Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (20 page)

That night Lord Devonshire gave a banquet for the Princess. ‘All the noblemen and the other persons of distinction then in arms had the honour to sup at her royal highness’s table’. Anne was ‘very well pleased’ with her reception, and ‘seemed wonderful pleasant and cheerful’.
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Hearing that Anne was in town, large numbers of local gentry and nobility arrived there, often bringing armed men with them. However, when Anne tried to enlist their support for the movement against James, she sometimes encountered difficulties. For example, the Earl of Chesterfield turned down her request that he subscribe to the ‘Association’, a document whose signatories pledged to exact retribution on all Catholics if William came to any harm. Since James himself theoretically could fall victim to such vengeance, Chesterfield refused, to Anne’s visible displeasure. The Earl noted wryly, ‘I have made my court very ill; but I have the satisfaction of having acted according to my conscience’.
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On 8 December Bishop Compton received orders from William, instructing him to bring the Princess to meet him and her husband at Oxford. Accompanied by about 1,500 horsemen and two companies of foot soldiers, Anne set off the following day. One young man in her train recalled, ‘Through every town we passed the people came out … with such rural and rusty weapons as they had, to meet us in acclamations of welcome and good wishes’. The Princess spent two nights at Leicester before passing through Coventry, Warwick, and Banbury. At Warwick on
12 December she heard the momentous news that her father had fled the country and that his army had been disbanded. Her uncle Clarendon was pained to hear that ‘she seemed not at all moved, but called for cards and was as merry as she used to be’. Once she was back in London, Clarendon took her to task for this, but his niece told him sulkily that she had seen no reason to disrupt her usual routine as ‘she never loved to do anything that looked like an affected constraint’. The Princess was fortunate that Clarendon made no rejoinder, for he had recently become aware that Anne had known herself not to be pregnant when she had told her father that she could not attend the council meeting on 22 October. The discovery had profoundly shocked him, prompting him to declare ‘Good God! Nothing but lying and dissimulation in the world!’ Now he could, with justice, have retorted that Anne was scarcely entitled to maintain that she despised all forms of pretence.
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The Princess was still in high spirits when she ‘made a splendid entry’ into Oxford on 15 December. The Bishop of London featured prominently in her impressive cavalcade, ‘riding in a purple cloak, martial habit, pistols before him and his sword drawn’, a ‘strange appearance’ that one observer considered ‘not conformable to … a Christian bishop’. George had already been in Oxford for a day or two, and Anne was reunited with him in Christchurch quadrangle. The couple greeted each other ‘with all possible demonstrations of love and affection’ and that evening they were ‘entertained by the university at a cost of £1,000 at the least’.
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After resting for a couple of days Anne and George moved on towards London. By the time they re-entered the capital on 19 December, Anne perhaps realised she had another cause to congratulate herself. Her earlier pretence that she was pregnant had been a cynical ploy. However, she had actually conceived around the end of October, and despite the stress and exertion of her flight, had not miscarried.

Anne had been away from London for less than a month, but much had happened during that time. On the morning of 26 November it had emerged that she was missing when her woman of the bedchamber Mrs Danvers went to wake her at eight o’clock. ‘Receiving no answer to her call, she opened the bed [curtains] and found the Princess gone’. Pandemonium ensued: her ladies assumed she had been abducted, and some even began shrieking ‘the Princess was murdered by the priests’. When the news was carried to the Queen, she too ‘screamed out as if she had been mad’.
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The truth only started to appear when the sentry on
night duty was questioned and revealed the mysterious goings on he had seen outside the palace, but it was some time before Anne’s whereabouts could be established.

