Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  When it appeared that she would not be able to give Sarah the position, Anne grew distraught. She sent Sarah a letter that was almost incoherent with emotion, imploring her not to blame her for the setback. ‘Oh dear Lady Churchill’, she wrote frantically, ‘let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it because I gave you my word so often that I would never give my consent to any, no more I have not, but have said all that was possible for one to say’. Anne explained that she had delayed telling Sarah how gloomy the outlook appeared because

  I was yet in hopes that I might prevail with the Duke, and I will try once more, be he never so angry; but oh, do not let this take away your kindness from me, for I assure you ’tis the greatest trouble in the world to me and I am sure you have not a faithfuller friend on earth nor that loves you better than I do; my eyes are full, I cannot say a word more.

  She became even more agitated when she heard that Sarah was about to go to Windsor, leaving her behind, and protested ‘this cruel disappointment is too much to be borne without the loss of your company’. Anne’s next letter, however, brought better news, for, as she had promised, she had raised the matter again with her father, and this time won him over. Jubilantly Anne reported, ‘The Duke came just as you were gone and made no difficulties but has promised me that I shall have you, which I assure you is a great joy to me’.145

  As Anne’s Second Lady of the Bedchamber Sarah received a modest salary of £200 a year, but the real value of the position lay in Anne’s assurance to her that she would be ‘ready at any time to do you all the service that lies in my power’. Sarah admitted that she cultivated the relationship with great care, and ‘now began to employ all her wit, all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert and entertain and serve the Princess’. She succeeded triumphantly, for Anne’s liking for her ‘quickly became a passion, and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid’. Being with Sarah afforded her such intense delight that Anne begrudged letting her out of her sight. One account of their relationship based on Sarah’s own reminiscences described how ‘They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of a tedious, lifeless state … This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. [The Princess] used to say She desired to possess her wholly and could hardly bear that [Sarah] should ever escape … into any other company’.146

  In retrospect Sarah claimed that the hours she spent closeted with Anne were ‘a confinement indeed for her’ and even stated that Anne’s ‘extremely tedious’ company ensured that she would ‘rather have been in a dungeon’ than with her mistress. Since Anne was not naturally talkative, Sarah had to work hard to keep the conversation flowing, but Sarah also complained that anything the Princess did have to say was characterised by ‘an insipid heaviness’. Sarah was nevertheless careful to hide from the Princess that she found her a bore. Anne was led to believe that even if her passion for Sarah was not reciprocated in full, neither was it completely unrequited. One of Anne’s earliest letters to her friend refers to ‘poor me (who you say you love)’. In 1706, four years after Anne’s accession to the throne, Sarah wrote to her, reminding her of the ‘passion and tenderness’ she had ‘once had’ for Anne.147

  Anne once protested ‘’tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart’; on another occasion she declared ‘If I writ whole volumes I could never express how well I love you’. She insisted that ‘Nothing can ever alter me’, and that her ‘kindness’ for Sarah could ‘never end but with my life’. Years later, once it had emerged that Anne had overstated the immutability of her love, Sarah noted bitterly, ‘Such vows … strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards’.148

  The Princess submitted to frequent separations to enable Sarah to spend time at her own house at St Albans and to be with her husband when he was waiting on the Duke of York. ‘This absence … though be it never so short, it will appear a great while to me’, Anne declared when Sarah was away. She consoled herself by keeping in touch by letter, saying it constituted her ‘greatest pleasure’. Sarah later complained that Anne’s letters were never interesting, even if ‘enlivened with a few passionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough’. At the time, however, Sarah was more appreciative, delighting Anne by being ‘so kind [as] to be satisfied with my dull letters’. Anne herself conceded ‘I am the worst in the world at invention’, but since Sarah encouraged her to write to her at length the Princess was able to convince herself that her letters were welcome.149

