Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  Losing her mother at the age of only eight and quickly separated from her father because of his conversion to Catholicism, Anne became shy, reserved and lonely. She had found consolation in a series of close friendships with women. Much the most important and long lasting was that with Sarah Churchill, and testimony to it are the countless letters they wrote each other under the levelling pseudonyms of Mrs Freeman (Sarah) and Mrs Morley (Anne). Back in 1692, when the Churchills had been disgraced, William had demanded that Anne dismiss Sarah and John from her household. But Anne won the lasting hatred of her brother-in-law the king when she refused. Anne had pledged herself to Sarah as follows: ‘never believe your Mrs Morley will ever submit, she can wait for a Sunshine Day, and if she does not live to see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again’. Now, with William’s death, the Sunshine Day had arrived for England and, especially, for the Churchills.

  Within a week of her accession, Anne had delivered her person and her kingdom to John and Sarah. Sarah was made Groom of the Stole and head of the royal bedchamber. The office was known, after its official symbol, as ‘the key to the prince’, and it controlled access to the queen’s private apartments, her jewels and robes, and her personal cash. At the same time, John was appointed captain-general, master-general of the ordnance and ambassador extraordinary to the Dutch Republic, which in turn appointed him its own captain-general with the elegant Mauritshuis in The Hague as his residence.

  His occupation of the Mauritshuis, which had belonged to the junior branch of the House of Orange, emphasized that John had now inherited William III’s role as joint commander of the Anglo-Dutch alliance. Indeed, in military terms the Dutch were still the senior partner, as they had once been in trade and public finance. Their army was professionally drilled and equipped with the most modern weapons, such as flintlock muskets with fixed bayonets, while the Dutch logistics and commissariat were the most efficient in Europe.

  But the English, as in other areas, copied them, and, thanks to their superior resources, soon outdid them. In all this Marlborough was the beneficiary of William III’s pioneering efforts. But he achieved what William had only dreamed of doing. In 1702/03 he freed the Dutch Republic from the French stranglehold. That won him the dukedom of Marlborough. In 1704 he shattered the French threat to the emperor, the other key member of the Grand Alliance, with the victory of Blenheim on the Danube. The French commander was captured, along with 13,000 of his men, and 20,000 were killed. It was a crushing defeat for France, and England’s greatest victory since Henry V’s at Agincourt.

  Marlborough scribbled the news to Anne on the back of a tavern bill and was rewarded with the royal estate of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Here a vast palace grander by far than any of Anne’s own was built for him and his wife at public expense. Called Blenheim, it is a temple to Marlborough’s series of victories in the 1700s. Its every feature memorializes his triumphs: Blenheim itself; the victory at Ramillies in 1706 which drove France out of modern Belgium; and Oudenarde, the victory in 1708 which opened up the door to France itself.

  But, despite Marlborough’s triumphs, there remained profound tensions in Britain. For the issue of the succession had reopened. Back in 1689, the full implications of dethroning James II, whose general Marlborough had once been, had been masked because the House of Stuart would, it seemed, continue in the persons of his daughters and their issue.

  Indeed, that very July Anne, despite her unfortunate tendency to miscarriages, had had a son who lived. He was christened William, created duke of Gloucester and became the apple of his uncle William III’s eye. The succession would continue, and it would be through a male, a Protestant, a descendant of the direct Stuart line and an Englishman. The people could be reassured that the rule of a foreigner was only a temporary sacrifice. But in 1700 the boy died. Who should now replace him in the succession after Anne?

  There was always the possibility of reverting to the male Stuart line, still temptingly near in their exile in France. The dethroned James II died in 1701 but was succeeded by the ‘warming-pan baby’, James Francis, whose birth in 1688 had started it all. Known to history as the Old Pretender, he was recognized by Louis XIV as King James VIII of Scotland and James III of England immediately on his father’s death.

