Behind the Palace Doors (21 page)

Fortunately for Mary, the French fleet was destroyed in a fierce naval battle and the plots against her came to nothing. Her father, however, was not quite finished, and directly involved himself in a plot to assassinate William. “I have been informed of the business,” James wrote to the chief conspirator. “If you and your companions do me this service, you shall never want.”

The would-be assassin was ultimately exposed, and Mary was urged to publish the details of his trial, in which James was implicated. The queen, however, was extremely reluctant to make public what she regarded as her shame—“that he who I dare no more name father was consenting to the barbarous murder of my husband.”

Mary was indeed tortured by her father’s actions. “I was ashamed to look at anybody in the face,” she wrote. “I fancied I should be pointed at as the daughter of one who was capable of such things, and the people would believe I might by nature have as ill inclinations. I lamented his sin and his shame.” Most
of all, though, Mary worried what William would think—that somehow the plot against his life “might lessen my husband’s kindness for me.”

William was really all the queen had; she was childless, her relationship with her father had been destroyed, and a vicious feud with her sister, Anne (see
Chapter 16
), alienated her from the only immediate family remaining. Mary adored her wheezy, slightly hunchbacked husband, the cousin she had reluctantly married when she was just a girl of fifteen. Theirs was one of the rare arranged royal marriages that actually worked. Her feelings for him were perhaps best expressed in a scene between them, recounted in her journal, when William was preparing his invasion force to topple James II and encouraged Mary to remarry if anything should happen to him:

William loved Mary, too, though for much of their marriage he treated her more as an ornament than a true equal—a dynamic she seemed to encourage by her deference to him in all matters. He often preferred the company of his male friends and his mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, which wounded Mary
deeply. In time, however, he came to appreciate his wife’s political sense and admired the way she managed the kingdom during his frequent absences. Their shared isolation in England also drew the couple closer.

“There was a union of their thoughts, as well as of their persons,” wrote Gilbert Burnet, who spent much time with the co-monarchs, “and a concurring in the same designs, as well as in the same interests.… He was to conquer enemies, and she was to gain friends.… While he had more business, and she more leisure, she prepared and suggested what he executed.”

It was only when Mary contracted smallpox in 1694 that William’s deepest feelings for her burst forth. “He cried out that there was no hope for the Queen,” Burnet recalled, astonished by the usually undemonstrative king’s great show of emotion, “and that from being the happiest, he was now going to be the miserablest creature upon earth.” The king was even more expressive to his friend the prince of Vaudémont: “You know what it is to have a good wife. If I were so unhappy as to lose mine, I should have to retire from this world.”

On December 28, 1694, Queen Mary II succumbed to smallpox at age thirty-two. William was inconsolable, fainting at his wife’s deathbed and shutting himself away for weeks on end. He even gave up his mistress in her honor. “If I could believe any mortal man could be born without the contamination of sin,” the king told his confessor, “I would believe it of the Queen.”

The reaction in France to Mary’s death was significantly more subdued. Her father forbade anyone at his court to mourn her, and requested that Louis XIV do the same. It was, James said, a mighty affliction for him to see “a child he loved so tenderly persevere to her death in such a signal state of disobedience and disloyalty.”

Queen Anne succeeded her brother-in-law William III after his death in 1702. She had voluntarily given up her right to immediately succeed her sister, Mary II, who died in 1694, as this had been one of William’s conditions when he took the crown during the Glorious Revolution. Anne’s reign, during which England and Scotland were unified as one kingdom, lasted until her death in 1714
.

Mary II and her sister, Anne, had each participated in the revolution against their father. But no sooner was James II removed from his throne than their own relationship disintegrated in the throes of a bitter feud. It was a clash nurtured by Anne’s servant and close companion Sarah Jennings Churchill, a formidable woman who completely dominated her royal mistress—until their storied friendship itself imploded after Anne became queen.

Anne and Sarah met as young girls, when Sarah became a maid of honor to Anne’s stepmother, Mary Beatrice of Modena. “We had used to play together when she was a child,” Sarah wrote, “and she even then expressed a particular fondness for me.” The shy, somewhat plodding Anne, just seven at the time and recently
left motherless, was indeed attracted to the pert, supremely confident Sarah, five years her senior. What developed was a bit of a schoolgirl crush, albeit a one-sided one. For though Anne clearly adored her older friend, showering upon her devoted love letters and other marks of affection, Sarah seems to have sensed only opportunity. She became part of Anne’s household but found her mistress painfully dull—“ignorant of everything but what the parsons had taught her when a child.”

Sarah’s unflattering portrait of Anne was written years after their friendship ended and is extremely self-serving in parts. Nevertheless, it offers an intimate glimpse into their relationship, as do the numerous letters Anne wrote to her. (Few of Sarah’s letters to Anne survive, so the feelings she expressed at the time are unknown.)

It certainly emerges that Anne was extremely devoted to her servant, almost obsessively so. “I have been in expectation of you a long time but can stay no longer without desiring to know what you intend to do with me, for it is most certain I can’t go to bed without seeing you,” Anne wrote while Sarah was away from court. “If you knew in what a condition you have made me I am sure you would pity [me].”

