Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (6 page)

No one who when young had any experience of the Restoration court could be said to have had an entirely sheltered upbringing. Pepys memorably observed that there was ‘nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom’. Marital infidelity was so much the norm that in her early teens Anne’s sister Mary would write nonchalantly to a friend: ‘in two or three years men are always weary of their wives and [go] for mistresses as soon as they can get them’. Perhaps it was the behaviour of her father which planted this idea, although the court was of course also swarming with Charles II’s paramours. Anne was well aware of their existence, and came to dislike the King’s principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Mary and Anne were not insulated from the gossip and scandal that periodically engulfed the Duchess of York’s maids of honour, many of whom were themselves barely out of adolescence.
⁷⁴

Far from being corrupted by their early environment, Mary and Anne both developed strong moral values and never lost sight of them. In view of their position, they were obviously less vulnerable than other young women at court, and in many ways they were carefully protected. One obvious precaution was to limit their exposure to predatory men, and at Richmond and London their social circle was almost exclusively female. Yet even here the princesses proved emotionally susceptible, developing schoolgirl crushes which, though innocent enough, had an intensity startling to modern sensibilities.

Anne and Mary of course relied upon each other for companionship, and were very close when young. Mary once referred to Anne as ‘a creature … so double dear to me’, insisting that she had always cherished her with ‘a love too great to increase and too natural not to last always’. In a melodramatic moment she wrote of her protective feelings for ‘the only sister I have in the world, the sister I love like my own life’. Mary was apt to think that Anne was too easily swayed by others, although, somewhat paradoxically, she also complained of her stubbornness, a character trait that manifested itself at an early age. As an adult Mary liked recalling an occasion when they had been walking in the park and began arguing about whether a distant object was a man or a tree. Mary insisted it was a man, and as they drew closer it became apparent that she had been right. Mary demanded, ‘“Now sister, are you satisfied that it is a man?” But Lady Anne, after she saw what it was, turned away, and persisting still in her own side of the question, cried out, “No sister, it is a tree”’.
⁷⁵

The sisters’ social circle included Lady Frances Villiers’s six daughters, and their stepmother’s maids of honour. Among them was the future Duchess of Marlborough, Sarah Jennings, who in 1673, aged thirteen, had become a maid of honour to Mary Beatrice. Sarah was five years older than Anne, but she later claimed that this did not discourage them from playing together, and that Anne ‘even then expressed a particular fondness for me’.
⁷⁶

In both Anne and Mary’s case, however, the friendship that meant most to them in their early teens was with Frances Apsley, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, the Treasurer of the Duke of York’s household. The two of them wrote some remarkable letters to her, most of them undated, although the correspondence appears to have started around 1675, when Mary was thirteen and Frances Apsley was twenty-two. Mary’s letters are astonishingly ardent. She addressed Frances as ‘my dearest dear husband’ while styling herself ‘your faithful wife, true to your bed’. A typical effusion reads, ‘My much loved husband … How I dote on you, oh, I am in raptures of a sweet amaze, when I think of you I am in an ecstasy’. A little later Mary declares ‘I love you with a flame more lasting than the vestals’ fire … I love you with a love that ne’er was known by man; I have for you excess of friendship, more of love than any woman can for women’.
⁷⁷

It is somewhat surprising that a woman of Frances’s age was happy to be the recipient of these fevered schoolgirl outpourings, but she gave the impression that she fully reciprocated Mary’s affection. She claimed to be as ‘lovesick’ as her teenage devotee, and that she had been moved to tears when she suspected Mary of wavering in her adoration. A year or
so later, however, Mary and Frances’s relationship was disrupted when Anne – now aged about twelve – came between them ‘with her alluring charms’. After Frances wrote to Anne and gave her a ring, Mary accused Frances of having ‘forsaken me quite’. She lamented that Anne now possessed Frances’s ‘heart … and your letters too, oh thrice happy she! She is happier than ever I was, for she has triumphed over a rival that once was happy in your love’. Mary described sitting consumed with misery as Frances and Anne ‘whispered and then laughed as if you had said, now we are rid of her, let us be happy, whilst poor unhappy I sat reading of a play, my heart ready to break … It made me ready to cry but before my happy rival I would not show my weak[ness]’.
⁷⁸

