Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  On her accession, however, no problems were apparent, least of all to Anne herself. As Sarah later recalled, at the outset ‘we were still friends at the old rate’, for despite her change in status the Queen continued to write to her ‘in the same strain of tenderness’. Anne’s letters to ‘dear Mrs Freeman that I love more than words or actions can express’ bear this out. ‘Be assured your poor unfortunate faithful Morley will live and die with all the tenderness imaginable yours’ she wrote a couple of months after her accession, promising a little later, ‘Your poor unfortunate faithful Morley … sincerely dotes on dear Mrs Freeman’. ‘Believe me’, she urged Sarah shortly afterwards, ‘you’ll never find in all the search of love a heart like mine’.58

  On coming to the throne the Queen awarded Sarah three key positions in her household, namely Groom of the Stole, Mistress of the Robes, and Keeper of the Privy Purse. These offices brought Sarah a combined salary of £5,600 a year, and the Queen also made her Ranger of Windsor Park. A beautiful lodge in Windsor Great Park came with this position, from which the Queen took pleasure in evicting the late King’s favourite, the Earl of Portland. In the past, when Anne and Sarah had passed the property, Sarah had commented how desirable it was, and the Queen was delighted to install her there. She ensured that if she predeceased her friend, Sarah would not have to surrender the Lodge to another incumbent, explaining that ‘anything that is of so much satisfaction as this poor place seems to be to you I would give my dearest Mrs Freeman for all her days’. In the end, the warrant assigning the Lodge to Sarah went further, granting it for the span of three lives. Sarah would later acknowledge that the Lodge was ‘of all places that I ever was in the most agreeable to me’, and that the Queen’s conferring it on her ‘was in a kind way’. Nevertheless, she saw no reason to be particularly grateful, as being Ranger afforded ‘no manner of profit’. Some years later she churlishly complained to Anne, ‘that lodge … has been an expense to me’.59

  Although none of her household posts was in any way a sinecure, Sarah contrived to be absent from court a good deal. She was sometimes criticised on this account and later became somewhat defensive about it, insisting ‘I had always the Queen’s leave … and the offices were executed to her Majesty’s satisfaction in all points’. She elaborated by saying that Anne ‘left me to my own liberty in this particular. After she came to the crown, if I had changed my way it would have looked as if I had been besieging or mistrusting her. I love liberty in everything, so I could not resolve to abridge myself of it.’

  Periodically the Queen expressed regret that Sarah stayed away so much, telling her in January 1703 that she hoped ‘my dear Mrs Freeman will let me have the satisfaction of seeing her, for indeed I think it a long time since I was so blest’. Nevertheless Anne was careful not to be too pressing, insisting that however eager she was to meet, ‘I do not desire you to come one minute sooner to town than it is easier to you, but will wait with patience for the happy hour’.60

  As Groom of the Stole, Sarah was in charge of the household department known as the Bedchamber, and was the most senior of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Although Anne retained all the ladies who had served her as Princess, on her accession she had to choose more female attendants. Sarah later recalled, ‘I prepared a list of the ladies of the best quality the nearest to the Queen … and most suited to her temper to be Ladies of the Bedchamber. The number was fixed to ten and about all this there was much discourse between the Queen and myself’. In Anne’s time as Princess, it had been ‘very hard to get anybody that was either useful or agreeable because it was a good deal of trouble and attendance with so small a salary’. Now, all was different, with ‘a thousand pretenders’ even for a dresser’s place. Lady Hyde, the wife of Anne’s first cousin, was so desperate to become a Bedchamber Lady that she could not mention it to Sarah without flushing. ‘I never saw any mortal have such a passion for anything as she had to be in that post’, Sarah chortled, and in the end Lady Hyde had her wish even though ‘the Queen did not like her’. Two of Sarah’s daughters, Lady Sunderland and Godolphin’s daughter-in-law Lady Rialton, were made Ladies of the Bedchamber, and when her youngest daughter married the heir to the Duke of Montagu she too was installed there. Initially the Duchess of Somerset turned down the Queen’s offer of a place in the Bedchamber, but after another woman had accepted it the Duchess changed her mind. Sarah claimed this was because she had not initially realised that the position carried with it a salary of £1,000.61 The Queen agreed to take the Duchess on, despite her reluctance to have more than the set number. However, when Lady Charlotte Beverwort died in late 1702, the Queen did not replace her, leaving her once again with ten Ladies of the Bedchamber.