  The Old Pretender was brave, moderately intelligent and charming – one to one at least. But he had his father’s stiffness of public manner, his arrogance and his unyielding rigidity in his commitment to Catholicism. In short, the Old Pretender was the kind of man to arouse loyalty but, almost invariably, to disappoint it.

  A few English and more Scots remained devoted to the cause of James III and were known, from the Latin form of his name, as ‘Jacobites’. But, overwhelmingly, the English elite remained opposed to a Catholic king. Instead, Parliament – Tories as well as Whigs – passed the Act of Settlement in 1701. This reaffirmed the principle of the revolution that a Roman Catholic should never be king. The problem was that they had to look very far to find a Protestant in the line of descent from the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. Parliament passed over fifty other popish claimants who stood legitimately in the line of succession, including the Old Pretender. At last, it gave the succession, after Anne, to the impeccably Protestant Sophia, granddaughter of James I and electress dowager of the insignificant north German principality of Hanover. It was a link with the royal line, but a very distant one.

  Two months after the passing of the Act of Settlement an English embassy arrived in Hanover to honour the future dynasty. They presented the widowed Electress Sophia with a copy of the Act of Settlement and her son, Georg Ludwig, with the Garter. (Georg was ruling prince of Hanover, because there, unlike in England, women were prevented from reigning in their own right.) Five years later, Sophia’s grandson, the electoral prince, Georg August, was also made a Knight of the Garter and created duke of Cambridge as well.

  But though Anne was happy to shower honours on her successors, she refused absolutely to allow any member of the electoral family to set foot in England. Successors were a magnet for opposition, as the queen knew, for she had been a difficult heir herself. Anne, wisely, was taking no risks. In England the choice of the House of Hanover was widely welcomed. But in Scotland, which shared a monarch with England but not a parliament, it precipitated an immediate rupture in relations with its southern neighbour. It was not automatic that the House of Hanover would succeed to the throne of Scotland. The spectre of renewed hostility between the two kingdoms raised its ugly head once again.

  Would Marlborough have to break off the greater ambition of taking on Europe, in order, like that earlier captain-general Cromwell, to subdue the rebellious northern kingdom?

  III

  In March 1703 the Scottish Parliament was opened with the customary ‘riding’. The mounted procession set out from Holyrood Palace, rode up the High Street, past St Giles Cathedral, and turned into the Scottish Parliament House. First came the nobles in their robes; then the barons representing the shires; and finally the town burgesses. The members were accompanied by their armed retainers and rode through a lane of citizens, also armed.

  The carrying of arms was traditional. But, on this occasion, the atmosphere was feverish with barely suppressed real violence: ‘our swords were in our hands or at least our hands were at our swords’, one leading member remembered. And the object of this impassioned feeling was England.

  Before the revolution, the Scottish Parliament was a poor thing, managed for the absentee monarch by a committee called the Lords of the Articles. But the revolution liberated Parliament in Scotland as well as in England. Freed from royal management, it could take an independent line against the crown – and a crown that was seen, above all, as the prisoner of its English ministers. Indeed, there was now talk of actual independence, or at least of selling freedom dearly.

  The bargaining counter was the Hanoverian succession. The English Act of Settlement, which gave the crown to the House of Hanover, had been passed without consulting the Sco
ts. Now the Scots would play the English at their own game and settle their succession independently too. The Scottish Parliament of 1703 did so in the Act of Security. This provided that, after Anne’s death, the next monarch of Scotland should be a Protestant and of the royal line, but need not be the same person as the successor to the English crown. The English Parliament had actually named who the successor would be. This was to ensure that none of the fifty or so Catholics who stood in the line converted to Protestantism in order to fulfil the obligations of the Act of Succession and claim their right. As the Scots framed their Act of Security, there was nothing to stop the Old Pretender, the so-called James VIII of Scotland, from converting to Protestantism to claim the throne, and then switching back to Catholicism when circumstances suited. The British Isles would once again have two monarchs facing each other with mutual enmity.

