Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (34 page)

At Anne’s accession at least some of her female subjects hoped they were witnessing the dawn of a new era. On 11 April 1702 Dame Sarah Cowper noted in her diary that her husband had agreed they could have dinner at one in the afternoon, an event without precedent. ‘’Tis the first time I ever did prevail’ she recorded in excitement. ‘Perhaps, happening in the reign of Queen Anne, ’tis a sign the power of women will increase’.
The pious early feminist Mary Astell believed that women would feel buoyed up by seeing one of their own number on the throne, and looked forward ‘to all the great things that women might perform inspired by her example, encouraged by her smiles and supported by her power’. She hoped that Anne would expend her ‘maternal and royal care’ on ‘the most helpless and most neglected part of her subjects’, prophesying that ‘her Majesty will give them full demonstration that there’s nothing either wise or good or great that is above her sex’.
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Anne’s masculine subjects felt more uneasy about being in subjection to a woman. It is true that one welcomed her accession on the grounds that ‘Nothing can make us greater than a queen’, but he was at once rebuked by another male writer who asserted that this statement could only have come from the pen of a man henpecked by ‘some petulant and imperious she’, who had bullied him into writing a manifest absurdity. For this writer, Anne’s dominion over him had to be accepted simply as an exception to a still valid rule, and he consoled himself that ‘when heaven finds a female on the throne, ’tis sufficient evidence of worth and merit’. Struggling to make sense of it all, he maintained that ‘Not a soul of ’em [women] is able to bear the weight and charge of a kingdom on their shoulders. Except our incomparable lady, Queen Anne, who possesses a masculine spirit beneath the softer body of a woman … Her government is mild and compassionate as her sex and yet awful and manly as the spirit of her royal consort’.
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Englishmen who found it hard to come to terms with their awkward situation could seek inspiration from biblical heroines. In one tract Anne was hailed as the ‘Deborah of our English Israel’, and urged to take up the song of Judith, who had exulted, after despatching Holofernes, ‘Almighty God has disappointed him by the hand of a woman’. It was even speculated that God had deliberately arranged to humiliate Louis XIV by pitting him against a female ruler, for ‘who knows but the humbling of that haughty monarch … to make his fall more grating and uneasy, be providentially reserved for one of the weaker sex?’
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Anne of course was not just a woman, but also a semi-invalid, and so doubly incapacitated as a war leader in many eyes. As one person commented, ‘Her Majesty was no amazon; it was not expected that she should ride herself in the head of her troops’. Marlborough might maintain that ‘the only change resulting from the death [of King William] is this, that the Queen does not take the field’, but in the eyes of many men her sex automatically disqualified her from any kind of military role. The Earl of Marchmont assumed that even when it came to handing out
subordinate commands, ‘the Queen will do as she is advised by persons who may understand matter of that sort more than any woman can’. For much of the war, Anne was indeed very cautious about intervening in such appointments. In 1707 she told a Scotsman that ‘she never thought herself a fit judge to know what men were to be employed or preferred in the army and therefore she had trusted that to proper persons … viz … the Duke of Marlborough … and the commanders-in-chief of her forces in Scotland and Ireland’. In the early years of the reign, however, Marlborough took some account of her wishes when making promotions. For example, regarding the appointment of a captain in 1703 he told Godolphin, ‘I shall be careful of doing nothing but what she will be pleased to have me do in it’.
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The woman ruler to whom Anne most relished being compared was Queen Elizabeth. The parallels between them were of course far from exact. Anne was not nearly so well educated as Elizabeth and had come to the throne at a later age, besides being far more infirm. Like Elizabeth, however, Anne was a Protestant princess engaged in a struggle with a Catholic superpower, and this invited flattering comparisons. In November 1702, as England was celebrating an early success in the war, verses were attached to Ludgate declaiming that,

As threatening Spain did to Eliza bow

So France and Spain shall do to Anna now.

One clergyman preaching soon after King William’s death assured his congregation that although Anne was of ‘too soft a sex to handle rough arms or to appear at the head of armies, she yet presides in councils and revives the memory of that heroine Queen Elizabeth, whose armies were as victorious abroad as her wise designs of policy were well laid at home’. After that, it became commonplace to refer to Anne in sermons as ‘the second Elizabeth’, and congratulatory addresses presented after triumphs such as the Battle of Blenheim or Union with Scotland also frequently invoked Elizabeth’s name.
