It was not until two years before her death that the Duchess ventured to give to the world what she considered as a complete vindication of herself. When the work, entitled “An Account of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from her first coming to Court in the year 1710,” was published, she was eighty-two years of age. Her conviction must have been that she could not live long; to life she had, according to her own statement, become indifferent, but she still cherished a desire for justification in the eyes of posterity. The charges alleged against her were avarice, insolence, and ingratitude to her royal mistress. Doubtful of her own powers of executing a complete and connected work, the Duchess selected as the nominal historian of her life, Nathaniel Hooke, best known as the compiler of a Roman history, and long the companion, and in some respects a dependent, of the great and learned. Hooke had been a sufferer in the South Sea bubble, after which epidemic infatuation he described himself, in a letter to the Earl of Oxford, as in some measure happy to find himself at that time “just worth nothing;” that being considered, at the period in question, as an escape compared with the heavy burden of debts. The cause of the Duchess’s preference to Hooke is not discoverable, since he was a Quietist and a Mystic, and had evinced the sincerity of his religious opinions by taking a Catholic priest to Pope on his deathbed, to the great annoyance of Bolingbroke.[393] The Duchess did not object to Hooke on that account, and gave him the large sum of five thousand pounds, on condition that he would aid her in her work. She would not, however, allow him to make use of all her letters, and they were, according to the historian’s statement, sadly garbled at her grace’s desire.[394] In the course of their mutual task, however, certain conversations arose, in which the Duchess perceived, or fancied she perceived, an intention on the part of Hooke to beguile her into popery. The result was a violent quarrel; but whether before or after the completion of the work does not appear. Hooke, in extenuation of the quarrel, stated, on his own part, that finding her grace without religion, he had attempted to infuse into her mind his own opinions.