  Anne admitted that there was something compulsive about the way she wrote so frequently to her friend, sometimes more than once a day. ‘You will think me mad, I believe, for troubling you so often’, she told Sarah apologetically, but despite acknowledging that her behaviour was slightly odd, she expected prompt replies to every letter, notwithstanding the burden it placed on her friend. The Princess explained, ‘If I could tell how to hinder myself from writing to you every day I would, that you need not be at the trouble of writing so often to me, because you say it does you hurt, but really I cannot … for when I am from you I cannot be at ease without enquiring after you’. She would declare petulantly that unless she received a letter the next morning ‘I shall conclude with reason that I am quite forgot and ne’er trouble you any more with my dull letters’.150

  Anne asked Sarah to show her letters to nobody else, but Sarah insisted that hers to Anne were destroyed. As a result we do not know the tenor of her replies. Sarah later encouraged the assumption that they were more restrained in tone than Anne’s effusions, but this is open to question. Towards the end of her life Anne told a third party that Sarah ‘wrote to me as [I] used to do to her’.151

  The Princess accepted that Sarah’s strongest feelings were reserved for her husband, and she let it be understood that the same applied to her and George. When telling Sarah that she had ‘no greater satisfaction’ than being in her company she qualified this by saying that this was ‘next [to] being with the Prince’. However her love for George hardly had the same needy intensity that characterised her relationship with Sarah. Although she missed him when they were apart, she bore his absence with an equanimity that was lacking during separations from Sarah.152

  If Anne did not contest that Churchill took priority over her in Sarah’s eyes, she nevertheless claimed ‘the little corner of your heart that my Lord Churchill has left empty’. Believing herself entitled to ‘possession of the second place’, she was reluctant to share it with other women, but to her distress found herself contending with ‘a great many rivals’ who vied with her for Sarah’s attention. Anne’s jealousy and resentment of these ladies who were ‘more entertaining than I can ever pretend to be’ made her ‘sometimes fear losing what I so much value’, and would cause tension in years to come.153

  Sarah would later assert that Anne very early in their relationship sought to eliminate the awkwardness arising from the disparity in rank between them by proposing that they adopt pen names when corresponding with one another. In fact the arrangement whereby they referred to each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman only came into being about two or three years after the 1688 Revolution. Before that Anne invariably addressed Sarah as ‘my dear Lady Churchill’, and Sarah’s style towards her remained markedly deferential. By September 1684 Anne was uneasy enough about this to entreat Sarah ‘not to call me your Highness at every word, but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another’, but Sarah was very cautious about taking up her offer. The following July the Princess again protested at Sarah’s ‘calling me at every three words your Highness’. Yet even when Anne insisted, ‘Ceremony is a thing you know I hate with anybody and especially with you’, Sarah would not abandon the formal tone. She affected to believe that Anne had been joking when she had urged her to be less mindful of etiquette, and a few months later Anne felt impelled to tell her friend, ‘I hope you are not so unjust to me a
s to believe … that I did it to laugh at you, for I am sure … I never will be so base’.154

  In view of Sarah’s punctilious observance of protocol when writing to the Princess, it is surely right to be sceptical of her claim that from the very beginning of their relationship, she was always forthright with Anne. In her memoirs she boasted that having ‘laid it down for a maxim that flattery was falsehood to my trust and ingratitude to my greatest friend’, she decided that she could best serve Anne ‘by speaking the truth’. Thinking ‘it was part of flattery not to tell her everything that was in any sort amiss in her’, Sarah took pains to be ‘not only honest, but open and frank, perhaps to a fault’.155

  Sarah claimed that her lack of sycophancy caused no problems as Anne promised ‘never to be offended at it, but to love me the better for my frankness’. Early on in the relationship the Princess assured Sarah ‘you can never give me any greater proof of your friendship than in telling me your mind freely in all things’. Not long afterwards Anne noted appreciatively ‘I do not believe there is so much truth in anybody as there is in you’ but, in fact, it does not seem that Sarah had yet tested Anne’s devotion by being over-critical. The only indication of anything amiss between them comes in one of Anne’s first letters to Sarah, when Anne upbraids Sarah for having a groundless ‘unkind thought’ about her. She expresses incredulity that ‘my dear Lady Churchill’ could ‘be so cruel as to believe what she told me’ and begs distractedly, ‘Oh come to me tomorrow … that I may clear myself’.156