  The duties of the Ladies of the Bedchamber were not too demanding, although if Anne dined in public they did have to serve her on bended knee. One was always present when the Queen dressed, to hand her a fan and sometimes her shift. Besides this they accompanied her to Drawing Rooms and were in attendance when she went to open Parliament, or on public occasions such as the trial of Dr Sacheverell. The four Women of the Bedchamber (otherwise known as dressers) worked much harder. Every morning, as the Queen was dressing, a Bedchamber Woman knelt before her and poured water into a basin so she could wash her hands, and they also waited on her at table. Besides this, they nursed her when she was unwell, and in view of Anne’s poor health this was a major undertaking. In Sarah’s view, the Women of the Bedchamber were no more than ‘chambermaids’, who performed menial tasks. She once alluded to her cousin Abigail Masham hanging out Anne’s linen, contemptuously describing her as ‘a woman that combs [the Queen’s] head and does the lowest offices’.62

  Sarah had to concede that Anne was a considerate employer. ‘She was extremely well bred and treated her chief ladies and servants as if they had been her equals’, she acknowledged. However, she criticised Anne for not being more generous to them: when the Queen did hand out gifts, it was allegedly only of paltry items like fruit or venison. Yet it was Sarah’s meanness rather than the Queen’s that seems to have bothered the Bedchamber Women. Sarah recounted indignantly ‘the dressers railed at me everywhere’, accusing her of appropriating all the Queen’s discarded clothes for herself. She insisted that by right ‘they all belonged to me’, and that it was to her credit that she ‘never failed to give the Queen’s women three or four mantoes and petticoats every year’. It seems that the Queen was worried that Sarah treated her dressers unfairly, for in early 1712, after the Duchess had ceased to be her Groom of the Stole, Anne ‘took all her clothes and divided them herself in six several heaps and stood by whilst the Bedchamber Women chose’ what they wanted.63

  Sarah congratulated herself on not selling lesser posts in the Bedchamber to the highest bidder. She appointed a new royal starcher and seamstress without taking any money, even though ‘nobody can doubt but I might at least have disposed of all the under places in my offices’ for a thousand guineas apiece. In July 1702 such practices in fact became illegal after the Queen issued a proclamation banning the buying or selling of office, but Sarah insisted that this was done only because ‘I spoke often to her Majesty to have that order made’. In reality, it seems that this was a matter on which the Queen herself felt strongly, and that she had instituted the measure after discussions with Godolphin. Her interest in household reform ensured that she had closely involved herself when Godolphin and the Treasury official Sir Stephen Fox drew up her first establishment, ‘in which’ according to Fox, ‘her Majesty was very circumspect and knowing’.64

  As Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sarah was in charge of disbursing money for the Queen’s personal expenditure. Gambling accounted for quite a lot of this, and much of the thousand guineas in cash that Sarah handed the Queen most months went to pay her losses at cards. Otherwise, apart from incidental expenses such as the purchase of chocolate and elder wine, most of the Queen’s money went on pensions to needy individuals and charitable donations. The Queen’s official almoner already a
warded charity to deserving recipients, but Anne used her own money to support worthy causes such as a fund for widows of poor clergy and £50 a year to the free school at Windsor. Sarah regarded it as a matter for pride that, unlike William III’s Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Earl of Portland, she did not deduct ‘poundage’ for herself from Anne’s charitable donations, thinking it ‘a monstrous thing to take so many shillings from those that wanted when I was in plenty’. In the early years of the reign Anne’s annual Privy Purse allowance was £20,000, but this was later increased to £26,000.65

  When away from court Sarah used her cousin Abigail Hill, for whom she had secured a post as Woman of the Bedchamber, to act as her Deputy Keeper of the Privy Purse. At this point Sarah trusted her cousin implicitly. She even said that, had she considered it necessary to keep herself informed about what the Queen was up to, it would have been Abigail to whom she would have turned. As she somewhat incoherently explained to Bishop Burnet in 1711, ‘for the putting persons of an assured confidence as my spies about [the Queen], as I had never any such thought, so in case I should have had it, whom could I have thought more proper for that’ than her cousin Abigail?66

