Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (60 page)

As Godolphin observed, the Whigs’ belief that Anne had reneged on undertakings given the previous year inclined them ‘to lay more weight upon it, than in truth the thing itself ought to bear’. Godolphin did not strengthen his own position with the Queen by showing that for him the whole matter was little more than an irritant. When the crisis was at its height he would write to warn Anne that she was imperilling the government’s parliamentary majority and ability to finance the war by her intransigence, and he begged her to consider ‘what reflexion will it not cause in the world that all these weighty things together can not stand in balance with this single point, whether Dr Blackall be made a bishop or a dean or a prebend?’ To this the Queen could with justice have retorted that if the question was really so unimportant, why were the Whigs making such an issue of it?
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Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, it resulted, as Godolphin gloomily remarked, in ‘a very great contretemps’. As soon as Somers got wind that Dawes and Blackall had been offered promotion, he vowed not to tolerate such ‘juggling and trifling and falseness’, and once again despatched the Archbishop of Canterbury to complain to the Queen. As before, however, Tenison was given short shrift. At the beginning of June 1707 Anne made an effort at conciliation when she promoted the Whig Bishop Moore of Norwich to the bishopric of Ely. Unfortunately this did not satisfy the Junto, and by the end of that month Godolphin believed them ready to ‘tear everything in pieces if they can’t have their own terms’. The Earl of Sunderland, whom Anne had made Secretary on the understanding that henceforth he would loyally support the government, warned that he and his Junto colleagues would punish the ministry by mounting an attack on the conduct of the Admiralty, which would result in Marlborough’s brother George Churchill being driven from Prince George’s naval council. Undaunted, the Queen still refused to retract her offers to Blackall and Dawes, insisting that it was a matter of honour, as she could not break her word to them. Even when the Junto indicated they would permit her to award the See of Exeter to the man of her choice, providing that Chester, Norwich, and the Oxford professorship went to Whiggish divines, she would not accept the compromise.
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Godolphin was convinced not only that Anne’s resistance was being encouraged by Robert Harley, but that the Secretary had advised her to appoint Blackall and Dawes in the first place. Harley himself later emphatically denied this and Anne too insisted that ‘he knew nothing of it till it was the talk of the town’. Yet while it may have been true that she had not consulted Harley before making the appointments, it is almost
certain that the Secretary was doing what he could to keep up her hostility towards the Junto. Godolphin informed Marlborough that Harley was so full of ‘hate and fear’ for Somers and Sunderland that ‘he omits no occasion of filling [the Queen’s] head with their projects and designs’, and Sarah, who by now loathed the Secretary, was equally sure that he was a pernicious influence. Yet while Marlborough wrote sympathetically to his wife that he was ‘sorry you think … [Harley] takes all occasion of doing hurt’, he was acutely aware that Anne had a profound regard for the Secretary, and believed this made it out of the question to break with him. He told Godolphin that the strategy must be to win Harley over to his viewpoint, and warned his wife ‘there is no possibility of acting otherways than making use of him’.
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Marlborough did his best to make the Queen more amenable. In July 1707 he wrote reminding her that if the Tories came to power they ‘would not carry on this war with vigour’ and that it was therefore very dangerous to antagonise the Whigs. His letter left Anne unmoved, and her firmness made him wonder whether ‘somebody or other (I know not who) has got so much credit’ with the Queen as to be capable of causing the ministry serious difficulties.
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These suspicions chimed exactly with his wife’s beliefs, but the Duchess was far less wary than her husband when it came to apportioning blame. Indeed, for some weeks now, Sarah had been troubled by the growing conviction that her cousin Abigail Hill, whom she had rescued from destitution and installed as a Woman of the Bedchamber, had become sufficiently close to the Queen to exert a malign political influence.

For the past fifteen years or so, the entire Hill family had benefited from Sarah’s kindness. When the Duke of Gloucester’s death had led to Alice Hill losing her job as his laundress, Sarah had tried to persuade Anne to take her on as an extra Woman of the Bedchamber, arguing that those currently in office, who nursed Anne when she was incapacitated, would welcome an addition to their number, ‘the duty being too hard … upon account of the Princess being often ill’. Anne had rejected the suggestion at that time, but after further urging from Sarah in 1705, she awarded Alice a pension of £200.
