Describing Anne’s feelings for her in the third person, Sarah wrote: Every moment of absence she [Anne] counted a sort of tedious lifeless state. To see her [Sarah] was a constant joy, and to part with her for ever so short a time a constant uneasiness . . . She used to say she desired to possess her wholly and could hardly bear that she should ever escape this confinement into any other company.
However, the two women wanted decidedly different things from their relationship. On Anne’s side, it was the yearning for the consummation of a physical passion for the sensuous, honey-haired Sarah. Sarah felt no more for the corpulent Anne than the affection one heterosexual female feels for a very dear friend. But she knew very well which side of the bread had the butter. Referring to herself, Sarah wrote: She had too great a sense of her favor not to submit to all such inconveniences to oblige one she saw loved her to excess . . . yet their tempers were not more different than their principles and notions on many occasions appeared to be.
Unlike Anne, Sarah was blazingly straight. She was seventeen years old in the winter of 1677 when she secretly wed John Churchill, a dashing soldier who used to return from his military campaigns and make love to her with his boots on. No wedding date was recorded and only the Duchess of York was informed of it, so that Sarah could retain her position as a maid of honor, a sinecure reserved for virgins.
Churchill had a rakish past. A man who had to make his own way in the world, at one point he’d been the lover of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine.
Both John and Sarah proved to be good friends to Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark. In 1688, when King James threatened to arrest Anne and George if they joined William of Orange against him, Sarah spirited Anne out of London, conveying her to safety in Nottingham, where William had many supporters, while John delivered George, without incident, to William’s army camp.
Sarah’s prominence in Anne’s household was a bone of contention between the two sisters. Perhaps Mary, who had to leave Frances Apsley behind, was jealous that Anne was able to enjoy her favorite’s daily companionship. When Mary became queen, she was determined to prevent Anne from bringing Sarah to court. A despondent Anne dramatically threatened to “shut myself up and never see the world more, but live where I may be forgotten by human kind.”
Anne told Sarah, “If I had any inclination to part with dear Mrs. Freeman, it would make me keep her in spite of their teeth.” And then—in a classic display of sibling rivalry—Anne took Mary’s precious Frances Apsley, now Lady Bathurst, into her own household.
But where Sarah was concerned, there was more at stake than sisterly disaffection. John Churchill’s military successes had earned him an elevation to the peerage. For his valiant leadership in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, King William made him Earl of Marlborough, but only a few years later, Marlborough fell from grace. He was known to have corresponded with the exiled James II and was suspected of turning Jacobite. As such, both John and Sarah Churchill posed a threat to William and Mary’s throne. And for Anne to retain Sarah in her household, particularly as her most intimate confidante, was potentially treasonous.
Mary also believed that Anne was sharing some of the allowance she received from Parliament with Sarah. And it infuriated her that Sarah, in consort with a few of Anne’s other well-placed friends, including the Duke of Somerset, had brought the matter of Anne’s allowance (a parliamentary annuity of £50,000—nearly $13.5 million today) straight to the House of Commons, instead of taking it up with the monarchs.
In 1692, things came to a head. Marlborough was dismissed from court when his signature was discovered on an incriminating document supporting James II. The earl was stripped of his offices and was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Mary confronted her much larger little sister and demanded that she now release the traitor’s wife from her service. Anne refused, defiantly appearing at court with Sarah beside her. Mary retained her dignity in the moment, but fired off a letter to Anne excoriating her for daring to bring her tainted favorite to court as “the strangest thing that ever was done.” Anne replied that her sister’s rebuke would have zero effect on her conduct.
The two Stuart sisters never reconciled, and Sarah was the wedge that had created the irrevocable rift. Even after Anne had experienced her umpteenth stillbirth and Mary came to visit her, the queen used the occasion to discuss the Sarah Problem. Anne, weak and exhausted from her maternal ordeal, never forgave Mary for making her feel worse, and they never saw each other again.
After Mary’s death, William restored Anne, as well as Marlborough, to his favor, having learned that the treasonous document bearing the earl’s signature was a forgery intended to discredit him. Another European war loomed on the horizon and the king had need of the duke’s martial skills.
When Anne became queen, Sarah was the acknowledged power behind the throne, while Marlborough’s military prowess on the Continent made him a national hero. Anne offered Churchill a dukedom, but Sarah refused at first, citing the tremendous financial burden of maintaining such an honor. So the queen ameliorated matters by granting her favorite a lifetime annuity of £5,000 ($1.4 million today)—payable by Parliament—and an additional £200 (roughly $56,000) from the Royal Privy Purse, as well as a number of royal offices and titles, including Keeper of the Privy Purse. The Churchills accepted the dukedom. And Anne bestowed on John the honor of the Garter and made him Captain-General of the army.
As much as the new duchess begrudgingly acknowledged that Anne, being the sovereign, was her better, Sarah, as bossy, outspoken, and competitive as she was witty, lively, and charming, was clearly the dominant partner in their relationship.
