Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (35 page)

Although George was denied the title of King, great efforts were made to accord him other responsibilities. On 17 April 1702 George was named ‘Generalissimo of all forces at land and sea’. This meant that he was nominally Marlborough’s superior, and Marlborough acknowledged this by always taking care to keep the Prince, as well as the Queen, fully informed of military developments. While in effect the position was honorary, the move was applauded as a gracious gesture on Anne’s part, with one diplomat recording that ‘everyone is delighted that the Queen has accorded this authority to HRH’. It turned out, however, that Anne wanted more than this for her husband, and soon moves were under way to invest George with the military role traditionally assumed by the monarch. As soon as William died, George began to be depicted as a martial hero. On 10 March Lady Gardiner reported to Sir John Verney, ‘’tis now said that the Prince George … did actions very great in war in Denmark, so you see the rising sun gains advantage’. When he set off for Holland on 14 March, Marlborough was instructed to ask the States General to agree that George should be made commander-in-chief of all allied forces in the Netherlands. At home, the Queen herself put this request to the Dutch ambassador, sparking fears that she would pull England out of the war if her wishes were not granted.
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Marlborough did his best. He insisted to the States General that it was ‘absolutely necessary for the good of the whole’ alliance that George was
appointed. He wrote to Godolphin that he had told the Dutch ‘very plainly that it is His Royal Highness only that can unite the 40,000 paid by England’, and that it was in ‘their interest to have the Prince for their generalissimo and that it would be very agreeable to all England’. The English could argue that since they were not only supplying large numbers of their own troops, but paying for soldiers supplied by other allied powers, they deserved to have overall command. Marlborough maintained ‘if the prince were their generalissimo, all disputes would be avoided’, but the Dutch were understandably resistant.
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It was not just that, despite the laughable attempts to portray George as a doughty warrior, he was unfit, inexperienced, and widely regarded as incapable. There were numerous other better qualified candidates for the post, including the King of Prussia and the Elector of Hanover. The Dutch were also alarmed at the prospect that they would be unable to control George. The States General always sent Field Deputies on campaign with their armies with orders to prevent generals from taking rash actions that might result in the Dutch republic being overrun by the enemy, but it would not be easy for these officials to impose their will on Queen Anne’s husband.

It proved impossible to convince the Dutch to accede to George’s appointment. For the moment, therefore, the Prince’s ambitions for military command had to be shelved, but it was understood that in a few months’ time the Dutch would be approached again on the matter. By the autumn of 1702, however, George’s health had deteriorated so much that even Anne realised that the idea was impractical. Disappointing as the rebuff was for Anne and George, it ultimately worked to Marlborough’s advantage. ‘Purely to oblige the Queen of England’, and much to the anger of their own generals, the Dutch made the relatively inexperienced Marlborough the commander-in-chief of all allied forces operating in the Netherlands.
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The Queen had better luck entrusting George with her navy, and on 21 May 1702 he was appointed Lord High Admiral. It was an immense responsibility, for the navy accounted for nearly half of military expenditure, and although the Cabinet and Secretary of State controlled the strategic direction of affairs at sea, the Prince and his council were in charge of most naval administration. Bishop Burnet claimed that the legality of awarding so much power to George and his council without an Act of Parliament was privately ‘much questioned’, but ‘the respect paid the Queen’ ensured that this remained ‘a secret murmur’. Furthermore, Burnet asserted, the Prince was utterly unfitted to carry out such an important task:

At sea … things were ill designed and worse executed; the making Prince George our Lord High Admiral proved in many instances very unhappy to the nation; men of bad designs imposed on him, he understood those matters very little and they sheltered themselves under his name, to which a great submission was paid; but the complaints rose the higher for that.

