Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (75 page)

The excitement was heightened by the fact that Sacheverell had become an unlikely heartthrob among Tory ladies. There was a brisk trade in portrait prints of him for, despite his plump features and protuberant eyes, ‘a good assurance, clean gloves, white handkerchiefs well managed’ somehow gave him a spurious appeal.
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Everyone in London society was desperate to obtain tickets for the trial in Westminster Hall and, once it started, fashionable ladies queued up to take their seats at seven in the morning.

The Queen was not numbered among Sacheverell’s admirers. Since the matter had not been raised in Cabinet, she had taken no part in the decision to proceed against him, but she did not dispute he had preached ‘a bad sermon and that he deserved well to be punished for it’. Almost certainly, however, she would have preferred it if, instead of being subjected to a show trial, Sacheverell had been called before the bar of the House of Commons and chastised lightly. The passions that were stirred up by the case disturbed her greatly, and she later told her physician ‘that his impeachment had been better let alone’. Nevertheless, she was careful to maintain a stance of strict neutrality. Just before the trial began Abigail Masham (herself a Sacheverell supporter) tried to draw Anne on the subject. She reported to Harley ‘I was with my aunt last night on purpose to speak to her about Dr Sacheverell and asked her if she did not let people know her mind in the matter. She said no, she did not meddle one way or other, and that it was her friends’ advice not to meddle’. Ruffled by the Queen’s discretion, Abigail wanted to know ‘who she called her friends?’
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Sacheverell’s trial lasted three and a half weeks, and the Queen attended most days, sitting in a curtained-off area. Alleging that
Sacheverell had sought to ‘blacken the Revolution’ of 1688, the Whigs sought to use the impeachment as a showcase to parade their own principles. Robert Walpole, acting as one of the managers for the Commons, affirmed that ‘The very being of our present government is the resistance that was necessarily used at the Revolution’, while his colleague James Stanhope accused Sacheverell of insulting Anne herself by implying ‘the Revolution … was a usurpation’. He contended that Sacheverell’s real aim was to bring about the restoration of James Francis Edward, for ‘the true object of these doctrines is a prince on the other side of the water’.
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At no time did any of the Commons managers suggest that the Pretender was not really James II’s son. The warming pan baby story was tacitly acknowledged to be a fiction, and instead it was affirmed that King James’s violation of the contract between monarch and people had entitled them to rise up against him. One shrewd observer would later argue that it was unwise to take this approach, because ‘One of the principal things that drew the nation so unanimously into the Revolution was the supposed illegitimacy of the Pretender … Nothing can weaken the Revolution so much as to the dispossessing the people of this notion’.
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The same person thought that if Anne was persuaded that the Pretender was her ‘true brother’, it would be ‘very natural’ if she inclined to him.
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Others too have supposed that after the Sacheverell trial Anne could no longer delude herself that the Pretender was not her father’s son and that her attitude towards him changed from this point. There is, however, no evidence for this view. It seems that Anne was one of the few people who continued to subscribe to the myth of the supposititious child but, even if doubts did creep in about its substance, she believed that other reasons besides his birth disqualified James Francis Edward from wearing the crown. However, for those whose sympathies leaned that way, the Sacheverell trial could be said to have validated the Pretender’s claim. Paradoxically, an event that was designed to vindicate the Revolution, actually put heart in the Jacobites.

From the start the mob had been on Sacheverell’s side. He came to court every day in a showy coach that had been loaned to him, making his way through cheering crowds and occasionally sticking his hand out to be kissed. As the Queen was carried towards Westminster in her chair, the crowd swarmed about her shouting ‘God bless your Majesty and the Church! We hope your Majesty is for Dr Sacheverell’. Despite the display of loyalty, the Queen looked ‘very pensive’. It did not take long for the mood of the crowd to turn ugly, and for anger to boil up against dissenters. On 28 February some meeting-houses in London had their windows
broken. The following evening violent riots broke out, and for four hours the mob rampaged through London. Burgess’s meeting-house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ransacked and its contents burnt, and other meeting-houses in the capital suffered similar destruction. Passers-by were forced to drink the health of Sacheverell and one of the Commons managers who was waylaid only narrowly escaped lynching. By 9 p.m. it was feared that the mob were planning to storm the Bank of England, and Sunderland went to St James’s Palace to warn the Queen. On hearing the news she was reportedly ‘seized with paleness and trembling’, but she soon recovered her composure and ordered the Secretary to send her Horse and Foot Guards to disperse the mob. When Sunderland expressed concern about the palace being left undefended, she answered staunchly, ‘God would be her guard’.
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The troops sent out to deal with the crisis successfully restored order. One rioter had his hand cut off at the wrist by a cavalryman’s sabre, and there were also several arrests. Two of the supposed ringleaders of the disorders were convicted of treason, but later pardoned. The Queen ordered that the damage to the meeting-houses should be repaired at public expense.

