Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (42 page)

The Queen’s letters to foreign princes or allied heads of state were usually drafted by Godolphin or one of the Secretaries, but when copying them out in her own hand she amended them as she considered appropriate. The majority of her dealings with foreign ambassadors consisted of formal audiences where they presented their credentials or took their leave when going home, but occasionally she was required to have more meaningful discussions which took place in private. According to the Duchess of Marlborough, performing such a task was beyond the Queen’s abilities. Sarah claimed that because Anne knew herself to be incapable of impromptu exchanges, she would ask her advisers to ‘make … speeches’ for her to deliver, ‘getting them by heart’ before embarking on a conversation. ‘In weightier matters she never spoke but in a road, and had a certain knack of sticking to what had been dictated to her’, Sarah asserted, maintaining that the Queen was left utterly at a loss if
things did not go as scripted. Should ‘you happen to speak of a thing that she has not had her lesson upon’, so the Duchess said, the Queen was reduced to mumbling incoherently, and there were allegedly ‘many occasions’ when, not knowing what to say, Anne would ‘move only her lips and make as if she said something when in truth no words were uttered’. Clearly it was true that before important meetings with foreign envoys Anne did obtain guidelines from her ministers on how to proceed. After seeing the States General’s representative, Paul Buys, in October 1711 with regard to commencing peace negotiations with France, the Queen informed her Treasurer, Lord Oxford, ‘I answered him in those words you proposed’. Yet it was hardly a sign of stupidity to be well-briefed and prepared for such encounters, and Buys was impressed by the way she handled herself on this occasion.
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Despite Sarah’s strictures, there is nothing to suggest that during such meetings with foreign ministers, she did not acquit herself satisfactorily if something was put to her that had not been anticipated.

Unlike her predecessor, who had regularly attended Treasury meetings when in England, Anne was not equipped to be her own finance minister. Nevertheless, early in her reign she did sometimes go to the Treasury when applications for payment and petitions from private individuals were under consideration. The Duchess of Marlborough mocked the Queen for deluding herself that ‘her presence there was so useful as to make her sit with them as she did at first some hours in a day’, and Anne herself concluded after a time that it was more sensible to leave all such matters in Godolphin’s hands. However, after the Treasury was put in commission in the summer of 1710, she took to attending meetings once more, being concerned at the parlous state of the national finances. She begged the board to be ‘good husbands for the public in the first place and for her Civil List in the second place and that they did endeavour to get her out of debt (especially to her poor servants) as fast as they possibly can’. As a result, measures were taken to reform the way figures for Civil List expenditure were compiled but, after this minor achievement, Anne absented herself from Treasury meetings for the last four years of her reign.
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The Queen took great care in the exercise of her royal prerogative of mercy. She had the right to pardon those sentenced to death, and to help her make the correct decisions the judges were required to ‘attend [on her] and give an account of their circuits’ when they had completed their tours of assize. They were also sometimes called upon to provide her
with written information. Three weeks after Anne’s accession, Judge Hatsell was asked to furnish details regarding the case of Philip Devon, condemned to death at the last Surrey Assizes. Having learned that Devon was aged only seventeen, and had previously been a good servant, Secretary Hedges instructed Judge Hatsell to describe ‘how the fact appeared to you on the trial, that the Queen may consider the question of pardon’. Four months later the High Sheriff of Wiltshire was ordered to defer the execution of William Hull until the judges had returned to London and reported whether, as the Queen had been led to understand, he was deserving of mercy.
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The Queen was often prompted to intervene after receiving petitions from the families of condemned persons, who represented their plight in the most harrowing terms. In March 1702 Anne asked for more information about John Banfill, a young man reportedly convicted on slender evidence, and whose wife and small children ‘must perish’ if his execution went ahead. On another occasion, the Queen told Hedges that a petition on behalf of a married man with six children ‘makes me think it a case of compassion’, and she asked him to make the necessary enquiries. Evidently it was felt in some quarters that Anne was too soft-hearted, for at one point she wrote to Hedges, ‘I have been so often found fault with for interposing in the case of deserters that I am almost afraid to do it; but the enclosed paper seems to me so moving that I can’t help sending it to you’. Yet if desertion was held to merit severe punishment, the necessity to keep the forces manned offered a lifeline to some offenders, who obtained mercy by promising to enlist in the army or navy if their lives were spared.
