But more important in its effect upon the author’s fortunes than any action of the outraged government was the resentment which her defamation of certain illustrious persons awakened in the breast of the dictator of letters.  In chosing [Transcriber’s note:  sic] to expose in the character of her chief heroine, Ismonda, the foibles of Mrs. Henrietta Howard, the neighbor of Pope, the friend of Swift and Arbuthnot, and the admired of Lord Peterborough, Mrs. Haywood made herself offensive in the nostrils of the literary trio.  The King’s mistress, later the Countess of Suffolk, conducted herself with such propriety that her friends affected to believe that her relations with her royal lover were purely platonic, and they naturally failed to welcome the chronicle of her amours and the revelation of the slights which George II delighted to inflict upon her.  Swift described the writer of the scandal as a “stupid, infamous, scribbling woman";[24] Peterborough writing to Lady Mary Montagu in behalf of his friend, the English Homer, sneered at the “four remarkable poetesses and scribblers, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Haywood, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Ben [sic]";[25] and Pope himself pilloried the offender to all time in his greatest satire.

FOOTNOTES [1] Monthly Review, I, 238.  July, 1749.

[2] Mme de Villedieu, Annales galantes de Grece and Les exiles de la cour d’Auguste.  Mme Durand-Bedacier, Les belles Grecques, ou l’histoire des plus fameuses courtisanes de la Grece.

[3] B.M.  Catalogue.

[4] A. Lang, History of English Literature (1912), 458.  See ante, p. 25.

[5] Re-issued as The Unfortunate Princess, or, the Ambitious Statesman, 1741.

[6] J.E.  Wells, Fielding’s Political Purpose in Jonathan Wilde, PMLA, XXVIII, No.  I, pp. 1-55.  March, 1913.  See also The Secret History of Mama Oello, 1733.  “The Curaca Robilda’s Character [i.e.  Sir Robert Walpole’s] will inform you that there were Evil Ministers even amongst the simple Indians” ... and The Statesman’s Progress:  Or, Memoirs of the Life, Administration, and Fall of Houly Chan, Primier Minister to Abensader, Emperor of China (1733).

[7] A.C.  Ewald, Sir Robert Walpole (1878), 444.

[8] A.C.  Ewald, Sir Robert Walpole, 450.

[9] Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, London, 1884, II, 143.

[10] The Unfortunate Princess, 18, etc.

[11] Memoirs of a Certain Island, II, 249.  “Marama [the Duchess of Marlborough] has been for many Years a Grandmother; but Age is the smallest of her Imperfections:—­She is of a Disposition so perverse and peevish, so designing, mercenary, proud, cruel, and revengeful, that it has been a matter of debate, if she were really Woman, or if some Fiend had not assumed that Shape on purpose to affront the Sex, and fright Mankind from Marriage.”

[12] J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, III, 649, records the tradition that Chapman was the publisher of Mrs. Haywood’s Utopia.