“Anne could not cope with her discarded favorite in eloquence and violence, but she could resist and dissemble; above all, she could hold her tongue.” Influenced by the Tories, who gained the ear of the queen through the connivance of Mrs. Masham, it was secretly arranged that the Whig ministry should be forced to retire; that the Marlboroughs should be disgraced, and that peace should be negotiated with Louis XIV. The proud duchess had not yet been publicly informed of her impending downfall, but rumors had reached her of the queen’s animosity. Hastening to Kensington, she forced herself into the presence of the queen, and demanded with the air of a sovereign rather than a subject, of what she was accused. The queen, aware that her only weapon against the sarcastic and voluble tongue of the duchess was silence, remarked with cutting composure: “I shall make no answer to anything you say.” This was more than the enraged duchess could bear, and she launched forth into such a terrible tongue-lashing of violent vituperation, that the incensed queen turned to leave the room; whereupon the duchess exclaimed, “I am confident you will suffer in this world or the next for so much inhumanity.” “That is my business,” retorted the queen, as she lifted the portière and retired, leaving the discomfited duchess to weep in a fury of rage and humiliation. They never met again. When the Duke of Marlborough returned from his campaign, not all his condescension in begging on his knees that the golden key,—his wife’s badge of office,—might be retained by her for a few weeks sufficed to appease the queen. “I will have it in two days,” exclaimed the angry Anne; and upon reporting his failure to his indignant wife, she also hurled upon his poor head her invectives of wrath, and throwing the golden keys upon the floor, the haughty virago, who had lost all power over her queen, but still maintained her ascendency in her husband’s heart in spite of all her outbursts of temper, sullenly retired, leaving her humiliated spouse to pick up her tardily relinquished badge of office and meekly bear it back in shame and sorrow to her offended sovereign. Hard fate for a man to fall into the snare of playing the go-between of two angry women, especially when one is his wife and the other his sovereign. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough afterwards went abroad, and their history is no longer connected with that of Queen Anne. The famous peace of Utrecht was signed in 1713. The remainder of Queen Anne’s reign was unmomentous. After her experience with the Duchess of Marlborough she determined to assert her own will, but she deceived no one but herself, as she was now alternately swayed by her two favorites, the Duchess of Somerset, who was appointed mistress of the robes, and Lady Masham, whom she had raised to a title and made the keeper of the privy purse. Swift says of Anne at this time:—