Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (30 page)

By 22 October the worst was over, although the Princess reported the attack had ‘left so great a weakness in my foot and knee’ that she was postponing her journey to London. She now dreaded that the party which she was giving for the King’s birthday on 4 November would prove too exhausting for ‘one who is a cripple and inclined so much to vapours’.
¹²⁹
Fortunately for Anne, the King did not return from the Continent until 15 November.

Anne had long felt aggrieved that the Irish estates granted to her father when Duke of York had devolved upon William at his accession. Since then, William had surreptitiously bestowed Irish estates on his principal Dutch favourites and his former mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, Countess of Orkney. This had angered Anne, who regarded the lands as rightfully hers, being mindful that James had made a will years before, naming her and Mary as the heirs to his Irish estates. While dwelling on this point, she cheerfully overlooked the fact that James had two other children with claims on the property, for Mary Beatrice had given birth to a daughter in June 1692.

In the autumn of 1697 William was seeking to have his grants confirmed by Parliament, and Anne seized the opportunity to stake her
own claim. Having secretly obtained documentation to support her case, she wrote to William in December, saying she was ‘apt to believe’ that William was unaware that James had bequeathed his Irish possessions to his daughters. Having now clarified the position for him, she asked him to abandon the projected parliamentary proceedings, assuring him she did this ‘with the greatest respect and duty imaginable’. In no way mollified by such expressions, William simply ignored her letter, which consequently ‘had no effect’ whatever.
¹³⁰

This was annoying for Anne, but such concerns were insignificant in comparison to her heartrending experiences as a mother. On 2 December, a day or two after attending a firework display to celebrate the Peace of Ryswick, the Princess had yet another miscarriage. This time she lost ‘two male children, at least as far as could be recognised’. It was reported that ‘Her highness is as well as she possibly can be in such a state’
¹³¹
but however admirably she coped physically, the emotional toll was horrendous.

In January 1698 Whitehall Palace burnt down. The fire lit up the sky for five miles and though the Cockpit and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House escaped the flames, most of the building was reduced to ashes. It had never been entirely satisfactory, being rambling but architecturally undistinguished, but St James’s Palace, which now became the principal royal residence in the capital, had less room for entertaining. Consequently, even though peace had been restored, the royal court could no longer operate as London’s principal social centre.

The King was nonetheless aware that he could not neglect his social obligations. In February Anne announced that she would give a ball every Monday night at St James’s. Eighteen months later, she agreed to act as William’s hostess at weekly receptions at Kensington Palace. This was done at the behest of the Earl of Albemarle, the King’s youthful new Dutch favourite, who had persuaded his master that if the ladies of the court were entertained with gambling parties and suchlike excitements, they and their husbands would grow more attached to his regime. Unfortunately Anne was not well fitted by nature to perform her new role. When she presided at the first of these soirées in November 1699, cards were played at a central table, but no alcohol was provided. Clearly the evening was judged a failure, as thenceforward wine was always served.
¹³²

In December 1697 William had informed Anne that it was now time for the Duke of Gloucester to be ‘put into men’s hands’ by being given his own household. William had originally wanted to make the Duke of Shrewsbury the little boy’s governor, but when he turned down the post Anne asked if Marlborough could be appointed. To her great pleasure, the King agreed, having decided that he must now overlook Marlborough’s shortcomings and avail himself of his talents. After being named as Gloucester’s governor, Marlborough was also made a Privy Councillor in June 1698, prompting a foreign observer to comment ‘There’s a major change!’ A month later he was appointed one of the Lords Justices who exercised executive power during William’s travels abroad. Such was Anne’s delight at the Duke of Gloucester being entrusted to Marlborough’s charge that she assured Sarah, ‘Whatever may happen to me now I shall be very easy about my son; if I should live long, it will be a great pleasure to see him in such good hands, and if I were to die never so soon it would be an unexpressible satisfaction to leave him in them’.
¹³³