  According to Sarah, a major cause of tension between them had arisen just at the time she entered Anne’s employment. Sarah felt passionately that many of those arrested in the summer of 1683 for having conspired against the King had been falsely charged with treason, and she was overcome ‘with an horror and an aversion to all such arbitrary proceedings’. However it transpired that ‘these notions … [were] very disagreeable and contrary to those of her mistress’. Anne accepted that those accused were guilty, and not only approved of the death sentences meted out, but also endorsed the subsequent crackdown on ‘fanatics’ or dissenters, who were held to have been associated with the plot. It is not clear whether Lady Churchill dared remonstrate with her about this. In one account it is stated that Sarah could not keep silent on the subject as ‘it was impossible for one of her open temper not to declare, with some warmth, her real sentiments of things’. Far from reproving her lady-in-waiting for being so outspoken, Anne ‘seemed … not to be displeased with this open sincerity’. Another version of Sarah’s memoirs suggests, however, that despite being ‘sorry not to find that compassion in the breast of another person’, Sarah had been much more circumspect. She recalled, ‘All I could prevail on my self to do was to say nothing, but I could not commend and flatter and rail at the unfortunate sufferers’.157 Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that it was not until much later in their relationship that Sarah became more confrontational in her dealings with Anne.

  The Princess of Denmark was undeniably besotted with Lady Churchill. This raises the question of whether Anne was also sexually attracted to her, particularly since Sarah herself later insinuated that Anne had lesbian tendencies and had a physical relationship with her dresser, Abigail Masham. However, it never seems to have occurred to Sarah that it could be inferred from this that Anne’s passion for her had likewise been erotically charged. She clearly differentiated between her relationship with Anne in which, in her own eyes, there had been not a hint of deviancy, and Anne’s baser connection with Abigail.

  The fact that Anne and Sarah were both happily married could be seen to militate against the possibility that there was a sexual component to their relationship. Their regular pregnancies leave no room for doubt that both were sexually active with their husbands. The two of them were acutely conscious that it was part of their wifely duties to produce as many offspring as possible, and they unselfconsciously exchanged information about the likelihood that they were expecting babies.

  There is much debate both as to the existence of lesbianism in seventeenth-century England and regarding the extent of awareness that women could sexually desire other women. According to the memoirs of the French Comte de Gramont, at the court of Charles II, ‘they were simple enough … never to have heard tell of such Grecian refinements in the art of love’. However, as the century progressed, imported translations of French pornography appear to have widened consciousness of lesbian eroticism. References in literature suggest that awareness of the phenomenon was growing, and with that came the notion that it was socially subversive and something to be feared. In 1667 the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle published The Convent of Love in which the heroine is horrified to find herself falling in love with a foreign princess, and fears being punished by the goddess Nature for transgressing her laws. Only when the princess is revealed as a man in disguise is the situation resolved.158

  It may be that women who were erotically drawn towards their own sex were able to indulge their desires without fear of detection, because men were blind to the existence of lesbian passion. A poem written for another girl at court by Anne Finch, a maid of honour to the Duchess of York, has been cited as an instance of this. In these verses the author wishes she could be transformed into a mouse (a symbol of female lust) so as to nestle unobtrusively in her friend’s bosom and enjoy her ‘soft caresses’ without been suspected by ‘jealous [male] lover’.159

