For four and a half years the Duchess was a dignified pattern of all the virtues.  The passions of youth had lost their fires; the scenes of revelry and coarse dissipation to which they had given birth were only a memory.  She would yet die in the odour of sanctity, however tardy.  But storms were brewing, and the Duke’s death, in 1746, precipitated them, though not before she had had another fling with the riches he left to her.

Throwing aside her widow’s weeds, she flung herself again—­old, obese, and faded as she was—­into a round of dissipation which shocked and disgusted even London, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of the “quality,” until she was glad to escape from the storm of censure she had brought on her head.

She bought a magnificent yacht and sailed away to Rome, where Pope and Cardinal alike conspired to do her honour; and was only saved from eloping with a titled swindler by his arrest and later suicide in prison.  It was while in Rome that news came to her that her late husband’s heirs were planning a charge of bigamy against her, with a view to setting aside his will in her favour.

Her exchequer was empty for the time; but, presenting herself before her banker, pistol in hand, she compelled him to provide her with funds to enable her to return to London—­to find all arrangements already made for her trial in Westminster Hall on a charge of bigamy.  Public opinion was arrayed against her; she was received with abuse, jeers, and lampoons.  Foote made her the object of universal ridicule by a comedy entitled, “A Trip to Calais.”  But the Duchess metaphorically snapped her fingers at them all.  She was no woman to bow before the storm of ridicule and censure.  She openly defied it to do its worst.  Her splendid equipage was to be seen everywhere, with the autocratic Duchess, serene, smiling, contemptuous.

It was of this period of her life that the following story is told.  One day when driving in London her gorgeous carriage was brought to a halt by a coal-cart which was being unloaded in a narrow street.  The Duchess was furious at the delay, and protruding her head and shoulders from the carriage and leaning her arms on the door, she cried out to the offending carter:  “How dare you, sirrah, to stop a woman of quality in the street?” “Woman of quality!” sneered the man.  “Yes, fellow,” rejoined her Grace, “don’t you see my arms upon my carriage?” “Indeed I do,” he answered, “and a pair of d——­ coarse arms they are, too!”

Seldom has a trial excited such widespread excitement and interest.

“Everybody,” Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Sir Horace Mann, “is on the quest for tickets for her Grace of Kingston’s trial.  I am persuaded that her impudence will operate in some singular manner; probably she will appear in weeds, with a train to reach across Westminster Hall, with mourning maids-of-honour to support her when she swoons at the dear Duke’s