Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  This kind of audacious attack clearly indicated that something in Sarah had snapped. She had “grown into a shrew,” P. F. William Ryan wrote colorfully in his early-twentieth-century study of Queen Anne’s court, “a virago, afraid of nothing, in love with nothing, a mad woman when crossed, so disastrously had the natural tyranny of her disposition been pampered by the compliance of those who had learned to dread her tongue.” No wonder the ailing queen was beginning to prefer the quiet company of her servant Abigail Hill.

  Anne was actually growing frightened of her once beloved Mrs. Freeman, though she wasn’t quite prepared to part with her. “I agree that all Lady Marlborough’s unkindness proceeds from [the] real concern she has for my good,” the queen wrote to her minister Sidney Godolphin, “but I can’t hope as you do, that she will ever be easy with me again. I quite despair of it now, which is no small mortification to me, however I will ever be the same, and ready on all occasions to do her all the service that lies in my poor power.”

  As it turned out, Sarah’s abuse of the queen had barely even begun. She raged at the influence she believed Abigail had on Anne, and went so far as to assert that they were lesbians. “I remember you said … of all things in this world, you valued most your reputation,” Sarah wrote spitefully, “which I confess surprised me very much, that Your Majesty should so soon mention that word after having discovered so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can be no great reputation in a thing so strange and unaccountable, to say no more of it, nor can I think the having no inclination for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours.”

  Several weeks later, on the way to a thanksgiving service for the Duke of Marlborough’s victory over the French at Oudenaarde, Sarah berated the queen for not wearing the heavy jewels she had laid out for her. Anne was responding as their coach arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral, when the duchess snarled, “Be quiet!” This was truly no way to treat a queen, but Sarah was unrepentant. In fact, she added to the grievous insult by sending Anne a nasty note chastising her for what had transpired: “Your Majesty chose a very wrong day to mortify me, when you were just going to return thanks for a victory obtained by Lord Marlborough.”

  The already precarious relationship between Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman was further fractured after the death of Anne’s beloved husband in 1708. Perhaps there was no time in the queen’s life when she needed a true friend more. Alas, all she found was Sarah.

  The duchess swooped into Kensington Palace and found Anne at Prince George’s deathbed, weeping and kissing him tenderly. She decided the queen should leave the scene, but Anne silently demurred, pointing to her watch to indicate that she needed more time. After indulging this, reluctantly, Sarah gripped Anne’s arm firmly to lead her away. Then the dreaded Abigail crossed their path. Sarah was outraged by the acknowledgment the queen accorded her loyal servant, writing that “at the sight of that charming lady, as her [Anne’s] arm was upon mine, which she had leaned upon, I found she had strength to bend down towards [Abigail] like a sail, and in passing by, went some steps more than was necessary, to be nearer her.”

  Such was the depth of Sarah’s sympathy that she actually mocked the queen’s sorrow by noting how she ate two hearty meals in the midst of it. She also decided to remove Prince George’s portrait from Anne’s bedroom because, she lamely explained, “I thought she loved him, and if she had been like other people ’tis terrible to see a picture while the affliction is just upon one.” The queen thought otherwise, and was reduced to pleading with Sarah for the portrait’s return: “I cannot end this without begging you once more for God sake to let the dear picture you have of mine, be put into my bedchamber for I cannot be without it any longer.”

  Having satisfied her duty to serve the newly widowed queen—her way—Sarah swept out of court and away from Anne, though she did continue to harass her. Now she wanted to expand the Marlboroughs’ apartments at St. James’s Palace, which Anne refused to allow. Sarah, “being resolved that I would vex her a little longer,” insisted that the queen’s denial be repeated publicly, certain it would be thought strange, she wrote, “that after the service Lord Marlborough had done her, she would not give him a miserable hole to make him a clean way to his lodgings.”

  The Duke of Marlborough made the mistake of entering Sarah’s quarrel with the queen and taking his wife’s side. He wrote to Anne, threatening to resign his services at the conclusion of the war with France, and “hoping that in time you will be sensible of the long and faithful services of Lady Marlborough and that God will bless you with the opening of your eyes.”

  This was too much for Anne, who, in her response to Marlborough, poured out all the hurt and anger that had accumulated within her. “You seem to be dissatisfied with my behaviour to the Duchess of Marlborough,” she wrote.

  I do not love complaining, but it is impossible to help saying on this occasion, I believe nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been by her since my coming to the Crown. I desire nothing but that she would leave off teasing and tormenting me and behave herself with the decency she ought, both to her friend and Queen, and this I hope you will make her do, and is what I am sure no unreasonable body can wonder I should desire of you, whatever her behaviour is to me, mine to her shall be always as becomes me.

  I shall end this letter as you did yours to me, wishing both your eyes and the Duchess of Marlborough’s may be opened and that you may ever be happy.