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Although the Queen was compassionate by nature, an appeal for clemency was only granted after careful consideration. In December 1702 the Earl of Nottingham noted that while willing to reprieve James Wilson, a boy ‘not twelve years old … condemned for cutting and stealing a couple of bags from off a horse in Piccadilly … the Queen leaves Mary Jones to the ordinary course of justice’. After discussing the case of Evan Evans and his brother William with the judge that tried them in 1706, Anne was ‘pleased to leave them to execution, for they are very notorious highwaymen and so have been for many years’. In March 1713 she was equally firm with regard to Richard Noble, a well-connected man who had run through his mistress’s husband with a sword. She talked to her physician Sir David Hamilton of ‘her unwillingness to save Mr [Noble], because it was so barbarous a thing’.
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Much of Anne’s time was taken up by concerns relating to Church patronage. In the early years of the previous reign, Queen Mary, guided by the Earl of Nottingham, had largely overseen senior ecclesiastical appointments, but after her death Episcopal preferment was entrusted to a commission. Anne took such matters back into her own hands, much to the alarm of Thomas Tenison, who had been Archbishop of Canterbury since 1694. A martyr to the gout, Tenison was a hulking man ‘with brawny sinews and … shoulders large’, who was decidedly Low Church in outlook. Fearful that Anne would alter the balance of the Episcopal bench by promoting High Churchmen who voted with the Tories in the Lords, he tried to dissuade her from exercising her right to appoint bishops, but the Queen firmly rejected his advice. She informed Tenison that while it was understandable that William, as a foreigner, had felt obliged to leave the choice of bishops to a commission, ‘she was English, and having set herself to know the clergy by studying them for twenty years, she would dispense benefices herself to those she knew to be most worthy’. The Archbishop persisted, warning her that she would find it a weighty responsibility, but the Queen told him serenely ‘he mustn’t worry himself about it’.
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The Queen in fact rarely welcomed advice from Tenison, observing darkly a few years later that, ‘as all the world knows’, he was ‘governed by [the Whigs]’. She far preferred the Archbishop of York, John Sharp, who also had been given his office in the last reign but was much more sympathetic to the Tories than his fellow Metropolitan. A distinguished figure whose ‘eyes flamed very remarkably at public prayers’ and who ‘had a certain vehemence in preaching’, Sharp was ‘pitched upon by the Queen herself for her counsellor and favourite among the clergy’. When informing Sharp that Anne wanted him to preach her Coronation sermon, the Earl of Nottingham declared, ‘I have good reason to believe that your Grace is more in her Majesty’s favour and esteem than any of your order’, and the Queen herself would tell Sarah that he was the only bishop she truly respected. She described Sharp as ‘a very reasonable as well as a good man’ but others regarded him as a dangerous political activist. According to the Whig, Burnet, Sharp was ‘an ill instrument and set himself at the head of the [High Church] party’; another Whig clergyman blamed him for encouraging the excesses of the lower clergy by putting ‘himself at their head as it were in direct opposition to his old friend Dr Tenison’.
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In late 1702 Sharp was appointed the Queen’s Almoner after the former incumbent, the Whig Bishop of Worcester, was dismissed
following complaints in the House of Commons that he had campaigned against a Tory MP seeking election. Because he had to discuss business matters relating to her charitable donations, Sharp ‘had now free access at all times to the Queen … The clergy crowed about him as the great favourite at court’. Anne used their meetings to consult him for spiritual advice, and he prided himself on being her ‘confessor’. On one occasion he noted in his diary, ‘I had a great deal of talk with her about the preparation for receiving the sacrament’; at another time they had a discussion on the difference ‘between wilful sins and sins of infirmity and … ignorance’. While such matters were indisputably part of his province, the Queen also occasionally permitted him to express his views on political developments. She informed him beforehand when she made changes to her ministry, and Sharp did not always hide his disapproval, using ‘hard words [such] as “Poor Queen! That he truly pitied her”’. According to Sharp’s son and biographer, ‘Her Majesty would then sometimes vindicate her proceedings, and at others look grave and be silent’.
