The Duchess had, it appeared, informed His Majesty of a domestic arrangement, all important to the mother and infant, but not usually deemed an affair such as royalty might condescend to take account of, or be a matter for an elderly pedant, like King James, to decide. “I hope my Lord Arran,” she wrote to the King, “has told your Majesty that I mean to wean Moll very shortly. I would not by any means do it till I had made your Majesty acquainted with it; so I intend to make trial this very night how she will endure it.”[54] “Little Moll,” who afterwards married successively three times, is mentioned frequently in the domestic correspondence of the day.[55] Footnote 54: Nichols, p. 843; from papers in the Advocate’s Library, Edinburgh. Footnote 55: Harleian, vol. 6987. James’s regard for the Duchess was also shown in another way. When the Duke applied to His Majesty for jewels, his young wife, scarcely twenty years of age, was eager to part with baubles which were so precious in the eyes of others, in order to advance Buckingham’s interest, and enhance his splendour at the Spanish Court. The King could hardly bear that his favourite should accept her generosity. “And now,” he wrote, "my sweet Steenie gossip, that the poor fool Kate hath also sent thee her pearl chain, which, by chance, I saw in a box in Frank Steward’s hand, I hope I need not to conjure thee not to give any of her jewels away there, for thou knowest what necessary use she will have of them at your return here, besides that it is not lucky to give away anything that I have given her."[56] In his correspondence, James never forgot the Duchess. “This,” he says, addressing Buckingham, “is the sixt time I have written to you two, five to Kate, two to Su (the Countess of Denbigh), and one to thy mother, Steenie, all with my own hands.”[57] In presents of provisions he was considerate of her comfort, and so lavish that the Duke was wont to call his Majesty his “man-purveyor.” Footnote 56: Nichols, 850. Footnote 57: Nichols, from Harleian MSS., 6987. Like a good wife, the Duchess appears to have occupied herself, during the absence of her husband, in maintaining and improving Newhall and Burleigh, places in which the Duke felt a lively interest, and his mother participated in these exertions without any of that petty jealousy of interference being exhibited, which a less amiable mind than that of the Duchess might have disturbed. “For Burley,” she writes word, “I hear the wall is not very forward yet, and my lady” (the Countess) “bid me send you word that she is gone down to look how things are there. She says she is about making a littel river to run through the park. It will be about sixteen feet broad; but she says she wants money.”[58] Footnote 58: State Papers, vol. cxi., No. 13.