Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (47 page)

Despite the fact that Prince George and Godolphin both voted for the measure, it was mauled by the House of Lords. Numerous amendments were added to it, which the Commons refused to accept, and in consequence the bill foundered. Nevertheless the Tories remained committed to introducing a similar measure in a subsequent session, so the issue looked set to cause further trouble.

The first year of the war had gone well for the allies. Admittedly a naval expedition sent to capture Cadiz had ended in failure. On its way home, however, the fleet had entered Vigo Bay and sunk and captured a number of galleons, securing a haul of booty. Marlborough had also had a successful campaign in the Netherlands. Despite the fact that the Dutch had prevented him from confronting the enemy in battle, he had captured a number of important towns along the River Meuse, significantly improving allied communications.

In the view of the elderly diarist John Evelyn, ‘Such a concurrence of blessings and hope of God’s future favour has not been known in a hundred years’. The House of Commons passed an address stating that Marlborough had ‘retrieved the ancient honour and glory of the English nation’ and a thanksgiving service was held in St Paul’s. As she made her way by coach to the cathedral which, though not completed till 1711, provided such a magnificent setting for these occasions, Anne was ‘wonderfully huzzaaed’.
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Wanting to show her appreciation for Marlborough’s achievements, the Queen decided to raise him to the highest level of the peerage. On 22 October she wrote to Sarah, ‘It is very uneasy to your poor unfortunate faithful Morley to think she has so very little in her power to show you how truly sensible I am of all my Lord Marlborough’s kindness … but since there is nothing else at this time I hope you will give me leave as soon as he comes to make him a duke’. The Queen continued apologetically, ‘I know my dear Mrs Freeman does not care for anything of that kind, nor I am not satisfied with it’, but she nevertheless hoped that Sarah would agree to her suggestion.
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Sarah claimed that ‘when I read the letter I let it drop out of my hand and was for some minutes like one that had received the news of the death of one of their dear friends’. Godolphin did his best to overcome her aversion to the proposed honour, telling her, ‘I think it must be endured’. He argued that it would not give rise to unpleasant accusations of favouritism, because ‘it’s visible to the whole world that it is not done upon your own account’.
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Marlborough himself was keen to accept the grander title, pointing out to his wife that it would raise his standing abroad. When Sarah objected they were not wealthy enough to sustain such a lofty position he reassured her that the Queen was already planning to remedy that.

Prior to Marlborough’s return on 27 November, Anne did indeed seek to strengthen the Marlboroughs’ financial situation. Not content with awarding her general a pension of £5,000 for her life out of the Post
Office revenues, she attempted to make the grant permanent. Unfortunately, when a message was sent from Anne to the Commons on 10 November, asking that the payment be awarded in perpetuity to Marlborough and his heirs, it met with great hostility. Dumbfounded by what was ‘thought a bold and unadvised request’, the House ‘in amaze kept so long silent’ that Speaker Harley had to stand up to encourage comments from the floor. ‘Then they went to it helter-skelter and the debate ran very high’.
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Tory members were most vocal in making their displeasure felt. Marlborough was already believed to enjoy annual emoluments of £54,835, so Sir Christopher Musgrave had a point when he observed that the general was ‘very well paid’ and that his wife also had ‘profitable employments’. The upshot was that the Commons presented the Queen with an address saying that they did not want to set a precedent permitting the irreversible alienation of Crown revenues, which had already been ‘so much reduced by the exorbitant grants of the last reign’. Anne duly dropped her demand but ‘was not pleased with this baulk’.
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With ‘the Queen and her two favourites … nettled to the quick at their disappointment’, Anne wrote to Sarah saying she wanted to do something ‘towards making up what has been so maliciously hindered in Parliament, and therefore I desire my dear Mrs Freeman and Mr Freeman would be so kind as to accept’ £2,000 a year out of her Privy Purse for the remainder of her life. ‘This can draw no envy’, the Queen urged, ‘for nobody need know’. Sarah was understandably tempted. By this time the unofficial pension of £1,000 a year that Anne had volunteered when her revenue as Princess had been settled in 1689 had long since lapsed. Sarah claimed that it had only ever been paid intermittently, and that over the years she had received no more than £4,000 in all, but ‘I never was such a wretch as to mention it either before or since she came to the crown’.
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On reflection, however, she and Marlborough decided it would not be proper to accept the Queen’s generous offer. Later, Sarah would regret such scruples. When she resigned her posts at court in 1711 she would claw back the money she had renounced in 1702, despite the fact that in the meantime Marlborough’s pension from the Post Office had been made permanent, obviating the reason why the Queen had offered them restitution from her Privy Purse in the first place.

The Queen had been displeased that the Tories had opposed her efforts to enrich the Marlboroughs, but soon afterwards it was the Whigs who infuriated her by attempting to block financial provision for Prince
George. By the terms of his marriage settlement, Prince George would be left virtually penniless if his wife predeceased him. Anne wanted to remedy this by arranging that in that event he would enjoy a revenue of £100,000 a year and be allowed the palaces of Kensington and Winchester as his residences. Besides being anxious that her husband would not face financial difficulties as a widower, the Queen felt strongly that he was owed a generous settlement because he had renounced any claim to the Crown Matrimonial. ‘The Queen pressed it with the greatest earnestness she had yet showed in anything whatsoever; she thought it became her as a good wife to have the act passed; in which she might be the more earnest because it was not thought advisable’ to make George King. Nevertheless, no Queen Dowager had ever been given more than £50,000 a year, and with the sum proposed for George ‘being beyond any of our Queens’ dowries, some thinks so much will not be granted’.
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The bill providing for Prince George passed the Commons, though not without some adverse comment.
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However, it met with much greater opposition in the House of Lords, where the Whigs had more power. Ostensibly the difficulties centred around the fact that the Act specifically exempted Prince George from the clause in the 1701 Act of Settlement stating that after the Hanoverians succeeded to the throne, no foreigner would be permitted to sit in the House of Lords. The Whig peers objected that if they agreed to this, by implication the Dutchmen who had been given titles in William’s reign, but who had no such exemption, would find themselves expelled from the Lords on Anne’s demise. The Queen, however, believed that the Whigs were merely seizing on this technicality to spite her and the Prince for their support of the Occasional Conformity Act.