  Whether or not the men of the period deluded themselves in imagining that women could never be their sexual rivals, it was by no means unusual for women to enjoy what has been termed ‘romantic friendships’ with one another. Because it was assumed that these relationships were platonic, this was generally condoned. In the course of what Lord Halifax called these ‘violent intimacies’ and ‘great dearnesses’ it was regarded as perfectly acceptable for women to employ endearments when addressing one another that nowadays would be considered only appropriate between lovers. For example, when Lady Shaftesbury wrote to her friend Lady Rachel Russell in 1683 she signed her letter ‘unimaginably, passionately, affectionately yours’. It is worth noting, too, that Anne was not the only female correspondent of Sarah who addressed her in impassioned terms. Lady Sunderland wrote to her on one occasion ‘I long to embrace you … I love you beyond expression’, while another letter assures Sarah that she cannot imagine ‘how full my heart is of love and tenderness for thee … I am for ever and ever my dearest with a heart flowing, tender and sincere’.160

  It must be stressed that during the seventeenth century, impassioned, asexual love was looked on as admirable in both sexes, and friendship was idealised. The views expressed by the sixteenth-century sage Michel de Montaigne in his essay ‘On Friendship’ were widely influential. While deploring homosexuality, he praised the kind of ‘highest friendship’ that ‘takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway’. Anne’s grandfather the Earl of Clarendon declared that friendship was ‘more a sacrament than marriage’, and John Evelyn took a similar view. He pointed out that marriage was an unequal partnership subject to law and contract, whereas a freely undertaken friendship was ‘implanted by God alone’ and hence innately virtuous. The poetess Katherine Philips, whose verses were first published three years after her death in 1664, has been called ‘the high priestess of the cult of friendship’. Her poems expressed passionate love for other women, but stressed that the bond between them was sublimely spiritual and unsullied by any carnal element. In recent years there has been much debate as to whether her poems actually had an erotic subtext, but Philips’s contemporaries never doubted her purity.161

  It might seem farfetched to suggest that in forming such a close attachment to Sarah, Anne was influenced by these ideas. She was not a wide reader, and nor was she closely attuned to the intellectual currents of the time. Nevertheless these theories were swirling about the court, and were so much in vogue that Anne could hardly fail to be aware of them. Certainly she had either read, or had some acquaintan
ce with Montaigne’s essay on friendship, and regularly quoted his maxim that passing on information to a friend ‘was no breach of promise of secrecy … because it was no more than telling it to oneself’. As well as being personally drawn to Sarah, she was interested in the abstract concept of friendship. She was aware of its obligations, and eager to be bound by what a contemporary called its ‘reciprocal and eternal’ laws. She was determined that her rank should not prevent her from achieving the personal fulfilment that friendship could provide, and believed that her bond with Sarah would add an emotional richness to her life which it was unrealistic to expect from marriage. Sarah herself stressed that Anne deliberately set out to cross the boundaries that customarily isolated royalty from lesser beings. As she recalled, ‘Kings and princes for the most part imagine they have a dignity peculiar to their birth and station which ought to raise them above all connection of friendship with an inferior … The Princess had a different taste. A friend was what she most coveted, and for the sake of friendship, a relation which she did not disdain to have with me, she was fond even of that equality which she thought belonged to it’.162

  Having married a man to whom she was ideally suited and found a friend in Sarah, all appeared well in Anne’s life. By late 1683 she was known to be pregnant, completing the rosy picture. The pressure on her to produce an heir – preferably male – was immense. In 1680 the physician of her sister Mary (who remained childless) complained of being constantly pestered on the orders of Charles II, who wanted to know whether his niece was pregnant, ‘since the future of three crowns depended on it’. In early May 1684 the King and Queen came up to London, intending to stay until Anne was delivered, but on 12 May the Princess had a stillborn child. While this was obviously upsetting, no one could know that this would be the first of a heartbreaking sequence of miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality that Anne was fated to endure. At the time her family’s disappointment was tempered by the fact that the baby appeared to have been dead in the womb for some days, which could have endangered her own life. In Holland Mary declared that she regarded her sister’s escape as ‘almost a miracle’.163