The Duchess of Marlborough had, in former days, thoroughly understood, and as thoroughly despised, the shallowness of his grace of Somerset’s understanding, and the unbounded arrogance of his pretensions. The Duke was one of those beings, of whom a simple delineation in works of fiction would be called exaggeration. Holding his exalted station by a disputed right,[311] he took precedence in his degree, in consequence of the first Duke of the nation being a Catholic. This pre-eminence, hazardous to one of limited capacity, was maintained by the Duke almost in a regal style. He intimated his commands to his servants by signs, not vouchsafing to speak to them. When he travelled, the roads were cleared of all obstruction, and of idle bystanders. His children never sat down in his presence; it was even his custom, when he slept in the afternoon, to insist upon one of his daughters standing on each side of him during his slumber. On one occasion, Lady Charlotte Seymour, being tired, ventured to sit down, and he left her, in consequence, twenty thousand pounds less than her sister. He gave precedence to no one but the Duke of Norfolk. Notwithstanding these absurdities, the Duke possessed some fine qualities. His pride was accompanied by a sense of honour, and his conversation graced by a nobleness of sentiment, which, in spite of a hesitation in his speech, must have well become a man who aimed at so much. He was a firm and generous friend; patronised the fine arts, and, what was perhaps of some importance to a widower disposed to marry again, possessed a fine exterior. At the time when he made proposals to the Duchess of Marlborough, he had, however, passed his prime, and was sixty-five years of age. Already had he linked himself to one of the noblest families in the land by his marriage with his first Duchess, the Lady Elizabeth Percy, the heiress of the Percys, and the widow successively of two husbands, Lord Ogle, and Thomas Thynne, Esq., the last of whom was shot in his coach by Count Coningsmark, in hopes of carrying off the heiress of the Percys. This Duchess of Somerset had been on apparently friendly, but actually, scarcely on good terms with the Duchess of Marlborough, who perceived, through the veil of courtesy and submissive sweetness, the ambitious designs of the “great lady,” as Swift termed her. She fixed her eyes, as the Duchess discovered, upon the place of groom of the stole, an office which proved a temptation to many; “but covered the impertinence of her ambition and expectation within, with the outward guise of lowliness and good humour.”[312] Such was the Duchess of Marlborough’s opinion of the Duke’s first wife; and when she further discovered that the Duchess of Somerset was secretly undermining her at the very time that she pretended to lament the misunderstandings between her and the Queen, it is not to be supposed that the pretended good-will which was still maintained, was anything but a very hollow alliance.