In the meantime a curious fortune unexpectedly favoured him. Swift’s unhappy Vanessa, associated with Bury Street in 1713, had settled on her property at Marley Abbey near Dublin; and Swift had privately married Stella, as she confessed to Vanessa, who thereafter revoked the bequest of her fortune to Swift, and left it to be divided between Berkeley and Marshal, afterwards an Irish judge. Vanessa died in May, 1723. A few days after Berkeley wrote thus to Lord Percival: “Here is something that will surprise your lordship as it doth me. Mrs. Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, died on Sunday. Yesterday her Will was opened, by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the advantage whereof is computed by those who understand her affairs to be worth £3000.... My Bermuda scheme is now stronger in my mind than ever; this providential event having made many things easy which were otherwise before.” Lord Percival in reply concludes that he would “persist more than ever in that noble scheme, which may in some time exalt your name beyond that of St. Xavier and the most famous missionaries abroad.” But he warns him that, “without the protection of Government,” he would encounter insurmountable difficulties. The Vanessa legacy, and the obstructions in the way of the Deanery of Dromore, were the subjects of a tedious correspondence with his friend and business factotum, “Tom Prior,” in 1724 and the three following years. In the end, the debts of Vanessa absorbed most of the legacy. And as to the Deanery of Dromore, he tells Percival, on September 19, 1723: “I despair of seeing it end to my advantage. The truth is, my fixed purpose of going to Bermuda sets me above soliciting anything with earnestness in this part of the world. It can be of no use to me, but as it may enable me the better to prosecute that design; and it must be owned that the present possession of something in the Church would make my application for an establishment in those islands more considered.”