  According to George Lockhart, Sarah carefully monitored Anne’s spending. He recounted an incident when Sarah vetoed the Queen’s attempt to give a generous reward to a lady who had fashioned for her an exquisite japanned cabinet. Whether or not this story was accurate, in June 1707 Sarah certainly became suspicious when Anne called for a larger than usual amount of money from the Privy Purse. At other times Sarah made free with the Queen’s money herself. She recalled how, after the Queen had conferred a pension of £50 on one impoverished lady, she decided that the recipient merited more and ‘according to a general power that was given me’, doubled the amount. After this had gone on for some years, Sarah submitted her accounts to the Queen and asked her to formalise the arrangement by increasing the pension to £100. To her fury Anne refused, saying she ‘could not maintain all the good people’.67 It may be that Sarah committed more serious irregularities than this, for at times she borrowed large sums from the Privy Purse for her own use, and it is unclear whether these were repaid.

  Sarah also incurred criticism in her role as Mistress of the Robes. Although she insisted ‘I have often been told that nobody was more agreeably dressed than this Queen’, not everyone approved of what Anne wore. The Duchess noted, ‘Some people to be revenged of me for not letting them cheat have said she was not fine enough for a queen, but it would have been ridiculous with her person and of her age to have been otherwise dressed … She really had every thing that was proper for her’. In fairness to Sarah, the Queen’s wardrobe accounts do suggest she had the most beautiful clothes. In the first year of Anne’s reign, for example, Mrs Clifton the Queen’s manto maker made her at least twenty-eight mantoes. These garments, whose name derived from the French word ‘manteau’, meaning coat, were loose silk overgowns with trains that were pinned up into folds at the back, creating an effect somewhat like a bustle. Although the fashion had originated in France, Louis XIV disapproved of it, and had banned the wearing of mantoes at court functions because they were too informal. Anne, in contrast, favoured this new style. When giving a party for William III’s birthday in 1697, she would have liked to decree that the ladies should wear mantoes but then, realising ‘there are people that will find fault … for one must expect every new thing will be disliked at first’, she reluctantly ‘did give over that pleasing thought’. The mantoes fashioned for her by Mrs Clifton were elaborate and colourful. They included one made from ash-coloured Indian satin with little flowers; a red and green flowered Indian damask manto with gold buttons and hoops; a blue satin manto flowered with silver and lined in scarlet; a blue flowered silver tissue manto lined in pale blue; and a manto of white damask covered in scarlet and gold flowers, with a lining of scarlet and pink lutestring.68

  Below the bodice, mantoes were left open, revealing a petticoat underneath. Among the forty-six petticoats made for the Queen in 1702 there were ones in black velvet, flowered satin, ‘glazed holland’, and ‘rich silver stuff’. Importantly for one who was a semi-invalid, the Queen also had magnificent nightwear. Twenty nightgowns were made for her in 1702, including one of white mohair lined with black and white striped flowered silk, and a ‘blue satin bed nightgown embroidered with several colours, lined with blue taffety’. Fine embroidery was a major expense: although most of Anne’s petticoats cost only ten shillings each, and the Queen’s manto maker charged her less than fifty pounds for all work in 1702, that same year the bill for seven and a half yards of silver embroidery around the hemline of one petticoat came to £16 17s. 6d. In 1707–8 Mr Reeves was paid over £22 for working the Queen’s handkerchiefs, with one itemised as being embroidered ‘like feathers, with silk and gold’.69

  The Queen usually wore tall lace headdresses, which were washed and starched for her by her laundress Mrs Abrahal. Her shoes were mostly made of satin, though she did own a few pairs of corked sabots. In 1705–6 she bought a total of sixty-one pairs of shoes at a cost of £45 18s. She also went through large numbers of gloves, ordering ninety-two chamois pairs in March 1702. Not surprisingly, considering Anne’s size, corsetry also featured in the accounts, with Mr Cousein the stay-maker charging £63 in 1702 for eleven pairs of stays. Fans were the most important female accessory in those days, and Anne had a fine collection, to which she added annually. In 1703–4 she bought seventeen fans, among which were ‘a fine ivory sticked Indian painted fan’ costing £1 5s. and a ‘green papered Indian fan with fine gilt sticks’. Anne’s milliner supplied her with ‘papers of patches’ to adorn her face, and she regularly purchased ‘amber powder’ from her perfumer Mr Cobwell.70

