Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (9 page)

It could be assumed that George would regard marriage to the English King’s niece as an enticing prospect. The French ambassador to England, Barrillon, played Cupid by putting George’s name forward as a husband for Anne in February 1683. The King received the idea warmly, and James too was enthusiastic, as this would undermine the Prince of Orange’s position in England. In March Barrillon reported that the English were ‘waiting impatiently’ for the Danes to make overtures on George’s behalf, and within a few weeks Charles II’s Secretary of State, the Earl of Sunderland, was discussing terms with the Danish envoy, the Sieur de Lente. By the end of April matters were far enough advanced for the Danes to be told that George’s lack of wealth was not a problem, as Anne would be provided with money for his upkeep. The only hitch came when the Sieur de Lente sounded out Barrillon as to whether the King could be prevailed upon to alter the succession in George’s favour by disqualifying William of Orange from inheriting the crown. Barrillon replied that at the present juncture the King was doing everything possible to preserve intact the hereditary succession, so it would be most inopportune to try and modify it in this way.
¹²⁰

On 3 May the Danes made a formal proposal, which was ‘very well received’. Later that day it was publicly announced that the King ‘had admitted of a proposal of marriage between Prince George and his niece, for which purpose he was coming over’. Until this point even the majority of the Council had been kept in ignorance of the negotiations, for fear they would oppose the match. A portrait of Anne was sent to Denmark for George to inspect prior to setting out, and possibly Anne was shown a painting of George too. Even if she had not liked what she saw, there was little she could have done, for when it came to marriage a princess could not realistically expect to have any account taken of her preferences. In one respect, however, Anne was fortunate. It was agreed that George would ‘live and keep his court in England’, freeing Anne from the necessity of starting life anew in a foreign country.
¹²¹

It was settled that Anne and George would receive an annual income of £20,000, comprising £10,000 a year from the King and the remainder from her father. This was to be supplemented by George’s own revenues, which derived from lands confiscated from the Duke of Holstein and conferred on him at the end of the last war between Denmark and Sweden. The income was estimated at £15,000, but rarely yielded so much in practice. As a wedding present the King also conferred on his niece the grant of the Cockpit lodgings at Whitehall, ensuring that she and her new husband were comfortably accommodated.
¹²²

The news of Anne’s forthcoming marriage was not universally well received. Some people expressed concern that George was a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist, but, according to Gilbert Burnet, the main reason the marriage ‘did not at all please the nation’ was that ‘we knew that the proposition came from France’. The French, meanwhile, congratulated themselves on having arranged a match designed ‘to imbue the Prince of Orange with bitter distress and to put a curb on the Dutch’.
¹²³

As expected, Prince William of Orange was duly ‘filled with consternation’ when his father-in-law informed him that the Danish proposal had been accepted. Quite apart from the unfavourable political implications, he knew Prince George and considered him a dolt, and had no desire to have him as a brother-in-law. William at once requested permission to come to England, but since it was clear that his object was to avert the marriage, he was told that a visit would not be convenient at this point. William had to settle for writing to his uncle Charles, warning of the perils of letting French power go unchecked, but the King felt free to ignore this. Charles was equally unimpressed when he was informed that William had been enraged to learn that as the son of a king, Prince George would take precedence over him at the English court. William was told there could be no question of modifying the rules in his favour, whereupon his emissary declared that he would never come to England while George was there.
¹²⁴

Some people concluded that Louis XIV’s whole object in arranging this marriage was to match Anne with a prince who would not ‘be able ever to prejudice him or strengthen the Protestant interest’. However, as the Duke of Ormonde pointed out, France and Denmark would not necessarily remain allies forever. In his view it was undeniably ‘time the lady should be married and … fit she should have a Protestant, and where to find one so readily, they that mislike this match cannot tell’. And indeed, in time Prince George grew ‘strongly opposed’ to the power of France. After Charles II’s death he even criticised the late King for having been too much in pocket of Louis XIV.
¹²⁵

Having been urged by King Charles to come to England without delay, George set out as soon as the terms of the marriage contract had been outlined to him, arriving on 19 July. He found England in a state of alert, for a ‘horrid conspiracy’ had recently been thwarted. Various notables had planned to stage risings in different parts of the country, while a subset of extremists had actually proposed to assassinate the King. Consequently the atmosphere at court was somewhat strained, and ‘his majesty very melancholic and not stirring without redoubled guards’.
On 13 July Lord Russell had been tried and found guilty of treason, and another suspect, Lord Essex, had committed suicide in the Tower. The day after Prince George’s arrival in England several minor figures in the plot were executed, and Lord Russell’s black-draped scaffold was being constructed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, ready for his execution on 21 July.
¹²⁶
It hardly formed the ideal backdrop to a royal wedding celebration.