  Sarah launched a fierce tirade against the queen in a series of long missives. She not only threatened to publish Anne’s gushing letters but once again essentially accused her of having a homosexual affair with Abigail. The friendship was now finally and irretrievably dead. Still, Sarah sought to vindicate herself and asked for a personal interview with the queen. Anne would not agree, however, and commanded the duchess to put her thoughts in writing. Of course Sarah didn’t listen.

  Several days later she again wrote to Anne and insisted she speak to the queen: “If this afternoon be not convenient, I will come every day, and wait till you please to allow me to speak with you. And one thing more I assure Your Majesty which is, that what I have to say will have no consequence either in obliging you to answer or to see me oftener hereafter than will be easy to you.”

  The two women did meet for the last time that afternoon at Kensington Palace. Queen Anne was as cold and hardened as her statue in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. “There is nothing you can have to say but you may write it,” she kept repeating after every point Sarah tried to make. Then, in response to the duchess’s direct questions, Anne was equally noncommunicative: “I shall make no answer to anything you say.”

  Furious at the queen’s intransigence, and desperate about the power and influence she saw slipping away, Sarah was reduced to threats and blackmail. “Such things are in my power,” she declared, “that if known by a man, that would apprehend and was a right politician, might lose a Crown.”

  After being dismissed from the queen’s service, Sarah vindictively trashed her apartments at St. James’s Palace, ripping out everything—right down to the doorknobs. In retaliation, Anne ordered a temporary halt to construction of the Marlboroughs’ magnificent new home, Blenheim Palace, stating angrily “that she would not build the Duke a house when the Duchess was pulling hers to pieces.”

  The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough left England in disgrace in 1713, not to return until the day after Queen Anne died less than two years later. By then it had been ages since Mrs. Morley had been able to write confidently, “I really believe one kind word from dear Mrs. Freeman would save me if I was gasping.”

  * The famed general, ancestor of Winston Churchill, was also the lover of Charles II’s mistress Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, and was believed to have fathered the child King Charles refused to acknowledge as his own (see Chapter 13).

  † Charles II offered this assessment of his niece Anne’s husband: “I have tried him drunk, and I
have tried him sober; and there is nothing in him.”

  ‡ Anne endured eighteen pregnancies, but only one of her children, William, Duke of Gloucester, survived infancy. His death at age eleven opened the way for the Hanoverian succession.

  House of Hanover

  GEORGE I

  (reigned 1714–1727)

  GEORGE II

  (r. 1727–1760)

  GEORGE III

  (r. 1760–1820)

  GEORGE IV

  (r. 1820–1830)

  WILLIAM IV

  (r. 1830–1837)

  VICTORIA

  (r. 1837–1901)

  17

  George I (1714–1727): His Heart Was in Hanover

  In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead.

  —LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

  Following the death of Queen Anne in 1714, her Protestant cousin George, sovereign of the German duchy of Hanover, succeeded her as King George I. Although the late queen had closer relatives, including her exiled father, James II, and his son, James Edward Stuart, the Act of Settlement of 1701 barred these Catholic Stuarts from inheriting the throne. Instead, the law decreed that the crown would pass to the Protestant descendants of James I’s daughter, Elizabeth (see Stuart family tree, this page). Thus, Elizabeth’s grandson came to Britain from Germany and established the royal House of Hanover. George I would rule until his death in 1727.

  George I was accompanied by a rather eccentric retinue when he came from Hanover to claim the British throne in 1714. Among them were the king’s stalk-thin mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg, whom the English immediately dubbed the Maypole, and his enormous half-sister, Sophia von Kielmansegg (also rumored to have been his mistress), who came to be known as the Elephant and Castle.* Then there were George’s Turkish servants, Mehomet and Mustafa, and his dwarf, Christian Ulrich Jorry. The only person missing from this odd mélange was the new king’s wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. She was stuck back in Germany—imprisoned in a castle for cheating on the husband she hated.

  The marriage had not been a good one—arranged, like so many royal unions, for reasons of state. Sophia Dorothea was horrified when she learned she was to be wed to her boorish cousin from the neighboring duchy of Hanover. And with good reason. Her intended was, according to his own mother, “the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived, and who has round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in there.”

  George wasn’t overly enthused about the arrangement, either. But Sophia Dorothea’s fat dowry had its compensations. “He does not care for the match itself,” his mother reported, “but one hundred thousand thalers a year have tempted him as they would have anybody else.”

  The woefully mismatched couple were wed on November 22, 1682. “There were priests and prayers and benedictions,” wrote historian William Henry Wilkins, “all the pomp and heraldry and the pageantry of Courts; yet when all was stripped away this marriage was nothing but a shameless bargain, and a young girl’s life [she was sixteen] was sold to a man steeped in selfishness and profligacy and who did not even make a pretext of loving her.”