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Sarah had also forwarded the prospects of Abigail and Alice’s younger brother, Jack Hill. After he had left St Albans Grammar School (where Sarah had paid for his education) she had arranged for him to become page to Prince George of Denmark. When the Duke of Gloucester was given his own household, Jack Hill was made one of his Grooms of the
Bedchamber, and on Gloucester’s death he transferred to being a Groom of the Bedchamber to Prince George. By her own account, Sarah then got Jack Hill started on an army career, for in November 1702 the young man (whom she later described as an ‘idle, drinking, mimicking creature’) secured a commission in the Coldstream Guards. Sarah noted that her husband sanctioned this ‘all at my request’ despite the fact he ‘always said that Jack Hill was good for nothing’.
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Abigail Hill, meanwhile, made the most of her position as one of the Queen’s Women of the Bedchamber, although it is not easy to chart her progress from relatively lowly servant to trusted confidante. Despite her later prominence, she remains a somewhat shadowy figure. In her writings, the Duchess of Marlborough would demonise her to such an extent that it has the paradoxical effect of making the reader think that Abigail cannot have been so bad as Sarah suggests. As for her appearance, Sarah and her crony Arthur Maynwaring revelled in portraying Abigail as physically hideous. They nicknamed her ‘Carbuncles’, and on different occasions Maynwaring described her as an ‘ugly hag’ with a ‘frightful face’ and ‘stinking breath’. Clearly their comments owed a great deal to malice, but the supposed portrait of Abigail in the National Portrait Gallery does indeed depict a fairly plain woman. Jonathan Swift, who liked her, noted at one point that she was ‘not very handsome’, but provided no details other than remarking that she was ‘extremely like one Mrs Malolly that was once my landlady in Trim’.
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A diplomat employed by the States General informed the Grand Pensionary of Holland that it was above all her skill as a servant that marked Abigail out in Anne’s eyes. He reported that the Queen had declared that none of her other waiting women were ‘so handy as her, and that not one of them handled her with so much delicacy when she was unwell, or combed and dressed her Majesty’s hair so skilfully’. The Duchess of Marlborough claimed that Abigail’s only attribute of distinction was ‘a little skill in mimic[ry] which served to divert her mistress sometimes’. It is tempting to speculate that Abigail sometimes imitated Sarah herself, although the Duchess was sure Abigail would initially have proceeded very cautiously. She mused, ‘I am apt to think she was too artful to rail at me, but rather pretended to have a kindness for me, and like Iago gave, as she saw occasion, wounds in the dark’.
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Swift gave an admiring pen sketch of Abigail’s character, summing her up as being possessed ‘of a plain sound understanding, of great truth and sincerity … of an honest boldness and courage superior to her sex, firm and disinterested in her friendship and full of love, duty and veneration
for the Queen her mistress’. The Earl of Dartmouth was less complimentary. Although from a political point of view his outlook was similar to hers, he noted that ‘she was exceeding mean and vulgar in her manners, of a very unequal temper, childishly exceptious and passionate’. From the regrettably limited evidence provided by her scant surviving correspondence, it seems fair to describe Abigail as a sly and insinuating woman. Furthermore, the Duchess of Marlborough undeniably had a point when she condemned Abigail for being unmindful of all she had done for her. Sarah noted that until her disloyalty became apparent, Abigail always ‘affected such an humble way that when she met me [she] would always offer to pin up my coat [or ‘manto’]’, but Abigail’s subsequent letters show that, far from suffering qualms about turning on her cousin, she took a positively unholy glee in doing so.
