Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (24 page)

George currently had other grounds for grievance. Contrary to what had been promised, he had not been recompensed for the lands he had surrendered to the Duke of Holstein. After ‘two years fruitlessly spent’ trying to secure payment, he had not received a penny. In August 1691 he had accepted ‘with a kind of repugnance’ a compensation offer of £85,000, a figure he believed undervalued the properties’ true worth. Infuriatingly, however, the money was not made available, even though George had only settled on condition of prompt payment.
³³

This coincided with another setback for Anne and George. For some time they had wanted the King to make some mark of favour to the Earl of Marlborough, who in the past three years had performed many services for William and Mary. He had been one of the nine Lords Justices appointed in the summer of 1690 to advise the Queen, and the following autumn he had conducted a remarkable military campaign in Ireland, resulting in the capture of Cork and Kinsale. Despite this the King and Queen remained suspicious of him, with Mary taking the view that he could ‘never deserve either trust or esteem’. Marlborough had recently been passed over for the position of Master of the Ordnance, and Anne and George wanted William to make a gesture that would go some way towards consoling him. Having understood that the King had agreed to make Marlborough a Knight of the Garter, George wrote to William on 2 August 1691 asking him to confer the promised honour, ‘it being the only thing I have ever pressed you for’. Anne seconded this request with a letter of her own. Robustly she told William ‘You cannot certainly bestow it upon anyone that has been more serviceable to you in the late Revolution nor that has ventured their lives for you as he has done ever since your coming to the Crown. But if people won’t think these merits enough, I can’t believe anybody will be so unreasonable to be dissatisfied when ’tis known you are pleased to give it him on the Prince’s account and mine’.
³⁴
Unperturbed by the certainty of causing serious affront, the King ignored both pleas.

William and Mary had hoped that in time the Princess’s infatuation with Lady Marlborough would lessen, but of that there appeared no prospect. On the contrary, it was around now that Anne told Sarah that she was, ‘if it be possible, every day more and more hers’. By April 1691 she had also instituted a new system designed to tear down the barrier of rank that divided them. Sarah recalled that Anne became ‘almost unhappy in the thought that she was her superior. She thought that such friendship ought to make them, at least in their conversations, equals … She could not bear the sound of words which implied in them distance and superiority’.
³⁵
They therefore agreed to adopt pseudonyms which masked the disparity in status between them, and to use these when writing or talking to one another. Anne took the name Mrs Morley, while Sarah called herself Mrs Freeman, and the arrangement extended to their husbands, who now became Mr Morley and Mr Freeman respectively.

Besides seeking to correct any imbalance in their relationship, the Princess demonstrated her devotion to her friend in a more material way. In the early spring of 1691 she wrote to Sarah, ‘I have had something to say to you a great while and did not know how to go about it; but now that you cannot see my blushes’ she was emboldened to offer the Countess of Marlborough an additional £1,000 a year as a reward for having secured Anne an increase in her allowance. She begged her to ‘never mention anything of it to me, for I should be ashamed to have any notice taken of such a thing from one that deserves more than I shall be ever able to return’. Considering that the Princess was still in pecuniary difficulties, it was a particularly munificent gesture; Sarah herself would later make the snide comment that since Anne’s ‘temper did not, of itself, frequently lead her to actions of great generosity’, it was more noteworthy still.
³⁶

Mindful of the demands of Sarah’s young family, Anne permitted her lady-in-waiting to spend long periods at her house at St Albans. Such separations were painful for the Princess, and Sarah recorded ‘I had upon that many kind expostulations, but the necessity of my affairs and some indulgence to my temper required it’. While in the country, the Countess immersed herself in works of political controversy, translations of the classics, and contemporary drama, prompting Anne once to reproach her for wasting ‘spare minutes to look on Seneca’, which could have been spent writing to her.
³⁷
She was right to perceive this as a threat, for as Sarah broadened her knowledge, the Princess appeared to her ever more dull and limited.