Ultimately the situation resolved itself. Even before going to Holland in 1677, Mary had ceased to be tormented with jealousy over Frances and Anne. After her marriage she continued to write to Frances, but in much more measured terms. She insisted she now had no objection to Anne’s having ‘some part’ of Frances’s love, confident that she herself still had ‘the greatest share of your heart’.
⁷⁹

The letters that Anne sent to Frances Apsley are less overwrought than her sister’s, but they still have curious aspects. For the purposes of the correspondence they took on the identities of the tragic lovers at the centre of Nathaniel Lee’s melodrama,
Mithridates
. Anne adopted a male persona, taking as her alter ego Lee’s hero, Prince Ziphares, while Frances became ‘dear adored Semandra’. Anne clearly saw nothing wrong with this, for she was open about the conceit, and in a letter to Frances’s mother Lady Apsley (of whom she was also very fond) she referred without embarrassment to ‘my fair Semandra’. When Anne was sent abroad to Brussels in 1679, she wrote affectionately to Frances, and back in England the following summer she sought permission from Lady Apsley for Frances to stay overnight as her guest at Windsor. During her stay in Scotland in 1681 Anne resumed her correspondence with her Semandra, but there are signs that by this time her affection was slightly cooling. She still signed herself ‘your Ziphares’, and protested ‘I do love you dearly, and not with that kind of love that I love all others who proffer themselves to be my friends’. However it appears that Frances, conscious that she was losing ground with Anne, had requested this reassurance, and Anne’s letter is also full of excuses for not writing more often.
⁸⁰

It would be wrong to focus too much attention on the adolescent fantasies of teenage girls. Of the two sisters, Mary appears to have been the more strongly emotionally involved with Frances Apsley. Yet after she went to Holland in 1677, Mary never formed a comparable relationship
with a member of her own sex.
⁸¹
In Anne’s case, her youthful affection for Frances Apsley foreshadowed deeper attachments to women in her mature years.

In the autumn of 1677 the princesses’ girlish existence, hitherto dominated by petty dramas and private obsessions, was altered forever. Fifteen-year-old Mary had been of marriageable age for three years, and the King now decided it was time to provide her with a husband. He was concerned that the monarchy was losing popularity because his heir apparent was a Catholic and he himself was justly suspected of having Catholic sympathies. In hopes of proclaiming his Protestant credentials, he began to think of matching his niece to his Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, son of the late Princess Royal. Such a union would delight Parliament because it would distance Charles II from the French, who were still at war with Holland. At the outset of the war, Charles had allied himself with Louis XIV, but in 1674 had signed peace terms with Holland. The conflict between France and Holland had continued, with the Dutch putting up a heroic resistance under the leadership of their hereditary
stadholder
and commander-in-chief, Prince William of Orange. By bestowing Mary on his nephew, Charles would indicate that he no longer wanted the French to win the struggle.

The match had obvious advantages for William. For the moment, Mary remained second in line to the English throne. Admittedly, there was a possibility that she could be displaced, for the Duchess of York, who had produced a daughter named Isabella in July 1676, was currently expecting another child. As things stood, however, Mary had a good chance of inheriting the crown. If she died childless, in theory it then passed to Anne, and it was only if she too died without heirs that it descended to William, whose claim came through his late mother. William nevertheless calculated that marrying Mary would bring him ‘a great step to one degree nearer the crown, and to all appearance the next [in line]’.
⁸²

William visited England in October 1677, and having insisted on having a brief preliminary meeting with Mary, he asked the King for her hand. Charles agreed, and the Duke of York, who had formerly cherished unrealistic hopes that Mary could be betrothed to the French Dauphin, was prevailed upon to give his consent. After dining at Whitehall on 21 October, James returned to St James’s and took Mary into his closet to tell her that her wedding had been arranged, and that she would be going to live with Prince William in Holland. Shattered to learn that she was to
be married to a stranger and wrenched from her homeland, Mary ‘wept all that afternoon and the following day’.
⁸³

