Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (62 page)

Much distressed, Anne implored him to reconsider, telling him that by resigning he would not only ‘expose me to ruin, but betray your country and your friends’. ‘If you should put it in practice I really believe it will be my death’, she declared, asking him to believe that the ‘concern I have been in’ since seeing him last was ‘not to be imagined by any but me that have felt it’. She was adamant, however, that her commitment to Blackall was sacrosanct, for if she broke her word she ‘could not answer it neither to God Almighty nor my self, my conscience and honour,
being too far engaged in that matter for me to alter my intentions’. Doing so would ‘expose me to the contempt of all mankind’, and she therefore trusted that Godolphin would not press her further on this point. Yet though she professed herself distraught at the prospect of losing her Lord Treasurer, her defiance towards the Whig leaders was as implacable as ever. ‘Whoever of the Whigs thinks I am to be hectored or frighted into compliance, though I am a woman, are mightily mistaken in me’, she proclaimed fiercely. ‘I thank God I have a soul above that, and am too much concerned for my reputation to do anything to forfeit it’. Perhaps somewhat startled by her own vehemence, Anne finally requested Godolphin not to ‘let this be seen by anybody, no, not by my unkind friend’.
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Godolphin delayed carrying out his threat to resign, hoping that he could yet prevail on the Queen to accommodate the Whigs. In late September Marlborough wrote to her again, saying he was in despair ‘to see everything that has been hitherto so prosperous running so fast to ruin’, and warning that he and Godolphin could ‘put no other construction’ upon her refusal to follow their advice ‘but that of your being guided by other hands’. But while the Duke was happy to support the Lord Treasurer in this way, he did not believe their careers were inextricably linked. Although Godolphin had understood that Marlborough would resign with him, the Duke explained that if the Lord Treasurer left office, he would cease to be involved in domestic politics, but would not give up his military command. The fact that Marlborough was prepared to stay on as general came as a shock to the Lord Treasurer, and forced him to reconsider his own position. By 7 October, although still despondent that ‘nothing is fixed here to make [Parliament] succeed’, he had resolved to do nothing ‘so shameful as to abandon [the Queen] but upon a joint measure with Mr Freeman’.
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Sarah meanwhile had been busy elsewhere, trying to find out exactly what Abigail had been up to recently. Her enquiries revealed that the situation was much worse than she had suspected, for until this point, ‘though I saw she was doing mischief, I did not think she could have been such a devil to me’. The first thing Sarah learned, in early September, was that Abigail had married Samuel Masham (who by then was in Ireland with his regiment) earlier in the year. Sarah had a right to feel affronted that her cousin had ‘married without telling me, which she ought not to have done, no more than any of my children’, but decided to overlook the lapse, attributing it ‘to bashfulness and want of breeding rather than anything worse’. Going to Abigail to offer her
congratulations, she offered to break the news to the Queen, and was taken aback when Abigail said she believed Anne had already heard of it from the gossip of the Bedchamber Women. Unsettled by this, Sarah went to the Queen and reproached her for keeping the secret from her, only to be shaken to the core when Anne blurted out, ‘I have a hundred times bid Masham tell it you and she would not’. The Queen’s use of Abigail’s married name, and her incautious admission that she talked with her so frequently, showed how calculated the deception had been. Worse was to come, for on investigating further Sarah discovered that Anne had attended the wedding herself, having been spotted making her way unattended to Dr Arbuthnot’s lodging ‘by a boy of the kitchen at Kensington’. Sarah was left in no doubt that ‘my cousin was become an absolute favourite’, for it soon emerged that Anne was regularly ‘locked up with Abigail after dinner when the Prince was in one of the rooms asleep’, and that Mrs Masham ‘was generally two hours every day in private with her. And I likewise then discovered beyond all dispute Mr Harley’s correspondence and interest at court by means of this woman’.