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With hindsight Sarah would come to believe that Abigail established herself in Anne’s favour very early in the reign, but initially she assumed that any kindness the Queen evinced towards her cousin was simply a reflection of Anne’s affection for her. However, some of the Queen’s other personal attendants were aware that Abigail had come to mean a great deal to the Queen. Sarah would later ruefully observe that, by 1707, ‘I believe all the family knew more of that fondness than I then did’. Another Woman of the Bedchamber, Mrs Beata Danvers, later related to Sarah an incident that had occurred during the Queen’s trip to Bath in 1703, which showed that Abigail had already acquired a lively sense of her own importance, and that Anne ‘was very fond of her’. Abigail had objected to the bedchamber allocated to her in the house taken by the Queen, and had said she would stay up overnight rather than sleep in it. There then ensued ‘the most ridiculous scene’, which Mrs Danvers acted out for Sarah’s benefit, delighting the Duchess by capturing ‘Mrs Hill’s sorely ill bred manner and the Queen going about the room after her and begging her to go to bed, calling her “Dear Hill” twenty times over’.
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When Sarah had requested the Queen to employ Alice Hill as a Bedchamber Woman in 1705, Anne had turned down the suggestion but had taken the opportunity to make clear how much she valued Abigail. Having explained that she did not like being looked after by strangers, she maintained that Abigail was coping well enough without an assistant, for ‘now that Hill does all Fielding’s business I am so much better served that I find no want of another’. However, she promised to take on Alice Hill if the situation changed, ‘believing she is very good. If she is like her sister, I am sure she must be so’.
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A few months earlier the Queen had also made plain her approval of Abigail to Lord Godolphin. By that time Abigail’s brother Jack, aided by his connection with the Marlboroughs, had attained the rank of captain, but Abigail wanted him to rise higher in the army. Although the selling of commissions was usually frowned upon, Abigail hoped that the Queen could make it possible for him to dispose of his current place, so that he could purchase the colonelcy of the 11th Foot. Accordingly Anne wrote to Godolphin, asking him to facilitate this. ‘If you think the D[uke] of Marl[borough] can have no objection against it, I must own to you I should be glad the thing were done’ she informed him, explaining that although in general ‘I am against selling’, in this case Hill’s sister ‘seems to be desirous of it, and she is so good a creature that I shall be glad at any time to do anything for her that is not unreasonable’. In May 1705 Hill had duly been made Colonel of the 11th Foot.
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As yet Sarah had no inkling that the Queen had become exceptionally close to Abigail. Only in retrospect did she recall tell-tale signs, incidents which at the time ‘had seemed odd and unaccountable’ but which had not then aroused ‘suspicion or jealousy’. On one occasion, for example, Sarah had been closeted with the Queen when ‘on a sudden this woman, not knowing I was there, came in with the boldest and gayest air possible, but upon sight of me stopped, and immediately, changing her manner and making a most solemn curtsey, “Did your Majesty ring?”’
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Abigail now acquired another influential friend at court. She was related to the Duchess of Marlborough through her mother but, by coincidence, Abigail’s father was a kinsman of the Harleys, meaning that Robert Harley was Abigail’s second cousin. Sarah noted that Harley had initially been slow to show family feeling towards his poor relations, for he ‘would not see any of them … when they wanted bread’. However, towards the end of William III’s reign, Sarah had prodded him into doing something for his cousins. At that point, Abigail’s eldest brother needed £2,000 in order to acquire a post in the customs office, and Sarah had written to Harley saying that if he would provide half the money, she would find the rest. Harley obliged.
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Once Anne was Queen, Harley gradually came to realise that Abigail could be of use to him. He found that she shared his political outlook and that, like him, she wanted to keep the Queen out of the clutches of the Junto. As Secretary of State he of course enjoyed regular access to the Queen, but as his views diverged from those of Marlborough and Godolphin, he wanted to put his opinions to Anne as unobtrusively as possible. By the summer of 1707 the pair were indeed so watchful of him
that Marlborough warned the Lord Treasurer, ‘I am afraid there is too much conversation between the Queen and Mr Harley’. Harley therefore welcomed the fact that Abigail could enable him to visit Anne unobserved or, when that was impracticable, act as his mouthpiece. The Grand Pensionary of Holland was told by his agent in England that ‘the conferences took place in the lady-in-waiting’s apartment’. The same informant reported that ‘as the Queen has been indisposed for a long time, and she lives as it were in retreat, the Secretary often had opportunities to talk privately to her without being noticed by the other ministers … by making use of his female relation’. Harley allegedly exploited this to the full, and availed himself of every chance ‘to inspire an aversion in the Queen towards the present ministry by representing to her the abuses they were committing’.
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