And since your lordship gave me leave to take this liberty with you, I will make the trouble as little as I can, both to yourself and to the Duke of Marlborough, by as short an account as possible of what has happened since his grace’s return to England, in two things I have had the honour to be employed in for his service, purely by his own and my Lady Duchess’s commands, without my applying or seeking for either, or ever having made any advantage by them. I mean, _the building of Blenheim_, and _the match with the Duke of Newcastle_. As to the former, as soon as the Duke of Marlborough arrived in England, I received his commands to attend him at Blenheim, where he was pleased to tell me, that when the government took care _to discharge him_ from the claim of the workmen for the debt in the Queen’s time, he intended to finish the building at his own expense. And, accordingly, from that time forwards he was pleased to give me his orders as occasion required, in things preparatory to it; till, at last, the affair of the debt being adjusted with the Treasury, and _owned to be the Queen’s_, he gave me directions to set people actually to work, after having considered an estimate he ordered me to prepare of the charge, to finish the house, offices, bridges, and out-walls of courts and gardens, which amounted to fifty-four thousand pounds. I spared for no pains or industry to lower the prices of materials and workmanship, on the reasonablest considerations of _sure and ready_ payment, which before (as experiments show) was _precarious_. I made no step without the Duke’s knowledge while he was well; _and I made none without the Duchess’s after he fell ill_; and was so far, I thought, from being in her ill opinion, that even the last time I waited on her and my Lord Duke at Blenheim, (which was last autumn,) she showed no sort of _dissatisfaction on anything I had done_, and was pleased to express herself to Mr. Hawkesmore (who saw her after I had taken my leave) _in the most favourable and obliging manner of me_; and to enjoin him to _repeat to me_ what she had said to him. Thus I left the Duke and Duchess at Blenheim. But a small time after I arrived in London, Brigadier Richards showed me a packet he had received from her grace, in which (without any new matter having happened) she had given herself the trouble, in twenty or thirty sides of paper, to draw up a charge against me, beginning from the time this building was first ordered by the Queen, and concluding upon the whole, that I had brought the Duke of Marlborough into this unhappy difficulty, either to leave the thing unfinished, and by consequence useless to him and his posterity; or, by finishing it, to distress his fortune, and deprive his grandchildren of the provision he inclined to make for them.