At length an answer was sent, the whole construction and style of which proved it, in the opinion of the Duchess, to be the production of an artful man, who knew perfectly well how to manage the affair. To Harley she imputed a deceptive and plotting character of mind, which by others was termed prudence. “His practices,” as the Duchess called them, “which were deemed fair in a politician,” were now fully understood by the two great men, Marlborough and Godolphin, who were their object. To him, therefore, the Duchess attributed the cautious, polite, and submissive letter, in which, expressing her grief at her Grace’s displeasure, and her unconsciousness of its precise cause, the careful Abigail sought to draw forth an explicit declaration of the cause of the Duchess’s chagrin, by inquiring who had been her enemy upon this occasion. But she addressed one whose prudence was, in this instance, stronger than her passions. The Duchess assured her cousin that her resentment did not proceed from any representations of others, but from her own observation, which made the impression the stronger; and she declined entering further into the subject by letter.[103] The Duchess of Marlborough was now, therefore, at open variance with her cousin. Towards her Majesty she stood in a predicament the most curious and unprecedented that perhaps ever existed between sovereign and subject. The amused and astonished court beheld Anne cautiously creeping out of that subjection in which the Duchess had, according to her enemies, long held the timid sovereign. “The grand inference,” says the authoress of the ‘Other Side of the Question,’ addressing the Duchess in her days of almost bed-ridden sickness, after the publication of the ‘Conduct,’ “that your grace draws from all this is, that you are betrayed. But those of the world are rather such as these,—that the Queen was captive, and you her gaoler; that she was neither mistress of her power, nor free to express her own inclinations; that she was so far overawed by a length of oppression, as to dread the very approach of her tormentress; that she was forced to unbosom herself by stealth; and that she durst not venture upon a contest with your grace, even to set herself free from your insupportable tyranny.”[104]