Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (27 page)

In hopes of improving matters, in August it was decided that the Princess and her husband should go to Bath again, accompanied by Sarah. However, when they arrived there it proved impossible to escape the family quarrel, for the Queen sent orders to the Mayor of Bath that he should not escort the Princess to church on Sundays. Anne loftily dismissed this as ‘a thing to be laughed at’ but she was less amused when Sarah was given an unpleasant reception by the townsfolk, who disapproved of her husband’s supposed disloyalty. When going through the streets Sarah was insulted so loudly that she did not dare show herself at the baths, putting her in a very bad mood.
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Perhaps in order to try and defuse such hostility, Anne made a public announcement ‘that no Jacobite or Papist shall come into her presence’. Her show of loyalty was undermined by the reports of a government double agent sent down to Bath by the Earl of Portland and Lord Nottingham. This was Dr Richard Kingston, a former royal chaplain who posed so successfully as a Jacobite that he was expert at winning the confidence of people loyal to James II. After provoking them to make outrageously indiscreet comments (never verified by a second witness) he passed them on to his employers. He had been trying to infiltrate Anne’s circle for some weeks. In July he had boasted, ‘I grow more and more in the intrigues of Sion House, who are in both with the Jacobites and the republicans’.
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Now he was welcomed when he came to see Anne at Bath and, according to his own account, she unburdened herself to him while Prince George was out of the room.

After complaining to Kingston of the Mayor being given orders ‘to slight her’, Anne asked her visitor ‘several questions concerning her father, as where he was and what he intended, and seemed well pleased’ when Kingston said he understood there was to be an invasion that winter. She then bewailed both her father’s misfortunes and ‘the iniquities offered by their majesties to her’, expressing hopes that all ‘would be … redressed at the sitting of the next Parliament’. At this point an unidentified lady interjected, ‘I hope Madam, your good father will do it himself before that time’. ‘More had been said’, Kingston explained in his report to Nottingham, ‘but the Prince his game at billiards was ended and put a period to our discourse’. Before signing off he provided the final detail ‘that the Princess, discoursing her sufferings, often made a parallel between herself and Queen Elizabeth’.
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One must be wary about accepting Kingston’s uncorroborated account, for Anne’s behaviour seems uncharacteristically incautious. She had, for example, been much more reserved when Lord Ailesbury had approached her after the French naval defeat at La Hogue. Ailesbury observed that ‘the face of affairs was much altered’ since his wife had visited her at Sion. To this the Princess replied ‘“Yes, greatly,” … with a melancholy face’, but when Ailesbury suggested that her father would be greatly comforted by ‘a tender line from her’, she muttered, ‘It is not a proper time for you and I to talk of that matter any farther’.
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On Anne’s return from Bath in late September, her relations with her sister remained as distant as ever. The Princess temporarily went to live with her son at Campden House, having discontinued her lease of Sion. One evening she was being carried back towards Kensington in her sedan chair after spending the day in central London, when the Queen overtook her in her coach. ‘No notice taken of either side’, it was reported.
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Whether or not Kingston had been telling the truth, the Princess was not completely cut off from Saint-Germain. Her letter had taken a long time to reach her father. The
Life
of James II states that it was delivered to him in May when he was in Normandy, although puzzlingly, James’s Secretary of State, Lord Melfort, marked on his copy that it was received in early July, according to the French calendar. On 18 July James wrote a reply which he stipulated was to be passed on to his daughter by the Earl of Marlborough ‘or his lady’. ‘I am confident that she is truly penitent since she tells me so’, he began, ‘and as such I … do give her that pardon she so heartily desires from me, providing she will endeavour to deserve it by all her future actions; she knows how easy a thing it is for me to
forgive thoroughly and the affection I have ever had for her, and may believe that my satisfaction is greater to see her return to her duty than ever my resentment was for her departing from it’.
