Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (79 page)

On 14 September Harley told an associate that the Queen was ‘resolved in her own breast’ on a dissolution, having accepted that the present Parliament could not meet ‘without intolerable heats’. Nevertheless, both Harley and the Queen still hoped that a few of the current ministers would remain in office. For some time Harley had been courting Lord Cowper, and on 18 September he met with him and ‘used all arguments possible’ to persuade him to stay on. Although Harley lamented that ‘he must … throw himself into the Thames’ if Cowper resisted his entreaties, the Lord Chancellor answered ‘that to keep in, when all my friends were out would be infamous’.
⁸¹

The Queen took action on 20 September, depriving Devonshire of his place as Lord Steward, and replacing him with the Duke of Buckingham. She also dismissed Lord Somers, but she sent word ‘she had not lessened her esteem for him’ and asked him to give her advice in private from time to time. Promising to do so, Somers ‘expressed a great deal of duty and gratitude’. He was succeeded as Lord President by the Earl of Rochester. Only days before, Rochester had lectured the Queen on the impossibility of forming a government independent of parties, saying he could not serve with men who did not share his principles. Now he proved surprisingly willing to compromise, and in the few months left to him would do his best to hold Harley’s administration together.
⁸²
To the disappointment of both Harley and the Queen, Secretary Boyle resigned and Harley reluctantly conferred his office on Henry St John.

At the Cabinet meeting on 21 September, the clerk read out a proclamation stating that Parliament was to be dissolved. Cowper started to protest, but ‘the Queen rose up and would admit of no debate, and ordered the writs for a new Parliament to be prepared’. She then left the
room, which ‘spoiled a great many intended speeches’. The next day Lords Orford, Wharton, and Cowper went to court to resign their places. The Queen was downcast at this, but was particularly upset at the prospect of losing Cowper. When he tried to surrender the Great Seal, she responded with ‘repeated importunities’ that lasted for three quarters of an hour, ‘begging him not to do so with tears’. Five times, Cowper handed over the seal, only for the Queen to give it back to him, saying humbly, ‘I beg it as a favour of you if I may use that expression’. Eventually Cowper took it on condition she would accept it from his hands the following day. The next morning Cowper duly returned, and this time, to Anne’s profound regret, managed to resign. Soon afterwards she sent him a message, asking him to pay her occasional visits and proffer advice.
⁸³

The Tory Simon Harcourt was made Lord Keeper, and the Admiralty was put into commission. Although Anne had yearned for a mixed ministry, it was undeniably ‘upon an entire Tory bottom that the administration is now founded’. Admittedly the Duke of Somerset remained in office, but he was no friend to the new ministry. ‘The day the Parliament was dissolved he came out of council in such a passion that he cursed and swore at all his servants’. The next day he tried to resign, and though ‘the Queen overpersuaded him’, during the elections he used all his influence to secure the return of Whig candidates. He complained he had been ‘deceived by Mr Harley, for all he intended to do was to free the Queen from the power of the two great men, and was promised that things should be carried no further’. After ‘a long audience and a very rough one on his part’ with the Queen in late October, he ceased to attend Cabinet meetings.
⁸⁴

It was true that a few minor Whigs remained in lesser offices, but even this would be difficult to sustain should the Tories gain a sweeping victory at the polls. Fearing that if the Tories became ‘too numerous … they should be insolent and kick against him’, Harley took ‘measures to cool the affection of the country’. He arranged for a propaganda tract entitled
Faults on Both Sides
to be written, criticising extreme Tory views on non-resistance, as well as attacking the Whigs. There were no ‘endeavours from the court to secure elections’ for Tory candidates, but the voters were in such a determined mood this made little difference. Public opinion had been so inflamed by the Sacheverell trial that ‘there never was so apparent a fury as the people of England show against the Whigs’. While the Whig party ‘bellowed far and near that Popery and the Pretender were coming in, the other cried aloud
that the Church and the monarchy were rescued from the very brink of perdition’, and in the current climate those claims had much the greater resonance. The Tories also benefited from war weariness, for they stressed that ‘the great motive of these changes was the absolute necessity of a peace, which they thought the Whigs were for perpetually delaying’.
⁸⁵

The result was a Tory landslide, with 270 Whigs losing their seats, and Tories outnumbering their opponents in the Commons by more than two to one. It was clear that such an assembly would prove hard for Harley to manage, and one observer reported, ‘Those who got the last Parliament dissolved are as much astonished, and they say troubled, for the glut of Tories that will be in the next as the Whigs themselves’. Ominously, a significant minority of newly returned MPs had Jacobite sympathies, and would have been happy to overturn the Hanoverian succession and install the Pretender on the throne after Anne. Several of the Scots representative peers were believed to have similar leanings, so it was perhaps not surprising that it was reported that ‘the people at Saint-Germain’s are very uppish at this time’.
⁸⁶

The Queen had not wanted such a resounding Tory victory. In November 1710 she told the Whig lawyer Sir Peter King, ‘Though I have changed my ministers I have not altered my measures’, insisting that her political outlook remained non-partisan. However, the events of recent months had created doubts about her views that would never be dispelled, and which would darken the last years of her reign. Immediately after Godolphin’s dismissal Anne had been dismayed when she had asked Sir David Hamilton what people were saying in the country, and he had told her bluntly, ‘They talked of her Majesty’s inclinations to the Pretender’. Bishop Burnet felt it necessary to lecture her on the subject after being ‘encouraged by the Queen to speak more freely’. Having warned that ‘reports were secretly spread of her through the nation as if she favoured the design of bringing the Pretender to succeed to the crown’, he said she must do everything possible ‘to extinguish those jealousies’. Anne could honestly have dismissed these rumours as unfounded, but Burnet recalled, ‘She heard me patiently; she was for the most part silent’.
⁸⁷

