Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough | letter signed, on lands abutting Marlborough House, 12 August 1733

Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough

Letter signed ("S: Marlborough"), to "Sir"

requesting that he intercede to force his servant, Mr Hughes, to sell her leasehold property on Pall Mall adjoining Marlborough House, enumerating the kindnesses that she had shown Hughes's father when he had been employed as her gardener at Blenheim ("...But I have liv'd too long to think there is any thing to be expected from Gratitude...") and claiming that her offer is far above the market price for "this miserable place" especially as it can no longer be used as an alehouse now she has had it closed down, 3 pages, folio, Tunbridge Wells, 12 August 1733

This long letter by the elderly but pugnacious Duchess of Marlborough gives a vivid impression of her forceful personality and litigious nature. Claiming, of course, "the Reasonableness of what I am going to desire" and that "all that I want is what I can obtain by Law", she gives a detailed account of the dispute with neighbours that has led her to try to acquire property adjacent to hers in Pall Mall. The Duchess of Marlborough was, however, no mere vindictive bully; strong-willed and highly intelligent, she was at the heart of British political life for decades. Indeed even this dispute over access to Marlborough House from Pall Mall, which had at this point been going on for some eight years, was highly politicised. Her real enemy in the affair was not the son of her "covetous" and inadequate former gardener nor even the "old Frenchman" who had opened an alehouse "so near for under-Servants to be at", but the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. The two detested each other and it was Walpole who had ended the Duchess's privilege of accessing her home through St James's Park, which was why she required access from Pall Mall in the first place, and then ensured that his protégé, Thomas Ripley, acquired the properties on Pall Mall where a suitably grand entrance to Marlborough Hose would have been sited. The leases under discussion in this letter, which she did eventually obtain, allowed only for a poky and off-centre entrance to Wren's magnificent mansion.