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On the evening of 22 September the Duchess came across her cousin as she went through the drawing room at Kensington on her way to see the Queen, and though decorum was preserved, it was an icy encounter. Abigail breathlessly reported to Harley, ‘as she passed I had a very low curtsey, which I returned in the same manner, but not one word passed between us; and as for her looks, indeed they are not to be described by any mortal but her own self’. Next day Sarah wrote to Abigail complaining ‘you have made me returns very unsuitable to what I might have expected’, and she then left court to go to Woodstock. On her way there she received a disingenuous letter from Abigail, which said she feared the Duchess had been told ‘some malicious lie of me’, and avowing that incurring her displeasure would be ‘the greatest unhappiness that could befall me’. Sarah replied that she was acting on her own observations and that she would explain further when next they met.
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Quite some time would elapse, however, before the Duchess had things out with her cousin. On 30 September the Queen and Prince George went to Newmarket for just over a fortnight, and Mrs Masham accompanied her mistress there. Even after the trip was over and Abigail returned with the Queen to St James’s Palace, she contrived not to see her cousin for another twelve days. Sarah complained to the Queen that Abigail was avoiding her, whereupon Anne countered that such
behaviour was ‘very natural’. At length, however, a meeting took place, and Sarah wasted no time berating Abigail for her treachery. Informing her angrily that ‘the Queen was much changed towards me and that I could not attribute this to anything but her secret management’, she argued that Abigail’s concealment of how often she saw Anne privately ‘was alone a very ill sign and enough to prove a very bad purpose at bottom’. Abigail was not in the least discomposed. Having denied that she ever discussed business with Anne, she nonplussed Sarah by telling her sweetly that ‘she was sure the Queen, who had loved me extremely, would always be very kind to me’. ‘To see a woman, whom I had raised out of the dust, put on such a superior air’ left Sarah dumbstruck, and the Duchess was still spluttering incoherently when Abigail calmly took her leave.
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Having failed to worst her cousin in this encounter, the Duchess went back to the Queen to direct complaints at her. She alleged that Abigail was unfit to be accorded the royal confidence because having ‘been in a mean status’ as a domestic servant, she would be unable to resist the temptations that would beset her once it was known that she had the Queen’s ear. She implied that Abigail would be susceptible to bribery, as ‘money would be offered whenever it was thought there was credit … and one did not know what people might be persuaded to that had an inclination to mend their condition’. ‘Without being quite stupid I can’t but see that she aims at much more than she would have you believe’, she cautioned the Queen, although she would later maintain that she had pointed this out in the most reasonable fashion, ‘with … little passion’. She had to admit however, that she breached the bounds of good taste when she moved on to discussing the need for a change of personnel on Prince George’s naval council, managing to convey that the Prince was reluctant to part with his adviser George Churchill because they were in a homosexual relationship.

Afterwards, Anne complained volubly to Godolphin, attacking Sarah for ‘saying perpetually ill things of Mrs Hill’ and accusing her of being ‘guilty of disrespect’ and other faults. Even Sarah realised she had gone too far with regard to Prince George and George Churchill, and clumsily tried to set things right by defending herself to Godolphin. ‘I did mean only what I said of Mr Morley as a companion and not with any disrespectful thought or reflection upon him, to show what a sort of friendship it was’, she explained lamely, ‘and if I had thought or ever heard that he had any such inclination it would have been the last thing that ever I should have touched upon’.
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Yet though she accepted that some of what
she had said was injudicious, she was not in the least contrite about her attacks upon Abigail.

Parliament met at the beginning of November 1707, with the Junto’s sour mood unabated. One observer reported, ‘The Whigs are positive that they will not bear the new intended bishops; the Queen seems fixed and resolved on it’. Although determined not to crumble before the Junto’s threats, Anne intimated to the Archbishop of York that she was ‘afraid of some ruffles’.
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The ministry’s difficulties were increased by the fact that from a military point of view, 1707 had been ‘a year of great misfortunes and disappointments’. In Spain the allies experienced a dreadful reverse on 14/25 April, when a force commanded by the Earl of Galway suffered a shattering defeat at Almanza. Soon afterwards one army officer acknowledged ‘the enemy has beaten and ruined us in Spain and hardly left us footing enough for our King to retain the title we gave him’, and with hindsight one can discern that from this point there was never a genuine chance of achieving victory within the Iberian peninsula.