There was public rapture at the news that ‘the eldest daughter of the crown should sleep in Protestant arms’. However, when the marriage took place at St James’s on 4 November, the atmosphere in the palace could hardly have been less festive. Mary was still in a state of great distress, and the heavily pregnant Mary Beatrice was also ‘much grieved’ at the prospect of being separated from a stepdaughter she held ‘in much affection’. As for Anne, she was already sickening with what turned out to be smallpox. The atmosphere was not lightened by Charles’s excruciating jokes, and his urging Bishop Compton, who was performing the marriage, to ‘make haste lest his sister[-in-law] should be delivered of a son, and the marriage be disappointed’.
⁸⁴

Things did not improve over the next few days. When Mary appeared with William at her side, she gave the impression of being ‘a very coy bride’, and the Prince was soon being criticised for ‘sullenness and clownishness’ and for taking ‘no notice of his princess at the play and ball’. According to the French ambassador, his mood darkened further when the Duchess of York gave birth to a boy on 7 November.
⁸⁵
Three days after this Anne, who had been ill since 5 November, was confirmed as suffering from smallpox.

Smallpox was a dreaded scourge and a virulent epidemic was sweeping through the court. A few days after Anne was diagnosed, Lady Frances caught the disease, which in her case proved fatal. Anne’s life was also feared for, and many at court believed that her soul too was imperilled. To avoid spreading infection her chaplain Dr Edward Lake had been ordered not to read prayers in her bedchamber, but he worried this would leave her vulnerable to the blandishments of her nurse, ‘a very busy, zealous Roman Catholic’. He alerted Bishop Compton to the danger, and the latter promptly ordered him ‘to wait constantly on her highness and do all the offices ministerial which were incumbent’. Quarantine precautions meant that after being with Anne, Lake could have no further contact with Mary. On going to take his leave of her, he found her ‘very disconsolate, not only for her sister’s illness’, but because she was worried that Anne was in need of her guidance. Lake did his best to reassure her, but Mary remained so haunted by the possibility that Anne would be converted that on her own deathbed, seventeen years later, she was tormented by visions of a Papist nurse lurking in the shadows.
⁸⁶

Initially it had seemed that Anne’s attack of smallpox would be relatively mild. On 12 November, however, the disease grew much worse. She
became covered with spots, and Lake found ‘her highness somewhat giddy and very much disordered’. Alarmed for her own safety, she begged Lake not to leave her. She remained ‘very ill’ for some days.
⁸⁷
As more and more people at court were stricken with smallpox, William grew desperate to take his wife home to Holland. Utterly distraught at her impending departure, Mary was also still bothered by fears for her sister’s physical and spiritual well-being. She was unable to say goodbye herself, but charged the Duchess of Monmouth to take care of Anne and to accompany her often to chapel, and she left behind her two letters to be given to Anne when she was better. Mary bade farewell to the rest of her family at Gravesend. An onlooker reported ‘there was a very sad parting between the Princess and her father, but especially the Duchess and her, who wept both with that excess of sorrow’ that everyone present was moved.
⁸⁸
However, within a fortnight of arriving in the Netherlands Mary had recovered from her homesickness and fallen deeply in love with her dour and uncommunicative husband.

During Anne’s illness, her father showed a touching solicitude for her. He ‘visited her every day … and commanded that her sister’s departure should be concealed from her; wherefore there was a feigned message sent every morning from the Princess to her Highness to know how she did’. Only on 4 December was she told that Mary had long since left the country, ‘which she appeared to bear very patiently’. In due course Anne made a full recovery, although there were fears her complexion would be permanently pitted. On 3 December she was allowed to visit her stepmother, who was still resting in her bedchamber after her confinement. Nine days later her little brother, who had been ‘sprightly and like to live’ at birth, died. It is often stated that Anne had unwittingly infected him with smallpox when she saw him for the first time, but this is questionable. It is not even certain that the child would have been present when she went to see Mary Beatrice; all the contemporary reports of his death blame negligence on the part of his nurses. Whatever the cause of his demise, the loss of the little male heir left the Duke and Duchess of York emotionally shattered. ‘The Duke was never known to grieve so much at the death of any of his other children’, while his wife was ‘inconsolable’.
⁸⁹