Anne’s escape caused a sensation. According to one observer ‘The Papists reckon the loss of the Princess as great as that of the army’. For the King, who arrived back in London that afternoon, it was a crushing personal blow. He was already emotionally shattered at being abandoned by men he had trusted, but this was ‘nothing in comparison of the Princess’s withdrawing herself’. The shock was the greater because, even though Prince George had already left him, he had been confident his daughter would not budge from Whitehall for fear of jeopardising her pregnancy. The news exacerbated ‘those most dreadful anguishes of spirit’ which already burdened him. Bursting into tears, he uttered the piteous cry, ‘God help me! My own children have forsaken me!’ One court lady formed the impression that James was ‘so … afflicted after the Princess Anne went away, that it disordered his understanding’, and others too talked of the King looking physically ill and appearing almost deranged over the next few days.
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Two days after Anne’s flight a letter from her to the Queen was published in the
London Gazette
. In this deeply insincere document, Anne explained that when ‘the surprising news of the Prince’s being gone’ had arrived, she had spontaneously decided to absent herself ‘to avoid the King’s displeasures, which I am not able to bear’. ‘Never was anyone in such an unhappy condition, so divided between duty and affection to a father and a husband’, she lamented, before blaming ‘the violent counsels of the priests’ for having caused such trouble. She declared that she would not return until she heard ‘the happy news of a reconcilement’, but expressed confidence that a settlement satisfactory to all could be reached. ‘I am fully persuaded that the Prince of Orange designs the King’s safety and preservation and hope all things may be composed without more bloodshed by the calling a Parliament’. She concluded, ‘God grant a happy end to these troubles, that the King’s reign may be prosperous, and that I may shortly meet you in perfect peace and safety; till when, let me beg of you to continue the same favourable opinion that you have hitherto had of your most obedient daughter and servant’.
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On 27 November the shattered King met with a group of about forty bishops and peers. They persuaded him to send commissioners to negotiate with William – who was now advancing with his army – and to summon a new Parliament to sit in January. However, although James
did as they bid, he told the French ambassador that he intended that his wife and child should flee abroad, and when they were safe he would follow them. The baby Prince had been taken to Portsmouth earlier in the month and James now ordered the Earl of Dartmouth to send him to France. When Dartmouth refused, the King brought the child back to London and started making alternative travel arrangements.

The King’s commissioners met with the Prince of Orange at Hungerford on 8 December, and the following day William named his terms for a truce. All Catholics were to be dismissed from government and an amnesty granted to those who had supported William. Parliament must be summoned, and the Prince of Orange would be allowed to come to London while it sat. In the meantime the expenses of his army must be met out of the public revenue.

If James had been willing to accept these terms, he might have retained his throne. It was inevitable that Parliament would demand that the Prince of Wales be brought up as a Protestant but, if the King had swallowed this, there was a chance that his son would be recognised as his heir. William’s more ardent supporters were certainly appalled that he could conceive of a settlement that left the baby’s rights intact.

Late on the night of 9 December the Queen and her child slipped unseen out of the palace and were in France within twenty-four hours. The following afternoon James heard from his commissioners, but he still remained determined to follow the Queen. Realising what the King had in mind, the Earl of Ailesbury begged him to reconsider, but James would not listen. He told the Earl, ‘If I should go, who can wonder after the treatment I have found?’ naming his daughter’s desertion as a key factor in his thinking. Undeterred, Ailesbury urged the King to march with a body of horse to Nottingham. He argued that ‘Your daughter will receive you or she will not. If the latter, and that she retires perhaps towards Oxford, all will cry out on her; if she doth stay to receive your Majesty, you will be able to treat honourably with the Prince of Orange’.
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It was fortunate for Anne that the King rejected this advice, so she was never given this dilemma.