After landing Prince George was taken to meet the King, the Duke of York and their respective wives. ‘From thence he waited on the Lady Anne’ at St James’s Palace where he ‘saluted her cheek’ with a kiss. One observer declared that the ‘handsome fresh coloured young prince’ made a good impression on all he encountered. ‘I think nobody could please better and more universally in one afternoon than he hath done’ declared an enthusiast, and another approving report described George as ‘a very comely person, fair hair, a few pock holes in his visage, but of very decent and graceful behaviour’. Others were more guarded. John Evelyn summed him up as having ‘the Danish countenance, blond, a young gentleman of few words, spake French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy’. The French ambassador, who should have been basking in his diplomatic triumph, was very sparing in his praise. ‘His person has nothing shocking about it, he appears sensible and reserved’, was his initial tepid comment. A little later he added that George struck people as ‘neither good nor bad, but he is a bit fat’.
¹²⁷

On 23 July Anne and George went to the theatre and sat in one box together. Over the next few days they got to know one another better, with Anne informing Frances Apsley ‘the Prince stays with me every day from dinner to prayers’. After prayers, they would see one another again until the time came for Anne to go to Whitehall to play cards. On the strength of this brief acquaintance Anne was able to form a positive opinion of her prospective bridegroom, and the day before the wedding Frances Apsley wrote to Mary to let her know. Mary replied ‘You may believe ’twas no small joy to me to hear she liked him and I hope she will do so every day more and more, for else I am sure she can’t love him, and without that ’tis impossible to be happy’.
¹²⁸

The wedding took place on 28 July 1683 at St James’s. It was a muted affair, as the King had said ‘he did not want any pomp and ceremony’. The service was performed by Bishop Compton, and was attended only by Anne’s immediate family. Afterwards the King and Queen were guests of honour at the wedding supper, and stayed at St James’s till the couple were bedded. It is not recorded if Charles showed the same exuberance as he had on William and Mary’s wedding night, when he had drawn the
bed curtains with a lusty cry of ‘Now nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’
¹²⁹

Almost immediately the royal family left London for their summer holidays, and the newlyweds accompanied them to Windsor. After a time they moved on to Winchester, where the King was planning to build a great palace. As Queen, Anne had hopes of bringing this project to conclusion, but it was never finished. In Hampshire she and George had a bucolic honeymoon, during which Anne enjoyed buck and hare hunting.
¹³⁰
Afterwards, the court continued on a westward progress, stopping to see Salisbury Cathedral and Wilton. They then sailed along a stretch of the South coast on the royal yacht before returning to London via Winchester.

Back in the capital, Anne and George moved into the suite of rooms allocated them at the Cockpit in Whitehall. This was part of a complex of buildings situated on the western side of King Street, spanned by Whitehall Palace. As its name suggested, Henry VIII had built it as an arena for cock fights, but it had long since been converted into lodgings for favoured courtiers. It was a spacious and luxurious apartment, measuring 210 feet in length and 140 feet at its widest part, and overlooked St James’s Park. The King had paid £6,500 to buy back the lease from its most recent occupant, and then conferred it in perpetuity on ‘Lady Anne … and … her heirs male’ in return for a peppercorn rent of 6
s
. 8
d
.
¹³¹

