The poor Queen is to be pitied—we dare not say despised—for her subserviency, her little artifices, her manœuvres in closets and the back stairs, her degrading connivance at duplicity, her thirst for flattery, or for what she termed friendship. Her confidence and affection, thus extended towards an unworthy object, henceforth weakened rather than adorned her character. It is remarkable, that when she learned to dispense with the friendship of the Marlborough family, the Queen ceased to be great abroad and respected at home. CHAPTER VI. Vexations and disappointments which harassed the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough—Vacillations of Anne—Her appointment of Tory bishops. The ensuing five or six years of the life of the Duchess of Marlborough present little else than annals of party rivalries and of court dissensions. Those who once envied her had now their revenge. To thirst still for power, and to be bowed down ever and anon by a secret but all-pervading influence; to witness one day the altered countenance of her royal mistress, and to experience, the next, relentings of her sovereign’s weak mind; to suffer the sneers of her adversaries, and to encounter the still more grating pity of her friends; to be blamed by all parties, and even reviled by almost all the Whig leaders, save the devoted and moderate Marlborough, or the faithful Godolphin,—these were the trials of the Duchess’s middle age. That her temper was soured by these vicissitudes of hope and fear, and by the excitement of all those angry passions which disappointment kindles, cannot be doubted. From the great age which she attained, and from the clearness of her intellect until the close of her existence, there is no reason to suppose that her health, or even her spirits, were eventually impaired by the everlasting contentions of which she was the centre. For a while, after her explanatory letter to the Queen, and her Majesty’s reply, “the great breach,” as the Duchess calls it, was not made public.[123] It was some time before Marlborough and Godolphin could be convinced of the secret influence which Harley exercised, or that the former, especially, could be induced to take the matter seriously to heart. The Duchess in vain importuned him to revenge her wrongs, and harassed him until he was heart-sick with the details of all that her enemies performed and projected. “You may be sure,” writes the Duke to her from Helchin, on Sept. 19, 1707, “I shall never mention Mrs. Masham, either in letter or discourse. I am so weary of all this sort of management, that I think it is the greatest folly in the world to think any struggling can do good when both sides have a mind to be angry.”[124]