Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  Anne remained adamant that though so many people had shown themselves ‘base and false’, she would ever be constant. She would not hear of Sarah resigning, begging her not to ‘deprive me of one of the greatest comforts of my life’. Insisting that she did not mind living out of London, she told Sarah, ‘Mrs Morley … is so mightily at her ease here that should the [here, a word has been deleted: possibly ‘monsters’] grow good natured and indulge her in everything she could desire, I believe she would be hardly persuaded to leave her retirement – but of these great changes I think there is no great danger’.68

  At this juncture, however, with the invasion scare at its height, the outlook dramatically worsened. On 4 May 1692 the Earl of Marlborough was sent to the Tower on suspicion of treason, after an unscrupulous informant concocted evidence that he had been plotting to seize the Queen. Anne was appalled, not just because ‘it is a dismal thing to have one’s friends sent to that place’, but also because she feared that Sarah would be restrained from seeing her by some kind of legal injunction. Before long there were even reports that the Princess herself faced confinement. Anne heard ‘by pretty good hands’ that as soon as the wind turned westerly, enabling the French fleet to sail for England, she and George would be placed under guard.69

  Marlborough urged his wife to stay with Anne at Sion, but instead she came to London to work for his release. Having not yet recovered from the illness that had followed her traumatic childbirth, the Princess was left fretting that she could not be on hand to provide comfort. Haunted by the memory of her friend being ‘in so dismal a way when she went from hence’, Anne begged her to look after herself. ‘I fancy asses’ milk would do you good’, she fussed, saying that ‘next to hearing Lord Marlborough were out of his enemies’ power’, the best news she could hope for was that Sarah was bearing up under the strain.70

  As tension mounted on account of the expected invasion, the Jacobite Lord Ailesbury sent his wife to Sion in a bid to persuade Anne that she should repeat her flight of 1688 and go over to the enemy. Anne was already in bed when Lady Ailesbury arrived about ten at night, but she agreed to receive her and sent her other ladies out of the room. Suspecting that some were listening at the door, Lady Ailesbury ‘begged of her highness to speak with a low voice’, and then delivered her sensitive message. She explained that in the belief that ‘the King your father, if wind permit, might very well be in twenty-four hours in the kingdom’, her husband had arranged for ‘upwards of 5000 men’ to be on hand to escort the Princess if she made a dash to join the invading forces. Lady Ailesbury reminded Anne that she had ‘exerted herself’ in the same manner in 1688; ‘Why may not you as well get on horseback … for to restore him to what you assisted in taking away from him?’ In his memoirs Lord Ailesbury stated that though Anne ‘seemed melancholy and pensive’, she heard this in a ‘very attentive’ manner. Then, ‘fetching a sigh’ she allegedly declared, ‘Well Madam, tell your Lord that I am ready to do what he can advise me to’. It seems unthinkable, however, that Anne genuinely contemplated taking up Ailesbury’s offer. After giving birth the previous month, she had been severely weakened by a fever, and it was not until 22 May that she described herself as being ‘able to go up and down stairs’. In the circumstances a gruelling cross-country ride would have been quite out of the question.71

  On 20 May Anne took an entirely different initiative by asking the Bishop of Worcester to deliver a message to the Queen, requesting permission to pay her respects now that she was strong enough to leave her house. Mary sent back a coruscating reply. ‘’Tis none of my fault we live at this distance’, she spat, ‘and I have endeavoured to show my willingness to do otherwise. And I will do no more. Don’t give yourself any unnecessary trouble, for be assured it is not words can make us live together as we ought. You know what I required of you, and I now tell you, if you doubted it before, that I cannot change my mind but expect to be complied with … You can give me no other marks that will satisfy me’.72

