Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (19 page)

Throughout August the King had been warned by the French that William of Orange was intending to invade, but he had remained in what the French Minister of the Marine described as ‘a surprising lethargy’. One reason for this was that James believed that William had left it too late in the year to mount such an operation. In addition, as he later acknowledged, ‘it was very long before I could believe that my nephew and son-in-law could be capable of so very ill an undertaking, and so began too late to provide against it’. Only towards the end of September, when despatches arrived from his ambassador in The Hague declaring categorically that the Prince would soon be on his way, did James wake up to the danger. On 23 September Anne told Clarendon that her father was ‘much disordered about the preparations which were making in Holland’, and by the following day James no longer had any doubt that an invasion was imminent.
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The week before, it had been announced that a new Parliament would meet in November, but on 28 September the writs for elections were recalled. On the same day James issued a proclamation warning his subjects of the impending arrival of an ‘armed force of foreigners and strangers’, intent on effecting ‘an absolute conquest of our kingdoms and the utter subduing and subjecting us … to a foreign power’. The proclamation noted sorrowfully that this enterprise was ‘promoted (as we understand, although it may seem almost incredible) by some of our subjects, being persons of … implacable malice and desperate designs’, who sought ‘to embroil this kingdom in blood and ruin’.
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As yet the King still clung to the illusion that his daughters remained loyal to him. Having persuaded himself that Mary had been ignorant of her husband’s intentions, he wrote to her on 28 September saying he hoped the news had surprised her as much as it had him. In Anne’s case, however, her father deemed such appeals superfluous. Although it was claimed in James’s authorised biography that James was aware she was disaffected because she had ‘altered her way of living with the King and Queen for some time’, this was written with the benefit of hindsight.
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During the crisis itself there is no indication that James had any idea she was contemplating treachery.

Everyone’s attention became fixated on the weather, for the Dutch fleet could not sail until the wind changed. In the meantime Clarendon urged Anne to prevail upon her father to bring back loyal Anglicans into government and to make concessions so that people no longer looked to William of Orange to remedy grievances. Both requests were rejected on the grounds that ‘she never spoke to the King on business’. Clarendon said her father would be touched ‘to see her Royal Highness so concerned for him; to which she replied he had no reason to doubt her concern’. The more her uncle ‘pressed her, the more reserved she was; and said she must dress herself, it was almost prayer time’.
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He raised the subject with her several more times prior to William’s landing, but always with the same lack of success.

On 22 October James made a new attempt to shore up his regime. A week earlier his son had been christened James Francis Edward at a Catholic ceremony, and the King now tried to dissipate all doubts about the child’s legitimacy. He summoned an extraordinary meeting of the Privy Council, and all those present at the birth of the Prince were called before it. The King explained that because he was aware that ‘very many do not think this son with which God hath blessed me to be mine’, he had decided to convene this tribunal. Numerous witnesses were then
heard, many of whom gave the most explicit evidence. The Protestant Lady Bellasyse, for example, testified that she ‘saw the child taken out of the bed with the navel string hanging to its belly’, while Dame Isabella Waldegrave ‘took the afterburthen and put it into a basin of water’. Anne was not to be present to hear any of this. Exploiting her father’s concern for her well-being, she told him that she feared miscarrying if she ventured out of her chamber, and accordingly the King excused her from attending. He told the council that his daughter would have been there but her health did not permit it, and he was ‘loth to hazard one child for the preservation of another’.
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When Clarendon visited his niece a day later, he found her treating the hearing as a cause for ribaldry. She teased her uncle for having ‘heard a great deal of fine discourse at council, and made herself very merry with that whole affair. She was dressing and all her women about her; many of whom put in their jests’. ‘Amazed at this’, Clarendon resolved to remonstrate with her in private, but over the next few days Anne avoided being on her own with him. When at last he taxed her about it, he was scarcely reassured by Anne’s remark that, ‘She must needs say the Queen’s behaviour during her being with child was very odd’. In public, however, she pretended that she had no worries on this score. When an official deputation presented her on 1 November with copies of the statements sworn before the council, she assured them, ‘My Lords, this was not necessary; for I have so much duty for the King that his word must be more to me than these depositions’.
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Prior to setting sail, William of Orange issued a manifesto, explaining why he had decided to invade. Entitled the
Declaration of Reasons for Appearing in Arms in the Kingdom of England
, this document recapitulated the ways in which James had ‘openly transgressed and annulled’ ‘the laws, liberties and customs’ of his realm. ‘To crown all’, there was ‘just and visible grounds of suspicion’ that ‘the pretended Prince of Wales was not born by the Queen’, and therefore William felt compelled to intervene. However, the Declaration insisted that William aimed at ‘nothing … but the preservation of the Protestant religion … and the securing the whole nation … their laws, rights and liberties’. He desired ‘to have a free and lawful Parliament assembled as soon as possible’, with authority not only to debate grievances but to mount an enquiry into the Prince of Wales’s birth.
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James at once rushed out a proclamation declaring that it was not only illegal to distribute this text but even to possess it. Anne, however, was exempted from the prohibition, for the King lent her his own copy.
She may have been comforted to find that it contained nothing to suggest that her father would lose his throne as a result of the invasion, but there is no way of knowing this.

