To such distresses of sickness and anxiety, there was now, doubtless, added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the _Daily Post_, showing that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the _Miscellanies_, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's indisposition last Winter, and a train of melancholy Accidents, scarce to be parallel'd; but he takes this opportunity to assure his Subscribers that he will most certainly deliver them within the time mentioned in his last receipts, viz. by the 25th December next." [1]
We may take it, then, that the first six months of 1742 were attended by no easy circumstances; and, accordingly, during these months Fielding's hard-worked pen produced no less than three very different attempts to win subsistence from those humoursome jades the nine Muses. To take these efforts in order of date, first comes, in March, his sole invocation of the historic Muse, the _Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough_, published almost before Joseph Andrews was clear of the printers, and sold at the modest price of one shilling. We learn from the title page that the _Vindication_ was called forth by a "late _scurrilous_ Pamphlet," containing "_base_ and _malicious_ Invectives" against Her Grace. Together with Fielding's natural love for fighting, a family tie may have given him a further incitement to draw his pen on behalf of the aged Duchess. For his first cousin, Mary Gould, the only child of his uncle James Gould, M.P. for Dorchester, had married General Charles Churchill, brother to the great Duke. Whether this cousinship by marriage led to any personal acquaintance between 'old Sarah' and Harry Fielding we do not know; and the muniment room at Blenheim affords no trace of any correspondence between the Duchess and her champion. But certainly the _Vindication_ lacks nothing of personal warmth. Fielding tells us that he has never contemplated the character of that 'Glorious Woman' but with admiration; and he defends her against the attacks of her opponents through forty strenuous pages, in which the curious may still hear the echoes of the controversies that raged round the Duke and his Duchess, their mistress Queen Anne, and other actors of the Revolution. The _Vindication_ appeared in March; and a second edition was called for during the year. As far as Millar's payment goes Fielding, as appears from the assignment in _Joseph Andrews_, received only £5; and it is to be feared that the Duchess (who is said to have paid the historian Hooke £5000 for his assistance in the production of her own celebrated pamphlet) placed but little substantial acknowledgment in Fielding's lean purse. Her champion at any rate had, within three years, modified the views expressed in this _Vindication_, concerning the munificence of Her Grace's private generosity; for in his journal the _True Patriot_, there occurs the following obituary notice, "A Man supposed to be a Pensioner of the late Duchess of Marlborough.... He is supposed to have been Poor."