Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (69 page)

Harley intimated that these financial difficulties had arisen partly because Godolphin and Marlborough had arrogantly rejected peace overtures from France. With Marlborough’s army bogged down in operations outside Lille, Harley – who in the past had been the first to offer the Duke fulsome praise for his exploits – claimed that it was now apparent that Marlborough’s earlier success in battle did not reflect true military skill. ‘Now it is come to pass that my cousin Nat Stephens [Marlborough] hast lost his reputation’ because ‘he does not understand
his business’, Harley asserted. In the past ‘Cousin Nat’ had won renown through ‘two or three lucky accidents but he has not a genius to carry on or manage the business he is in’. Yet Marlborough was not interested in peace, motivated largely by ‘his sordid avarice, which, as it is the root of all evil, so it renders useless all the good qualities my cousin is master of’.
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Harley thought it ‘very necessary’ these things ‘should be communicated to my aunt if you think it proper’ for unless she was ‘truly informed of her condition’, matters would only ‘grow worse and worse’. We do not know if Abigail passed on to Anne everything he wrote to her, but even if it was only a small proportion, it cannot have failed to have an insidious effect. Only six months before, the Queen had assured Godolphin how much she valued his friendship, and whatever the strain caused by their political disagreements, she had no reason to doubt that he had always strived to serve her loyally, and had acted in what he believed to be the national interest. While it may perhaps have been legitimate for Harley to express concern at the way the Lord Treasurer had gravitated towards the Junto, his suggestion that Godolphin was doing so out of personal ambition was nothing short of monstrous. The manner in which he impugned Godolphin and Marlborough’s competence and integrity was utterly pernicious, and the Queen should have refused to listen to his distilled malevolence. Her belief that she was in danger of being crushed under the heel of the Junto and her anger at Sarah’s atrocious conduct may have made her desperate, but Anne should not have stooped to countenancing personal attacks on men who deserved much better from her.

Perhaps Harley would have been more successful at stiffening the Queen’s will, had not an event occurred that transformed the political situation in the most heartrending way imaginable for Anne. For years Prince George’s underlying health had been terrible, but though his life had been regularly feared for, he had always overcome severe bouts of illness. Recently, however, matters had deteriorated further, for besides suffering from asthma attacks and breathing difficulties, he often spat blood when coughing, and his legs had swelled up alarmingly. Naturally, therefore, the Queen had been ‘much alarmed’ when George had contracted a ‘violent cold’ in early October, but after she cancelled their projected trip to Newmarket George had shown signs of improvement. Unfortunately a few days later he relapsed, and by 23 October he had ‘such a general weakness and decay of nature upon him that very few
people that see him have any hopes of his recovery’. Two days later Godolphin reported anxiously, ‘The Prince seems to be in no good way at all … and I think the Queen herself seems now much more apprehensive of his condition than I have formerly remembered upon the same occasion’. ‘I pray God her own health may not suffer by her perpetual watching and attendance upon him’, Godolphin commented in concern.
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When Sarah learned that the Prince was so gravely ill, she decided that it behoved her to be present. Even in these circumstances, however, she saw no reason to be gentle with the Queen. In her customary curt and offensive style she wrote to inform Anne that she believed it her duty to come to court, ‘though the last time I had the honour to wait upon your Majesty, your usage of me was such as was scarce possible for me to imagine or for anybody else to believe’.