  Anne was meditating her next step when she learned that Sarah’s youngest child, a boy of two, had died. Hot on the heels of this came news on 21 May that English warships had defeated the French fleet at the Battle of La Hogue two days earlier, forcing James to abandon his projected invasion. Distracted by her quarrel with the Queen, Anne could barely break off to offer her friend her sympathy. She assured Sarah that she was ‘very sensibly touched’ by her misfortune, ‘knowing very well what it is to lose a child’, but observed that in cases like theirs, when ‘both know one another’s hearts so well … to say any more on this sad subject is but impertinent’. Then, ‘for fear of renewing [Sarah’s] passion too much’, she changed the subject.73

  Doubtless hoping that Sarah would find the latest details of her feud with Mary a welcome distraction, Anne informed her of the letter she had just received. ‘I confess I think the more it is told about that I would have waited on the Queen, but that she refused seeing me, it is the best, and therefore I will not scruple saying it to anybody when it comes my way’, she confided to Sarah. ‘Sure never anybody was used so by a sister!’74

  The Princess also reported that when news arrived that Jacobite hopes had been dashed by the Battle of La Hogue, Lady Fitzharding and Mr Maul had urged her to congratulate Mary on the victory. Anne wrote that from the first she had been disinclined to do so, ‘and much less since I received this arbitrary letter’. She was pleased to take this dig at Lady Fitzharding, whose relationship with Sarah had already suffered because she had avoided her after Marlborough’s arrest. In October 1692 Anne would note happily, ‘God be thanked ’tis not now in her power to make me so uneasy as she has formerly done’.75

  The informer who had invented evidence against Marlborough was soon exposed as a liar, but for the time being the Earl remained in prison. Fortunately the Habeas Corpus act ensured that he could not be kept there much longer. Anne told Sarah that it was a comfort that he would have to be freed before the end of the current legal term, ‘and I hope when the Parliament sits, care will be taken that people may not be clapped up for nothing, or else there will be no living in quiet for anybody but insolent Dutch and sneaking mercenary Englishmen’.76 He was released on 15 June, but remained in disgrace, with the Queen personally striking his name from the register of Privy Councillors. Anne, however, was as supportive as ever, extending an invitation for him to visit her and George at Sion before he went back to the family home at St Albans.

  Sarah spent much of the summer at her country house, while Anne remained at Sion. Occasional treats were provided by outings to Sarah’s home. After a trip to St Albans in late July, Anne informed her hostess that she and Prince George ‘got home in three hour and it was then so light she repented she had not tried Mr Morley’s patience half an hour longer’.77

  At this time, Anne had various concerns about her health, complaining in April of suffering from ‘my old custom … of flushing so terribly after dinner’. This might have been an early sign of erysipelas, a streptococcal skin infection often associated with lupus, and which results in facial inflammation and blemishes. Her favourite physician Dr Lower had died in 1691, and she was now mainly in the hands of the well-respected but irascible Dr Radcliffe. As always Anne was desperate to conceive again, but her menstrual cycle had become alarmingly unpredictable. In her letters to Sarah she referred to her period as ‘Lady Charlotte’, a mysterious term that could perhaps have been a distasteful joke at the expense of Lady Charlotte Beverwort, who had become one of her ladies-in-waiting in 1689. Sarah later noted that the Princess was apt to be ‘unkind’ about her new attendant, even though the poor woman ‘deserved well from her’. At any rate, Anne’s letters in the late summer of 1692 are full of laments about the vagaries of ‘Lady Charlotte’. On 1 August, for example, she described herself as being ‘in a very splenetic way, for Lady Charlotte is not yet come to me’. While thinking it unlikely that she had conceived again after so short an interval, she was fearful that ‘if I should prove with child �
�tis too soon after my illness to hope to go on with it’. On the other hand, ‘if I am not, ’tis a very ugly thing to be so irregular’.78

  In hopes of improving matters, in August it was decided that the Princess and her husband should go to Bath again, accompanied by Sarah. However, when they arrived there it proved impossible to escape the family quarrel, for the Queen sent orders to the Mayor of Bath that he should not escort the Princess to church on Sundays. Anne loftily dismissed this as ‘a thing to be laughed at’ but she was less amused when Sarah was given an unpleasant reception by the townsfolk, who disapproved of her husband’s supposed disloyalty. When going through the streets Sarah was insulted so loudly that she did not dare show herself at the baths, putting her in a very bad mood.79

