“Whereas,” adds the plain-spoken favourite, “you might prevent all these misfortunes by giving my Lord Treasurer and my Lord Marlborough (whom you may so safely trust) leave to propose those things to you which they know and can judge to be absolutely necessary for your service, which will put it in their power to influence those who have given you proofs both of their being able to serve you, and of their desiring to make you great and happy. But rather than your Majesty will employ a party-man, as you are pleased to call Lord Sunderland, you will put all things in confusion; and at the same time that you say this, you employ Sir C. Hedges, who is against you, only that he has voted in remarkable things, that he might keep his place; and he did so in the last King’s time, till at last, when everybody saw that he was dying, and he could lose nothing by differing with that court; but formerly he voted with those men, the enemies to the government, called Whigs; and if he had not been a party-man, how could he have been a secretary of state, when all your councils were influenced by my Lord Rochester, Lord Nott, Sir Edward Seymour, and about six or seven just such men, that call themselves _the heroes of the church_?” The anathemas of the Duchess were not without effect. Sir Charles Hedges, dismayed at the vigorous opposition set up against him, deemed it, eventually, more prudent to retire, than to be turned out of his post; and, in the winter of 1706, Lord Sunderland was appointed to succeed him.[71] Queen Anne had now thrown herself, to all appearance, wholly into the hands of the Whig party, who, from her childhood, had appeared to her to be her natural enemies. Yet still she cherished a secret partiality to her early counsellors, and exhibited a reluctance to consult with her ministers on any promotions in the church. “The first artifice of those counsellors was,” says the Duchess,[72] “to instil into the Queen notions of the _high prerogative_ of _acting without her ministers_, and, as they expressed it, of being Queen _indeed_. And the nomination of persons to bishoprics, against the judgment and _remonstrances_ of her ministers, being what they knew her genius would fall in with more readily than with anything else they could propose, they began with that; and they took care that those _remonstrances_ should be interpreted by the world, and presented by herself, as hard usage, a denial of common civility, and even _the making her no_ Queen.” Such is the account given by this violent partisan of the secret power by which her friends were finally vanquished.