It was said that because George was frequently in ill health he delegated too much responsibility to his council, and that one member in particular, Marlborough’s brother George Churchill, exercised his power in a damaging fashion. A heavy drinker and ‘coarse fat man much marked with the smallpox’, Churchill not only, according to his sister-in-law Sarah, had ‘uncommon morals’ – by which she meant homosexual tendencies – but also nourished Jacobite sympathies. It was said that having ‘a great sway in the Prince of Denmark’s affections’ he ‘governed the Admiralty under him’, allegedly only promoting men of similar political principles.
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Undoubtedly there were grounds for criticising the conduct of naval affairs under George. On several occasions fleets were so poorly victualled that sailors died from food poisoning. Merchants complained that the navy failed to provide adequate convoys, so their ships were preyed on by the French. Nevertheless it appears that some of the Whig attacks on George and his council were themselves politically motivated, and that, because they saw it as a useful weapon against George, the Whigs were very hard on naval officers who suffered bad luck at sea. Churchill’s omnipotence in the Prince’s council was exaggerated, and there is no proof he was a Jacobite.

George himself was more active than was allowed. He saw his Admiralty Secretary most days, and took a keen interest in ship design, as well as naval management. On several occasions reports signed by him were read in Cabinet, addressing problems such as payments for seamen’s widows. Letters from him to the Navy Board abound on diverse matters, including the shape of topsails, the quality of canvas and anchors, the strain caused to ships by carrying heavy guns, and the desirability ‘of lifting the channels above the middle tier of ports’.
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Merchant shipping undoubtedly suffered severe losses at French hands, but devising an effective convoy system was very difficult. Operations in the Mediterranean and Caribbean meant that the navy was severely overstretched, and their success against the French in the 1704 Battle of Malaga paradoxically made matters worse, as thenceforth
the French navy tended to target commercial vessels rather than attacking warships. When George pointed this out in response to parliamentary complaints about the navy’s performance, there was fury; but there was much in what he said. Furthermore, although fewer merchant ships were captured by the French after George died in 1708, it would be wrong to infer from this that he was incompetent. Not only had pressure on the navy recently been eased by the partial scuttling of the French fleet following an allied attack on Toulon, but George’s death coincided with the British acquiring a Mediterranean base at Port Mahon, making it easier to protect merchant shipping. G. M. Trevelyan commented that the establishment of British naval and commercial supremacy lasting more than two hundred years ‘might not unreasonably be regarded as the most important outcome of the reign of Queen Anne’, and George deserves some of the credit for this.
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One source asserted that Prince George did ‘not much meddle with affairs out of his office’, and Jonathan Swift concurred that ‘the Prince, being somewhat infirm and inactive neither affected the grandeur of a crown nor the toils of business’. Yet he was far from being entirely detached from matters of State. Although he was not present when Anne had meetings with ministers such as Godolphin, he invariably attended Cabinet meetings if his health permitted. He did not sit silently there, but ventured opinions when he felt it warranted. In November 1706, for example, the minutes record, ‘R[oyal] H[ighness] moves again about agreeing with the States [General] for their ships and particularly to send their eighteen to Lisbon with all speed’. George had his own ‘Secretary for Foreign Affairs’, and once assured Marlborough that he would do everything possible to persuade his nephew the King of Denmark (who provided a contingent of mercenary troops to the allies) to ‘follow the influence of England in everything’. Although it is sometimes claimed that all court insiders considered him a negligible figure, after his death in 1708, the former chancellor of Scotland, Patrick, Earl of Marchmont, wrote to the Queen describing George as ‘my principal intercessor, upon whom I relied most when I had any suit to Your Majesty’. As one observer put it, George was ‘a prince … with a good, sound understanding, but modest in showing it’.
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In April 1708 Lord Godolphin blamed George for inflaming Anne’s antipathy to the Whig party; but most people regarded him as a force for moderation. One Whig believed that his party would have fared worse at Anne’s accession had it not been for George, who was ‘the promoter of those healing and wholesome measures’ that kept a few Whigs in
office. Another person who praised George because he prevented ‘the Queen from being beguiled to her dishonour by sycophants that were about her all the time of his life’, stated that ‘he kept whisperers off’. A leading dissenting clergyman remarked that the Prince ‘never appeared vigorous or active, but was singularly useful in keeping the Queen steady’.
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Anne herself told Sarah that she found it valuable to discuss politics with her husband. Sarah – who had such a low opinion of George that she maintained that winning large sums of money off him at cards was ‘but a small recompense for the penance of keeping him company’ – simply dismissed the idea that the Prince could provide Anne with guidance. While being sure that ‘Your Majesty certainly does not determine things wholly upon your own’, she belittled George’s influence, observing, ‘though you were pleased to say once you consulted the Prince in your affairs, I can’t but think HRH is too reasonable to meddle so much … in things that it is impossible for one in his high station and way of living to be perfectly informed of’. In fact, Sarah was wrong to discount George’s opinions. He played a crucial part in the political crisis of February 1708 by convincing his wife that she must dismiss Robert Harley. One of his household officers believed he had been proved correct when he prophesied that the Whig politicians who criticised George’s handling of naval affairs ‘would find the loss of him’ once he was dead.
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Posthumously, indeed, the Prince’s judgement was cited approvingly by Sarah, who told Anne in 1710 that her late husband would have disapproved of the political course she was following.

