Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (43 page)

It is clear that Anne herself took this aspect of her duties very seriously. In 1714 it was reported, ‘the Queen disorders herself by preparing
herself to touch … She fasts the day before and abstains [from meat?] several days, which they think does her hurt’. The fact that scrofula is a disease with recurring periods of remission meant that sometimes it appeared that the Queen had effected a cure, encouraging the belief that she genuinely possessed healing powers. One High Church divine went so far as to assert ‘to dispute the matter of fact is to go to the excesses of scepticism, to deny our sense and to be incredulous even to ridiculousness’.
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Hardly surprisingly, however, there were cases which did not respond to treatment from her. Dr Samuel Johnson was brought before her as a toddler, but the Queen could not prevent his scrofula from leaving him permanently scarred and damaging his eyesight. As an adult the Doctor expressed understandable scepticism about the royal touch, although he always wore the piece of healing gold Anne had given him.

Belief in her powers was widespread across the social spectrum, and access to her had to be rationed to avoid her being overwhelmed. She increased the number of sufferers she touched in a single session from forty to three hundred, but many were still turned away. Archbishop Sharp told one interested party that ‘there are now in London several thousands of people, some of them ready to perish, come out of the country waiting for her healing’, so it was pointless for anyone else to apply before these individuals had been served. When Anne was in Bath in the autumn of 1702, the Queen ordered her chief surgeon to examine the people hoping to be touched by her, ‘of whom but thirty appeared to have the evil, which he certified by tickets as is usual, and those thirty were all touched that day privately’. This vetting was not invariably done, although it was a desirable precaution. Years after Anne was dead one old man, who recalled being touched by her as a child, said he had never had the King’s evil, but ‘his parents were poor and had no objection to the bit of gold’.
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Persons with friends at court sought to exploit their connections to gain access to a healing session. When a surgeon urged Mary Lovett to have her little girl touched in May 1714, Mary was worried that she had ‘not … interest enough to do’ it. To her delight, Lady Denbigh intervened, whereupon the Queen promised to hold a special ceremony for Mary’s daughter and another girl. ‘Everybody says as long as I have hopes of getting her touched I must do nothing else with her’, Mrs Lovett wrote excitedly. She had great hopes of success because she had heard of people ‘who the Queen touched last year that had several sores on them, but are now as well as I am. Pray God grant the like effect of my poor Bess’. After the ceremony took place Bess was told by her mother to ‘take care of her
gold and wear it about her neck both night and day, and rub the place that swelled with it every morning’.
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Whether or not Bess showed any improvement is unknown, but if she continued to be unwell there could be no question of any recourse to Anne’s Hanoverian successors, as the Queen was the last British monarch to touch for scrofula.

Towards the end of the reign Burnet criticised Anne because she ‘laid down the splendour of a court too much and eats private; so that except on Sundays [when she processed to church in state] and a few hours twice or thrice a week at night in the drawing room, she appears so little that the court is as it were abandoned’.
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Certainly the days had passed when the nation’s elite looked to the court to provide them with their pleasures, and in comparison with the splendours of Versailles, the court appeared pitifully dreary. Yet despite her invalidism and retiring nature, the Queen was aware of her social obligations, and did her best not to neglect them.

Although Burnet complained that the Queen took her meals in private, early in the reign a Prussian diplomat observed her dining in public at Windsor. He watched as a Lady of the Bedchamber served Anne and George on bended knee, offering them dishes that were ‘refined enough, but fairly frugal’. Since Anne and George were both so overweight, he was surprised that they partook of only three courses comprising three dishes each, with fruit to finish. However, surviving menus do not suggest that Anne’s meals were light affairs. Dishes on offer included pigeon pottage, chicken patty, sirloin of beef, chine of mutton or veal, turkey, geese or quails, pheasants, partridges, ragout of sweetbreads, and rabbit fricassee. As accompaniments there were side-plates of vegetables such as morels and truffles, peas or artichokes and pistachio cream, with dessert to follow.
