Although what Bolingbroke described as Marlborough’s ‘miraculous successes’ on the Continent had encouraged the belief that victory in Spain was feasible, by late 1710 this had become utterly unrealistic. To the end of his life the Emperor Charles VI was bitter at what he saw as Britain’s treachery having deprived him of his Spanish inheritance, but he should have remembered that, had it not been for Queen Anne, his family might well have forfeited their Austrian dominions as well. Until Anne authorised Marlborough to go to the rescue of Charles’s father in 1704, Leopold I had been at ‘great risk of losing his crown’, and Marlborough reported that after his great victory at Blenheim, ‘Her Majesty’s health is constantly drank, as saviour of this empire’.19
The Whig Richard Steele complained that as a result of the Utrecht settlement, ‘the House of Bourbon … bids fairer … to engross the whole trade of Europe than it did before the war’. In 1715 the Earl of Oxford rebutted these claims, arguing that if the gains secured were examined, ‘it will not be thought the commerce of Great Britain was neglected by her Majesty in the late treaties’. Admittedly the Asiento never brought in the ‘vast riches’ anticipated, partly because the South Sea Company so overloaded their slave ships that mortality on their voyages was particularly high, eroding profits. In other regions, however, British commerce flourished. Oxford cited with pride ‘the additions made to our wealth … by the vast increase of shipping employed since the peace in the fishery and in merchandise’, resulting in a rise in both imports and exports. Joseph Addison noted that ‘trade, without enlarging British territories has given us a kind of additional empire’, and the concessions obtained at Utrecht played a valuable part in this process.20 To modern eyes it is abhorrent that this prosperity was underpinned by the slave trade but, for all her piety, this troubled Queen Anne as little as most of her subjects.
After Anne’s death the Whigs let it be understood that the Queen had intended to betray her people by bequeathing her crown to her brother. Lord Coningsby was confident there had been ‘a fixed resolution in her Majesty and her ministry … to give us the Pretender for an English successor’ and it was alleged ‘that if her Majesty had died but a month later our ruin would have been inevitable’. Such beliefs appeared verified when James Francis Edward issued a Declaration referring to his sister’s ‘good affection’ for him, whereupon some who did not ‘doubt it before were glad to have confirmation from himself under his own hand’. The Duchess of Marlborough felt sure that ‘as for [Anne’s] heart, there was proof enough in due time that that was engaged at another court’, although on another occasion she had been honest enough to admit ‘that all the time she had known the Queen she never heard her speak a favourable word of the Pretender’. Jacobites in Britain also eagerly subscribed to the myth that Anne wanted her brother to succeed her. George Lockhart wrote in his memoirs, ‘That the Queen did of a long time design her brother’s restoration I do not in the least question’. He believed she delayed committing herself partly on account of ‘her own timorous nature’ and partly because she was deceived by Oxford’s ‘tricks, intrigues and pretences’. All this meant that the most fervent adherents of the Protestant Succession regarded her demise as providential. Within hours of Anne’s death Archbishop Tenison greeted Richard Steele at Whitehall stairs with the words, ‘Master Steele! This is a great and glorious day’, while Bishop Burnet exulted, ‘We were, God knows, upon the point of at least confusions, if not of utter ruin, and are now delivered’.21
In reality, Archbishop Sharp had been correct when he opined that Anne had ‘no manner of doubt about’ the Protestant settlement. While she was far from fond of her Hanoverian heirs, she regarded them as fitter to ascend the throne than James Francis Edward. There is good reason to think that Anne retained her doubts about his birth till the day of her death, but even putting this aside, she did not regard him as worthy to succeed her. As befitted ‘a person who considered religion before her father’ in 1688, she had no intention that her kingdom should be ruled by a young man brought up as a Catholic in an absolutist country. Only days before her death she reminded Sir David Hamilton of her pride at being hailed as a protector of the Protestant religion, and demanded whether it was conceivable that she would ever consent to being ‘an instrument of ruining it in her own kingdoms’.22 Instead of Anne being the one who was ready to risk provoking a civil war by overturning the established succession, it was Marlborough and some of his Whig allies who exposed the kingdom to danger by seeking to persuade the Elector of Hanover to mount a pre-emptive invasion.
