The Duke of Abercorn's second viceroyalty was quiet and threadbare. Disraeli was not the man to attempt heroic measures. Perhaps he laboured to avoid Irish affairs, which since the Union had threatened to monopolize the time of Parliament. He sent Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, afterwards Viscount St. Aldwyn, to the Irish office, and trusted to the viceroy and the Chief Secretary to shield him from the worries created by the awkward fact that a Prime Minister's duties were not confined to England. When the Duke of Abercorn sent in his resignation, in December, 1876, owing to the state of his wife's health, Disraeli prevailed upon another duke to take his place. This was the sixth Duke of Marlborough, who had declined the viceroyalty in the first days of the Government's existence. The Duke and Duchess of Abercorn retired into private life, popular and respected, the duke living until 1885. [Sidenote: The Duke of Marlborough] The incoming Lord-Lieutenant was in his fifty-fifth year when in the early days of 1877 he was sworn in as Viceroy of Ireland. One of Disraeli's personal friends, the influence of the duke had helped the Prime Minister from the outer ring of plebeian obscurity into the inner circle of Conservative exclusiveness. Disraeli had a passion for dukes, although that rank suggested dulness to his bizarre and Oriental imagination. Marlborough {274} had been Lord President of the Council in 1868 during Disraeli's first administration, and he was induced to reconsider his decision not to join the ministry when the Duke of Abercorn retired. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough directed their attention to the amelioration of the lot of the poverty-stricken peasantry, and they endeavoured also to aid the trade of Ireland. When the failure of the crops brought a famine, the duchess inaugurated a relief fund, which, with the help of the Mansion House, London, brought over L170,000 to the rescue of the sufferers. Many other acts of kindness could be recorded of them, and although their reign necessarily concluded in May, 1880, on the destruction of the Tory Government, they accomplished much in a brief space of time, and, without being great reformers, achieved something in the way of reform. Her Excellency had been before her marriage Lady Frances Tempest, and was a daughter of the third Marquis of Londonderry. She was a dignified chatelaine of Dublin Castle, a fit partner for a great nobleman. The rumblings of the Home Rule agitation storm could be heard before they vacated the viceregal position, for by now Charles Stewart Parnell had arisen to sound a new battle-cry for Nationalist Ireland. The old methods of dead-and-gone agitators were to be improved upon, new ones invented and exploited, and a decisive battle fought for Irish independence. [Sidenote: Agitation and crime]