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Unfortunately the allies were slow to grasp the realities of the situation, and the British government remained committed to securing Charles III the Spanish throne.

The allies also had faced setbacks in Germany, and this in turn had made the Dutch more reluctant to permit Marlborough to take on the enemy in the Low Countries. Unable to fight a battle that summer, Marlborough became ‘much out of humour and peevish with the bad success of the war’, which plainly would have to last ‘a campaign or two more yet’. The allies had hoped to turn the tide of the war by capturing Toulon and invading France from the south, but the venture had ended in failure. The British could perhaps have derived some consolation from the fact that the Royal Navy had acquitted itself well during the operation, but on his way home Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell was wrecked off the Scillies, causing Godolphin such grief that he ‘would have torn off the few locks that remained on his head’.
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All this ensured that Parliament was in a restive mood, and the Junto intended to capitalise on the situation. They decided to focus their attacks on the perceived shortcomings of the navy, which had failed to protect merchant shipping from the attacks of French privateers. Before Parliament assembled they had sent George Churchill a message ‘that if he doth not quit the Prince’s council of his own accord they will find means to make him do it in spite of all he can do to keep himself in’.
Nevertheless, Churchill still clung to office, bolstered by the fact that Prince George indicated that if Churchill was replaced by a Whig nominee, he would resign himself.
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Although Parliament voted war supplies promptly, the Junto were able to organise an attack on naval policy and administration. In the Commons it was alleged that recent shipping losses had been caused by ‘fraud, malice and ignorance’ on the part of Churchill. For a time it seemed that the Tory opposition intended to align themselves with Junto supporters to bring him down, until it occurred to them that the Whigs would then put a nominee of their own in charge of the navy. Some moderate Whigs also proved reluctant to support Junto tactics. As a result the assault on Churchill faltered, but the Queen was still ‘highly offended at the whole proceeding’, and both she and her husband ‘looked on it as a design levelled at their authority’ by the Junto.
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It was at this point that Harley put forward proposals of his own as to how the government could build up support in Parliament and weaken opponents. He wanted Godolphin to preside over a ministry weighted in favour of the Tories, but which included moderate Whigs such as Newcastle, Devonshire, Somerset, Boyle, and Walpole. When Harley first approached him with these ideas on 5 December, it came as a shock to Godolphin. Harley had recently reaffirmed his loyalty to the duumvirs with what Sarah called ‘the most nauseous professions of affection and duty’, and this had lulled Godolphin into assuming that Harley would not dare embark on a new political initiative on his own. Believing that he and Marlborough held the key to resolving the government’s political difficulties, Godolphin was confident that ‘there is really no such thing as a scheme or anything like it from anybody else’ and that anyway the Queen would not contemplate ‘taking a scheme but from Mr Freeman and Mr Montgomery’. Sarah later recalled that at this time, Godolphin ‘would sometimes snap me up, notwithstanding his good breeding, when I said anything against Mr Harley’.
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The Duke of Marlborough was less surprised that Harley had come up with this plan, for he had had a shrewd idea that the Secretary had been moving behind the scenes throughout the autumn. Moreover, since the Queen had made a point of telling him how strongly she desired ‘to encourage all those who have not been in opposition that will concur in my service, whether they be Whigs or Tories’,
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he believed that Harley should be allowed to proceed, not least because the Queen would not consider any alternative proposals that enhanced Junto power, until other political combinations had been shown to be unworkable. The
Duke was the more amenable to Harley’s scheme because he had been angered by the Junto’s attempts to drive his brother from office, even though he had asked them to show restraint out of consideration for him. For all these reasons Marlborough (who had returned to England in early November) prevailed upon the Lord Treasurer to let Harley see if his design could be put into practice.