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Whereas previously James had made it plain that Marlborough could expect no mercy if he regained his throne, he now professed himself ready to forgive him. Persuading himself that the communication from his daughter provided ‘a more than ordinary mark of that lord’s sincerity’, in September he sent an agent to England to tell Marlborough (or ‘my nephew John’, as he was codenamed) that ‘I am satisfied of your good intentions to me by what you have done, and if you continue to do so you may assure your self of pardon for what’s passed’. He also asked Marlborough to act as his intermediary with Anne and George in all future transactions. ‘I do trust you as my factor with your late partners of your trade’, James told him, ‘and I do desire them to trust you in what you shall say to them from me, and I will take my measures of them from what you shall inform me of them and treat them accordingly’.
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James seems to have envisaged keeping in fairly regular touch with his daughter, but as far as we know, Anne did not renew contact for some years after this. From the Princess’s point of view, her letter had served its purpose, but now that James’s restoration seemed less likely, writing again was not worth the risk.

In the autumn of 1692 Anne moved to a fine new London residence, having rented Berkeley House in Piccadilly from the Earl of Berkeley. Anne had agreed that Lord Berkeley and his mother could have her lodgings at the Cockpit in exchange for his house, but they kept posing additional demands relating to their accommodation there. The Princess noted irritably ‘Considering how impertinent and peevishly both her son and she have behaved themselves in all this business, I have no reason to comply with them in all they desire’, but at length all was resolved. Grumbling somewhat unreasonably to Sarah about being ‘straitened for room’ the Princess took possession of her palatial new home.
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The fact that visiting the Princess entailed automatic exclusion from the King and Queen’s presence ensured that Anne’s court was almost deserted. The Jacobite Lord Ailesbury and a few ladies with similar sympathies came to Berkeley House ‘because … all of that interest rejoiced much at the quarrel’; otherwise only the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was currently out of office, ventured there to play whist. His presence could not disguise the fact that the Princess was ‘as much alone as
can be imagined’, living ‘under so great a neglect’ that, were it not for her ‘inflexible stiffness of humour, it would be very uneasy to her’. Anne professed to have no regrets. In February 1693 she wrote defiantly to Sarah ‘You cannot expect any news from Berkeley House, but as dull and despicable as some people may think it, I am so far from … repenting … that, were the year to run over again, I would tread the same steps’.
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Still smarting over his arrest the previous year, the Earl of Marlborough allied himself with the political opposition. At the end of 1692 he had voted for the Place Bill, which sought to prevent any Member of Parliament accepting government office. It was a measure which one observer believed ‘sapped the foundations of monarchy and tended to a republic’, but Marlborough prevailed upon Prince George to give it his support as well. After it was narrowly defeated in the Lords, a foreign diplomat was astonished when George was amongst those who registered a formal protest at its rejection.
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In January 1693 Prince George’s brother, Christian V of Denmark, wrote urging him to make up with the King and Queen, but Anne would not hear of it. She believed that King Christian had probably intervened at William’s request, ‘by which ’tis very plain
Mr Caliban
has some inclinations towards a reconciliation, but if ever I make the least step, may I be as great a slave as he would make me if it were in his power. Mr Morley is of that same mind and I trust in heaven we shall never be better friends [with William] than we are now, unless we chance to meet there’. George undertook to write ‘to desire his brother would not engage himself in this business’, while the Princess reiterated to Sarah that ‘her faithful Morley … will never part with you till she is fast locked in her coffin’.
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The little Duke of Gloucester provided the only remaining link between Anne and her sister and brother-in-law. Both Mary and the King (who, surprisingly, got on well with children) were very fond of the little boy. Anne would have liked to have restricted his visits to them, but was told, probably by Marlborough and Godolphin, that this would be unwise. Once, after arranging for her son to see his aunt, the Princess told Sarah ‘it goes extremely against the grain, yet since so much better judgements than mine think it necessary, he shall go’. William and Mary were at pains to publicise the fact that Gloucester was not comprehended in the family quarrel. As Sarah waspishly put it, the Queen ‘made a great show of kindness to him and gave him rattles and several playthings which were constantly put down in the Gazette’. When the child was ill the Queen
would always send a Bedchamber Woman to his home to gain an accurate report on his health, although this was done in a manner contrived to be deliberately insulting to Anne. ‘Without taking more notice of [the Princess] than if she were a rocker’, the royal emissary would address all questions to Gloucester’s nurse.