  Perhaps in order to try and defuse such hostility, Anne made a public announcement ‘that no Jacobite or Papist shall come into her presence’. Her show of loyalty was undermined by the reports of a government double agent sent down to Bath by the Earl of Portland and Lord Nottingham. This was Dr Richard Kingston, a former royal chaplain who posed so successfully as a Jacobite that he was expert at winning the confidence of people loyal to James II. After provoking them to make outrageously indiscreet comments (never verified by a second witness) he passed them on to his employers. He had been trying to infiltrate Anne’s circle for some weeks. In July he had boasted, ‘I grow more and more in the intrigues of Sion House, who are in both with the Jacobites and the republicans’.80 Now he was welcomed when he came to see Anne at Bath and, according to his own account, she unburdened herself to him while Prince George was out of the room.

  After complaining to Kingston of the Mayor being given orders ‘to slight her’, Anne asked her visitor ‘several questions concerning her father, as where he was and what he intended, and seemed well pleased’ when Kingston said he understood there was to be an invasion that winter. She then bewailed both her father’s misfortunes and ‘the iniquities offered by their majesties to her’, expressing hopes that all ‘would be … redressed at the sitting of the next Parliament’. At this point an unidentified lady interjected, ‘I hope Madam, your good father will do it himself before that time’. ‘More had been said’, Kingston explained in his report to Nottingham, ‘but the Prince his game at billiards was ended and put a period to our discourse’. Before signing off he provided the final detail ‘that the Princess, discoursing her sufferings, often made a parallel between herself and Queen Elizabeth’.81

  One must be wary about accepting Kingston’s uncorroborated account, for Anne’s behaviour seems uncharacteristically incautious. She had, for example, been much more reserved when Lord Ailesbury had approached her after the French naval defeat at La Hogue. Ailesbury observed that ‘the face of affairs was much altered’ since his wife had visited her at Sion. To this the Princess replied ‘“Yes, greatly,” … with a melancholy face’, but when Ailesbury suggested that her father would be greatly comforted by ‘a tender line from her’, she muttered, ‘It is not a proper time for you and I to talk of that matter any farther’.82

  On Anne’s return from Bath in late September, her relations with her sister remained as distant as ever. The Princess temporarily went to live with her son at Campden House, having discontinued her lease of Sion. One evening she was being carried back towards Kensington in her sedan chair after spending the day in central London, when the Queen overtook her in her coach. ‘No notice taken of either side’, it was reported.83

  Whether or not Kingston had been telling the truth, the Princess was not completely cut off from Saint-Germain. Her letter had taken a long time to reach her father. The Life of James II states that it was delivered to him in May when he was in Normandy, although puzzlingly, James’s Secretary of State, Lord Melfort, marked on his copy that it was received in early July, according to the French calendar. On 18 July James wrote a reply which he stipulated was to be passed on to his daughter by the Earl of Marlborough ‘or his lady’. ‘I am confident that she is truly penitent since she tells me so’, he began, ‘and as such I … do give her that pardon she so heartily desires from me, providing she will endeavour to deserve it by all her future actions; she knows how easy a thing it is for me to forgive thoroughly and the affection I have ever had for her, and may believe that my satisfaction is greater to see her return to her duty than ever my resentment was for her departing from it’.84

  Whereas previously James had made it plain that Marlborough could expect no mercy if he regained his throne, he now professed himself ready to forgive him. Persuading himself that the communication from his daughter provided ‘a more than ordinary mark of that lord’s sincerity’, in September he sent an agent to England to tell Marlborough (or ‘my nephew John’, as he was codenamed) that ‘I am satisfied of your good intentions to me by what you have done, and if you continue to do so you may assure your self of pardon for what’s passed’. He also asked Marlborough to act as his intermediary with Anne and George in all future transactions. ‘I do trust you as my factor with your late partners of your trade’, James told him, ‘and I do desire them to trust you in what you shall say to them from me, and I will take my measures of them from what you shall inform me of them and treat them accordingly’.85

  James seems to have envisaged keeping in fairly regular touch with his daughter, but as far as we know, Anne did not renew contact for some years after this. From the Princess’s point of view, her letter had served its purpose, but now that James’s restoration seemed less likely, writing again was not worth the risk.

