inconstancy proved he was not governed; but so awkwardly did he manage that artifice, that it but demonstrated more clearly the influence of the Queen.  With such a disposition, secrecy would by no means have answered his Majesty’s views; yet the publicity of the intrigue was especially owing to Mr. Howard, who, far from ceding his wife quietly, went one night into the quadrangle of St. James’s, and vociferously demanded her to be restored to him before the guards and other audience.  Being thrust out, he sent a letter to her by the Archbishop of Canterbury, reclaiming her, and the Archbishop by his instructions consigned the summons to the Queen, who had the malicious pleasure of delivering the letter to her rival. (107)

Such intemperate proceedings by no means invited the new mistress to leave the asylum of St. James’s.  She was safe while under the royal roof:  even after the rupture between the King and Prince (for the affair commenced in the reign of the first George), and though the Prince, on quitting St. James’s, resided in a private house, it was too serious an enterprise to attempt to take his wife by force out of the palace of the Prince of Wales.  The case was altered, when, on the arrival of summer, their Royal Highnesses were to remove to Richmond.  Being only woman of the bedchamber, etiquette did not allow Mrs. Howard the entr`ee of the coach with the Princess.  She apprehended that Mr. Howard might seize her on the road.  To baffle such an attempt, her friends, John, Duke of Argyle, and his brother, the Earl of Islay, called for her in the coach of one of them by eight o’clock in the morning of the day, at noon of which the Prince and Princess were to remove, and lodged her safely in their house at Richmond.  During the summer a negotiation was commenced with the obstreperous husband, and he sold his own noisy honour and the possession of his wife for a pension of twelve hundred a-year. (108)

These now little-known anecdotes of Mr. Howard’s behaviour I received between twenty and thirty years afterwards, from the mouth of Lady Suffolk herself.  She had left the court about the year 1735, and passed her summers at her villa of Marble Hill, at Twickenham, living very retired both there and in London.  I purchased Strawberry Hill in 1747; and being much acquainted with the houses of Dorset, Vere, and others of Lady Suffolk’s intimates, was become known to her; though she and my father had been at the head of two such hostile factions at court.  Becoming neighbours, and both, after her second husband’s death, living single and alone, our acquaintance turned to intimacy.  She was extremely deaf, (109) and consequently had more satisfaction in narrating than in listening; her memory both of remote and of the most recent facts was correct beyond belief.  I, like you, was indulgent to, and fond of old anecdotes.  Each of us knew different Parts of many court stories, and each was eager to learn what either could relate more; and thus, by comparing notes, we sometimes could make out discoveries of a third circumstance, (110) before unknown to both.  Those evenings, and I had many of them in autumnal nights, were extremely agreeable; and if this chain of minutiae proves so to you, you owe perhaps to those conversations the fidelity of my memory, which those repetitions recalled and stamped so lastingly.