Anne’s Coronation took place on St George’s Day, 23 April, which curiously was the same date her father had been crowned seventeen years earlier. Because the Queen was still having difficulty walking, a low-backed chair of rich crimson velvet was fashioned to carry her from Westminster Hall to the Abbey. In the view of one observer, far from detracting from the splendour of the occasion, this merely gave it ‘the face of a triumph’. The Coronation procession was certainly impressive. Anne was preceded in state to the Abbey by the aldermen of London, Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, judges, Privy Councillors, peers, peeresses, and bishops. Then came the Queen on her chair, borne by four Yeomen of the Guard, flanked on both sides by the unmarried daughters of four earls, ‘richly dressed’. Under a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, the Queen wore a robe of gold tissue, and her six-yard-long train flowed over the back of her chair and was carried by the Master of
the Robes and England’s highest ranking Duchess. Her head had been dressed with a hairpiece of ‘long locks and puffs’ supplied by her tirewoman Mrs Ducaila, and ‘diamonds mixed in the hair, which at the least motion brilled and flamed’. Atop it all she wore a crimson velvet cap, trimmed with ermine and diamonds.
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The Queen left her chair at the door of the Abbey to participate in a ritual that, for one in her poor physical condition, can only have been arduous. First she was conducted to the altar, and then, after the litany and prayers, the Archbishop of York made what Sarah considered a ‘very dull and heavy’ sermon. When he had finished Anne ‘arose and returned thanks’ to the Archbishop, remaining standing while the question was put to the congregation, ‘Do you take this to be your sovereign to be over you?’ Once all present had roared out their assent, the Coronation oath was put to her, and ‘she distinctly answered each article’, promising to maintain all privileges of Church and State. She was then presented with the gold spurs and sword of State, masculine symbols of regality that had been offered to William alone during his and Mary’s Coronation. The ring signifying she was married to her kingdom was placed on her finger, and she was given the orb and sceptre. Having been anointed, a crown ‘vastly rich in diamonds’ was ‘fixed on the Queen’s head with huzzas and sound of drums, trumpet, and guns’. After taking the sacrament, the Queen sat enthroned to receive the homage of the bishops and peers, with Prince George at the forefront. She briefly retired to pray privately in King Edward’s chapel and then emerged, clad in a mantle of purple velvet and wearing another crown of State. At the door of the Abbey she again took her chair to be carried to Westminster Hall, bestowing ‘obliging looks and bows to all that saluted her and were spectators … in the Abbey and all the streets’. In Westminster Hall a Coronation banquet was held, with Prince George seated at his wife’s side, in defiance of strict protocol. It was eight-thirty at night by the time Anne was back at St James’s Palace, having left it nearly twelve hours earlier.
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