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Sarah arrived at Kensington just in time to be present when George died between one and two in the afternoon of 28 October. The death of her beloved consort ‘flung the Queen into an unspeakable grief’. As one source movingly recounted, ‘She never left him till he was dead, but continued kissing him the very moment the breath went out of his body’. Yet this pitiable sight failed to inspire compassion in Sarah, who took the view that the Queen was too much under the spell of Mrs Masham to mind very much about losing George. As soon as the Prince had breathed his last, the Duchess assumed command of the situation, leading the Queen into a small room to prevent her making a spectacle of herself before other members of the household. ‘I knelt down to the Queen and said all that I could imagine’ would be of comfort, Sarah recalled, ‘but she seemed not to mind me, but clapped her hands together with other marks of passion’. Sarah then said it was necessary for Anne to move from Kensington to St James’s, as it would be morbid to remain ‘within a room or two of that dismal body’. Unable to bear the thought of this final parting from her husband, the Queen demurred, but Sarah overruled her. Privately the Duchess was convinced that the real reason for Anne’s reluctance to leave Kensington was that it would be difficult for her to see much of Abigail at St James’s. At length Anne agreed to do as Sarah wanted, but the Duchess’s relief was short-lived when the Queen asked her ‘to send to Masham to come to me before I go’. ‘This I thought very shocking’, Sarah recorded, and so, although she feigned compliance, ‘I resolved to avoid that’. Later she explained to the Queen that she had not carried out her wishes because she ‘thought it would make a disagreeable noise’ if Anne shut herself up with Abigail ‘when there were
bishops and ladies of the bedchamber without that she did not care to see’.
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As Anne was leaving for St James’s later that afternoon, leaning on Sarah’s arm in order to hobble towards her coach, Sarah was angered to see that Mrs Masham – who had resumed her duties after a brief maternity leave – had stationed herself in the gallery. To the Duchess’s fury, ‘notwithstanding her great affliction for the Prince, at the sight of that charming lady’ the Queen ‘had strength to bear down towards Mrs Masham like a sail and in passing by went some steps more than was necessary to be nearer her’. Deeming this a ‘cruel touch’ upon the Queen’s part, Sarah became even crosser when, having settled Anne at St James’s, she visited her after supper, and found her closeted with Abigail, who ‘went out of the room … with an air of insolence and anger’. Over the next few days, the Duchess attended Anne so assiduously that, in Abigail’s words, she ‘hardly left her so long as to let her say her private prayers’.
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Sarah’s visits afforded the Queen little solace, for the Duchess was far from sympathetic towards the grieving widow. Sarah noted cattily that although Anne’s ‘love to the Prince seemed in the eye of the world to be prodigiously great … her stomach was greater, for that very day he died she ate three large and hearty meals’. ‘I did see the tears in her eyes two or three times after his death and … I believe she fancied she loved him’, Sarah acknowledged, but to her mind the Queen’s sorrow was superficial. The fact that Anne immersed herself in George’s funeral arrangements, taking what Sarah called a ‘peculiar pleasure’ in examining precedents and basing proceedings on Charles II’s obsequies, struck the Duchess as ‘unusual, and not very decent’. In accordance with convention, the Queen herself stayed away from the ceremony, which took place late at night on 13 November, but Sarah found it risible that ‘naming the persons that were to attend, and placing them according to their ranks and to the rules of precedence … was the entertainment she gave herself every day till that solemnity was over’. When Anne wrote to Godolphin asking him to ensure that there was room in the family vault at Westminster Abbey for her own body to be interred alongside George’s, this too excited the Duchess’s mockery, being ‘a very extraordinary thought as it appeared to me’. She ‘could not help smiling’ at another letter from the Queen, requesting that great care be taken when George’s exceptionally heavy coffin was carried down the staircase at Kensington. Sarah scoffed that it was absurd for Anne to ‘fear the dear Prince’s body should be shook’ when during his lifetime she had forced him to go on ‘long jolting journeys’ to Bath.
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Immediately after George’s death, Sarah had taken it upon herself to remove his portrait from Anne’s bedroom wall, thinking to spare the Queen pain. Anne, however, was distraught at being deprived of this memento. In December, not for the first time, she pleaded piteously to have it returned, writing, ‘I can’t end this without begging you once more, for God sake to let the dear picture you have of mine be put into my bedchamber, for I cannot be without it any longer’. This merely confirmed the Duchess in the belief that Anne’s feelings for George had not run very deep. ‘I hid [it] away because I thought she loved him, and if she had been like other people ’tis terrible to see a picture while the affection is fresh upon one’, she commented unkindly.
