The Duchess never forgave Lady Anne Bateman; and whilst we acknowledge the wickedness of that vindictive spirit, it must be owned that the Duchess had much provocation from this grandchild. In addition to the ingratitude of Lady Anne, she had the vexation, when Lord Charles succeeded to the Marlborough estates, to see him and his younger brother, Lord John, squander away their patrimonial property, and vie with each other in every wild and mad frolic. At length their complicated quarrels ended in what was professedly an amicable lawsuit between the heir and his grandmother, for the settlement of some disputed portion of the property. To the amusement of the world, and certainly _not_ to the annoyance of those of her relatives who rejoiced in exposing her eccentricities, the Duchess, who was capable of any act of effrontery, appeared in court to plead her own cause. The diamond-hilted sword, given by the Emperor Charles to the great Marlborough, was claimed by Lord Sunderland. “What!” exclaimed the Duchess, indignantly, “shall I suffer _that_ sword, which _my_ lord would have carried to the gates of Paris, to be sent to a pawnbroker’s, to have the diamonds picked out one by one?”[344] Harsh and revolting as this exhibition of passion was, her prognostic was somewhat verified in the career of Charles Duke of Marlborough. His life presents a history of embarrassments, which, as the Duchess truly asserted, nothing but prudence on his own part could have prevented. To her correspondent, Mr. Scrope, for whom she appears to have imbibed a sincere regard, she unfolds all her troubles respecting her grandson in the subjoined paragraph. The tenor of the letter from which this passage is taken, places the Duchess’s character, as a grandmother, in a very different light from that in which the popular writers of her day have chosen to place it. The world, judging, as it often does, most erroneously when it takes up family quarrels, had condemned the Duchess as hard-hearted and relentless. The following simple statement of facts is calculated to mitigate that sentence.[345] “When I saw you (Mr. Scrope) last, you said something concerning the Duke of Marlborough, which occasions you this trouble, for you seemed to have a good opinion of him, and to wish that I would make him easy. This is to show you, that as to the good qualities you imagine he has, you are mistaken, and that it is impossible to make him easy. I will now give you the account of what has happened not long since.