Unfortunately the Princess was much less happy at the King’s choice of preceptor for her son. She and George had wanted the High Church Dean of Canterbury, Dr Hooper, but the King would not hear of him. Instead William wanted the position to go to Gilbert Burnet, the talkative Bishop of Salisbury, known for his Low Church tendencies. Anne was appalled by the prospect, but gave in after Marlborough and Godolphin told her it would not do to make a stand on this issue. She raged to Sarah ‘Though I submit to this brutal usage because my friends think it fit (whose judgements I shall ever prefer before my own) my heart is touched to that degree as is not to be expressed’.
¹³⁴

This was not the end of her tribulations. When William had decided that Gloucester should have a separate establishment, Parliament had voted £30,000 a year to pay for it. After hanging on to this money for some months, the King informed his sister-in-law that he would contribute only £15,000 a year towards Gloucester’s expenses. Furthermore he refused to advance anything at all towards the cost of equipping the separate quarters the child had been allocated at St James’s Palace, meaning that the Princess had to pay for it out of her own pocket.
¹³⁵

William did at least agree that Anne should be allowed to choose all other members of Gloucester’s household. ‘This message was so humane and of so different an air from anything the Princess had been used to that it gave her an extreme pleasure’. She had promised employments to various applicants when the King upset everything by saying, just before
he departed on a visit to Holland, that he would send back from there a list of people whom he wanted appointed. When Marlborough reminded him that Anne had already awarded these places, and that her pregnancy meant ‘anything of trouble might do her prejudice’, William flew into a rage, shouting ‘she should not be Queen before her time’. In the end the matter was sorted out by Lord Albemarle, who prevailed on William to approve of most of the Princess’s appointments, but the episode nevertheless exposed the underlying ill feeling between William and his sister-in-law. One person reported that ‘this, and a commendation the King gave to the Prince of Wales in public, makes a world of odd stories about the town’.
¹³⁶

In October 1697 the Earl and Countess of Marlborough had started making arrangements to marry their eldest daughter Harriet to Lord Godolphin’s only son. The couple were quite affluent enough to provide for their daughter, but the Princess seized this opportunity to help them. ‘Knowing myself to be a poor speaker’ she wrote that she wanted to give Lady Harriet ‘something to keep one in her thoughts’, and that she hoped her ‘poor mite’ would be acceptable. In a later letter she clarified what she meant by this, explaining diffidently, ‘I am ashamed to say how little I can contribute … but … I hope dear Mrs Freeman will accept of £10,000, a poor offering from such a faithful heart as mine’. This was a stupendous sum, which the Princess could ill afford. After consulting with Godolphin, Sarah and her husband decided that they would only accept half the amount offered, albeit on the understanding that Anne would give another £5,000 to Harriet’s younger sister Anne Churchill when she married.
¹³⁷

The Princess’s gesture was all the more remarkable considering her perennial shortage of money. In late 1697 Sir Benjamin Bathurst was caught out by Sarah in ‘ill practices’ which verged upon the fraudulent. He had failed to invest Anne’s assets in a manner that would have protected her from the effects of a currency devaluation that took place in 1696, with the result that when he made up his accounts towards the end of 1697 her funds had depreciated by almost a third. If the Princess had accepted his figures she would have incurred a capital loss of about £20,000, but the vigilant Sarah stepped in and ‘got all that to be undone’.
¹³⁸

In Sarah’s opinion Sir Benjamin had ‘showed himself a great knave’ by his actions, but because of her former fondness for his wife, Anne did not want Sarah to take him to task. ‘Since there is nobody perfect but
dear Mrs Freeman I must have patience with the rest of the world and look as much into all my affairs as I can’, the Princess told her serenely. The following year, however, Anne’s patience with Bathurst finally snapped. After noticing some discrepancies in her domestic accounts, the Princess summoned her cook and some other servants and discovered they had been inflating their expenses because Sir Benjamin had extorted money from them when they had taken up their jobs. Finding this ‘abominable’ the Princess called Bathurst before her, and was not appeased when he blustered that the servants had volunteered these sums of their own accord. ‘I told him he must excuse me [from] believing him in this, it was so unlikely a thing’, Anne reported to Sarah. Being in no doubt that ‘for all his solemn protestations … what he said was false’, the Princess informed Sir Benjamin that he would have to repay the money.
¹³⁹