Sarah, smothered by Anne’s attentions and needs, was decidedly less enthusiastic about spending time together but claimed she did so out of duty. “Though it was extremely tedious to be so much where there could be no manner of conversation,” she wrote, “I knew she loved me, and suffered by fearing I did wrong when I was not with her; for which reason I have gone a thousand times to her, when I had rather have been in a dungeon.”

What Sarah lost in scintillating conversation, she gained in ascendency over Anne, who was completely enthralled by her and happily followed her lead in almost everything. “It is certain she at length distinguished me by as high, or perhaps a higher place in her favour than any person ever arrived at, with
queen or princess,” Sarah wrote; “and if from hence I may draw any glory, it is that I both obtained and held this place without the assistance of flattery.”

And as far as Sarah was concerned, Anne was lucky to have her, especially considering the alternatives. “Her Highness’s court was throughout so oddly composed,” she wrote, “that I think it would be making myself no great compliment, if I should say, her choosing to spend more of her time with me, than with any of her other servants, did no discredit to her taste.”

As a mark of Anne’s favor, and of her insistence that they treat each other as equals, the women adopted cozy names for each other that they would employ for the remaining years of their friendship. Anne became Mrs. Morley, and Sarah was Mrs. Freeman. Eventually Sarah’s overfamiliarity and sharp tongue would recoil against her, but for many years Anne basked in her friend’s irreverence. Secure in her position as confidante and advisor, Sarah used her position to poison the relationship between Anne and her sister.

She was ambitious for her husband, John Churchill,
^*
who she believed would be well rewarded for abandoning James II and supporting William of Orange in his invasion of the kingdom. William distrusted Churchill, however, calling him “a vile man,” and told Gilbert Burnet that “though he [William] had himself profited by [Churchill’s] treason, he abhorred the traitor.” It quickly became apparent that the Churchills, aside from being granted the earldom of Marlborough, would have no friends in William and Mary, and that all their hopes for honor and advancement would have to be centered on the heir to the throne, Anne. Isolating her from the king and queen, in the guise of
friendship, would serve their ends by increasing Anne’s dependence on them and her gratitude for their service to her cause.

The seeds of estrangement were already there before the Churchills even made their first move. “It was indeed impossible [Anne and Mary] should be very agreeable companions to each other,” Sarah wrote, “because Queen Mary grew weary of anybody who would not talk a great deal, and the Princess [Anne] was so silent that she rarely spoke more than was necessary to answer a question.”

Furthermore, Anne had come to loathe her brother-in-law William, whom she lovingly referred to as “the Dutch abortion.” She had already grudgingly ceded to William her place in the line of succession immediately after Mary, as he had insisted, but she really resented the king’s treatment of her extremely dull husband, Prince George of Denmark.
^†
William took as little notice of George “if he had been a page of the back stairs,” Sarah noted, and even refused him a place in his coach on the way to the Battle of the Boyne. Anne, who loved her boring spouse, bristled at the slight.

In an act sure to stir up trouble between William and Mary and their heir, the Churchills helped arrange for a motion in Parliament that would give Anne an allowance far in excess of what she already received from the king and queen. Mary, stunned that Anne would go behind their backs in such an unprecedented way, confronted her sister. When Anne blithely informed her that she had some friends in the House of Commons who wished to see her income increased, Mary was incensed. “Pray,” the queen replied imperiously, “what friends have you but the king and me?” With that, a feud was born.

William tried to reason with his stubborn sister-in-law by promising her an increased income if she would cease soliciting
Parliament. But Sarah was right there to remind her that the king had broken promises to her before. Anne remained adamant, telling William’s representative, Lord Shrewsbury, “The business is now gone so far that I think it reasonable to see what my friends can do for me.” In the end, Anne won her parliamentary allowance, which both infuriated and frightened her sister the queen.

While William was away fighting her father in France, Mary was confronted by unrest at home among supporters of the deposed king, as well as threats from France. The last thing she needed was trouble from her sister, who should have been there to support her. The queen worried that her government was under siege by a Jacobite party that had formed around her father, a second party in favor of a republic, and, she wrote, “I have reason to believe that my sister forms a third.”

Mary was placid by nature and wanted harmony with Anne but wrote that she “saw plainly that [Anne] was so absolutely governed by Lady Marlborough that it was to no purpose.” Sarah, on the other hand, disingenuously claimed in her memoir that she in fact tried to be a peacemaker. “It was impossible for any body to labour more than I did to keep the two sisters in perfect unison and friendship,” she wrote, “thinking it best for them not to quarrel when their true interest and safety were jointly concerned to support the revolution.”

While Sarah claimed that she was encouraging Anne to support William and Mary’s government, her disenchanted husband was at the same time making overtures of rapprochement to the exiled king he had betrayed, James II. Perhaps it was just a cynical maneuver on Marlborough’s part to protect his interests should James or his son ever recover the crown, but to William and Mary it was unpardonable treason. Marlborough was relieved of all his offices in a sensational turn of events, made all the more so because William declined to publicly explain the reason. He told one member of Parliament
only that “the Earl had treated him in such a manner that he would have asked him for satisfaction with the sword [in a duel] if he had not been king.”