Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (16 page)

Ten days after returning to London, Anne suffered another crushing blow. In the eighth month of her pregnancy she went into premature labour and on 22 October was delivered of a dead son. The fact that ‘the child was full grown and thought to have been alive in or near the princess’s travail’ only made the loss more agonising.
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Her two previous miscarriages had not been considered especially significant but this one (which technically was not a miscarriage at all as it took place when she was more than twenty-eight weeks into pregnancy) was more worrying as it could not be attributed to an external cause. Tragically for Anne, this was far from the last time when she would have to endure such heartbreak.

Multiple miscarriages are sometimes caused by rhesus incompatibility. This occurs when the mother’s blood is rhesus negative, and the father’s rhesus positive. When they conceive a child together, its blood is rhesus positive. The mother responds to the presence of the child’s rhesus factor by forming antibodies, which then fatally interact with the child’s blood. However, such a diagnosis does not fit with the pattern of Anne’s pregnancies. Rhesus incompatibility does not usually affect a first pregnancy, but tends to manifest itself in second or third pregnancies. After that, all pregnancies are liable to end in failure, with miscarriage occurring earlier each time. As we have seen, Anne’s second and third pregnancies went to term and she produced two live children. This was followed by three miscarriages in close succession, but in 1689 she did succeed in having another child, which in a case of rhesus incompatibility would be an unlikely outcome. After that none of her children survived, but many of her pregnancies only terminated at a late stage.
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A more plausible hypothesis is that Anne lost her babies as a result of intra-uterine growth retardation caused by an insufficiency of the placenta. This in turn could have been the consequence of Anne being afflicted by Hughes syndrome, also known as antiphospholipid syndrome, or ‘sticky blood’. This condition, only recently discovered by Dr Graham Hughes, is now thought to be responsible for one in five miscarriages. The mother’s blood, often as a result of genetic factors, is loaded with antibodies which overstimulate the immune system, increasing blood clotting. The thickened blood cannot pass through the small blood vessels in the placenta, depriving the foetus of nutrients and often causing miscarriage in late pregnancy. Today pregnant women with the condition are sometimes successfully treated by taking a single aspirin daily. Even in Anne’s time, herbal preparations containing willow bark (the active component of aspirin) were available, and might have had a good effect, but of course no one then was aware of this.
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What makes this diagnosis more compelling is that there is a strong link between Hughes syndrome and disseminated lupus erythematosus. While it is possible to have Hughes syndrome without ever manifesting symptoms of lupus, it has been estimated that one fifth of those affected by Hughes syndrome subsequently develop this auto-immune disease, which is found particularly in young women. Its most notable symptoms include polyarthritis and facial eruption, both of which severely afflicted Anne in coming years.

The loss of another child, coming only months after Anne’s miscarriage at the start of the year and the deaths of her two daughters, was profoundly distressing for the Princess. Once again her father and stepmother were ‘deeply afflicted’ for her, but their sympathy afforded Anne scant consolation. Mary Beatrice’s sufferings as a mother had in many ways been similar to Anne’s, but the Princess was very far from feeling a sense of solidarity with her. Instead the possibility that Mary Beatrice might be blessed with offspring while she remained childless was almost intolerable. This, however, was the prospect that now faced the Princess. On the same day that Barrillon informed Louis XIV that Anne had lost her baby, he reported, ‘there is a slight suspicion that the Queen of England is pregnant’. He cautioned that this was as yet considered ‘highly doubtful’, but the news turned out to be true.
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Mary Beatrice had last been pregnant in 1684, and English Protestants had optimistically assumed that her childbearing days were over. Recently, however, her health had much improved. In August 1687 she went to drink and bathe in the warm spa waters at Bath, which were
renowned for promoting fertility. The King joined her there between 18–21 August, and then set off on his progress. He returned briefly to Bath on 6 September and – even though it was recommended that ladies should not sleep with their husbands while taking the waters – it was during this short visit that his son was conceived. However, it took longer than usual for this to become apparent. As Mary Beatrice herself later confided to her stepdaughter Mary, ‘I had libels [her period] after I was with child, which I never had before’.
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It was only in late October that she and the King began to entertain hopes as to her condition, and once these were confirmed the baby’s expected date of arrival was calculated on the assumption that the Queen had conceived immediately after returning to London on 6 October.