As a chronicler of Anne’s time noted, ‘Her reign may be called bloodless, not one person having been … beheaded for treason during the whole course of it, which cannot be said of any reign since the time of Edward I’. Yet not all of Anne’s subjects hailed her as a mild ruler. Despite her professed desire to ‘indulge all sorts of people in their just liberties’, to the end of her life she retained her intolerant instincts towards dissenters. Lacking ‘true notions of religious liberty, which she had never been taught’, she sanctioned measures designed ‘to discourage and distress’ them.23 In the last year of the reign Anne welcomed the passage of the Schism Act, in which she was ‘most heartily engaged … from the beginning’. Worried that her next step would be a repeal of the Toleration Act, the dissenters submitted a petition expressing fears that ‘those who can be so unjust … as to insinuate that we are dangerous to your Majesty’s interest … will not fail to incense your Majesty … and to prepossess your Majesty … to make other and farther hardships and restraint upon us’.24
When Anne died on the date the Schism Act was due to come into force, the dissenters saw divine intervention at work. That morning, as a service was being held at a London meeting-house, the preacher received a prearranged signal sent to him by Bishop Burnet, informing him that the Queen was dead. The minister concluded his sermon by uttering heartfelt thanks for George I’s accession, whereupon the congregation rapturously broke forth into a celebratory psalm. Almost fifty years later, a nonconformist preacher was still dwelling on the miraculous deliverance afforded his brethren by Queen Anne’s death. In a sermon of 1758 Dr Benson reminded his audience how, ‘on the very day that the Schism Act was to take place, God … took away the life of that princess, who had so far been seduced, as causelessly to seek our destruction … O that glorious 1st of August! That most signal day which ought never to be forgot’.25
In his History of England, which appeared not long after Queen Anne’s death, Nicholas Tindal stated there were ‘two things to which the inglorious part of this reign may be chiefly imputed: the Queen’s passion for favourites and the prejudices of her education’. Both at the time and since Anne has been depicted as a ruler who lacked a will of her own, and who was totally dominated by women of stronger character. Having been ‘amazed to hear and read that all depends on the favourites’, a foreign visitor to London in 1710 accepted without question that the Duchess of Marlborough and Mistress Hill ‘have it all their own way’. Some men considered that such a state of affairs was an inevitable hazard when a Queen was on the throne, for Anne’s gender rendered her vulnerable to manipulation. Having written of ‘the female buzz which had for many years … too much influence in public managements’, Daniel Defoe asserted it was unsurprising that Anne allowed herself to be imposed upon in this way, considering ‘she was but a woman’.26
In the early years of the reign it was the Duchess of Marlborough who was widely thought to keep the Queen in thrall, acting, according to Defoe, as a ‘she dictator’. Being in a position to know how false such claims were, one might have thought that the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough would have been wary of subscribing to the idea that the Queen was ruled by favourites, but after 1707 they became utterly convinced that Abigail Masham was all powerful. Partly this was because neither of them understood that after coming to the throne Anne had become readier to assert her authority. The Marlboroughs had formed their assessment of Anne’s character in the
early years of their acquaintance with her, and thereafter never modified their views. The best Marlborough could say of Anne during a visit to Hanover, was that she was ‘a very good sort of woman’, a patronising comment that shocked Electress Sophia. As for Sarah, to her mind Anne was forever ‘very ignorant, very fearful, with very little judgment’. She informed Lord Cowper that ‘the Queen has no original thoughts on any subjects; is neither good nor bad, but as put into’, though at least this was slightly more measured than her reported dismissal of Anne as simply ‘a praying godly idiot’.27
Regarding the Queen as incapable of independent action, Sarah believed that the only explanation if Anne declined to fall in with her or her husband’s wishes was that another hand was at work. The Duchess made this plain in her memoirs, causing a reviewer to comment, ‘that the Queen was changed towards you, you charge point blank to the secret management of Mrs Masham, as though her Majesty had neither sentiment nor even sensation of her own’.28