Towards midnight on 10 December James left the palace and headed for Kent, where a boat was waiting for him. However, before the ship set sail, it was boarded by a party of local fishermen, who mistook James for a Catholic priest and carried him off as their prisoner to the Queen’s Head inn at Faversham. Meanwhile in James’s absence London had threatened to degenerate into anarchy, with anti-Catholic riots resulting in the destruction of much valuable property. When a committee of peers
and bishops learned on 13 December that James was in custody they resolved to bring him back to the capital, even though the Common Council of London had recently invited William of Orange there as well. On 16 December James had been much heartened to be acclaimed by the crowds as he drove back into London and he now looked forward to meeting William at ‘a personal conference to settle the distracted nation’.
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By now, however, William had decided it was too late for an arrangement of that kind. He had been delighted to hear that James had fled, and had at once decided to go to London, rather than meeting with Anne at Oxford. While on his way he was appalled when it emerged that James had been detained in Kent, and he was still more upset by the King’s return to London. At Windsor William had a conference with his supporters. He rejected advice from extremists to imprison James in the Tower or remove him to Holland, saying that Mary ‘would never bear it’, but he resolved to send his father-in-law out of London. Accordingly soldiers were despatched to Whitehall, where James was sleeping, and the King was informed that William expected him to leave the next day. On the morning of 18 December the King set off for Rochester, Kent, protesting bitterly at being ‘chased away from his own house by the Prince of Orange’. That afternoon William entered London, accompanied by a large number of cavalry, and took up residence at St James’s Palace ‘in extraordinary great grandeur’.
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Anne and George returned from Oxford the following day, and William promptly ‘called to see them at the Cockpit’. By now some people were disquieted by the way the King had been treated, calling his eviction a ‘gross violation’. Burnet, who had come over from Holland with the Prince as his chaplain, noted in concern that ‘compassion has begun to work’ but Anne, for one, appeared proof against this emotion. One report even claimed she went to the theatre that evening, bedecked in orange ribbons.
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For the moment, no one could tell how the situation would be resolved. The deadlock was broken by the King. As he explained to Lord Ailesbury, he was convinced that if he remained in England he would be imprisoned in the Tower ‘and no King ever went out of that place but to his grave’.
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Since William had seen to it that his father-in-law was lightly guarded at Rochester, James was able to make another escape on the night of 23 December, and this time he made it to France. The next day a committee of peers agreed that a Convention Parliament should meet in a month’s time. William was invited to take over the administration of government in the interim, and he agreed to this on 28 December.

Events had moved very fast, and a backlash against William was only to be expected. One influential Member of Parliament told Clarendon that he had welcomed William on his arrival in the West Country, ‘thinking in a free parliament to redress all that was amiss; but that men now began to think that the Prince aimed at something else’. While Anne’s feelings are hard to define, she gave some indication of unease and perhaps even remorse when talking with the Bishop of Winchester. The Bishop told her he had visited her father at Rochester and that though in general he had appeared in good health ‘nothing troubled him so much as his daughter Anne lest she should for grief miscarry’. Since Anne knew that she had in fact been deceiving her father about her pregnancy, this could hardly fail to touch her conscience, but unfortunately our source for this story deliberately omitted her response, noting only ‘she concluded that discourse thus: “If he had not gone so suddenly to Rochester, she would have sent to him”’.
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It is probably safe to say that Anne had never thought that the Prince of Orange might gain the throne following his invasion. Certainly Sarah Churchill maintained that the possibility had not occurred to her. ‘I do solemnly protest that … I was so very simple a creature that I never once dreamt of his being king’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I imagined that the Prince of Orange’s sole design was to provide for the safety of his own country by obliging King James to keep the laws of ours, and that he would go back as soon as he had made us all happy’.
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Yet while one can be sure that Anne had not foreseen that William would be crowned, it is less easy to know what sort of settlement she had anticipated. She was unlikely to have been satisfied by any settlement that left her brother’s right to the crown intact, although she could hardly have conceived that her father would agree to his son being disinherited. Perhaps she envisaged a solution along the lines proposed by Charles II back in 1681 whereby James would retain the nominal title of King but would be banished for life. William and Mary would serve as regents, and then, since the Prince of Wales would be rejected as an imposter, on James’s death, Mary would become Queen. On the other hand, Anne may not have thought things through in such detail.