The ambitious Sarah assumed the role of Anne’s manager and agent, officially controlling the queen’s finances and acting as gatekeeper to all who sought her audience. She was quick to give her frank opinion of any matter, even if it differed from Anne’s. Few royal mistresses ever had such influence on government policy and affairs, or got away with openly contradicting the sovereign, often with thinly veiled contempt for the royal point of view.
The Duchess of Marlborough did have something that the queen never would. Sarah had given birth to two sons and four daughters, which made her feel vastly superior to Anne, and she parlayed her influence with the queen to secure positions for each of her girls.
Sarah also scored an appointment as a Lady of the Bedchamber for one of her poor relations, Abigail Hill, a young lady described by a contemporary as being inclined to “give . . . a loose to her passions.”
In short order, the horse-faced Abigail replaced Sarah in Anne’s affections. In 1707, when Abigail married Samuel Masham, a gentleman of the queen’s household, Sarah learned about it through backstairs gossip, while Anne had not only been an honored guest at the wedding but had given Abigail a magnanimous dowry of £2,000 (well over $500,000 today) from the Privy Purse.
Sarah, who lamented that Abigail “could make a queen stand on her head if she chose,” wrote in her memoirs: My cousin was an absolute favorite. Mrs. Masham came often to the Queen when the Prince was asleep, and was generally two hours in private with her.
It’s possible that Abigail supplanted Sarah because she was willing to give the queen what Sarah would not—sexual gratification. Or, the intimacy could have been purely political. Sarah was a staunch Whig while Abigail was a firm Tory, the party that was consistently promonarchy. And by 1704, when Abigail was established in the queen’s household, Sarah was absenting herself frequently from court to give pro-Whig political lectures across the realm. Sarah was an astute politician with a keen intellect in an era when a woman with such “masculine” skills was an anomaly.
Additionally, Anne craved kindness and affection from her favorites in return for their preferment, and Sarah was most unwilling to play the game. She didn’t fawn or flatter and her frankness with Anne often reached the point of insensitivity.
If the shrewd and gorgeous Sarah was the queen’s Anne Bo
leyn, Abigail was her Jane Seymour. She was quietly compassionate, a homely nurturer who was content to give every impression that her ego took a backseat to her loving lady’s. At the same time, she was busily promoting the interests of her Tory cousin, the MP Robert Harley.
Both Abigail and Sarah pressed their advantage with Anne to appoint ministers of their party preference, thereby exercising a tremendous influence on government policy from behind the scenes. But there was one appointment that Abigail could not convince the queen to make. Anne refused to elevate her new favorite to the peerage, because she was loath to lose Abigail as a Lady of the Bedchamber, a position that required the retainer to sleep in the same room with the sovereign. So Anne told Mrs. Masham that “it would give great offence to have a peeress lie on the floor.”
In 1708, rumors of a royal affair abounded and dirty little ditties circulated about Anne and Abigail. The final verse of one such tune says it all: Her secretary she was not
Because she could not write
But had the conduct and the care
Of some dark deeds at night.
Almost gleefully, Sarah strode into Anne’s bedchamber brandishing the broadsheet. She cautioned the queen that the gossip had reached Europe and was being spread across the Continent. Her memoirs recounted the conversation. . . . I remember you said at the same time of all things in this world you valued most your reputation, 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 . . . nor can I think that having no inclination for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as what I wish may be yours.
But Anne stubbornly refused to end the affair with Abigail. And Sarah was trying her royal patience. When Anne’s husband, Prince George, died in 1708 and Anne was overcome with grief, Sarah—the only one at court who refused to don mourning clothes because she thought the queen shed crocodile tears—unadvisedly referred to the late king in Anne’s presence as “that dreary corpse.”
That same year, under the influence of the Marlboroughs, there were cries from the House of Commons that Abigail was an undue influence on the queen, with calls for her dismissal. Anne herself met with individual MPs and “with tears in her eyes” begged them to oppose the formal motion to cashier her concubine. Instead, Anne dismissed the duchess from her service.
After Sarah left the court, some discrepancies were discovered in her accounts as Keeper of the Privy Purse. This information was used to blackmail Sarah when she threatened to publish a book about life at Anne’s court, which would include excerpts from the queen’s private correspondence. Sarah’s embezzlement was swept under the rug, and in exchange she agreed to withhold publication of her sensational memoirs. (The volumes were finally published in 1742, twenty-eight years after Anne’s death.)
Anne appointed Abigail Keeper of the Privy Purse in 1711 and her husband was created Baron Masham in 1713. After Anne’s death in 1714, the baroness retired into private life, dying on December 6, 1734, at the age of sixty-four.
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, became one of the richest women in Europe, returning to favor with the Hanoverians after Anne’s death. She left an architectural legacy, Blenheim Palace (which she never liked, calling it “that great heap of stones”), and lived to the ripe old age of eighty-four, dying on October 18, 1744. Her distinguished descendants include Winston Churchill and Diana, the late Princess of Wales.