  In the autumn of 1692 Anne moved to a fine new London residence, having rented Berkeley House in Piccadilly from the Earl of Berkeley. Anne had agreed that Lord Berkeley and his mother could have her lodgings at the Cockpit in exchange for his house, but they kept posing additional demands relating to their accommodation there. The Princess noted irritably ‘Considering how impertinent and peevishly both her son and she have behaved themselves in all this business, I have no reason to comply with them in all they desire’, but at length all was resolved. Grumbling somewhat unreasonably to Sarah about being ‘straitened for room’ the Princess took possession of her palatial new home.86

  The fact that visiting the Princess entailed automatic exclusion from the King and Queen’s presence ensured that Anne’s court was almost deserted. The Jacobite Lord Ailesbury and a few ladies with similar sympathies came to Berkeley House ‘because … all of that interest rejoiced much at the quarrel’; otherwise only the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was currently out of office, ventured there to play whist. His presence could not disguise the fact that the Princess was ‘as much alone as can be imagined’, living ‘under so great a neglect’ that, were it not for her ‘inflexible stiffness of humour, it would be very uneasy to her’. Anne professed to have no regrets. In February 1693 she wrote defiantly to Sarah ‘You cannot expect any news from Berkeley House, but as dull and despicable as some people may think it, I am so far from … repenting … that, were the year to run over again, I would tread the same steps’.87

  Still smarting over his arrest the previous year, the Earl of Marlborough allied himself with the political opposition. At the end of 1692 he had voted for the Place Bill, which sought to prevent any Member of Parliament accepting government office. It was a measure which one observer believed ‘sapped the foundations of monarchy and tended to a republic’, but Marlborough prevailed upon Prince George to give it his support as well. After it was narrowly defeated in the Lords, a foreign diplomat was astonished when George was amongst those who registered a formal protest at its rejection.88

  In January 1693 Prince George’s brother, Christian V of Denmark, wrote urging him to make up with the King and Queen, but Anne would not hear of it. She believed that King Christian had probably intervened at William’s request, ‘by which ’tis very plain Mr Caliban has some inclinations towards a reconciliation, but if ever I make the least step, may I be as great a slave as he would make me if it were in his power. Mr Morley is of that same min
d and I trust in heaven we shall never be better friends [with William] than we are now, unless we chance to meet there’. George undertook to write ‘to desire his brother would not engage himself in this business’, while the Princess reiterated to Sarah that ‘her faithful Morley … will never part with you till she is fast locked in her coffin’.89

  The little Duke of Gloucester provided the only remaining link between Anne and her sister and brother-in-law. Both Mary and the King (who, surprisingly, got on well with children) were very fond of the little boy. Anne would have liked to have restricted his visits to them, but was told, probably by Marlborough and Godolphin, that this would be unwise. Once, after arranging for her son to see his aunt, the Princess told Sarah ‘it goes extremely against the grain, yet since so much better judgements than mine think it necessary, he shall go’. William and Mary were at pains to publicise the fact that Gloucester was not comprehended in the family quarrel. As Sarah waspishly put it, the Queen ‘made a great show of kindness to him and gave him rattles and several playthings which were constantly put down in the Gazette’. When the child was ill the Queen would always send a Bedchamber Woman to his home to gain an accurate report on his health, although this was done in a manner contrived to be deliberately insulting to Anne. ‘Without taking more notice of [the Princess] than if she were a rocker’, the royal emissary would address all questions to Gloucester’s nurse.90