  Anne refused to give her consent to the Act of Security for almost a year, until overwhelming pressure forced her to yield. A few days later, news of Marlborough’s great victory at Blenheim reached London. Freed from the immediate threat of a French-sponsored Jacobite invasion of Scotland, the English Parliament could now respond in kind to the Scottish.

  The result was the Aliens Act, passed in spring 1705. All Scots, except those resident in England, were to be treated as aliens, and the major Scottish export trades to England banned unless, by Christmas 1705, significant progress had been made to agreeing a union of the two kingdoms.

  The Aliens Act aroused predictable outrage in Scotland. But the deadline did concentrate minds. Two sets of commissioners, thirty or so on each side, were appointed to thrash out an agreement. The commissioners began work in April 1706 in government offices in what had been Henry VIII’s cockpit at Whitehall. To soothe Scottish sensibilities, the two sets of commissioners met in separate rooms, communicated by written minutes only and strictly avoided socializing with each other.

  On 22 April, the English room sent the following proposal to the Scottish:

  That the two kingdoms of England and Scotland be for ever United into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain. That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same parliament, and that the succession to the monarchy of Great Britain [be vested in the House of Hanover].

  On the 25th, the Scottish commissioners came back with a counterproposal. They would accept union and the Hanoverian succession but on condition of freedom of trade, not only within the United Kingdom but also within ‘the Plantations’. The English replied promptly that they regarded such mutual freedom of trade as a ‘necessary consequence of an entire Union’.

  It had taken only three days to work out the bones of an agreement. For both sides had got what they wanted. The English wanted Scotland unshakeably onside during their newly embarked-upon geopolitical struggle with France; while the Scots, having tried but failed catastrophically to establish a colonial empire of their own, wanted free access to the English ‘Plantations’ as a way out of their own desperate national poverty.

  The ‘Plantations’, or colonies, largely in North America, were the great English success story of the previous hundred years, as, in spite of civil strife at home, the English had built an empire abroad. By Anne’s reign, indeed, America seemed a separate realm and appears symbolically as such on the base of Anne’s statue outside St Paul’s, alongside figures representing her three other kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. Henceforward, this American realm was to be as much Scottish as English. Or rather, like the empire itself, it was to be British.

  And it was to St Paul’s that Anne, wearing the combined orders of the English Garter and the Scottish Thistle and accompanied by 400 coaches, came to celebrate Union on 1 May 1707, the day that it came into effect. It was, she said, even among so many victories, the day that would prove the true happiness of her reign.

  The Union was a nice mixture of the conservative and the radical. Most that was distinctively Scottish (or indeed English) was preserved, and along with ‘the most ancient and most noble order of the Thistle’, Scotland kept its own law and law courts (complete, at the outset, with the torture that was an intrinsic part of its criminal law), its universities and educational system and, above all, the intolerant, monopolistic Presbyterian Kirk that had been restored in the religious upheaval that was Scotland’s peculiar contribution to the Glorious Revolution.

  But equally, the institutions of the United Kingdom were new and were framed with the innovative, rational methods of Anglo-Dutch political economy. Most pressing, however, was the issue of Scottish representation in the Union Parliament at Westminster. It could be determined either by population or (since the principal business of Parliament was to vote taxation) by taxable wealth. Using the former basis would have given Scotland eighty-five MPs; using the latter (since Scotland’s wealth was only a fortieth of England’s) only thirteen. Eventually the commissioners compromised at forty-five, and honour was more or less satisfied.

  Nevertheless, there were no celebrations for Union in Scotland. But, as the intellectual and economic transformation of eighteenth-century Scotland would show, the Scots probably got the better deal.