When the wind at last turned favourable, William and his army set sail on 1 November, landing at Torbay in Devon four days later. He then moved on to Exeter, where he stayed for nearly a fortnight. James promptly ordered his army to go to Salisbury. John Churchill was promoted to be a Lieutenant General, in charge of a brigade, and it was rumoured that Prince George would be named the King’s ‘generalissimo’, though in fact he had decided to turn down any command. After James’s nephew Lord Cornbury defected to William on 14 November, the King’s general Lord Feversham entreated James to come to Salisbury ‘to keep the infection amongst his army from spreading’. Anne, however, was confident that Cornbury would soon be followed by other officers. When Clarendon talked to her of his distress at his son’s disloyalty, she told him that ‘people were so apprehensive of Popery that she believed many more of the army would do the same’.
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Evidently she was counting on James’s forces being so reduced by mass defections that he would have to seek a settlement, rather than deciding the issue on the battlefield.

At this stage, however, the King appeared determined to fight. Just before he left to join his army on 17 November he was petitioned by eighteen lords and bishops to summon a free Parliament to ‘prevent the effusion of blood’, but James said that this was impossible while a foreign army was in the country. ‘Having taken his adieu of the Queen and of the Princess Anne of Denmark’ he left London in warlike mood, proclaiming his intention ‘to go on directly to the enemy and to give him no quarter’.
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This was the last time Anne saw her father. George accompanied his father-in-law, though Anne knew, as James did not, that he was planning to go over to William when an opportunity presented itself. Anne stayed behind at the Cockpit, uncomfortably close to the Queen at Whitehall. Bishop Compton was also in London, and it had been arranged that he would provide the Princess with a refuge in the capital if the need arose.