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There was plenty for Anne and George to drink at every meal, though it should not be assumed that they consumed their full allowance. Apart from beer and ale, they were provided daily with two bottles of claret, two bottles of white wine, two bottles of Rhenish wine and three bottles of sherry. It was rumoured that in addition to all this, Anne was an ‘admirer of spiritous liquors’, with her supposed fondness for strong drink earning her the cruel nickname ‘Brandy Nan’. One foreign visitor to the country was informed in 1710 that while the Queen ‘no longer drinks so much brandy and liqueurs’ she still occasionally indulged herself with what was euphemistically called ‘cold tea’. While it would be understandable enough if Anne took drink as a form of pain relief, one
should beware of being too credulous of such reports. The Jacobites had also put it about that the late Queen Mary was a secret drinker, who supposedly became ‘maudlin in her cups’ after imbibing ‘cool tea in liberal sups’. A contemporary biographer of Queen Anne insisted that the allegation that she was addicted to drink was an ‘undeserved calumny’, while Sarah, who rarely lost an opportunity to attack Anne, stated that she ‘never went beyond such a quantity of strong wines as her physicians judged to be necessary’.
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Although the court was no longer the nation’s social hub, the Queen usually held large parties or balls to mark her birthday. Every four years the birthday of Prince George, born on Leap Year’s Day, was also celebrated in style. On some years there were ballet performances by professional dancers, such as Hester Santlow, famous for her ‘melting lascivious motions’. Plays were also sometimes staged at St James’s. In 1704 Dryden’s
All for Love
was performed on Anne’s birthday; three weeks later the Queen and Prince were reportedly ‘both extremely diverted’ by a production of
Sir Solomon Single
that enlivened George’s quadrennial birthday festivities.
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Odes set to music were another traditional royal birthday entertainment. In 1711 the Queen was ‘extremely well pleased’ with a dialogue in Italian in her Majesty’s praise sung by the castrato Nicolini, and set to music by George Frederick Handel. Two years later the Queen awarded the composer a pension of £200 after Handel penned the music for another birthday ode.
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During Queen Anne’s reign, opera in the Italian style became all the rage, a craze that prompted one elderly lady to enquire of Jonathan Swift ‘what these
Uproars
were that her daughter was always going to’. The Queen herself was an opera fan, but staging such works at court posed a challenge. Rather than featuring full operatic productions, the Queen’s birthdays tended to be enlivened by sung concerts, as in 1712, when Anne listened to a miscellany ‘collected out of several Italian operas’, performed by ‘Nicolini Grimaldi and the other best voices’.
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In former times music had been one of Anne’s principal sources of enjoyment. A Dutch diplomat recorded that before she came to the throne, violins and oboes were always playing in the background as she took her meals, ‘and whenever some extraordinary musician visited the country she always wanted to hear them’. After the Duke of Gloucester’s death, such diversions no longer afforded her the same pleasure, and as Queen she scarcely had leisure to listen to her court musicians. From time to time, however, an exception was made, and a private
performance was put on for her benefit. In June 1707, for example, £16 2
s
. 6
d
. was paid to ‘the boy that sung before the Queen’. Anne was also a patron of sacred music. At the service to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, a Te Deum composed by Handel was sung for the first time. In keeping with her High Church tastes, the Queen reversed the orders issued by her late sister that music should feature less in services held for regular worship in the Chapel Royal. She so valued the vocal talents of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal that they were required to move with her from palace to palace. Yet when a foreign visitor attended a religious service in St James’s Palace he was unimpressed by what he heard, considering the singing just ‘tolerable, though hardly such as befits a royal chapel’.