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With the exception of Sarah, all sources are unanimous that the Queen was shattered at losing her husband. When Archbishop Sharp saw her the day after George’s funeral, he confided to his diary, ‘We both wept at my first coming in. She is in a very disconsolate condition’. Another observer described Anne as being ‘so overwhelmed with grief … that she avoided the conversation of her nearest friends and scarcely could endure the light … Her grief seemed incapable of all consolation’. As for Abigail Masham, she showed the Queen the compassion that Sarah so manifestly lacked, writing that Anne deserved to be pitied ‘for … losing all that is dear to her, the only comfort of her life’.
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Even the Queen’s formal letters informing foreign heads of state of the Prince’s death are touchingly expressive of her intense sorrow. She wrote brokenly to his nephew, the King of Denmark, that George’s ill health should perhaps in some measure have prepared her for his death, ‘but I must confess to your Majesty that the loss of such a husband, who loved me so dearly and so devotedly is too crushing for me to be able to bear it as I ought’. Her official notification to the States General stated, ‘You can judge of the magnitude of our affliction because such a husband was an inestimable treasure, who loved us with such tenderness for the course of so many years’.
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The Queen confessed, ‘This terrible misfortune has overwhelmed us with such deep sorrow that we would willingly remain in profound silence’, but her responsibilities as a sovereign dictated otherwise. Even in the midst of her unhappiness, she did not shirk her duty, for less than forty-eight hours after George’s death James Vernon reported that the Queen ‘applies herself already to business’. She even decided that for the present she herself would discharge George’s responsibilities as Lord High Admiral, the last time that a sovereign of Great Britain undertook such a charge. Sadly, on the first occasion when papers relating to naval
affairs were brought for her to sign, it proved too much for her, and she burst into tears.
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The fact that Parliament was about to meet made it more imperative than ever that a solution was found to the current political impasse, even though Godolphin found it awkward to press Anne too much at this distressing time. Somewhat ungraciously he wrote to Marlborough that ‘the Queen’s affliction … is a new additional inconvenience which our circumstances did not need’. The Whigs, however, were optimistic that without her husband to prop her up, Anne would not be able to withstand their being brought into the government. Lord Sunderland exulted, ‘It opens an easy way to have everything put upon a right foot’, while a Tory friend informed Harley, ‘It is not to be imagined how joyful some men are at the death of the Prince’.
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Distraught at the prospect of the Queen surrendering to his enemies, Harley wrote frantically to Abigail, urging her to ‘redouble her care and attendance … for there is nothing … so mischievous to body and mind as for persons to be too much alone on such occasions, and therefore those who are true friends should almost force themselves upon them’. He expressed anxiety that those who had already abused the Queen’s good nature would take this opportunity to press on her ‘all the extravagant things which are required’ by the Junto, and proposed that the Queen should say ‘she cannot in these circumstances weigh and consider these things’. He warned that if Anne gave in at this juncture, ‘they will put it out of her power … to help herself or support herself … Gaining time is of great consequence’.
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George’s death, however, had left Anne so broken that she could no longer keep up her struggle against the Junto. By 4 November Sunderland had learned that she had agreed that Lord Somers would become Lord President of the Council, while Lord Wharton was to be installed as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Two days later Abigail lamented to Harley, ‘Oh my poor aunt is in a very deplorable condition … for now her ready money [courage] is all gone … She has shut and bolted the door upon herself … to satisfy those monsters who she knows will ruin her’. The Junto were somewhat nettled that Anne had decided that the moderate Tory, Lord Pembroke, should succeed George as Lord Admiral, but they consoled themselves that in time they could overturn his appointment. In other respects they were triumphant, so that the men whom Anne had earlier called ‘the five tyrannising lords’ were ‘now the Lords paramount’.
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