During Sarah’s absences the Princess had to settle for keeping in touch by letter, and as ever she demanded prompt replies. ‘I know dear Mrs
Freeman hates writing’ she admitted, but since ‘one kind word or two’ sufficed her she felt it was not too much to ask for a daily affirmation of friendship. The Princess observed, ‘To what purpose should you and I tell one another, yesterday it rained and today it shined; as for news you will have it from those that are more intelligible’. To make their separations more tolerable Anne commissioned more than one portrait of Sarah, keeping a copy in miniature constantly with her. It was, she wrote ‘a pleasing thing to look upon’, if no substitute for seeing ‘the dear original whom I adore’.
³⁸

When Sarah was away, the Princess eagerly accepted invitations to visit her in the country. She and George usually went for the day, even though the return journey by coach was about fifty miles. Having dined with her friend at St Albans on 12 June 1691, Anne and George were back in London shortly before midnight. Far from being tired out by the trip Anne declared to Sarah ‘If I could follow my own inclinations I believe I should come to you every day’. Sure enough, a week later she paid her another visit, returning so exhilarated that she again proclaimed her desire to repeat the experience whenever possible.
³⁹

Although Anne happily underwent these exertions, her health was currently deteriorating. Both Bishop Burnet and Sarah write as if it had long been generally assumed that Anne was unlikely to outlive her sister, yet until 1691 she does not seem to have suffered from frequent illness. At some point in that year, however, she had a bad bout of fever and also became ‘so lame I cannot go without limping’. This was probably the first attack of the arthritis that later made her life a misery. As she made a slow recovery, she did have one cause for optimism: by the end of the year she was expecting another child.
⁴⁰

By this time the Marlboroughs had effected a significant addition to Anne’s inner circle by establishing their friend Sidney Lord Godolphin in her confidence. Nicknamed ‘Bacon Face’, Godolphin was a short, lugubrious Cornishman who combined high skills at managing the public finances with a private weakness for gambling. Having been widowed in tragic circumstances, this ‘very silent man’ was noted for his ‘somewhat shocking and ungracious stern gravity’, and possessed a ferocious stare that many found intimidating.
⁴¹
With a few intimates, however, Godolphin was less forbidding, and for both John and Sarah Marlborough he felt only admiration and affection.

In 1689 King William had appointed Godolphin his chief Treasury commissioner. However, in addition to performing his public duties, Godolphin proved willing to act as an adviser to Anne and George. Once
he had been brought by the Earl and Countess of Marlborough ‘into the service of the Morleys to counsel them in all their difficulties’ the Prince and Princess quickly came to depend upon his calm good sense and shrewdness. By the summer of 1691 it was noted that he appeared more attentive towards the Princess than the Queen, and that whereas he only came to court for council meetings, he was to be seen every afternoon playing cards at the Cockpit. He became so integral a part of Anne’s coterie that she and Sarah dubbed him with an alias of his own, so that in their parlance he went by, and answered to, the name of Mr Montgomery.
⁴²

It was impossible to predict that another person who came into Anne’s life about this time would ultimately play an important part in it. Some time in 1690 or 1691 the Countess of Marlborough was informed that some close relations of hers were living in penury. Until that point she ‘never knew there were such people in the world’, for Sarah’s paternal grandfather had fathered twenty-two children, and his youngest daughter had lost contact with her siblings after marrying a merchant named Mr Hill. In the late 1680s Hill had gone bankrupt and died shortly afterwards, leaving his wife and four children destitute. Having learned of their plight Sarah gave them £10 for their immediate relief and then set about making more permanent provision for her first cousins. The oldest son (who died soon after Anne’s accession) was procured a place in the Treasury, while his younger brother Jack was enrolled in St Albans Grammar School. As Sarah later recalled, finding employment for their adult sisters posed more of a problem. Then aged twenty, the eldest girl, called Abigail, had been working in domestic service, but Sarah now took her into her own household. Sarah insisted she ‘treated her with as great kindness as if she had been my sister’ and even ‘nursed her up with ass’s milk’ when the young woman contracted smallpox; one may be sure, however, that Abigail was never allowed to forget her dependent condition.
⁴³

A little later one of Anne’s Women of the Bedchamber, Mrs Ellen Bust, fell seriously unwell. Despite her qualms that Abigail’s previous menial employment made her ineligible for royal service, Sarah asked the Princess if Abigail could succeed to her position. Anne at once agreed that Abigail should ‘have any place you desire for her whenever Bust dies’, and said she was delighted to be ‘serviceable to dear Mrs Freeman’ whose ‘commands weigh more with me than all the world besides’.
⁴⁴
Though it is possible Eleanor Bust lived on for a bit longer, before the end of the reign Abigail had been installed in Anne’s household.
Furthermore, in 1698 her younger sister Alice was made a laundress to the Duke of Gloucester.