  Almost as soon as he said “I do,” George abandoned his bride and took up with his emaciated mistress, Melusine, by whom he had three daughters. Sophia Dorothea was left alone and isolated in the scheming court at Hanover. Her harridan of a mother-in-law hated her, while her father-in-law’s grasping mistress, Countess Clara von Platen, actively conspired against her. “I believe all my troubles will come through her,” Sophia Dorothea wrote of Clara. And she was right.

  Living in this lonely, oppressive atmosphere made Sophia Dorothea more than receptive to the attentions of a dashing Swedish officer named Philip Christoph von Königsmarck. The relationship began innocently enough, with Königsmarck’s flattering flirtations, but quickly evolved into a passionate affair that proved disastrous.

  Both lovers unwittingly prophesied their doom in the letters they exchanged. “I am ready to cast at your feet my life, my honour, my future, my fortune,” Königsmarck wrote in one slightly overwrought missive. In another letter, Sophia Dorothea declared that life without him would be intolerable, “and imprisonment within four walls pleasanter than to go on living in the world.” As it turned out, his life would be sacrificed and she would find herself locked away.

  The lovers were dangerously indiscreet, and their plans to run away together revealed them to be hopelessly naïve as well. This was a matter of state, the powers of which would be activated against them should they ever attempt to flee.

  It has been said that Clara von Platen, furious over Königsmarck’s rejection of her advances, informed George and his father, the elector of Hanover (who was also her lover), about the affair. She also allegedly arranged for the ambush of Königsmarck outside Sophia Dorothea’s apartments on the night of July 1, 1694. Though this is just one of several theories about what happened that night, what remains certain is that Königsmarck was never seen again. One widely circulated story held that George ordered the body of his wife’s lover hacked to pieces and buried beneath the floorboards of his palace. His treatment of Sophia Dorothea was arguably even crueler. She was shut up in a castle prison, deprived of her children, for the rest of her life.

  Such was the situation when Queen Anne, Britain’s final Stuart monarch, breathed her last and George, as her nearest Protestant relative, was proclaimed king. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he became the object of ridicule. There was just something vaguely absurd about the dull, remote German who couldn’t even speak the language of his new subjects. “The King’s character may be comprised in very few words,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead.”

  King George was horribly out of his element in his new kingdom, with its vicious party politics and the gross irreverence shown the sovereign. The statesman Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, was one wickedly precise commentator on the king’s peccadillos. “The standard of His Majesty’s taste,” he wrote, “as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour … strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others … burst.”

  George I ruled Britain for just under thirteen years, an effective but uninspiring monarch who never warmed to his people nor they to him. “His heart was in Hanover,” William Makepeace Thackeray wrote of the king. “He was more than fifty-four years of age when he came amongst us: we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him.”

  Then they forgot him.

  * The essayist Horace Walpole, son of King George’s minister Horace, left a particularly vivid description of this oversized matron, who apparently terrified him as a child: “Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by a stay … no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a seraglio!”

  18

  George II (1727–1760): A Boorish, Oversexed Bully

  I lost my eldest son, but was glad of it.

  —KING GEORGE II

  Like his father, George I, whom he succeeded in 1727, George II was born in Hanover, and was thus Britain’s last foreign-born monarch. His reign was marked by the Seven Years’ War—from which Britain emerged as Europe’s dominant colonial power—and even more savage domestic battles with his son and heir, Prince Frederick.

  George I introduced to Britain not only a new royal dynasty but a virulent tradition among the Hanoverian monarchs of hatred toward their heirs. The first George so loathed his son, the future George II, that after one particularly nasty spat he had the prince arrested, snatched away his children, then booted him out of St. James’s Palace. But tha
t behavior was positively tender compared with the way George II treated his own son Frederick, of whom he once lovingly said, “Our firstborn is the greatest ass, the greatest liar, the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world and we heartily wish he was out of it.”*

  It is not exactly clear what Frederick might have done to earn his father’s unceasing animosity, other than exist. Sure, he was a little on the lecherous side, but so was George II, and George I before him. As a matter of fact, all three generations availed themselves at various times of the same mistress, Madame d’Elitz, who was rather ancient by the time she deflowered Frederick when he was sixteen. (When someone once observed that there was nothing new under the sun when it came to Madame d’Elitz’s promiscuity, the English politician and wit George Selwyn is said to have retorted, “Or under the grandson.”)

  Frederick was abandoned in Hanover as a little boy of seven when his parents and siblings left the German duchy to join George I as he claimed the British crown in 1714. There the child languished, essentially orphaned, for the next fourteen years. His parents hoped it would be longer. They actively schemed to keep Frederick out of England, not even inviting him to his father’s coronation after the death of George I in 1727. “Poor Fred,” as he came to be called, had no idea that his mom and dad were conspiring against him. “My only consolation in this sad affliction [grief over the death of his grandfather King George] is the knowledge of my dear parents’ goodness,” he wrote to his sister. “I flatter myself that I shall always conduct myself in a manner deserving of their esteem and friendship for me.”