Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (100 page)

Anne insisted she had every respect for the rights of her subjects but that it was only reasonable ‘that I should desire to enjoy mine too’.
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During her reign the necessity of financing a long and expensive war placed the executive at a disadvantage when bargaining for parliamentary majorities, and the tendency of men to band together to implement their political programme, irrespective of the ruler’s wishes, likewise threatened Anne’s sovereign rights. It was a notable achievement that despite these constraints, her reign did not see a major shift in the way the constitution was balanced, and the monarchy’s powers were handed to her successor intact.

A German observer commented that despite the fact that Anne modelled herself on Queen Elizabeth, the latter ‘would never have let France off so cheaply and dishonourably’ when negotiating peace. It is true that after the Treaty of Utrecht was concluded Louis XIV told his plenipotentiaries, ‘In many points you have surpassed my wildest hopes’, and perhaps if Britain had driven a harder bargain, France would have offered greater concessions, such as including Lille among the Barrier fortresses. Yet as
Oxford pointed out when facing impeachment in 1715, ‘That the nation wanted a peace, nobody will deny’. With France offering terms that Bolingbroke considered ‘not worth the life of one common soldier to refuse’, the Queen, Oxford contended, was ‘constrained in compassion to her people to hearken’ to these overtures, for while the war had ‘raised the glory of her arms … she could not think this a sufficient recompense for the increasing miseries of her people’. He saw nothing to be ashamed of in the agreement eventually hammered out, demanding in 1715 ‘whether the balance of power in Europe be not now upon a better foot than it has been for an hundred years past?’
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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