  On 19 August 1708, Anne processed once more to the spiritual home of her reign, St Paul’s, to give thanks for Marlborough’s victory of Oudenarde. Accompanying her in her coach, as etiquette demanded, was Marlborough’s duchess, Sarah. There had been much resentment at the duke and duchess of Marlborough’s influence over the queen. Sarah was a committed Whig, contemptuous of princes and princesses, proudly atheist and opposed to the Anglican monopoly. She believed that it was her job to keep Anne from the Tories, whom the queen instinctively supported. Many detested Sarah as the malign power behind the throne.

  All this came to a head on the way to St Paul’s. En route, the two women had a terrible quarrel because Anne, who hated cumbrous clothing, had refused to wear the rich, heavy jewels that Sarah, as Groom of the Stole, had put out for her. As they stepped out of the coach, Sarah was heard to hiss ‘Be quiet’ to the queen, lest (she claimed) others overheard their quarrel. It seemed to confirm Sarah’s unnatural power over the monarch. But more importantly, Anne never forgave the insult to majesty and the long and fraught friendship was over.

  The quarrel was in fact only the straw that broke the camel’s back. For Sarah had fought her own war at home against the Tory leaders whom she accused, not altogether wrongly as it turned out, of being secret Jacobites. Aware of James III’s insidious charms, Sarah campaigned, with all her husband’s relentlessness but none of his panache, for the Tories to be removed from government and for her Whig friends to retain power. But Anne, desperate to preserve her freedom of action between the competing political parties, refused. The result was that Sarah’s company became increasingly disagreeable to the queen, who resented the political lectures and nagging. Lonely, unwell and in need of friendship, she transferred her affections to another courtier, Abigail Masham, who, unlike the domineering and high-handed Sarah, was demure and undemanding. Abigail was also close to the Tories, and her favour with the queen threatened to break the Whigs’ monopoly on power. Sarah, outraged in turn, then accused the queen, in barely concealed terms, of lesbianism.

  Sarah’s loss of favour dangerously exposed Marlborough on the home front. For in any case, Anne, and much of the nation, were getting sick of the war, the deaths and the spiralling taxation. The turning point was Marlborough’s last great set-piece battle of Malplaquet. It was an English victory of sorts. But the casualties were enormous and the French, faced with the invasion of their own soil, dug their heels in to fight a patriotic war. Marlborough’s reaction was to demand the captain-generalship for life, like Oliver Cromwell. Anne’s was to exclaim, ‘when will this bloodshed ever cease?’ and to decide that Marlborough must go.

  Marlborough was dismissed in December 1711 and his Whig allies were replaced by a Tory ministry determined to make a unilateral peace with France. Secret negotiations were opened and agreement quickly reached. Louis
XIV’s grandson Philip would retain Spain and her American empire, but renounce any future right to France. England would be granted huge exclusive commercial concessions in the Spanish Empire, including a thirty-year monopoly on the slave trade. The Tories also had a secret plot. They had provoked outrage in Europe by abandoning their allies. One very important loser in this matter was Georg Ludwig, the elector of Hanover and heir to Sophia, who stood to inherit the English crown. Once on the throne, Georg would be unlikely to forget or forgive this gross betrayal. The outcome of the Act of Succession would be to place the Tories in danger. The leaders would therefore dump Hanover and offer the crown to the Old Pretender, provided he renounced Catholicism.

  The separate peace was formally agreed at Utrecht in 1713 and celebrated with yet another grand thanksgiving service in St Paul’s. And there was much to celebrate, since the peace, despite its consciously moderate terms, marked England’s eclipse of the two powers that, only half a century before, had overshadowed her: England was now more powerful militarily than France and more commercially successful than the Netherlands.

  And she had found her own unique way to modernity. At the root of this success was a new relationship between monarch and Parliament, in which the sovereign reigned, but for the most part the ministers ruled. Forged in the revolution of 1688, developed under William and consolidated under Anne, this new constitutional monarchy had proved more than a match for the absolutist political model represented by France. Over the coming centuries it would do so time and again.