Sarah Jennings was not the equal of her sister in beauty, of whom Grammont says ‘she had a complexion of dazzling fairness, luxuriant hair of a light golden colour, an animated countenance, and the most beautiful mouth in the world. Nature had adorned her with every charm, to which the Graces had added the finishing touches. She gave you the idea of Aurora, or of the Goddess of Spring, as the poets depict those divinities.’ She did not quite come up to this standard, but, if the judgment of her contemporaries and the truth of the painter’s brush may be accepted on her behalf, she would have been the foremost beauty at Whitehall or Saint James’s had not her sister already held that distinction. Kneller’s portrait of her shows a face of considerable beauty, poised charmingly upon a graceful neck and fringed with flowing curls and with luxuriant hair as fine, one would dare contend, as that of her sister Frances, the theme of that French gossip. She has in all her portraits that piquant beauty which shines out of glancing eyes, full and luscious (eyes which the Churchills have inherited to the present day); that comes of a departure from regularity of feature; which is exhibited most charmingly in the nose, tip-tilted ever so little, but destructive of all coldness and frigid hauteur of appearance; eyes eloquent, nose rebellious, chin a little cleft and firm; lips somewhat rich and ripe, and with a sensuousness that must have been three parts the convention that obtained among the courtly painters of the time. Do you wonder, looking at her counterfeit presentment, that she should have been the ultimate ruler of that great commanding officer; the scourge of Ministers of State; or that the Queen--Anne, the most paltry puppet of a sovereign which modern times afford our astonished gaze--should have been for years entirely under her thumb? She was a woman of imperious and ungovernable temper, shrewd withal, if not a little shrewish; accomplished and clever enough to have proved, for a time, a match for the intriguers who beset the Throne during the last years of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth. During a great part of Queen Anne’s reign the country, it has been truly said, was ruled by a Triumvirate: the Duchess of Marlborough ruled her mellifluous Mrs. Morley, the Queen; the Duke had, in reality, fulfilled the kingly function of going forth to battle and defeating the enemies of the nation; while Godolphin ruled the Parliament in his absence. But the greatest of these, in council, was the Duchess. The Queen was a _quantité négligéable_, and Marlborough himself, very accurately, if contemptuously, described her in the Courts of Europe as ‘a very good sort of a woman.’ Anne reigned, but did not govern, but ‘Mrs. Freeman’ had ambition enough, and very nearly the capacity, to govern everybody but herself; and there the want of self-control and her woman’s reckless tongue betrayed her.