THE HANOVERS 1714–1901
GEORGE I
1660-1727 RULED 1714-1727
“GERMAN GEORGE,” THE GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSON OF James I and founder of the Hanoverian dynasty, was the first English monarch to reign pursuant to the Act of Settlement, which required the crown to pass to the nearest Protestant relation of the deceased sovereign. Before being called to do so, he was Elector of Hanover, a tiny German duchy known for its mercenary soldiers and an annual carnival internationally renowned for its licentiousness.
The fifty-four-year-old George arrived in his new country on September 29, 1714. He knew only a few words and fractured phrases of English on his arrival. His refusal to learn much more of the language during his reign reinforced the British prejudice against him as a stranger in their midst, remote and uninterested in their concerns. State business was conducted in French instead, the international language of diplomacy.
Homesick for Hanover, George spent as little time in England as possible. But his sojourns home were more than idyllic holidays; as he was still Elector of Hanover, he could not effectively govern the duchy long-distance. And it was clear to everyone which realm he preferred. George mightily disliked and distrusted his British subjects. The feeling was mutual; the English mocked him mercilessly for his coarseness, as well as for his exceptionally odd taste in mistresses.
There was no queen of England during George I’s reign. In 1682, back in Hanover, George had been forced into an exceedingly loveless marriage with his high-strung, gorgeous, sixteen-year-old first cousin, Princess Sophia Dorothea of Celle. George divorced his wife in 1694, after her long-standing love affair with a studly Swedish mercenary became a public embarrassment.
George’s political legacy includes the Septennial Act of 1718, which called for parliamentary elections every seven years, creating stability in the House of Commons for the first time, and leading to the MPs’ increased influence in government affairs. But his reign was most characterized by financial scandals and an acrimonious feud with his son, the Prince of Wales, the future George II, because the father had chosen his mistresses over his son’s mother, made her life hell, and then banished her to honorable captivity till the end of her days. In other words, the usual stuff.
The king consistently refused to give his heir a role of his own in government affairs, so the sociable prince formed his own parties in both houses of Parliament, and he and his wife hosted a rival court in their home, Leicester House. George I then deprived his son of every royal perquisite, including the participation in any matters of state. He took his children from him, and at one point plotted to have the Prince of Wales killed, or at the very least deported.
In 1720, the economy nearly collapsed when a speculative get-rich-quick scheme, known as the South Sea Bubble—the Enron scandal of its day—caused a run on the Bank of England. George’s gangly mistress, by then the Duchess of Kendal, was one of the principals who successfully bribed and swindled her way to a fortune, attaching her royal lover’s name to the South Sea proposal as well.
On the morning of June 10, 1727, a day after eating a surfeit of fruit, George suffered an apoplectic fit and was dead within twenty-four hours. His son succeeded him, becoming George II.
G EORGE I and Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, Countess of Darlington and Countess of Leinster 1678-1725 and (simultaneously) Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal and Duchess of Munster 1667-1743
The words of Horace Walpole (the eighteenth-century diarist and son of the king’s First Minister, Sir Robert Walpole) paint a colorful description of George I’s two hideous mistresses. His depiction of the zaftig Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, Countess of Darlington, is particularly grotesque: Lady Darlington . . . whom I remember by being terrified at her enormous figure, was as corpulent and ample as the duchess was long and emaciated. 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 parts of her body, and no part restrained by stays—no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of such a seraglio . . . and indeed nothing could be grosser than the ribaldry that was vomited out in lampoons, libels, and every channel of abuse, against the sovereign and the new court and chanted even in their hearing about in the public streets.
Surely the Disney animators had this pair in mind when they
drew the ugly stepsisters in Cinderella.
Of course, their royal lover was no Adonis either. George’s family were the Guelphs of Hanover, and all Guelphs shared a number of rather unfortunate physical traits. They tended to be chinless wonders with bulging blue eyes, and a complexion that turned beet red at the slightest discontent—a frequent occurrence, since the Guelphs also tended to be hot-tempered.
George was indoctrinated into the delights of debauchery, probably as a teenager, by the Countess Platen, a painted doxy who also happened to be his father’s maîtresse en titre. The countess procured a nice girl for George, as fat and blowsy and greedy as herself: Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, the wife of the Hanoverian court’s Oberstallmeister, or Master of the Horse.
Her name was both a hint and an inside joke, because George’s sister was also named Sophia Charlotte. Although the countess had numerous lovers, it was widely assumed that the woman whom Platen had placed in the prince’s bed was her own daughter by the boy’s father, Duke Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, making the happy young couple half siblings. The Countess Platen was a piece of work of historical proportions. Although George was recreationally sleeping with her daughter, the countess was also instrumental in brokering the prince’s marriage to his first cousin, Sophia Dorothea.
The luscious, chestnut-haired, doe-eyed Sophia Dorothea mistakenly assumed that George would ditch his mistress once they were married; George, however, continued to prefer his flabby, grasping trollop. Sophia Dorothea couldn’t stand her husband anyway, but no one likes to be publicly humiliated. Still, in October 1683, the newlyweds managed to beget a son and heir, George Augustus.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 23