Abigail Hill would subsequently exert a powerful and destructive effect on Anne’s friendship with Sarah Marlborough, but this lay long in the future. In 1691 it was the Duke of Gloucester’s governess, Lady Fitzharding, who threatened to come between them. By an odd coincidence, in her letters to Sarah, Anne did not use Lady Fitzharding’s real name, but instead gave her the sobriquet ‘Mrs Hill’. Understandably this later caused confusion, as historians assumed she was referring to Abigail Hill. However, an often overlooked annotation by Sarah on one of Anne’s letters discloses the real identity of ‘Mrs Hill’.
⁴⁵

Anne was no longer bothered by Sarah’s feelings for Lady Sunderland, regarding Lady Fitzharding as much more of a threat. Sarah made little effort to allay her anxieties. In 1691 she and Lady Fitzharding sat for a double portrait that showed them playing cards seated close together, an image of female intimacy that must have pained Anne greatly. On more than one occasion Anne’s jealousy caused her to flare up with Sarah, and she was then forced to apologise. After one such row she wrote, ‘I must confess Mrs Hill has heretofore made me more uneasy than you can imagine’, but added that she was now ‘ashamed and angry with myself that I have been so troublesome to my dear Lady Marlborough’. She continued contritely, ‘We have all our failings more or less and one of mine I must own is being a little hot sometimes’.
⁴⁶

To Anne’s delight, a little later in the year Sarah had a falling out with Lady Fitzharding, but the rift did not last long. The Princess wrote in agitation ‘I hope Mrs Freeman has no thoughts of going to the opera with Mrs Hill’, entreating that ‘for your own sake as well as poor Mrs Morley’s … have as little to do with that enchantress as ’tis possible’. She warned her friend not to be taken in by Lady Fitzharding’s ‘deceitful tears’, excusing her impertinence by reminding Sarah ‘what the song says: “to be jealous is the fault of every tender lover”’.
⁴⁷
None of this prevented Sarah from renewing her friendship with Lady Fitzharding, and it was not until the following year that Anne could reassure herself that ‘Mrs Hill’ was no longer a dangerous rival.

By the end of 1691 Anne had become so disenchanted with William and Mary that she was prepared to engage in outright disloyalty. Almost certainly she did so at the instigation of the Earl of Marlborough, and though in her memoirs Sarah insisted that her own support for the
Revolution never wavered, she too probably condoned what now occurred. Earlier in the year Lord Marlborough had made several secret attempts to renew contact with his former master King James. Many English politicians were doing likewise, motivated not so much by a genuine desire to see James restored, but in the hope of protecting themselves from his vengeance if he did regain his throne. At the time this seemed far from unlikely, for William and Mary’s regime remained highly unstable. While William had been in Ireland in 1690 the French had inflicted a serious naval defeat on a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet, and if they had followed this up by mounting an invasion of England, the kingdom might well have fallen. Since then King William had at least gained control of all Ireland, and in October 1691 the Treaty of Limerick had provided for the evacuation of all remaining Jacobite forces from there. However, Louis XIV was still providing active support for James, and had established a court in exile for him and Mary Beatrice at the palace of Saint-Germain, outside Paris. This remained the centre of innumerable intrigues aimed at overthrowing William and Mary

Although it was not uncommon for leading men in England to make secret approaches to Saint-Germain, Marlborough went further than most of his contemporaries. Besides writing twice to James in 1691, he had informed a Jacobite agent in England that regret for his part in James’s deposition had left him unable to ‘sleep or eat, in continual anguish’. James sent word back that since Marlborough ‘was the greatest of criminals, where he had the greatest obligations’, he could only hope to receive pardon by doing James some ‘extraordinary service’. In the autumn of 1691 Marlborough was in fact causing trouble for King William in Parliament, but this was not enough to earn James’s gratitude.
⁴⁸
Marlborough therefore had to find some other means of commending himself to his former master, and prevailing on Anne to send a penitent letter to her father provided a way of doing this.