As Anne and George settled down to married life together, it soon became apparent that they were remarkably compatible. With the sole exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, everyone agreed that they were an exceptionally devoted couple. Twenty-five years later it was said at George’s funeral, ‘Never did a happier pair come together’. Anne was described as ‘an extraordinarily tender and affectionate wife’ while George ‘lived in all respects the happiest with his princess that was possible’. George was so notable for his marital fidelity, ‘a virtue … not often to be found in courts in these degenerate and licentious ages’, that it was said that envy itself would ‘bear witness to the chastity and entire love of this most happy pair’. He and Anne had an admirable ‘conformity of humour, preferring privacy and a retired life to high society and grand entertainments’. They were both (as Anne herself put it) ‘poor in words’, but with each other they were completely at ease. At a time when some aristocratic husbands and wives led virtually separate existences Anne and George were unusual for their companionable way of life. One observer noted ‘The Prince and she use to spend extraordinary much
time together in conversation daily, scarce any occurrent can cause an intermission’.
¹³²

George was an amiable and undemanding man. ‘Blessed from heaven with … a mild and sweet temper’, he was ‘mighty easy to all his servants’ and invariably ‘affable and kind in … his addresses’. At a time when men were entitled to act as domestic tyrants, he was a particularly easy-going husband, permitting himself, in the opinion of some people, to be ‘entirely governed’ by his wife. His conciliatory disposition was so well known that when Anne and her sister Mary fell out after the Revolution, Sophia of Hanover had no doubt that George bore no responsibility for the rift. Only the Duchess of Marlborough stuck a discordant note, alleging that Anne loved the Prince less than commonly supposed, and that he had a spiteful side. According to her ‘His great employment, when he was not engaged in play, was to stand upon a stair head or at a window and make ill natured remarks upon all that passed by. And this became so remarkable that the Princess was often known to be uneasy at the figure his highness made whilst he was entertaining himself with so princely an amusement’.
¹³³

George came to look on England as ‘my native country … by the most endearing tie become so’, and developed into ‘so hardy an Englishman that it was visible to all who were about him’. He acquired a reputation for being ‘the most indolent of all mankind’, but he did enjoy country sports such as hunting and shooting. Unfortunately he was not active enough to counter his tendency to plumpness. On his arrival Charles had advised him ‘Walk with me, hunt with my brother and do justice to my niece and you will not be fat’, but though Anne’s numerous pregnancies show that George conscientiously carried out the last injunction, this did not prevent him becoming alarmingly overweight.
¹³⁴

One reason for this was that he was a heavy drinker, even for the time. During Anne’s reign he was summarised as a man who was ‘very fat, loves news, his bottle and the Queen’. His prodigious intake of alcohol does not seem to have soured his temper, but neither did it make him particularly convivial. The Duchess of Marlborough stated that Charles II had hoped to ‘discover of what he was made, in the way of drinking; but declared upon the experiment that he could compare him to nothing but a great jar or vessel, standing still and receiving unmoved and undisturbed so much liquor whenever it came to its turn’. Lord Dartmouth recorded a similar anecdote of George, writing that King Charles had told his father ‘he had tried him, drunk and sober, but “God’s fish! There was nothing in him”’. It would have wounded George had he heard this, for he admired Charles as a shrewd politician. After his death he often
approvingly quoted the late King’s maxims, fortunately without realising that he himself was the subject of one of Charles’s most celebrated aphorisms.
¹³⁵

Prior to George’s coming to England, Charles had told some courtiers that ‘on enquiry he appeared to be … a quiet man, which was a very good thing in a young man’. George certainly appreciated a restful existence. Soon after his arrival he wrote fretfully that the court would soon be on the move, whereas ‘sitting still all summer … was the height of my ambition. God send me a quiet life somewhere, for I shall not be long able to bear this perpetual motion’. His inertia led people to dismiss him as dull, stupid, and lazy, though possibly he was underestimated because he never acquired a perfect grasp of English. Bishop Burnet noted that George ‘knew much more than he could well express; for he spoke acquired languages ill and ungracefully’. Not everyone dismissed his intellect as negligible: a German diplomat who encountered him shortly before Anne’s accession reported that George had been lucid when discussing state affairs, ‘about which he appeared to me to be very knowledgeable’. He added that although George did not meddle in politics ‘he gave me to understand that he was very particularly informed of all that happened and very curious to know everything about the disputes between the two parties’. A French ambassador also paid tribute to George in 1686, noting that although he appeared ‘ponderous … he has very good sense’.
¹³⁶
Anne herself was always furious if people were dismissive of her husband and had a touching faith in his abilities.