vessel as it sailed, and multitudes thronged the banks of the Thames, uttering loud acclamations of joy at the arrival of the monarch. Yet George the First, a man of plain understanding, without ambition, the romance of monarchs, felt, it is said, that he had arrived to claim a crown not his own, and had an uncomfortable notion all his life, that he was somewhat of a character to which nature had little disposed him, an usurper. In the evening of his landing, the royal house at Greenwich was crowded with nobility and gentry, amongst whom the Duke of Marlborough (who was regarded as a kind of martyr to the “criminals” of the last reign, as it was now the fashion to term Queen Anne’s last ministry) was pre-eminently distinguished by the new sovereign.[227]