The Duke of Marlborough did what he could to fan such fears. Ironically, he had kept up his own duplicitous connection with Saint-Germain. As recently as July 1710 he had sought to compromise Abigail Masham by artfully suggesting to the deposed Queen Mary Beatrice that she should establish contact with ‘the new [female] favourite’. While
pronouncing this ‘very obliging’, Mary Beatrice had declined to take the bait. She pointed out to Marlborough, ‘What can we hope from a stranger who has no obligation to us? Whereas we have all the reasons in the world to depend upon you’.
⁸⁸

Marlborough had decided against resigning when Godolphin was dismissed. He told the former Lord Treasurer that he would concentrate on bringing that year’s campaign to a successful finish, while ‘troubling my head as little as is possible with politics’. When Sarah expressed anger, he pointed out the Elector of Hanover had asked him to stay on, and explained that, while ‘I detest [Harley]’, he would not let himself be governed by faction. Yet although Marlborough seemed to have come to terms with events, inwardly he was seething with bitterness and hatred. ‘The folly and ingratitude of [the Queen] makes [me] sick and weary of everything’ he told Godolphin in late September. He was determined to do what he could to make things difficult for Harley, and so systematically set about destroying his reputation with allied powers. After Marlborough had warned that the new ministers ‘intend absolutely to bring about peace’, the Emperor instructed his envoy in England to take directions from Marlborough rather than the government. Marlborough also sullied Harley’s name in Hanover. The Electress Sophia professed unconcern at Anne’s change of government, remarking, ‘It was but reasonable she should make choice of such ministers as were most agreeable to her’, but Elector George Ludwig was persuaded that Harley’s intentions towards him were malign. One of his leading advisers informed Marlborough that the Elector was taking ‘English affairs far more to heart than he had ever done’, and George not only expressed indignation at Marlborough’s ‘barbarous usage’, but assured the Duke he would ‘not be governed’ by Harley.
⁸⁹

In September Harley sent Earl Rivers on an embassy to Hanover in a bid to convince the Elector he and his ministry were not hostile to him. Harley may even have hoped that the Elector would act on hints from Rivers and volunteer to take overall command of allied forces in place of Marlborough, but George Ludwig showed no interest in doing so. Instead, he received Rivers coldly and then wrote to the Queen urging her to do everything possible to ensure Marlborough remained at the head of the army. His suspicious reaction was understandable in view of the fact that on 30 August Marlborough had written to warn him Harley was a Jacobite. The Duke declared that, besides having ruined the country’s credit and tarnished Anne’s reputation abroad by engineering Godolphin’s dismissal, Harley and his followers had other ‘pernicious
designs’. It was, he wrote, no longer possible to ‘doubt that their views tend [only] to bring back the pretended Prince of Wales … and to form cabals and projects which will infallibly overturn the Protestant succession’.
⁹⁰

13

I Do Not Like War

In July 1710 the Abbé Gaultier, a fat, worldly French priest who had ‘skulked in England’ since coming over with the French ambassador late in William III’s reign, received a message from Louis XIV’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Marquis de Torcy. Soon after settling in London, Gaultier had become an unofficial French agent, occasionally sending gossipy letters home. In June 1710, he had intrigued Torcy by reporting that ‘the Duke of Shrewsbury and Mistress Masham govern the Queen absolutely’. Although at that point the peace negotiations at Geertrudenberg had not been broken off, Torcy clearly had little hope that they would be successful. Thinking to bypass Godolphin (still in office at that point) and obtain less severe peace terms, Torcy asked Gaultier to approach Shrewsbury and Mrs Masham.
¹

Gaultier had replied that he did not know either of them and, anyway, dealing with Mrs Masham would be pointless, as she ‘could not render any service in an affair of this consequence’. He was, however, acquainted with the Earl of Jersey, who was close to both the Duke of Shrewsbury and Robert Harley. The priest duly contacted Jersey and indicated that he could provide the ministers with an informal means of communicating with France. Jersey passed this on to Harley, who welcomed the opportunity to let Jersey act for him, despite the fact that the Earl was suspected of Jacobite sympathies. Communicating with the enemy in time of war was treasonable, so doing it at one remove through a shadowy figure like Jersey had its attractions.
²
Harley was not worried by the prospect that Jersey would raise France’s hopes of a Jacobite restoration. Hinting at the possibility would widen his own options, but verbal offers made by Jersey could always be disavowed.

It is unclear whether Harley fully informed the Queen of Jersey’s role: when Gaultier asked Jersey if she was aware of his contribution, Jersey blustered that ‘the question was superfluous’. In April 1711 the Queen did not appear to have been surprised when Jersey delivered to her peace proposals formulated by France, so one may surmise that by that stage
she knew that contact had been established and that Jersey was involved.
³
However, at what point she was brought into the secret remains impossible to establish.

Very soon after opening dealings with Gaultier, Jersey started giving extravagant assurances about the likelihood that James Francis Edward would succeed Anne. On 22 September Gaultier reported that Jersey had declared, ‘Be in no doubt that the Queen … has very tender sentiments for … the King of England and that she considers him like her own child’. Jersey claimed that Harley, Shrewsbury, and Buckingham ‘are only working on his behalf, with a view to giving him back what was taken from him’. A few days later he repeated that the ministers were sympathetic to James, and that so long as the prince ‘thought like them, there would be no difficulty giving him back what belongs to him’.
⁴
It is unthinkable that Anne had authorised Jersey to make such statements on her behalf; whether Harley approved is more difficult to assess.