The Duke, shattered in nerves, was greatly agitated by this abrupt disclosure; but it was received by the Duchess with disdain, and by an endeavour to soothe his irritation. But when her husband informed her that the King had heard the report, and that even the Duke was supposed to share her treasonable practices, she resolved, with her wonted courage, to appear at the drawing-room, in order to ascertain how deeply the poison of calumny had worked. On her first appearance she was received coldly; and when on a second occasion she repaired to court, a reception equally chilling, and equally contrasted with the marked attention which had formerly been paid to her, confirmed her fears; and upon this demonstration of displeasure she resolved to make her wrongs and her innocence known to the King. The person through whose mediation the Duchess did not think it unseemly to address his Majesty, was the Duchess of Kendal, formerly Madame Schulemberg, the mistress, or, as some supposed, the left-handed wife of George the First; a lady whose mental and personal qualities were not, fortunately for the safety of virtue, such as to cast a lustre over the equivocal, if not disgraceful position in which she stood. The Duchess of Kendal was at this time a “tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady,” who had lived for forty years in all the contentment which virtue merits, and without the usual attractions of vice; mistress to a King, unimpassioned, inert, and respectably vicious—an “honest, dull German gentleman,”[274] to whose darkened conscience habitual profligacy offered no offence. The Duchess of Kendal, when she arrived in England, was destined to learn a lesson new to her; and the desire of political influence which she acquired, led to an interference of which she had never before dreamed. Her hatred to the Walpole family, whom the Duchess also detested, might probably account for their making common cause together, on the occasion which must now be described. It was through the persuasion of the Duchess of Kendal that the Duchess of Marlborough obtained an interview with the King, at the apartments of his mistress in St. James’s palace, in the same suite of rooms which were afterwards inhabited by the Countess of Suffolk, the favourite of his equally profligate and equally uninteresting son.