‘All the malcontents’ in the Lords who opposed the measure prefaced their speeches ‘with high professions of honour for the Prince’, but the Queen was not appeased by this. She was so ‘set upon having that bill pass’ that she declared ‘she had rather an affront were given to herself than the Prince’. During debates on 19 January 1703, Marlborough expressed himself with ‘some heats’ in favour of the Prince, only to find himself defied by his son-in-law, a vehement Whig who had become third Earl of Sunderland following his father’s recent death. In the end the bill passed as Anne wished, but its Whig opponents registered their disapproval in a formal protest.
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Aware that Sarah had been furious at the stance Sunderland had adopted, Anne wrote to her on 19 January, ‘I am sure the Prince’s bill passing after so much struggle is wholly owing to the pains you and Mr
Freeman have taken … Neither words nor actions can ever express the true sense Mr Morley and I have of your sincere kindness on this and all other occasions; and therefore I will not say any more … but that to my last moment your dear, unfortunate, faithful Morley will be most passionately and tenderly yours’. A little later she again alluded to her relief at having provided for her husband, telling Sarah, ‘Whenever it please God to take me out of this world I shall die in quiet, which I should not have done if I had left him unsettled’.
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While Sarah’s anger with her son-in-law gave Anne room for hope that the Duchess would not always blindly support the Whigs, the Queen now delighted the Marlboroughs by taking action against her uncle the Earl of Rochester. She suspected that it was he who had encouraged Tories in the Commons to resist the permanent grant to Marlborough, and also had come to accept that he was ‘endeavouring to embroil affairs’ in other ways. She therefore ordered him to go to Ireland, ‘which greatly needed his presence’ as Lord Lieutenant. When Rochester declared ‘with great insolence that he would not go into Ireland, though she would give the country to him and his son’, the Queen relieved him of his post. On 4 February she announced his resignation to the Cabinet, manifesting little regret at having cut herself off from every member of her family.
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Despite the likelihood that Rochester would become a figurehead for discontented Tories, she believed that his departure would strengthen the ministry and make it better equipped to face the challenges to come.

7

Nothing But Uneasiness

The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough’s only surviving son, John, Lord Blandford was studying at Cambridge. He was sixteen years old and considered a promising student, when in February 1703 he caught the dreaded smallpox. His distraught and fearful mother immediately rushed to Cambridge to be at his bedside.

The Queen was naturally appalled to hear that this talented young man had contracted the deadly disease that had killed her daughters fifteen years earlier, and was desperate to do all she could to help. She despatched two of her personal physicians in her own coach to tend the boy and fretted when they were ‘long upon the road’. She also sent medicine that she believed might bring him through the illness, wishing that the messenger carrying it ‘could fly, that nothing may be wanting’.
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Sadly, none of this availed to save Blandford. Having been summoned to Cambridge by Sarah, the Duke arrived there just in time to see his son die on 20 February.

Once it had become clear that there was little hope of Blandford’s survival, Anne had written to his mother ‘Christ Jesus comfort and support you under this terrible affliction, and it is his mercy alone that can do it’. Sarah, however, lacked the reserves of faith that had afforded Anne some vestige of comfort when she had experienced similar losses. When Sarah shut herself away at her house near St Albans, the Queen ached to come and see her, pointing out, ‘I know so well what you feel’ and that ‘the unfortunate ought to come to the unfortunate’. Sarah rejected the offer outright. Such was her agony that Anne’s attempts to console her in her letters only aggravated her pain. Trying not to be hurt, Anne wrote that ‘though what your poor unfortunate faithful Morley says may not suit with your humours’, she hoped that Sarah would recognise that she meant well.
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The Queen saw the bereft parents when Marlborough and his wife came to wait on her on 28 February, four days before the Duke left for the Continent to resume military operations against France. After her
husband had sailed, Sarah went back to the country, still enveloped in misery. Later in the month one person reported, ‘We hear the Duchess of Marlborough bears not her affliction like her mistress’. At night she was glimpsed wandering around the cloisters of St Albans Abbey like a ghost, and it was said that Blandford’s death affected ‘not only her heart but her brain’.
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This tragic event would indeed have a permanently corrosive effect on Sarah’s personality.

Far from making her feel a greater affinity with the Queen, on the grounds that they had experienced equally dreadful losses, Sarah’s grief acquired a competitive edge. She came to believe that Anne’s suffering when her children died had not been nearly as intense as hers. Noting that Anne had never given way to the uninhibited weeping fits that overcame her at this time of sorrow, Sarah would even suggest that Anne had not been particularly ‘concerned’ by the Duke of Gloucester’s death. ‘Her nature was very hard, and she was not apt to cry’, the Duchess observed harshly.
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