quite true. There was a new wall begun, and walks! To her eye the walls at the palace compared unfavourably with those here, the park "having none but what you may kick down with your foot, nor the fine garden but what must be pulled down again, being done with a stone the undertakers must know would not hold ". Certainly Vanbrugh must go and so during her visit she was careful never to be alone with him, so that he should not raise the question of the marriage. He on his side made no attempt to bring it forward, "and being to see the Duke of Newcastle before there could be anything new to speak upon, did not wonder she said nothing to him of that matter ". Once more brother Van was too simple.

When, however, he went to Claremont, he found the Duke of Newcastle full of eager impatience to know what the Duchess had said. Vanbrugh, surprised, answered that she had said nothing, no doubt because there was nothing new to say. The Duke was yet more surprised, because during Sir John's visit to Blenheim he had been called upon by Mr. Walter, who had had a good deal to say about the marriage. He was even then in the house; would Vanbrugh like to see him? The two negotiators were thereupon introduced to one another, and Vanbrugh was more surprised than ever. Then, as he thought upon the situation, his feeling turned to anger; he was greatly annoyed that he, Sir John Vanbrugh, the creator of Blenheim, Clarenceux King of Arms, the friend of all the wits and many of nobility, a man of mature years, should have been shelved in so shabby a way by this Mr. Walter of whom nobody had even so much as heard. Like another pitiful goer-between' he had found the

1 Add. MSS. 9123. Letter from Vanbrugh 1709, endorsed by Duchess later, endorsement beginning " In August 1716..."

task thankless, and, again like the other, would not "meddle nor make no more i' the matter ". He at once wrote to the Duchess a letter glinting with cold indignation, in which he simply set forth the history of the whole affair and his labours therein, and in which he also declared his wonder at her silence during their last meeting at Blenheim. But as he wrote a warmer feeling rose up in him, and the indignation became less cold. "I don't say this, madam,” he flamed up suddenly,

to court being farther employed in this matter; for a Match-maker is a damned trade, and I was never fond of meddling in other people's affairs. But as in this, on your own motion and your own desire, I had taken a good deal of hearty pains to serve you, and I think with a good deal of hearty success, I cannot but wonder (though not be sorry) you should not think it right to continue your commands upon

Your obedient humble servant

J. VANBRUGH." 1

Such a letter was, of course, all the Duchess could desire. Sir John had sent in his resignation as far as the marriage question was concerned. Nevertheless she wrote him a letter in her usual disarmingly frank style, setting forth her view, and innocently supposing nobody could see anything in the least unnatural in her approaches to Mr. Walter, once she had found him to be an intimate of the Duke of Newcastle. And as to not having raised the question at Blenheim, she remarked blandly, " I think it was your turn to speak after what I had written, and not at all reasonable for you to find fault with what passed between Mr. Walter and me at the Bath". Indeed, her surprise was unbounded; but in her character of the injured person she magnanimously concluded:

Add. MSS. 9125; also Athenaeum, 1890.

"I have now written a very true relation of this whole proceeding, and if any third person will say that I have done anything wrong to you in it, I shall be very sorry for it, and very ready to ask your pardon; but at present I have the ease and satisfaction to believe there is no sort of complaint against

Your most humble servant

S. MARLBOROUGH.1

"[P.S.]I have two letters of yours concerning the building of this place, which I will not trouble you to answer after so long a letter as this; besides, after the trial I made when you were last here, [Blenheim] 'tis plain we can never agree upon that matter."

But the Duchess knew there was no need to answer those two letters, because she had shot another bolt. Indeed, the only explanation of the one just quoted is her need, in this case not without malice, to prove herself in the right, at any rate to herself. For when Vanbrugh got back to town after his visit to the Duke of Newcastle, a certain Brigadier Richards, a building contractor, showed him a screed 2 in which the Duchess had "given. herself the trouble in twenty or thirty sides of paper ", Vanbrugh told Newcastle, "to draw up a charge against me, beginning from the time this building was first ordered by the Queen, and concluding upon the whole that I had brought the Duke of Marlborough into this unhappy difficulty, Either to leave the thing unfinished, and by consequence useless to him and his posterity, or by finishing it, to distress his fortune, and deprive his grandchildren of the provision he inclined to make for them". At last the Duchess had formulated the dark suspicions she had always had of Vanbrugh. He had always hated the Duke-perhaps he had always been secretly a Tory agent!

I

Thomson, ii, Appendix.

2 Add. MSS. 9123.

Vanbrugh's anger exploded. He wrote to the Duchess at white heat, and let her see she had for once met her match for straight talk.

"When I writ to your Grace on Tuesday last ", he wrote on the Thursday, "I was much at a loss what could be the ground of your having dropped me in the service I had been endeavouring to do you and your family with the Duke of Newcastle, upon your sole motion and desire. But having since been shown, by Mr. Richards, a large packet of building papers sent him by your Grace, I find the reason was that you had resolved to use me so ill in respect of Blenheim, as must make it impracticable to employ me in any other branch of your service.

"These papers, madam, are so full of far-fetched, laboured accusations, mistaken facts, wrong inferences, groundless jealousies and strained constructions, that I should put a very great affront upon your understanding if I supposed it possible you could mean anything in earnest by them, but to put a stop to my troubling you any more. You have your end, madam, for I will never trouble you more, unless the Duke of Marlborough recovers so far as to shelter me from such intolerable treatment."

For the sake of effect, and even of dignity, the letter should have ended there. But Vanbrugh's temper was, in the rare state of being aroused, far beyond caring for dignity, which, as La Rochefoucauld has observed, is a social cloak. Besides, the temptation must have been irresistible to try to sting one who in all her personal dealings had shown herself so little capable of feeling. So he continued, opening an old wound with cruel point:

"I shall in the mean time have only this concern on his account (for whom I shall ever retain the greatest veneration) that your Grace, having like the [late] Queen, thought fit to get rid of a faithful servant, the

Tories will have the pleasure to see your Glass-maker Moor [Hawkesmoor?] make such an end of the Duke's building as her Minister Harley did of his victories, for which it was erected.

I am your Grace's

Most obedient servant

J. VANBRUGH." I

But it is plain he was no longer, even formally, her humble servant, and he did not forbear to make one more thrust, probably a reference to the Duchess's threat to publish Mrs. Morley's letters (1711), and he added a postscript:

"If your Grace will give me leave to print your papers, I'll do it very exactly, and without any answer or remark but this short letter attached to the tail of them, that the world may know I desired they might be published."

The Duchess certainly had her end', for Sir John had no more to do with the building of Blenheim, and she had managed it in such a way as to clear herself of all blame. Had not the resignation come from him, thus proving her in the right? All the same Vanbrugh's letter stung her, for when, in after years, her own epistle to him explaining the Walter affair fell into her hands, she endorsed it: 2

66

Upon receiving that very insolent letter upon the same month, 'tis easy to imagine that I wished to have had the civility I expressed in this letter back again, and was sorry I had fouled my fingers in writing to such a fellow."

1 Add. MSS. 9125: Nov. 1716.

2 So I believe, both from the obvious inference, and from the appearance of the MSS. Previous critics have given it as a second PS. to her letter-but if she had not sent it, why should she want the civility she expressed in it back again? If she did not want to express civility, why did she send the letter? Besides, though her epistolary style is downright, it is not downright rude.