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Anne herself had a strong sense of identity with Elizabeth. She took as her own Elizabeth’s motto
Semper Eadem
(‘Always the Same’), and appears to have treasured a book of Elizabeth’s private prayers and meditations. Certainly a copy of this work in Lambeth Palace Library has a handwritten prayer by Anne inserted on the inside cover. At times Anne explicitly claimed to model her conduct on Elizabeth’s. Writing to the States General in January 1713, she declared ‘We will never lose sight of
the example and prudent conduct of our predecessor, that great Queen’ who had aided the Dutch in their struggle against their enemies. Sometimes, however, her supposed affinity with Elizabeth could be used to embarrass her, and Lord Halifax exploited this on two occasions. In 1704, when opposing a bill directed against dissenters, he ‘took notice of the Queen’s proposing Queen Elizabeth as her pattern’, claiming, not entirely accurately, that Elizabeth ‘always discountenanced any bearing hard upon the Puritans’. Ten years later he adopted a similar tactic when speaking in the House of Lords against the Schism Bill, remarking that ‘her Majesty made it the glory of her reign to follow the steps of Queen Elizabeth’, whose tolerance towards Huguenot refugees was well known. There was also a possibly apocryphal story that when some High Churchmen decided that Anne had failed to give the Church the support they expected, they set up a weathercock on the roof of an Oxford college, emblazoned ‘with her Majesty’s motto,
Semper Eadem
’.
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For the country however, it was an identification with motherhood they were hoping for. In his Coronation sermon Archbishop Sharp of York took as his text a quotation from Isaiah: ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their Queens thy nursing mothers’. He explained that this was apt because Anne could be relied upon to have a mother’s ‘wonderful care and solicitude’ for her people. Later that year the author of
Petticoat Government
assured his readers ‘She is a nursing mother to all her subjects and governs them with spirit and tenderness’. It was also hoped that Anne would become a mother in the literal sense, preferably to a male heir. In July 1702 the Scottish Earl of Marchmont informed Anne that it was his fervent prayer ‘that your Majesty may soon embrace a son of your own, that would be a healing and composing blessing to this wavering nation’. The collect, read annually on the anniversary of Anne’s succession, likewise begged the Almighty to ‘make the Queen, we pray thee, an happy mother of children who, being educated in thy truth, faith and fear may happily succeed her’. Optimists did not doubt that she was still capable of producing children. Lady Gardiner reported in August 1702 that Anne was currently in good health ‘and I hope may yet bring us an heir to the Crown’. When Sir David Hamilton, whose reputation rested primarily on his skill as an ‘eminent man midwife’, was made a physician-in-ordinary to the Queen, it was assumed he had been called in to see whether she was pregnant.
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In June 1703 the Queen told Sarah she yearned for ‘the inexpressible blessing of another child, for though I do not flatter myself with the thoughts of it, I would leave no reasonable thing undone that might be
a means towards it’. When Sarah suggested it would be sensible to bring over a young prince from Hanover so that he could learn more about the kingdom he would one day rule, the Queen, ‘not being very well pleased’ retorted ‘she believed nobody of her age and who might have children would do that’. Sarah considered this ‘a very vain thought’ which in her view ‘proceeded more from her pride … than that she really could expect children, though she was not forty, because she had had before seventeen dead ones’. Others too were inclined to scoff at the Queen for deluding herself she was still fertile. At a meeting of the Whig Kit Cat Club in March 1703, a member read out a cruel poem mocking Anne’s phantom pregnancies, depicting her as knighting her doctor with her bare gouty leg when he assures her that a baby is on the way. However distasteful, their raillery was on target, for Anne never conceived again. She was mother to her people in a purely figurative sense, remaining (in the words of an anonymous pamphlet) their ‘childless parent’.
