‘The Viceroy over the Queen,’ as she had been termed, was no longer heard; even when she went in person to Kensington Palace, the Queen would no longer listen to her. ‘Dear Mrs. Morley’ and ‘Dearest Mrs. Freeman’ were estranged for ever, and though six years later the Queen died, and that commonplace dynasty the House of Hanover came to the throne in the person of George I., neither the Duke nor the Duchess of Marlborough ever again held the power which had once been theirs. Marlborough died in 1720. His wife survived him for over twenty-four years, dying at the advanced age of eighty-four. Age did not wither her resolution nor custom stale her pugnacity. She still panted, like the war-horse in Job, for the fray; she sniffed contention from afar, and kept Death himself waiting an unconscionable time. A year before her death, when very ill and like to shuffle off this mortal coil, her physicians, in consultation over her bed, upon which she lay in apparent unconsciousness, decided that she must either be blistered or she must die. ‘Must’ was no word to utter in her presence; compulsion was not to be thought of or applied to that proud spirit. ‘I won’t be blistered, and I won’t die,’ she exclaimed, with her old fire and vehemence--and she did neither at that time. She died, possessed of immense wealth, at Marlborough House, on October 18th, 1744. She left an income of 30,000_l._ a year to her grandson, Charles, Duke of Marlborough, and the same to his brother; while her hatreds were shown in the legacies she bequeathed to Pitt (afterwards Earl of Chatham) and to the Earl of Chesterfield, in recognition of their opposition to one of her pet aversions, Sir Robert Walpole.