At the end of June 1698, Anne calculated that she was four months pregnant, and resolved to look after herself with the utmost care. ‘She keeps her chamber religiously’ a foreign diplomat recorded. She eagerly tried remedies said to have helped women with similar histories of multiple miscarriage, taking powders recommended by the ambassadress of Sweden and spa waters that an English lady had found beneficial. She also abandoned all thought of taking her usual summer holiday in Windsor. As the weeks went by, hopes began to rise that these stringent measures would allow the Princess to ‘avoid those misfortunes that she is too subject to’.
¹⁴⁰

In early September however, when Anne was six months into her pregnancy, she became worried that she could no longer feel the child kicking. Since she also felt unwell, she was blooded, and initially it was thought that this had solved the problem, diagnosed as a passing attack of gout. Yet Anne remained fearful that something was wrong. ‘She fancies she feels the child stir, but wants the assurance of it’, the King’s Secretary of State reported. Drawing on past experience George became convinced that Anne’s child had died in the womb, and that she would be in great danger unless it expelled itself naturally. From that point of view it was arguably a mercy when, after a short labour, the Princess was delivered of a stillborn male child on 15 September. It was estimated that the baby had died eight to ten days previously but the cause remained a mystery. As the experienced diplomat Monsieur Bonet put it ‘A calamity of this kind, after so many precautions, creates fears that
Madame la Princesse
will not have children in future’.
¹⁴¹

Although the Princess had been spared post-parturition complications this time, she was once again incapacitated by gout in January 1699. George too was now intermittently afflicted in the same way, suffering an attack himself the following April. Yet despite their increasing decrepitude, the couple were still intent on having more children. By the late summer this was once again in prospect, as Anne embarked on her seventeenth pregnancy.

Their relations with the King were now ostensibly polite, but with a strong undercurrent of mutual antipathy. When, in November 1699, ‘their royal highnesses … dined with his Majesty at Kensington’, after giving him a birthday ball at St James’s, to outsiders it seemed an agreeable occasion. In reality, the Prince and Princess were burning with resentment. George’s brother the King of Denmark had recently died, but when Anne had asked if they could attend the party in mourning, William had insisted they wore brightly coloured clothing.
¹⁴²

One long-standing grievance did at least appear on the brink of resolution by the end of 1699. At the opening of Parliament in November the King publicly admitted that the debt owed to Prince George for surrendering his lands in 1689 was still outstanding, and he asked the House to give the matter urgent consideration. A government minister admitted that the delay in bringing the debt to Parliament’s attention ‘partly proceeded from a coldness and misunderstanding that was for some time between the two courts’. In the Lords, Marlborough ‘bestirred himself’ to ensure that George was treated generously, but there was some grumbling that a debt secretly incurred by William was having to be borne by his subjects. At one point it was proposed that George should be repaid with Irish lands confiscated from Lady Orkney. ‘You may imagine how disgustful that will be to the King!’ Secretary of State Vernon commented in panic, although doubtless Anne was delighted by the prospect. In the end other means were found to compensate the Prince. On 15 February 1700 it was resolved that a subsidy would be levied, whose proceeds would be ‘laid out in land’ for him. The following day Anne wrote a heartfelt letter to Sarah, explaining that she had wished to thank Marlborough for his kindness in settling George’s business, but had found herself unable to articulate the words. She therefore asked Sarah to convey her and George’s gratitude.
¹⁴³

However pleasing it was to have this matter resolved, Anne was hardly in a mood to celebrate. Despite her taking every care, her pregnancy had ended in the usual failure ‘within six weeks of her time’. On 25 January, nothing had appeared amiss when she had retired for the evening after
playing cards. Between ten and eleven that night she was delivered of a stillborn male child, estimated to have been ‘dead in her a month’. She did not know that she would never be pregnant again. Whether this was due to pelvic inflammatory disease, very common at the time, or simply a natural decline in fertility now that she had reached the age of thirty-five, can only be speculated upon.
¹⁴⁴