She spent over 40,000_l._ in this way, and the good bishop who preached her funeral sermon took, as an apt text, ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house.’ She rebuilt the castles of Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon Tower, Pendragon, and Brough; she restored the churches of Bongate, Skipton, and Appleby, and the chapels of Ninekirks, Brougham, Bongate, and Mallerstang; she erected a monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey, another--on the old Penrith road--to her mother, the Dowager Countess of Cumberland, and another still to her tutor, Samuel Daniel, and she founded and restored almshouses besides. But the first Duchess of Marlborough was a prize termagant, although in early life a woman of winning ways. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was the ruler of that great commander and military genius, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, and victor of such hard-fought fields as Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet. The rise of the Churchills reads like a romance, so constantly was their progress maintained for so many years. He was the son of an impoverished country gentleman who had lost his all in a chivalric attachment to Charles the First, and gained little consideration for it when the Restoration brought Charles the Second to Dover, and the King enjoyed his own again. All the recompense the ruined Cavalier received was the reception of his son, afterwards to become the most famous soldier and general of his time, as a page in the service of the King’s brother, the Duke of York. [Illustration: ANN CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY, AGED 81. ] Macaulay’s Whiggish prejudices forbade him writing anything to the credit of the Duke of Marlborough; and so he seized upon the gossip of the time, which has come down to us, and has stated as a fact that John Churchill owed this initiatory post to the interest of his sister Arabella, who had become an acknowledged mistress of the Duke of York. ‘The young lady was not beautiful,’ he says, in his _History of England_, ‘but the taste of James was not nice, and she became his avowed mistress. She was the daughter of a poor Cavalier knight who haunted Whitehall, and made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchs and monarchy. The necessity of the Churchills was pressing, their loyalty was ardent, and their only feeling on Arabella’s seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so plain a girl should have obtained such height of preferment.’