There can be no denying that Abigail Masham had an extraordinary career. A woman that, as the Duchess of Marlborough enjoyed reminding people, ‘I took out of a garret in a starving condition’ progressed ‘from the poor degree of a chamber’ to a position of great favour.29 Yet though Abigail undoubtedly carved out an impressive niche for herself, this should not be confused with the exercise of real power. Just as the Marlboroughs and the Whigs overestimated the damage she did them, so her turning against Oxford in 1714 was less significant than some imagined. The claim put forward by one pamphleteer that by the end of the reign Abigail had subjugated her mistress to the point where the Queen was entirely ‘at the mercy and discretion of this puffed up favourite’ was utterly preposterous.30
The idea that Abigail made herself the instrument of France must likewise be rejected. In 1710, when the French foreign minister suggested that Mrs Masham might prove helpful, Abbé Gaultier was adamant that peace was a matter far beyond Abigail’s province. Although in late 1713 Gaultier did prevail on her to ask Anne if Dunkirk harbour could be spared destruction, Abigail reported back that the Queen ‘would not dare even to think of’ permitting France to evade its treaty obligations. This solitary instance scarcely supports the claim that Lady Masham and her associates were ‘the springs that moved our vast machines of state, who carried on the designs of France and Spain to the ruin of their country’.31
It was assumed that the favourites who supposedly governed Anne ruthlessly denied her access to anyone who might put forward a point of view conflicting with their own. Sir David Hamilton alleged ‘False insinuations and misrepresentations … misled the Queen’s judgment … and made her yield to the direction of others’, so ‘she was kept not only from persons of a contrary opinion but from the knowledge of things’. The Whigs believed the situation became particularly acute towards the end of the reign. A pamphlet written shortly after Anne’s death deplored that ‘since Abigail and her creatures had taken possession at court, there was not a faithful tongue about her, that dares truly represent the people’s sufferings, nor one honest ear to whom she durst tell her own’.32 In reality, Anne was never as isolated as such accounts suggest.
Sir David Hamilton was particularly reluctant to admit that when Anne did things of which he disapproved, she was acting of her own volition. ‘The Queen in herself had all the goodness of temper, of courtesy and breeding, of compassion and inclination to serve the world, and what had another appearance was from outward influence’, he affirmed. It suited others too to claim that Anne was blameless for events they could not condone. When describing an incident that took place during the last weeks of her reign, the annalist Abel Boyer excused Anne on the grounds that ‘they … who had the entire management of the deluded Queen made her speak according to their freaks and humours’. After her death one pamphleteer who attacked her Tory ministers was sure that ‘She, poor lady, knew nothing of the mysterious part of their management, but considering the natural infirmities of her sex submitted herself and power to her late servants’. Another reassured his readers that the Queen was ‘not to answer for the late base and felonious treaty of peace … though signed by her own royal hands’.33
The fact is, just as Anne’s contribution towards the reign’s triumphs should not be overlooked, so she cannot be absolved from her part in less praiseworthy events. The idea that Anne was hopelessly weak and ineffectual, and constantly imposed upon by others, does not stand up to scrutiny. Her natural reserve, and reluctance to appear overbearing was misleading, as was the habitual modesty which ensured the disclaimer ‘in my poor opinion’, was a recurring phrase in her letters. At times the monarch’s humility attained almost comic levels. When making arrangements she could be unnecessarily furtive, implying that she was seeking a clandestine favour rather than simply making her wishes clear. In 1709 the Duchess of Marlborough and Arthur Maynwaring were full of scorn when they heard that upon instructing her Secretary at War, Sir Robert Walpole, not to send overseas the regiment of a favourite royal equerry, the Queen had begged, ‘but pray don’t say a word to anybody’. Maynwaring sneered, ‘I think this is an admirable sense for one that is supposed to give laws to the world and to hold the balance of Europe … Abroad there never was so great a figure; at home all is the reverse of it’. Sarah assumed the Queen was acting at the behest of Abigail Masham, and for her the incident typified the way Anne ‘loved a secret to manage with anybody in a low place’.34 In reality, however, the Queen’s surreptitious air owed more to her instinct for privacy and discretion, and her unwillingness gratuitously to flaunt her own power.