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For those who wished to come to court, receptions known as Drawing Rooms were held at St James’s Palace or Windsor Castle. Since anyone correctly dressed was free to attend, they were often ‘prodigious crowded’. Gambling was the only entertainment on offer, and the Queen usually passed some of the time playing a hand of basset. By convention, ladies did not have to remain standing once Anne was seated at the gaming table, but this scarcely made for comfort as they crammed in on both sides of her, ‘so close sometimes that the Queen could hardly put her hand in her pocket’. Understandably Anne found these grim affairs something of a trial, but she was conscious that it was her duty to attend whenever her health permitted. Once, when suffering from period pains caused by that ‘visitor that always gives one some uneasiness of some kind or other’, the Queen remarked to Sarah, ‘I shall not be the better I believe for the heats of the Drawing Room, but one cannot put off that for this reason’.
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Anne was not a gifted hostess, who could put guests at their ease with well-chosen remarks. In August 1711 Swift attended a Drawing Room given by the Queen at Windsor. At that time of year few people came to court, and the small gathering took place in Anne’s bedchamber. Swift described how ‘we made our bows and stood about twenty of us round the room, while she looked at us with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready and went out’. But if she could not enliven proceedings with sparkling conversation, she was at least unfailingly courteous and considerate. Lady Hervey reported that at a St James’s Drawing Room in April 1711 the Queen was ‘so particularly gracious’ to her ‘that it was taken notice of … She was not at rest till they brought me a stool over everybody’s head’.
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Towards the end of the reign Anne’s health became so bad that Drawing Rooms frequently were held without her, and it became ‘a rarity enough to be reckoned news’ when she attended. Swift was never bothered by her absence, for as far as he was concerned the principal object of the exercise was to cultivate acquaintances and secure himself dinner invitations. ‘I love to go there on Sundays and see the world’, he informed some lady friends who lived in Ireland. At one point he rather grandly proclaimed, ‘the court serves me as a coffee house’. His visits there afforded opportunities to chat with people ‘whom otherwise I should hardly meet twice a year’ and he acknowledged that in this way ‘one passes half an hour pleasant enough’. Others too appreciated the opportunities for socialising that Drawing Rooms afforded, but it is hard to contest Lord Chesterfield’s verdict that in Anne’s day these gatherings ‘were more respectable than agreeable and had more the air of solemn places of worship than the gaiety of a court’.
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If Drawing Rooms did not provide much in the way of excitement, at other times the court was even duller. One young man who was taken to see the Queen when ill health had caused her to shut herself away affirmed, ‘Her palace of Kensington where she commonly resided was a perfect solitude … Few houses in England belonging to persons of quality were kept in a more private way’. After visiting the Queen in the country in the summer of 1714, the Countess of Orkney told a friend, ‘I don’t make you a compliment to say you are wanted at Windsor, for after the respectful thoughts seeing the Queen gives, there is nothing but ceremony, no manner of conversation’. Once dinner was concluded, ‘we played … [cards] drank tea, bowed extremely and so returned’. An associate of the Duchess of Marlborough sneered that the Queen ‘never willingly draws any of her nobles from their own seats’. Instead she contented herself with the company of her Lord Chamberlain, a Bedchamber Lady, her doctor and a favourite Woman of the Bedchamber, apparently believing that these luminaries invested her court with lustre enough.
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At the beginning of the reign the Queen promised Sarah, ‘whatever hurry I am in (which indeed is every day very great)’, she would always be mindful of her needs. Before long however, she often had to apologise for not answering Sarah’s letters more promptly. On one Saturday evening in 1703 she explained that the whole day had been taken up with receiving visits, so that ‘till now, that it is almost nine a clock, I have not had one minute to myself’. As their relationship deteriorated, Sarah began to suspect that Anne merely pretended she could not attend to private correspondence, although the Queen protested, ‘When I have
made any excuses for want of time I am sure it has been no feigned one’. Certainly her routine would have been taxing for a woman in better health. When writing to a Scots peer in 1707 she lamented ‘the continual hurry of business I have been in this winter’, and on one occasion confessed to Archbishop Sharp, ‘she was really so taken up with business that she had not time to say her prayers’.
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