For Anne this was a devastating development, both personally and politically. She was still in mourning for her two daughters, and suffering two miscarriages within a year had taken a terrible emotional toll. The implications were shattering: if the child was a boy – and as early as 3 November the French ambassador noted that Catholics at court were talking as if this was a foregone conclusion – he would supersede his sisters in the succession. James’s son would be brought up as a Catholic, and so James’s achievements would outlast his life. If the King died while his son was a minor, Mary Beatrice would become regent, and power would rest in the hands of a woman Anne saw as a fanatical enemy of the true Church. With her hopes for the future in shreds, Anne’s chagrin and dismay were painfully apparent. The Tuscan envoy noted in December, ‘No words can express the rage of the Princess of Denmark at the Queen’s condition; she can dissimulate it to no one’.
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Exactly when Anne persuaded herself that her stepmother was only pretending to be pregnant is unclear, but her sister Mary had some doubts on the subject from the outset. When her father wrote to her in late November confirming that the Queen was pregnant, it struck her as odd that he should be ‘talking in such an assured way … at a time when no woman could be certain’. It was enough to instil in her ‘the slightest suspicion’.
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Mary insisted that the thought of being denied the crown left her ‘indifferent on her own account’, but concerned for ‘the interest of the Protestant religion’. She was also upset that her husband’s worldly prospects would be blighted if she did not ascend the throne. For Anne too, of course, the welfare of the Church was paramount, but whether she could have truthfully claimed that her fury at being ousted from the succession owed nothing to personal ambition is questionable. Despite
being of a retiring disposition Anne had a strong sense of her entitlement to rule, and would not readily relinquish what she regarded as her rightful inheritance. In her case it would have stretched credibility to claim that she wanted to become Queen merely to enhance the power and prestige of her husband.

The news that Mary Beatrice was expecting a child was so unwelcome that many people elected not to believe it, and the French ambassador reported on 3 November that Londoners were scoffing at rumours that the Queen was pregnant. On 1 January 1688 the news was officially announced, but this did not diminish public scepticism. Already there were people who ‘impudently declare it a fiction’, and satires started appearing suggesting that Mary Beatrice was faking her pregnancy. The Earl of Clarendon noted on 15 January, ‘it is strange to see how the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true. Good God help us!’.
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Since the dissolution of July 1687, the King had dismissed several Lord Lieutenants he considered unreliable, and in autumn 1688 he ordered those still in office to put three questions to all men of substance in the counties. The questionnaire was designed to establish whether these individuals would vote to repeal the Test Act in the coming Parliament or, if they were not standing for election themselves, whether they would support candidates known to favour repeal. In the counties the answers served mainly to demonstrate the strength of opinion against royal policy, but in the municipal boroughs, where it was easier to meddle with the franchise, James’s electoral agents were optimistic that by remodelling corporations and filling the Commission of the Peace with dissenters and Catholics they could pack the House of Commons with men willing to do the King’s bidding.

Other provocative acts on James’s part demonstrated the King’s determination to press on with a Catholicising agenda. In November 1687 all the remaining Fellows of Magdalen College Oxford were dismissed. At least six of the men who replaced them were Catholics. A month later James’s Jesuit Clerk of the Closet, Father Petre, – who was regarded as the most extreme of the King’s Catholic advisers – was made a Privy Councillor.

When the Earl of Scarsdale, who was Prince George’s Groom of the Stool, was deprived of his Lord Lieutenancy after refusing to put the three questions to local gentlemen, the King was pleased when Anne asked whether Scarsdale should also be removed from his place in
George’s household. Assuming that Anne and George would recognise the impropriety of employing a disgraced man, James left it to their discretion, but in the absence of explicit orders the Prince and Princess decided that it was permissible to retain Scarsdale. James then commanded that the Earl should be dismissed. This was duly done, but Anne made it clear she was acting under coercion.
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In late 1687 Lord and Lady Churchill used the excuse of Sarah being pregnant again to withdraw to their house in the country. The French ambassador assumed this was because they did not want to be blamed for Anne’s conduct, but though Churchill had still not made it clear that he was opposed to a repeal of the Test Acts, his position was growing steadily more precarious.
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All concerned were aware that if Churchill opposed the King in the House of Lords, he would inevitably lose his places at court and in the army.