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Sharp was particularly influential when it came to guiding the Queen in her choice of bishops. His son claimed that Anne rarely made a decision on Episcopal appointments ‘without his advice and, generally speaking, consent first obtained’. He did not always attain his desires, as sometimes ministers intervened to override his suggestions. However, Sharp had ‘more success [with the Queen] than any one man in her reign, though not so much as he might have expected could she always have followed her own judgement or inclination’.
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The Queen also concerned herself in lesser ecclesiastical appointments. In 1705 Archbishop Tenison was upset when she took back into her own hands the distribution of livings hitherto awarded under the Lord Keeper’s jurisdiction. The following year the Duchess of Marlborough urged the Queen to surrender back to the Lord Keeper his traditional rights, but Anne told her firmly, ‘I think the Crown can never have too many livings at its disposal; and therefore though there may be some trouble in it, it is a power I can never think reasonable to part with’. Once she realised the extent of Sarah’s Low Church sympathies, the Queen became wary of listening to her recommendations about ecclesiastical preferment, and Sarah admitted she had ‘less opinion of my solicitations’ in this area than any other. This did not prevent the Duchess approaching Anne in 1704 to ask that her protégé Benjamin Hoadly be awarded a desirable benefice. It was a controversial request in view of the fact that Hoadly was a rancorous character of such radical views that one contemporary described him as ‘a republican priest’. Anne wrote to
Sarah, ‘as to the living you writ about, you may easily imagine I will do anything you desire but intending to be always very careful in disposing anything of this nature I hope you will not take it ill … if I may get the Archbishop of York to inform himself if [the gentleman] be proper for it’. Hardly surprisingly, Sharp saw to it that the place in question went to another applicant.
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Anne revived the practice of touching to cure scrofula (also known as ‘the King’s evil’), a marvellous power that English hereditary monarchs supposedly derived from Edward the Confessor. Her father and uncle had both touched those afflicted with this tubercular infection of the lymph nodes, which caused swellings in the neck and other debilitating symptoms such as fever and malaise. According to one estimate, Charles II touched about 100,000 sufferers in the course of his reign, but William III had discontinued the practice, much to the annoyance of many of his subjects. In October 1702 a foreign diplomat noted that ‘the late King did himself great harm among the people by not taking on the custom of his ancestors, treating it as a superstition’. When Anne began holding ceremonies to touch the sick, a few individuals were dismayed, complaining that the practice was based on ‘nothing … but monkery and miracle’, but in general the decision was very popular. The Tories in particular were delighted that the Queen had resumed an activity that could be interpreted ‘as a visible proof’ of her hereditary right.
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Special ceremonies were regularly held at which the Queen laid hands on sufferers, and then concluded the rite by giving each person brought before her a piece of ‘healing gold’ strung on a white ribbon. The expense entailed was considerable. In June 1707 alone the Privy Purse accounts record an outlay of £688 17
s
. 6
d
. on 1,670 pieces of gold. When Anne was in London, the ceremony usually took place in the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, which, as she told the Duchess of Marlborough, suited her on account of it ‘being a very cool room, and the doing it there keeps my own house sweet and free from crowds’. ‘Infirm persons, one by one … [were] presented unto the Queen upon their knees’ while her chaplain knelt at her side intoning blessings. Whereas past monarchs had been called upon to wash the affected part, and Queen Elizabeth had enthusiastically applied her ‘exquisite hands’ to the diseased, ‘pressing their sores and ulcers … not merely touching them with her finger tips’, Anne confined herself to a brief stroking of their necks.
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