Extraordinary as the displays of violent passion in the Duchess of Marlborough may appear in modern days, when every exhibition of natural feeling, whether good or bad, is carefully suppressed by the customs of society, there were not wanting, in her own sphere, ladies of high rank, equally arrogant though less gifted, between whom common report hesitated on which to bestow the distinction of being the most absurd, outrageous, and repulsive. Among those ladies who, in the reigns of George the First and George the Second, formed a link with the times of the Stuarts, was the Duchess of Buckingham, natural daughter of James the Second by Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester—a parentage of which the Duchess was shamelessly proud. Possessing the arrogance of her contemporary Duchess, without her masculine sense, and exhibiting equally a love of display, pertinacity, and violence of temper, the Duchess of Buckingham laboured with unceasing pains to procure the restoration of her half-brother, the Pretender. She frequently travelled to the Continent in hopes of furthering that end; she stopped ever with filial devotion at the tomb of James, shedding tears over the threadbare pall which covered his remains; but her filial duty extended not to replace it by a newer and more sumptuous decoration. These two Duchesses both possessed, from the same cause, some influence in the sphere of politics. Around them gathered the malcontents of the two parties: both were in enmity to the court—both detested Sir Robert Walpole. Tories and Jacobites thronged the saloons of the Duchess of Buckingham; the malcontent Whigs, those of Marlborough-house. The anecdotes related by Horace Walpole must always be adopted with much caution. He states that the Duchess of Buckingham, passionately attached to shows and pageants, made a funeral for her husband as splendid as that of Marlborough. She wished afterwards to borrow for the procession at her son’s interment the car which conveyed the remains of Marlborough to the tomb. “It carried my Lord Marlborough,” was the Duchess of Marlborough’s angry reply, “and it shall never carry any other.” “I have consulted the undertaker,” retorted the Duchess of Buckingham, “and he tells me I may have the same for twenty pounds.” The same authority informs us, that when the illegitimate daughter of James the Second received Lord Hervey as a suitor to her granddaughter, she appointed the day of her royal grandfather’s martyrdom for the first interview, and appeared, when he entered, seated in a chair of state, of deep mourning, in weeds and weepers, with her attendants in similar suits.[317]