It is plain that, when it mattered, Anne was perfectly capable of being authoritative, even masterful. Bolingbroke later justified his failure to protest against the Restraining Orders of 1712 by claiming that ‘after the Queen had delivered her pleasure to the Lords [in Cabinet], she made a sign with her fan at her mouth, which Lord Bolingbroke knew she never did but when she was determined on a measure’. The Earl of Oxford did not doubt the Queen’s ability to impose her will on her ministers, telling the French in the spring of 1712 that as soon as they produced an acceptable peace offer, ‘the Queen of England takes it upon herself to communicate it to her Cabinet council and have it approved’.35
Queen Anne’s earliest biographer, Abel Boyer, pronounced that ‘She was not equal to the weight of a crown and management of arduous affairs’, but his verdict should not go unquestioned. Undeniably Anne was far from having a brilliant intellect. However, as the Marquis de Torcy remarked, she ‘had a great share of good sense’, and applied this well in governing her country.36
While even the Duchess of Marlborough acknowledged, ‘There was something of majesty in her look’, Anne was not a charismatic figure. Nor was she a good communicator. Incorrigibly shy, ‘her discourse had nothing of brightness or wit’. Only on paper did she sometimes show a certain aptitude for words, obliging Sarah to concede that ‘some of her letters are better than one could imagine is possible for her to write when one only hears her speak’.37
By the time Anne came to the throne she had long lost her personal attractions, was overweight and lame. On occasion she showed a certain artfulness at disguising her bulk, swathing herself in voluminous folds of velvet which made it difficult to assess how fat she was.38 Nevertheless for the most part it was all too apparent that she was corpulent, coarse-complexioned, and ungainly. The sight of her was not such as to inspire devotion, and Anne could never rely on feminine allure to secure her the hearts of her subjects.
Anne did her best to conceal the full extent of her invalidism, disliking to be seen as an object of pity. At one point Abigail asked Robert Harley to keep the Queen’s severe pain secret, for ‘she does not care to have it known till it is so bad she cannot hide it’. As with her obesity, however, her chronic ill health was too obvious to escape notice. Bishop Burnet, often so critical of the Queen, praised her ‘high degree of patience and submission to the will of God under long and sharp pains’, but it is more than just her C
hristian fortitude that compels admiration. Not only was she ‘little querulous or impatient under the infirmities of a broken constitution’, but she refused to let her afflictions interfere with her duties. In January 1713, for example, an attack of gout prevented her from appearing at a court reception, but she did not cancel her scheduled evening conference with Lord Oxford to discuss the arrangements for Emperor Charles VI’s evacuation of Catalonia.39
After seeing the Queen at home in 1706, Sir John Clerk exclaimed, ‘Nature seems to be inverted when a poor infirm woman becomes one of the rulers of the world’. What prompted this reflection, however, was the contrast between Anne’s pitiable state of decrepitude, and the regal assurance with which she referred to ‘her people of Scotland’. When describing the scene Clerk recalled he had asked himself, ‘What are you, poor mean-like mortal … who talks in the style of a sovereign?’ but if, from a corporeal point of view, Anne was a miserable specimen, the condition of the monarchical ‘body politic’ was much sounder. The Italian Cardinal who dismissed her as ‘a princess weak in body and mind’ was wrong as regards the latter,40 for while Anne was undoubtedly a very sick woman, she was often a shrewd ruler.
A monarch usually derives strength from the sense of being part of a dynasty but for Anne, whose children had predeceased her and whose heirs were unloved and distant cousins, things were different. As the last of her line, she was sustained not by family feeling but by a genuine concern for ‘the happiness and prosperity of England’. The Duchess of Marlborough’s claim that the Queen was ‘insensible of what related to the public’ was as false as it was malevolent.41
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