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Such incidents occurred all too frequently, for Gloucester’s health gave constant cause for concern. To try and minimise the symptoms of hydrocephalus which had afflicted him from an early age he had an ‘issue in his poll [head] that had been kept running ever since his sickness at Hampton Court’. It was hoped that by permanently keeping open a small incision in the scalp, harmful humours would have an outlet through which they could escape, but hardly surprisingly the treatment proved ineffectual. Fluid continued to accumulate within the child’s cranium, with the result that his head became abnormally large. By 1694 ‘his hat was big enough for most men’ and when the time came to measure him for a wig, it was difficult to find one that fitted him. Consequently he had a strange appearance, as even Anne acknowledged. Writing to tell Sarah in 1692 that her son currently looked ‘better I think than ever he did in his life’, she qualified this, ‘I mean more healthy, for though I love him very well, I can’t brag of his beauty’.
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Although Gloucester was ‘active and lively’, the hydrocephalus affected his balance. ‘He tottered as he walked and could not go up or down stairs without holding the rails’. When he fell over, as often happened, he could not raise himself unaided. Instead of being recognised as a symptom of his illness, his debility was attributed to ‘the overcare of the ladies’ in charge of him. An attendant recalled, ‘the Prince of Denmark, who was a very good-natured pleasant man, would often rally them about it’.
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Presumably because he was worried about toppling over, when aged four or five Gloucester refused to move unless adults held his hand on either side. Until then, most unusually for a child of his age, he had never been whipped, for ‘the Princess, who was the tenderest of mothers, would not let him be roughly handled’. However, this refusal to walk on his own was considered a dangerous whim which could not be indulged. First Prince George took the child to task for it, showing him the birch as Anne looked on. As this had no effect, Gloucester was beaten, with the punishment being repeated when he persisted in his ‘very unaccountable fancy’. After that his will was broken.
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To modern sensibilities this is a horrific story, an almost unbearable tale of brutish treatment meted out to a child who was struggling with a challenging physical disability. Before condemning Anne and George,
one should, however, place it in context, for corporal punishment for the young was virtually universal at the time. It must be borne in mind that even John Locke, the very embodiment of the early English enlightenment, argued that small children were animals controllable only by pain and that it was appropriate to inflict physical punishment in moderation before they had developed powers of reasoning.
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In other ways Anne was the most solicitous parent. Such was her concern for her son’s welfare that she admitted ‘’tis impossible to help being alarmed at every little thing’. One of Gloucester’s servants recorded, ‘If he tottered whenever he walked in her presence, it threw her into a violent perspiration through fear’, and this was far from being her only worry, as the child was delicate in other ways. He suffered from severe fevers in 1693, 1694, and 1695, and on each occasion was subjected to a variety of unpleasant medical treatments. In 1693 his back was blistered by doctors who believed this would lower his temperature, causing the poor child such pain that he begged his servants to rescue him from his tormentors. He was also dosed with ‘Jesuits’ powder’, made from cinchona bark, an effective treatment for fever but potentially dangerous in large quantities. When Gloucester had a recurring bout of fever the following spring, despite being desperate for a cure – for ‘methinks ’tis an ugly thing for such a distemper to hang so long upon one of his age’ – Anne hoped that Dr Radcliffe would be able to prescribe a different remedy. After initially taking his medicine ‘most manfully’, the little boy had grown ‘so very averse to the powder … it would be almost impossible to force it down’. It also constipated him severely, so instead he was given a mixture of brandy, saffron, and other ingredients, reputed to cure every kind of ague. At first the only result was to make the child vomit, but after that he began to recover.
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