About one point there is no doubt--Anne accepted the resignation with eagerness and joyfulness, and divided the Duchess's Court places between Lady Masham and the Duchess of Somerset. It astonished most people to see the Duke consent to serve when his wife was dismissed--to see him continue to hold command of the troops under the Ministry which had sprung out of a bed-chamber squabble, and which was sure to thwart him in all his measures. His enemies have generally accounted for this by assuming that the Duke's avarice was at the bottom of it; but his lady assigns very different reasons. "The Duke of Marlborough," she says, "notwithstanding an infinite variety of mortifications, by which it was endeavoured to _make_ him resign his commission, that there might be a pretence to raise an outcry against him, as having quitted his Queen's and his country's service merely because he could not govern in the cabinet as well as in the field, continued to serve yet another campaign. All his friends here, moved by a true concern for the public welfare, pressed him to it, the confederates called him with the utmost importunity, and Prince Eugene entreated him to come with all the earnestness and passion that could be expressed." These were certainly powerful inducements, and they may have mingled (together with that passionate fondness for a fine army which every good general must contract) with Marlborough's love of money. Mr. Hallam says, with strong and proper feeling, "It seems rather a humiliating proof of the sway which the feeblest prince enjoys even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes of Europe should have been changed by nothing more noble than the insolence of one waiting woman and the cunning of another. It is true that this was effected by throwing the weight of the crown into the scale of a powerful _faction_; yet the House of Bourbon would probably not have reigned beyond the Pyrenees but for Sarah and Abigail at Queen Anne's toilette."[53] [53] Hallam--Constitutional History. The Queen, altogether unmindful of her former warm attachment to her Mistress of the Robes, overjoyed to find herself free, wrote, with her own hand, the dismissal of the Duchess, and gave herself up to her enemies.