A Want of Kindness

by Joanne Limburg

  The figure on the bed is still, and snoring a little – she sleeps: good. Somebody – Hill or Danvers – has been filling her up with cold tea, so they might all have a break from her weeping. Sarah creeps nearer, and spies a book open on the little table by the bedside, next to the candle. She sits down in the chair beside it and takes a look at what sort of stuff her mistress and her Prince have been reading: The Christian’s Defence Against the Fears of Death. All very well, but in Anne’s place she would prefer to resort to the stoics. Perhaps she will read a little Seneca to her, made into English – Anne has always liked to be read to.

  Sarah replaces the book. She notices that there are three bottles on the table and takes them up one by one, squinting at the labels with her short­sighted eyes: laudanum – as always; spa water – it would be better taken at the source, but Anne is in no condition to travel; the third one has no label, so she takes off the stopper and has a sniff, but she cannot identify the contents – well, there are always new doctors and new concoctions, and this must be another of those.

  She leans over the bed to see her mistress better, and the sight of her brings out the usual mix of humours: tenderness and kindness on the one hand, impatience and vexation on the other. She has always been sensibly touched by the Princess’s loyalty, her generosity, her sincere desire to put ceremony aside so as to be a better friend; she has always been exasperated by her stubbornness, frustrated by the dullness of her conversation, and driven to distraction by her demanding, repetitious letters. It shames her a little to own it, but whenever she hears that the gout has gone to the Princess’s hand, she cannot but feel relieved that it will stay the letters for a while.

  So, Anne is not with child after all. Looking at the body stretched out upon the bed, so broken and so monstrously swelled, Sarah cannot see that any living child could ever come out of it now. They had better settle the succession on her German cousins, and soon. But let Anne please outlive the Dutchman – let her survive him long enough for Sarah and her Lord to achieve what only they can achieve.

  The snores cease abruptly and Anne’s eyes open. They brighten when she sees that Sarah is there, but a moment later they are full of tears.

  ‘O, dear Mrs Freeman! Mrs Freeman!’

  ‘Sshh . . .’ Sarah leans forward and embraces her. ‘Ssshhh . . .’

  ‘O Mrs Freeman, how unfortunate is your poor Morley now, see how the Lord chastises me now, how harshly am I punished!’

  ‘No, Mrs Morley! Not punished – only unfortunate – your goodness has ever been—’

  ‘But – do you not see? I must think that I am punished, for otherwise there is no sense in it – my children, my sufferings – and to lose the sense of it is to lose all reason.’

  ‘I am sure your chaplains have told you, it is not for us to find out the sense – to go a-hunting for the sense is the best way to lose reason that I know.’

  ‘Then I shall try – I shall try to leave aside that question – but there still remains another.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘How shall I bear my life, Mrs Freeman? How shall I bear it?’

  Historical Note

  Anne outlived her brother-in-law, and came to the throne in 1702. She died in 1714, aged 49. As she left no children, she was succeeded by her distant – but Protestant – cousin, George of Hanover.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance I received from the Arts Council, through their Grants for the Arts scheme, and from the Society of Authors, who awarded me an Authors’ Foundation Grant to help with the research towards this book. Lucy Sheerman at Arts Council East and the staff at the Writers’ Centre Norwich provided invaluable support throughout the Grants for the Arts application process.

  I am also grateful to historians Robert O. Bucholz and Adrian Tinniswood for answering my questions, to Polly Clark and my husband Chris Hadley for being my first readers, to my agent Louise Greenberg for her advice and support, and to Karen Duffy, Maddie West and Sam Redman at Atlantic Books.

  Although this book was conceived as a work of fiction, it is based upon the life of a real historical figure, and I have chosen to include real documents, where I felt this to be the best way of telling the story I had set out to tell. All the letters in the book, except for Anne’s to Mrs Cornwallis and her first letter to her sister, are real and mostly quoted verbatim. The main sources for these are two books – Ben Bathurst’s Letters of Two Queens and Beatrice Curtis Brown’s The Letters of Queen Anne – along with unpublished material from the Blenheim Papers, held in the British Library. I am grateful to Steve Cook at the Royal Literary Fund for helping me to gain access to this material, and to the staff at the British Library for all their assistance.

  There are other primary sources I should acknowledge. The account of the Rye House plot is a précis of the story as it was printed in the London Gazette of that year; King James’s first speech to his Privy Council is quoted verbatim, and was taken from this very useful website: http://www.jacobite.ca/documents/. I have also made use of Parliamentary and State Papers held at British History Online, and various phrases have been lifted from letters and debates reproduced there. This collage technique reflects my desire to use whenever possible the language that was written and spoken at the time: to my mind, one of the best ways to understand an era is to try out the words and imagery that were available to them to make sense of themselves and their world. With this in mind, I have also drawn heavily from certain texts that would have been very familiar to Anne and her contemporaries, in particular the King James’s Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and a popular devotional text, Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man. Queen Mary and – notoriously – Sarah Churchill – both left memoirs, and I have also drawn on these.

  Secondary sources that have been most useful to me have included biographies of Queen Anne by Edward Gregg, David Green and Anne Somerset; biographies of Sarah Churchill by Frances Harris and Ophelia Field; Maureen Waller’s book Ungrateful Daughters; Hester W Chapman’s biographies of Queen Mary and the Duke of Gloucester; the double biography William and Mary by Henri and Barbara van der Zee, Mary of Modena by Carole Oman, James II, a Study in Kingship by James Miller and King Charles II by Antonia Fraser. Medicine and midwifery were – unfortunately for Anne – central themes in this story, and I found the following books essential: Patient’s Progress and In Sickness and in Health, both by Roy and Dorothy Porter, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 by Hannah Newton, Sufferers and Healers by

  Lucinda McCray Beier, Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox by Gareth Williams, The Sickly Stuarts by Frederick Holmes and a17th Century text, The Midwives’Book, by Jane Sharp. For the general political context, I have relied on The Routledge Companion to the Stuart Age, 1603–1714. If you are looking for further reading, you would do well to start with these.

  Joanne Limburg, October 2014