The day after her father’s departure, Anne wrote to William, assuring him she desired ‘your good success in this so just an undertaking’. She explained that her husband was accompanying the King to Salisbury but intended ‘to go from there to you as soon as his friends thought it proper. I am not yet certain if I shall continue here or remove into the city: that
shall depend on the advice my friends will give me, but wherever I am I shall be ready to show you how much I am your humble servant’.
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Within days, however, Anne had been thrown into disarray by an unforeseen turn of events. After arriving at Salisbury the King had been afflicted by debilitating nosebleeds, and his spirits had sunk further on hearing that much of the north of England had risen up against him. On 22 November James decided to return to London with his army. He started on his journey the following day, but on the night of 23 November John Churchill defected, taking with him the Duke of Grafton and Colonel John Berkeley – although they were not accompanied by as many common soldiers as they had hoped. If James’s nerve had held, he still had a reasonable chance of beating William in the field, but he was dreadfully shaken by the desertion of key officers. He was particularly shocked by Churchill’s behaviour, having ‘raised him from the mud’.
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George had hoped to leave James’s camp with the other men, but he had to wait a while longer. Just as he was mounting his horse to ride towards William, James had invited him to share his coach for the homeward journey. Seated opposite his father-in-law as they jolted down muddy roads, George had to maintain a facade of loyalty for the rest of the day. Every time that news came that another officer had defected, he exclaimed in his execrable French, ‘Est-il possible!’ That evening he had supper with the King at Andover and ‘made it his business … to condemn those that were gone, and how little such people were to be trusted, and sure the Prince [of Orange] could put no confidence in such’. When the meal was over ‘Prince George waited on [James] in his chamber very late’. The King urged George to get some rest, but his son-in-law insisted that he would wait ‘till he saw the King in bed’. Touched by his kindness, James told him ‘he should not forget the respects he paid him’. Yet as soon as the King had retired, George hurried off to find his horse, and he and the Duke of Ormonde galloped westwards to join William. The King was not yet asleep when the news was brought to him.
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James wished it to be thought that he took the reverse calmly. His authorised biography states that though somewhat ‘troubled at the unnaturalness of the action’, he consoled himself ‘that the loss of a good trooper had been of greater consequence’. He even managed a grim quip, asking sardonically, ‘is est-il possible gone too?’ However, when the Danish envoy, who was in the royal camp at the time, informed Christian V what his brother had done, he reported ‘Your Majesty cannot imagine the King of England’s consternation at this news’.
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George was able to send a courier to London to tell his wife that he had made his move. For Anne the good news that George had escaped was cancelled out by her horror at hearing that the King was on his way to London, for she dreaded a confrontation with him above all else. Summoning Sarah Churchill to the Cockpit, she ‘declared that rather than see her father she would jump out at the window’.
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When the Queen had heard that John Churchill had abandoned the King, guards had been placed at the doors of Sarah’s lodgings, but their attitude was ‘very easy’, and they scarcely restricted her freedom of movement. On the evening of 25 November further instructions arrived from the King that Sarah and Mrs John Berkeley should be taken into custody but again nothing was done about this, possibly because Anne appealed to the Lord Chamberlain not to execute the order and he ‘suffered himself in complacence to be delayed by the Princess’. The upshot was that Sarah was able to pay a discreet visit to Bishop Compton at his house in Suffolk Street and an escape plan was devised. Further delay would have been disastrous, for after nightfall the Queen received another express from her husband, ordering her ‘to secure the Princess of Denmark’. Because it was so late ‘her Majesty out of her good nature only ordered a strict guard to be set about the Princess’s lodgings and she not to be disturbed till the morning’.
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It soon turned out that these measures were too lax. Anne’s stepmother had assumed she was already asleep, for she had been ‘in her ordinary way laid abed’ at the usual time. Yet once all her other servants had left Anne, Sarah and Mrs Berkeley ‘came privately to her’. Anne dressed hastily, and at one in the morning the three women made a stealthy exit through a little room where Anne usually sat on her close stool. This led to some ‘backstairs by which the necessary woman uses to go in and out for the cleaning’. Anne herself had never gone down this way before, and even at this moment of extreme tension could not help noticing that the walls were very shabby. One of the first things she did on reaching safety was to send directions to Sir Benjamin Bathurst that they should be repainted.
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Once the little party reached the street, they found Bishop Compton waiting for them in a coach. Watched by a dozy sentry, who did not think to challenge them, they climbed aboard and were driven to the house of Compton’s nephew Lord Dorset in Aldersgate Street. Even there, however, Anne did not feel safe. Still in a panic about her father’s imminent return, she was desperate to leave London, but realised that if she tried to reach William and her husband in the west she ran the risk of
being intercepted by royal troops. Accordingly it was decided that she should go north, where Compton had a good network of contacts. On the morning of 26 November the Bishop and the three ladies set off by coach, stopping that night at Dorset’s country seat, Copt Hall in Essex. At Hitchin in Hertfordshire they sat ‘taking some refreshment’ in a brewery cart while their horses were changed, and Sarah was heard joking that they were fortunate that they were not being driven in it to execution. Having resolved to head for Nottingham, where William’s supporter Lord Devonshire had seized control a week earlier, they continued on their journey via Castle Ashby, Market Harborough, and Leicester. At Nottingham, where Anne’s arrival was eagerly awaited, the citizens were alarmed by a false report ‘that two thousand of the King’s dragoons were in close pursuit to bring her back prisoner to London’. On 2 December they sallied forth to rescue her, but had not advanced far when they met the Princess sitting unharmed in her coach with Sarah and Mrs Berkeley. Anne was then ‘conducted into Nottingham through the acclamations of the people’.
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