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Unlike Elizabeth, Anne was a married woman, so in her case there was obviously no question of developing a cult of the virgin Queen. Her marital status created problems of its own, for some people believed that it contravened the divine order that her husband had a rank inferior to hers. This had been an issue when the Revolution Settlement was being devised, not least because William of Orange made it very clear that he would not occupy a subordinate position to his wife. The MP Henry Pollexfen considered this entirely understandable, demanding, ‘does any think the Prince of Orange will come in to be a subject of his own wife in England? This is not possible nor ought to be in nature’. In the Lords, Lord Halifax even contended that the crown was legally William’s alone, because Mary had given him her right to it as part of her marital estate, which belonged to a husband in its entirety. However, this argument was not accepted.
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Anne’s husband was less assertive about his rights than William. ‘Such was the moderation of Prince George … that he was content to continue with the same title and character as before’, retaining his rank as Duke of Cumberland. Immediately on Anne’s accession he announced, ‘I am her Majesty’s subject and have sworn homage to her today. I shall do naught but what she commands me’. Yet because the position was so abhorrent to contemporary assumptions, it was still predicted that Anne would make him King, even though this would require an Act of Parliament and would have serious implications for the succession.
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Ultimately the fact that Prince George was widely regarded as a nonentity helped reconcile people to his anomalous status, and so, almost by accident, George achieved a major advance for feminism. Until the reign of Anne no husband of a Queen regnant had been denied the title of King, even if, as in the case of Mary Tudor’s husband, Philip of Spain, he had not been given executive power and his title expired on her death. But the idea of George’s becoming King did not wither away easily. Before Parliament met in October 1702 the King of Prussia’s envoy in England reported, ‘Some members of the Commons talk of proposing … that the Prince be declared King’. Those in favour of this were described as being ‘not the most affectionate to the House of Hanover’. A tract supporting the proposal was published, deploring the current situation as unsatisfactory. ‘Consider how unprecedented a thing it is in this kingdom to see the husband a subject to his wife’, the anonymous author exhorted his readers, ‘and how contrary to nature’s customs and the apostolical institutions it is’. Somewhat inconsistently the piece then urged ‘that the administration of the regal power may be solely in her Majesty’ during her lifetime, but that, if Anne died childless and was outlived by George, ‘the administration of the government to be in His Royal Highness during his life’. An alarmed diplomat in Hanoverian service was informed ‘It is very likely it will take place if one may believe the whole Tory faction, who are at no pains to conceal it’.
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In Hanover Anne’s heiress presumptive, the Electress Sophia, watched developments keenly. Though in her early seventies, Sophia was remarkably sprightly, being ‘as firm and erect as any young lady’ and having ‘not one wrinkle in her face’. She also had ‘so much vivacity’ that she could be excellent company, with one admirer acclaiming her as ‘the most knowing and the most entertaining woman of the age’. Unfortunately she was apt to overrate her understanding of the English political scene, and this sometimes led her into error. When she read the tract urging Prince George’s claims she was naturally concerned, mistakenly assuming that Anne was behind it. She wrote to the Hanoverian Resident in England, ‘Between ourselves it’s unbelievable that this proposal has been disagreeable to the Queen, or even that it was made without her full approval … I believe the succession to be in a tottering state’. She considered commissioning someone to write a satirical reply, and it was lucky that she did not, because when Parliament met no mention was made of altering George’s status.
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George’s subordination to Anne was not merely a titular inferiority, for it is clear that she sometimes imposed her will on him in matters of
State. In 1702, for example, he reluctantly had to vote for the first Occasional Conformity Bill and three years later he was forced to dismiss his Secretary George Clarke after the latter disobeyed ministry instructions to vote for a particular candidate as Speaker of the House of Commons. Those who felt that such a state of affairs was contrary to the natural order had to console themselves with the reflection that at least in the domestic sphere George was considered master of the household. One tract that praised him for being ‘an extremely kind husband, evidencing his excessive love and yet behaving himself as a submissive subject in paying all due respect to her majesty’, also spoke admiringly of the way ‘his royal spouse, though exalted to the throne … yet demeaned herself with kindness and obedience towards him, the addition of three crowns not impairing her familiar affection or a whit altering her conjugal submission to her lord’s desires’. One of Anne’s chaplains likewise commended her for cancelling a visit to Newmarket ‘to comply with a motion of the Prince’. He remarked approvingly that this ‘gave the ladies a new lesson, that she who governs the nation can govern herself so well as always to oblige her husband’.
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