“Your mistress’s usage to me is so barbarous that sure she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she would not be thus ill-natured.  I have sent her a letter which I desire you will give her.  I do love her with all my soul, but will not torment her; but if I cannot have her love I shall despise her pity.  For the sake of what she has already done, let her read my letter and answer it, and not use me thus like a footman.”

In her reply to this letter Sarah assumed again an air of wounded innocence.  She had done nothing, she declared, with tears in her pen, to deserve what he had written to her; and since he evidently had such a poor opinion of her she was angry that she had too good a one of him.

“If I had as little love as yourself, I have been told enough of you to make me hate you, and then I believe I should have been more happy than I am like to be now.  However,” she continued, “if you can be so well contented never to see me, as I think you can by what you say, I will believe you, though I have not other people.”

No wonder the poor man was driven to his wits’ end by such varied and contradictory moods.  After avoiding him for weeks in the most marked and merciless manner she charges him with “being content never to see her.”  Although she had never uttered or penned a syllable of love in return for his reams of passionate protestations, she taunts him with having less love than herself!  Was ever woman so hard to woo or to understand, or lover so patient under so much provocation?

She further accused him of laughing at her when he was “at the Duke’s side,” to which he retorted “I was so far from that, that had it not been for shame I could have cried.”  She even swore that it was he who avoided her; and he proves to her that he had followed her elusive shadow everywhere, and had even “made his chair follow him, because I would see if there was any light in your chamber, but I saw none.”

But even this arch-coquette recognised that the most devoted lover’s forbearance has its bounds, and she was much too clever a woman to strain them too far.  When she had brought him to the verge of suicide by her moods and vapours she saw that the time of surrender had come; and when her lover’s arm was at last around her waist and her head on his shoulder, she vowed that she had never ceased to love him from the first, and that she had never meant to be unkind!

Thus it came to pass that one winter’s day in 1677, at St James’s Palace, John Churchill led his bride to the altar, which proved the portal to one of the happiest wedded lives that have ever fallen to the lot of mortals.  How little, at that crowning moment, Sarah Churchill could have foreseen those distant days of the future, when she was left to walk alone the last stage of life, in which she would read and re-read, with tear-dimmed eyes, the faded letters which her coldness had wrung from her lover in the flood-tide of his passion and his despair.