  Sarah was in charge of settling Anne’s clothing accounts, and she knew very well that some people felt she was ‘too hard upon the trades-men I dealt with’. She denied this, pointing out they were always paid promptly, and that she let them charge the Queen double the prices offered to other aristocratic customers. Unlike in previous reigns, they did not have to pay for the privilege of being royal suppliers, and Sarah emphasised that she took no percentage for herself. Nevertheless, she acquired such a reputation for haggling that one satirical work of 1705 depicted shopkeepers trembling at Sarah’s approach because of ‘her cunning way of purchasing velvets’.71

  ‘I did constantly write abundance of letters in answers to the petitions and applications that were made, by which her Majesty was pleased to say I saved her a great deal of trouble’, Sarah recalled proudly. But while undoubtedly she did the Queen a service in this way, she often handled such matters tactlessly. The Queen employed six maids of honour, whose function was largely decorative. Although the salary of £300 barely covered the expenses these girls incurred, the post was highly coveted, as the maids were assumed to have a good chance of acquiring eligible husbands, and were provided with a portion of £3,000 on their marriage. Accordingly Anne could be choosy, taking on none but ‘reigning toasts’, but Sarah spelt this out to one applicant in a somewhat brutal fashion. In April 1703 she informed Lady Oglethorp, ‘Her Majesty resolves to take no maid of honour but [such as] has had good education and beauty. The first may be reported, but the other is sometimes fancy, and the Queen will see all that are offered and judge of it herself. Her Majesty has had so melancholy a prospect for many years in her drawing room, I don’t wonder that she desires to mend it’.72

  Sarah noted that following the Queen’s accession, ‘I began to be looked upon as a person of consequence without whose approbation … neither places nor pensions nor honours were bestowed by the Crown’. To her mind, however, her power was too limited. She remarked irritably, ‘Though I was a favourite, without the help of the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Godolphin I should not have been able to do any thing of any consequence’. In some ways she did exert considerable influence through these two men. Godolphin was deeply attached to her, so much so that some people wrongly assumed they were lovers. He n
ot only kept up a constant correspondence with her when she was away from court but also showed her, without Anne’s knowledge, many of his letters from the Queen. He valued her advice, and frequently deferred to her views. In 1704 Godolphin apologised to Sarah for having pushed through the appointment of the Tory Lord Stawell to Prince George’s Bedchamber, promising never to ‘speak to the Queen again for anybody as long as I live … without telling you first’. Four years later Godolphin became despondent when Sarah left court during a political crisis ‘without leaving behind … one line only of direction and comfort to poor me, who can grieve myself to a shadow for every least mark of your indifference’. The following month he told her ‘I would not willingly take any step but what is first approved by you’.73 Ultimately, indeed, it was the realisation that Godolphin would always rely on Sarah’s guidance that persuaded the Queen she must dismiss him in 1710.

  Yet Sarah was disappointed that she only wielded influence in this indirect manner, for she had assumed that the Queen herself would constantly turn to her for advice. In fact, when she urged her views upon Anne, she met with resistance, and her attempts ‘to get honest men into the service’ were rebuffed. As she later resentfully recorded, ‘I never or very rarely succeeded in any endeavour of this kind till the ministers themselves came into it at last’.74

  Early in the reign the Queen did have political discussions with Sarah. In one letter to her of August 1703, Anne employed a cipher, substituting code numbers for people’s names, a precaution she adopted when writing of sensitive matters. As Sarah rather pathetically noted, ‘this letter shows the Queen talked and writ to me of her business’. Before long, however, the Queen grew irritated by Sarah’s patronising advice. Sarah boasted that she ‘watched perpetually to make her do everything that was good for herself or her kingdom’, but Anne was understandably wearied by Sarah’s belief that without her intervention the Queen would do nothing right.75