Eighteen thousand copies, with the perusal of which the country was to have been indulged, were actually destroyed, and the entire publication was effectually suppressed. Besides destroying the _Memoirs_ Mrs. Clarke gave up ninety private letters, containing, it is said, anecdotes of illustrious and noble personages, of the most curious description. _April 29._--'Mrs. Clarke's _Memoirs_ are said to have been suppressed, in consequence of her receiving 7,000_l._ down, and an annuity of 400_l._ for her own life, and an annuity of 200_l._ each for her respective daughters, with a promise that her son shall be provided for. The printer of the work has also received 500_l._ of the indemnification money.'[15] It is difficult to discriminate between the alleged motives of Colonel Wardle's action and his real object; public spirit was the mainspring which directed the mover of the investigation, if we may trust his own account, and for awhile the populace seems to have been of the same opinion, as addresses of thanks from various corporations acknowledged his patriotism. Somewhat later his disinterestedness began to be questioned; then the ugly evidence of the house at Westbourne Place was found difficult to argue away.[16] The absence of Major Dodd and Mr. Glennie at the action--where their presence was of the utmost importance--brought against the Colonel by one Wright, an upholsterer, to recover the expenses of furnishing this house, looked suspicious; the evidence was against the plaintiff, and Wardle was cast in the suit, and had to pay 2,000_l._ and costs. In the course of the trial it began to be hinted that the chief instigator of these proceedings was no less than a royal Duke, the brother of the Commander-in-Chief. It seems tolerably clear, on sifting the motives of the several actors and puppets in this matter, who had personally nothing to gain by the Duke's dismissal, and who were obviously, with one or two exceptions, corrupt agents in the first instance by their own confessions, and therefore likely to be actuated by no higher principles in the proceedings at issue, that they were (involuntarily in some cases) exposing their own misdeeds to forward the purpose of a greater personage, who did not appear, but to whose influence and purse they looked for their reward. Mrs. Clarke was, as everyone recognised, acting from the common impulse of personal aggrandisement, and she frankly acknowledged her principles. The year following the investigation, and the destruction of her _Memoirs_, she thought proper to revenge the want of faith which, according to her account, had characterised the proceedings of the 'conspirators' in her own case, by exposing the true intentions of the Duke's assailants; her motives, as she admitted, were in this second exposure prompted by the same interested spirit which had actuated the previous prosecution of her late friend and protector.