The morning after the riots Sacheverell’s trial resumed, and on 7 March he spoke in his own defence. He delivered a ‘studied, artful and pathetic speech’, ‘exquisitely contrived to move pity’ and ‘done in so fine a manner … with so harmonious a voice that the poor ladies wet all their clean handkerchiefs’. Even some Tory peers, such as Rochester and Nottingham, were in tears. On 16 March the scene switched to the House of Lords, where the peers debated the evidence for some days before giving their verdict. The Queen came to listen to most of their discussions, even though they went on for hours and ‘no bear garden was ever more noisy’.
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Despite Anne’s strictly impartial demeanour, this could not stop ‘secret whispers’ being ‘set about that though the Queen’s affairs put her on acting the part of one that was pleased with this scene, yet she disliked it all’. To the disappointment of Sacheverell’s supporters, however, she did nothing that betrayed approval for him. When, late one evening in the Lords, the Earl of Nottingham was making a long speech in the doctor’s favour, the Queen abruptly left the House, ‘which blew’d the good Lord’. On another night, as she stood up to leave at 10 p.m., the Duke of Somerset offered to escort her home, ‘but she told him, no, not without he brought a lord of the other party, for she would not have a vote lost on any score’. Towards the end of the trial the Earl of Kent asked
her for her views and ‘the Queen told him she thought the Commons had reason to be satisfied that they had made their allegations good, and the mildest punishment inflicted upon the doctor she thought the best’.
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The outcome of the trial was as the Queen desired. A majority of peers voted Sacheverell guilty on every count, but the only penalties imposed were a prohibition on him preaching for three years and for his sermon to be burnt. One lady commented acidly, ‘this might have been done without putting the nation to £60,000 charge, besides the terrible animosities that are raised throughout the kingdom’. Hailed as ‘rather … an absolution than a condemnation’, the light sentence was perceived as a humiliation for the ministry, and was celebrated with bonfires and illuminations. The mood of the public remained unsettled for weeks. On 29 March, six days after the trial had ended, Anne wrote in concern to the Lord Mayor about the ‘continuance of these riots and tumults’ in London, and a fortnight later she was still worried by ‘the heat and ferment that is in this poor nation’. At the end of April the Imperial Resident in London declared that England had not appeared so unstable since Cromwell’s time.
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The government had stirred up so much indignation that addresses were presented to the Queen from every part of the kingdom asking for new elections. While not endorsing the more extreme sentiments voiced in these papers, Anne was ‘spirited by the addresses’. They showed how unpopular the ministry had become, presenting her with an opportunity to liberate herself from the Junto.
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During the Sacheverell trial, the Duchess of Marlborough had yet another acrimonious encounter with Anne. The Queen’s ladies-in-waiting were in attendance when she went to Westminster Hall, but since Anne forgot to invite them to sit down, it appeared that they would have to stand behind her chair during the entire proceedings. Accordingly, Sarah had asked if they might be seated, and without hesitation the Queen had answered ‘by all means, pray sit’. To Sarah’s chagrin, however, the Duchess of Somerset and Lady Hyde did not avail themselves of the privilege. Scenting ‘a deep plot’ on the Duchess of Somerset’s part to make the Queen think ‘I had done something that was impertinent’, Sarah went to see Anne early the next morning and asked her to confirm that she was happy for her ladies to be seated. Understandably irritated, the Queen snapped, ‘If I had not liked it, why do you think I would have ordered it?’
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The incident confirmed Sarah in the suspicion that the Duke and Duchess of Somerset were causing trouble for her. ‘A man of vast pride’,
the Duke of Somerset was in theory a Whig, but of late his relations with Marlborough, Godolphin, and the Junto had cooled. He absented himself from the Lords’ vote on Sacheverell, and was one of those suspected of spreading the rumour that the Queen desired Sacheverell’s acquittal. Sarah claimed that in 1704 Anne had described him as a ‘fool and liar’ and had wanted to dismiss him for leaking Cabinet secrets. Since then, however, he had successfully ingratiated himself with her. During the summer of 1709 he was not ‘three days absent’ while the Queen was at Windsor, and by the following spring he had become ‘one of the greatest favourites’ who was with her ‘more hours in the day … than Abigail’.
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The Queen’s change of heart owed much to the fact that she had grown very fond of his wife. ‘The best bred as well as the best born lady in England’, the red-haired Duchess had experienced a turbulent youth. As a teenaged heiress she had been married against her will to the much older Thomas Thynne. She had fled to the Continent to avoid living with him, and while she was overseas a foreign adventurer named Count Konigsmark had murdered Thynne. The Duchess of Marlborough was among those who believed ‘she would have married her husband’s murderer’ and was somehow implicated. In fact, after Konigsmark had escaped abroad, the young widow had married the Duke of Somerset, making him extremely rich but in return being ‘treated … with little gratitude or affection’. She had become a Lady of the Bedchamber at the start of the reign and, by being ‘soft and complaisant, full of fine words and low curtseys’, as Sarah bitterly put it, she made herself agreeable to the Queen.
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Sarah recalled that when Mrs Masham first came into favour, she and the Duchess of Somerset ‘used to laugh and be very free on the subject of Abigail’. Now Sarah feared that the Duchess had informed the Queen that Sarah habitually spread ‘Grub Street stories’, and ‘often spoke of her in company disrespectfully’. Sarah believed that the Duke of Somerset was also disseminating ‘the most villainous lies’ about her.
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Sarah decided that she must see the Queen in order to vindicate herself, but Anne had reached the point where she could not bear to be alone with the Duchess of Marlborough. When Sarah requested a private audience on 3 April, the Queen initially assented and then changed her mind, saying it would be easier for both parties if Sarah communicated by letter. Sarah persisted, and the Queen again agreed to meet, only to cancel the appointment once more because she had gone to Kensington. Undeterred, Sarah wrote she would come to her there, saying that she could not take the sacrament at Easter until she had resolved matters.
She announced, ‘I will come every day and wait till you please to allow me to speak to you’, but rashly promised that Anne need make no answer to what she had to say.
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Without waiting for a reply, Sarah ‘followed this letter to Kensington’, stationing herself in the gallery ‘like a Scotch lady with a petition’. She asked the page to inform the Queen she was outside, and a long interval elapsed while Anne evidently debated with herself whether to receive her. At length, however, the Duchess was ushered into the closet, but the meeting did not go as she wished. Sarah once noted, ‘It was the Queen’s usual way on any occasion where she was predetermined (and my Lord Marlborough has told me that it was her father’s) to repeat over and over some principal words she had resolved to use and to stick firmly to them’.
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In this final interview, Anne used this technique to devastating effect.

