materially influence their principal resolutions. You
will neglect nothing to acquire a share of her confidence, from a
conviction that nothing can be more conducive to my interests. There is,
however, a manner of giving additional value to the marks of confidence
you bestow on her in private, by avoiding in public all appearances
which might seem too pointed, by which means you will avoid falling into
the inconvenience of being suspected by those who are not friendly to
the Duchess, at the same time that a kind of mysteriousness in public on
the subject of your confidence, will give rise to a firm belief of your
having formed a friendship mutually sincere."

The case of Lady Darlington was different. It was assured generally that
she, too, was a mistress of the King, a view that Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu accepted, and one which was endorsed by the historians and
biographers for more than a century. The first English writer to
discover the truth was Carlyle, who in his _Life of Frederick the Great_
said: "Miss Kielmansegg, Countess of Darlington, was, and is, believed
by the gossiping English to have been a second simultaneous Mistress of
His Majesty's, but seems after all to have been his Half-Sister and
nothing more." She was, in fact, a daughter of the Countess of Platen
(_nee_ Clara Elizabeth von Meysenbach), not, indeed, by that lady's
husband, but by Ernest Augustus, Duke (afterwards Elector) of Hanover,
the father of George I. Only Lady Cowper seems to have known this, and
to have accepted it as a fact. Yet there was no secrecy concerning the
paternity of the Countess, and it was, of course, well-known in the
German Courts. Further, it was overlooked that in the patent of nobility
in 1721 there is a reference to the royal blood of the recipient of the
title, and actually the patent, in addition to the Great Seal, had a
miniature of the King and the arms of the houses of Platen, Kielmansegg,
and Great Britain (Brunswick-Lueneburg) with the bar-sinister.[2]

[Footnote 2: Refutation of the scandal is to be found in a work
published in Hanover in 1902: "_Briefe des Hertzogs Ernst August zu
Braun schweig-Lueneburg an Johann Franz Diedrich von Wendt aus dem Jahren
1705 bis 1726_," edited by Erich Graf Kielmansegg.]

All this at this time must have been very distressing to Lady Darlington,
for she was very careful of her reputation, as the following amusing
incident, given in Lady Cowper's Diary (February 4, 1716) indi