“I know, indeed,” says the Duchess, “that my Lord Godolphin, and other great men, were much reflected upon by some well-disposed persons, for not laying hold of this opportunity, which the Tories put into their hands, of more effectually securing the succession to the crown in the House of Hanover. But those of the Whigs whose anger against the minister was raised on this account, little knew how impracticable the project of invitation was, and that the attempt would have only served to make the Queen discard her ministry, to the ruin of the common cause of these kingdoms, and of all Europe. I had often tried her Majesty upon this subject; and when I found that she would not hear of the immediate successor coming over, had pressed her that she would at least invite hither the young Prince of Hanover, who was not to be her immediate successor, and that she would let him live here as her son; but her Majesty would listen to no proposal of this kind in any shape whatever.” The Queen, upon this occasion, gave the first indications of anything like a real reconciliation to the Whig party.[58] Those in the houses of parliament, and there were many, who were zealously attached to the Pretender, and abjured him only in order better to serve him,[59] were infinitely less obnoxious to her than the politicians who dared to propose planting her extolled successor perpetually before her eyes. Stronger minds than that which Anne possessed would have shrunk from such a trial of temper. She was childless, and no longer young; and perhaps the determination manifested by this proposal to ruin the hopes of her nephew aggravated her resentment. Her self-love was deeply wounded. For though she was not, even then, as the Duchess expressed it, inwardly converted to the Whigs, neither by all that her favourite had been able to say, nor even “by the mad conduct of the tacking Tories,” to repeat language which must be readily appropriated by those who know the Duchess’s style,—yet their conduct in the _invitation_ occasioned a change in her sentiments, which an insult from one whom she had formerly regarded with kindly prepossessions completed. “She had been present,” says the Duchess, “at the debates in the House of Lords upon that subject, and had heard the Duke of Buckingham treat her with great disrespect, urging, as an argument for inviting over the Princess Sophia, that the Queen might live till she did not know what she did, and be like a child in the hands of others; and a great deal to the same effect. Such rude treatment from the Tories, and the zeal and success of the Whigs in opposing a motion so extremely disagreeable to her, occasioned her to write to me in the following terms.”