As soon as Sarah started to speak, the Queen interrupted, telling her, ‘Whatever you have to say you may put it in writing’. After that, whenever Sarah paused, Anne uttered the same phrase. The Duchess nevertheless doggedly explained that she believed Anne had been told she had ‘said things of her which I was no more capable of saying than killing my own children’, quite ‘unlike my manner of talking of your Majesty, whom I seldom name in company and never without respect’. At one point Sarah complained, ‘There are a thousand lies told of me’, to which the Queen cryptically returned, ‘Without doubt there were many lies told’. Sarah pressed on, begging Anne to tell her ‘the particulars of which I had been accused’, whereupon the Queen adopted a new formula, greeting every remark of Sarah’s with the words, ‘You desired no answer and shall have none’. Since this failed to silence Sarah, the Queen at one point tried to leave the room, but the Duchess, by this time in tears and almost hysterical, barred the door. She went on trying to justify herself, demanding ‘whether I had ever … told her one lie or played the hypocrite once?’ but the Queen merely reiterated the same single grim sentence. These ‘harsh words … were still continued after all the moving things I said’ Sarah later recalled, and the Duchess was finally forced to realise there was nothing to be gained by prolonging the exchange. Viciously she told the Queen ‘I was confident her Majesty would suffer for such an instance of inhumanity’, but Anne merely said ‘That will be to myself’. Defeated, the Duchess withdrew, never to see the Queen again. ‘So ended … a royal friendship which once could not be contained within the common bounds of love’.
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