Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (23 page)

With another parliamentary debate on the issue scheduled for that afternoon, the King opted for a partial retreat. The Comptroller of the Royal Household announced in the Commons that the King was content for Anne to be voted an allowance by Parliament, and moved that it
should be set at £50,000 a year. This was approved by the House, and the matter should have ended there, but the ill feeling caused by the affair was not so easily dispelled. That evening Mary accosted Anne, and demanded to know what grounds she had for claiming that the King had been unkind to her. Anne could cite no specific complaints, whereupon Mary rebuked her sharply, telling her ‘she had shewed as much want of kindness to me as respect to the King and I both’. ‘Upon this,’ the Queen noted in her journal, ‘we parted ill friends’.

The King visited the Princess just before New Year on the grounds that it was ‘an ungenerous thing to fall out with a woman’, and said he had no desire to live on poor terms with her. Anne responded politely, but since she failed to follow this up by making friendly overtures to Mary, the Queen dismissed her words as empty.
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It was not money matters alone that caused tension within the royal family. William’s policies were far from universally popular and the King and Queen soon came to suspect that Anne was giving encouragement to their critics. William was viewed in some quarters as insufficiently protective of the Church of England. Already upset by the fact that episcopacy was abolished in Scotland following the Revolution, in March 1689 ardent Anglicans had been outraged when William had indicated that he favoured altering the law so that Protestant dissenters were no longer barred from public office if they did not take Anglican communion. The proposal stirred up so much fury among High Tories, who considered themselves the guardians of the Church of England, that it had to be abandoned, but they could not prevent the passage of a Toleration Act, which enabled dissenters to practise their religion. Those who found this deplorable were further angered by royal treatment of Anglican clergy, including eight bishops, who declined to take the oath of allegiance to the new monarchs on grounds of conscience. In February 1690 they were deprived of their benefices, fuelling the displeasure of those who condemned William for ‘manifestly undermining … the prosperity of the Church of England’.
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Anne showed herself sympathetic to such views by deliberately distancing herself from William and Mary’s approach to Church matters. When Mary changed the order of communion in the Chapel Royal, Anne pretended that ill health obliged her to receive the sacrament elsewhere. She also poured scorn on other innovations introduced by the Queen. Mary noted bitterly that her sister ‘affected to find fault with everything was done, especially to laugh at afternoon sermons and doing in little things contrary to what I did’. She considered it pointless to
remonstrate, as ‘I saw plainly she was so absolutely governed by Lady Marlborough that it was to no purpose’.
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The King and Queen both believed that republicans posed a serious danger to the monarchy, while the supporters of James II (known as ‘Jacobites’ by 1690) threatened the kingdom’s stability in other ways. In the summer of 1690 the first of many plots to restore James was uncovered. Hostility from committed opponents of the regime was only to be expected, but Mary was haunted by the possibility that her sister was ‘forming a third’ party of malcontents.
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Even if not actively disloyal, many people were disenchanted, and it was feared that Anne could exploit this. It had not taken long for anti-Dutch sentiment to surface in England, and comments later made by Anne show that she was not immune from such feelings. Taxation had reached levels unseen since Cromwellian times, which naturally made the government more unpopular. Mary had considerable charm, but William’s gruff manner won him few friends, and the fact that his asthma obliged him to live out of London at either Kensington or Hampton Court meant that ‘the gaiety and diversions of a court disappeared’, causing ‘general disgust’. By January 1690 Evelyn perceived ‘as universal a discontent against K[ing] William … as was before against K[ing] James’, and in these circumstances Anne’s behaviour made the King and Queen uneasy. Having themselves benefited during the last reign from Anne’s disloyalty towards the incumbent monarch, they now feared that she would turn on them. Their distrust of her was heightened by the fact that ‘her servants who had seats in Parliament were observed to be very well with those whom the court had least reason to be fond of’. Accordingly the Cockpit came to be regarded as a centre of disaffection, not least because it was reported that ‘many rude things were daily said at that court’.
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In April 1690 Anne made an attempt at rapprochement, visiting Mary following her recovery from a brief but worrying illness, and asking ‘pardon for what was past’. Unfortunately the Princess then spoiled the effect by asking that her allowance be raised by a further £20,000 a year, which William curtly rejected. The King and Queen did not doubt that Lady Marlborough had encouraged Anne to make this unwelcome demand, and this sharpened their dislike of both Sarah and her husband.
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Anne in her turn felt hard done by, for she still believed she deserved an allowance of £70,000 a year. As it was, she remained perpetually short of cash, something that might have been largely attributable to Sir
Benjamin Bathurst’s incompetent, or even dishonest handling of her finances. On several occasions when Anne applied to him for money he told her none was available, forcing her to delay settling her obligations. In the Princess’s view however, the fault lay not with poor management, but with William and Mary.