Fortunately the outlook for Anne was not unremittingly bleak, for by 8 March 1688 it had been announced that she was expecting another baby. However, far from reconciling her to Mary Beatrice’s pregnancy, the renewed hope of motherhood only made the Princess more determined to protect her own, and her unborn child’s, hereditary rights. She was already facing the possibility that things would reach a point where it was impossible for her to remain quiescent. Her letters to Mary were now couched in a primitive code, in which the King was referred to as ‘Mansell’. On 20 March 1688 she wrote to her sister wanting to know ‘what you would have your friends to do if any alteration should come, as it is to be feared there will, especially if Mansell has a son’.
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Anne was able to justify this by persuading herself that the Queen was engaged in a wicked conspiracy to impose an imposter on the nation. Until the spring of 1688 she had been wary of committing her thoughts on the subject to paper, but she now made up for her former caution by writing Mary a series of devastating letters. Even if she could not substantiate her statements, the virulence of her hatred of Mary Beatrice, and her certainty that Catholics were utterly unscrupulous, invested her arguments with a spurious persuasive power. Certainly Mary found them convincing, giving her ‘good reason to suspect trickery’.
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This meant that when William of Orange decided to invade England, his wife could square her conscience with supporting the venture.

For Anne it was axiomatic that Catholics would not shrink from perpetrating such a gross deception, ‘the principles of that religion being such that they will stick at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interest’. She claimed on 20 March that she now had ‘much
reason to believe it is a false belly’, although the evidence she adduced was almost laughably meagre. She told Mary that her stepmother had grown very large, ‘but she looks better than ever she did, which is not usual … Besides, it is very odd that the Bath, that all the best doctors thought would do her a great deal of harm, should have had so very good effect so soon’. She contended that her stepmother was acting in a strangely furtive manner when, considering there had ‘been so many stories and jests made about it, she should, to convince the world, make either me or some of my friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child, she looks as if she were afraid one should touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she has been undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock.’

Mary Beatrice’s reluctance to expose herself to her stepdaughter’s inspection gave rise in Anne’s mind to ‘so much just cause for suspicion that I believe when she is brought to bed, nobody will be convinced it is her child, except it prove a daughter. For my part I declare I shall not, except I see the child and she parted’.
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There was later some dispute as to whether Mary Beatrice had truly been so coy about undressing in front of other women. In the
Life of James II
, compiled posthumously by an authorised biographer using James’s
Memoirs
, it was stated that Anne saw Mary Beatrice’s belly regularly during the earlier stages of pregnancy when she attended the Queen ‘at her toilet, and put on her shift as usually’. Burnet, on the other hand, claimed that Prince George himself had told him that Mary Beatrice had deliberately frustrated Anne’s attempts to watch her dressing. According to him, the Princess ‘had sometimes stayed by her even indecently long in mornings, to see her rise, and to give her her shift, but she never did either’. However, much of Burnet’s evidence relating to the birth of the Prince of Wales is highly tendentious, so accepting this without reservation would be unwise. The Queen’s Woman of the Bedchamber Mrs Margaret Dawson was adamant that her mistress did not try to hide her body from her ladies at any time during her pregnancy. Mrs Dawson testified that ‘the Queen did shift her linen and expose her great belly every day to all the ladies that had the privilege of the dressing room … and she did never go into a closet or behind a bed to do it’. When Anne herself was pressed to be more precise about the Queen’s habits, she dredged up a lame report that Mary Beatrice had been angry when the Countess of Arran had unexpectedly entered her room, ‘because she did not care to be seen when she was shifting’.
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