Matters did not improve when in June 1690 George accompanied William at his own expense on a military expedition against James II’s forces in Ireland. Throughout the campaign William treated him with insulting indifference, taking no ‘more notice of him than if he had been a page of the backstairs’. The King refused to let the Prince travel with him in his coach, and no mention was made of George in the official Gazette even though he had been close by the King when William was slightly wounded on 30 June. The following day George was at his side again when William crossed the river Boyne and won a notable victory against the Jacobite army. The result was that James fled back to France, leaving his Irish supporters to continue the fight against William in his name. To add to George’s frustration, while he was in Ireland he had great difficulty staying in touch with his wife, for couriers set off for England without waiting for his missives. The Earl of Nottingham had to write to Ireland to ask that in future George would be told whenever an express delivery was sent, because the Princess, who was pregnant once again, ‘was very uneasy that she had no letters by the last messenger’.
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In England meanwhile, the two sisters had not become any closer in their menfolk’s absence. They should have been drawn together by mutual sympathy, for in addition to the usual strains experienced by the wives of men on active service, they had to face the possibility that their father would be killed during the campaign. Mary was under great stress at the time, for though William normally dealt with all affairs of State, in his absence Mary was ruling the country in conjunction with nine Lords Justices. She lamented that ‘business, being a thing I am so new in, and so unfit for, does but break my brains’, but Anne remained ‘of a humour so reserved I could have little comfort from her’.
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While acknowledging that ‘for my humour I know I am morose and grave and therefore may not be so pleasing to her as other company’ Anne pointed out that she dined regularly with the Queen and was ‘with her as often and as long at a time as I could’. On most afternoons she stayed with her till three o’clock, but when she offered ‘to be oftener with her if I knew when she was alone’, the Queen did not seem keen on the idea. Anne reported that Mary told her ‘I might easily believe without a
compliment she should be very glad of my company but that … she was glad when she could get some time to herself’.
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In early September 1690 William and George returned from Ireland, even though the Jacobites had not been fully ousted. It was naturally a huge relief to Anne to have her husband safely back at home, but the joy of their reunion was soon marred. On 14 October Anne, who was then seven months pregnant, was ‘delivered of a daughter which lived about two hours and was christened and buried privately in Westminster Abbey’.
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Fortunately the Princess was unaware that henceforth she would never produce any child that survived longer than this, but though she recovered swiftly from the physical ill effects of the birth, she was inevitably distressed by her loss.

She could at least derive consolation from her son, who was now just over a year old. She had wanted the child to grow up at Richmond, as she had done, but since William and Mary insisted that the palace there was already fully occupied, she had instead installed him in a borrowed house in Bayswater. A year later she had taken, at an extortionate rent, a nearby property named Campden House, a Jacobean building with a fine hilltop view. Rooms were set aside there for Anne and George so they could stay overnight when visiting their son, and Anne grew very fond of what she referred to as ‘my cottage at Kensington’.
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Most afternoons the child was taken out in a little coach drawn by Shetland ponies. His health remained a worry and Anne was understandably a nervous mother. When he started to toddle he proved even more unsteady on his feet than most children, an unrecognised early sign of the poor balance caused by his hydrocephalus. Anne proudly informed Sarah as soon as he was able to walk the length of a room, but added that ‘he is so mighty heedless I am afraid it will be a great while before one shall dare venture to let him go without leadings’. In the summer of 1691 she tried not to panic when he had an attack of diarrhoea, reassuring herself he was ‘in very good temper and sleeps well … and they tell me ’tis the best way of breeding teeth’. Later that year she thought about taking the child with her when she went to Tunbridge, despite the fact that Lady Fitzharding’s husband told her this was unwise. Defiantly Anne told Sarah, ‘His eloquence can’t convince me more than other people’s that I am in the wrong’, but in the end she thought better of it and left Gloucester behind.
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Queen Mary was very fond of her nephew, giving him a beautiful set of ivory carpentry tools to play with, but the sisters’ mutual affection for
the little boy did not draw them closer together. The fact that Anne was a mother may indeed have aroused Mary’s jealousy, for in a meditation written in 1691 she recorded that she was finding it harder than ever to resign herself to being childless. Relations between the Cockpit and Whitehall remained so frosty that Sarah became concerned, partly because she thought Anne needlessly made things worse. Not only did Anne maintain a gauche silence in her sister’s presence, but the contrast between her sullen demeanour towards Mary, and her effusive behaviour to Sarah was positively embarrassing.
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When Sarah accused her of not trying hard enough to please the Queen, the Princess was adamant that ‘as for respect I have always behaved myself towards her with as much as ’tis possible’. She maintained she could not feign an affection she did not feel, for ‘if it were to save my soul, I can’t … make my court to any lady I have not a very great inclination for’. She also demurred at Sarah’s suggestion that she should be less demonstrative towards her in public, complaining ‘I think ’tis very hard I may not have the liberty of … being kind … to those I really dote on, as long as I do nothing extravagant’. Nevertheless she promised that if Sarah wished it, she would show more restraint.
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Far from a thaw developing, Anne’s feelings towards her sister and brother-in-law soon became more glacial than ever. In early 1691 William had gone to the Continent to pursue the war against France, but Prince George’s hopes of military preferment were not fulfilled and a rumour that he would be made Admiral of the fleet proved false. Upset at being overlooked, George decided to serve as a volunteer in a Royal Navy ship commanded by Lord Berkeley. He informed William of his intention when the King paid a brief visit to England in the spring of 1691. The King, who was about to go abroad once again, merely gave his brother-in-law a farewell embrace, which George interpreted as consent. In fact, the King was appalled by the prospect of George going to sea, refusing to believe his brother-in-law simply wished to do his duty. As Mary darkly put it, ‘’Twas plain there was a design of growing popular’, and the King and she concluded that the Prince and Princess were set on courting sympathy for the way George had been treated.
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Before departing William instructed his wife to ensure that George did not go, though preferably without letting it appear that she had intervened. Mary began by asking the Countess of Marlborough to dissuade George, but she declined when it was stipulated that she must pretend she was doing this on her own initiative. The Queen next urged George directly to drop his plans, only to find that since his belongings had
already been loaded aboard his ship, he believed it would be undignified to change his mind at this late stage. In desperation Mary then forbade him to go. Both Anne and George were angry at the way the Prince had been humiliated, and one foreign diplomat believed that this incident was the principal cause of the total breakdown in relations between the sisters that occurred the following year. For her part the Queen thought that all along the Denmarks had wanted her to issue a prohibition, ‘that they might have a pretence to rail and so in discontent go to Tunbridge’.
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