25
ANNE WAS A VERY ordinary woman who presided over an extraordinary period of the island’s history. It has been too easy to dismiss her as a dull, overweight matron, deemed unfit to rule through the deficiencies of her health, education, intelligence and experience, and under the baleful influence of her favourites. Such a view may coincide with prejudices about a woman’s ability to do the job. While lacking the brilliance of Elizabeth I, she was no fool. She had a clear-eyed view of what was right and the determination to pursue it, a shrewd political nose and impeccable sense of timing, and an ability to choose good men. She gave her name to an age of phenomenal military, diplomatic, economic and cultural success.
When Anne’s ‘Sunshine Day’, as she had called her eagerly anticipated accession, arrived on Sunday, 8 March 1702, the triumvirate of her advisers – John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, Sidney, Lord Godolphin, and Robert Harley – had everything in place to effect a smooth transition of power. In consultation with the Princess, they decided that a continuity of William III’s policies, particularly the war against Louis XIV’s France, should be stressed, but that Anne should make a decisive break with her unpopular foreign brother-in-law in other respects.
In her first speech to Parliament, written by her uncle the Tory Earl of Rochester, Anne drew a parallel between herself and Queen Elizabeth. She played on the fact that, like Elizabeth, she was born in England of an English mother and had grown up in England. ‘As I know my heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England,’ she told the assembly in her melodious speaking voice. ‘Never any woman spoke more audibly or with better grace,’ one member noted approvingly.
The English sentiment was not one to win the hearts of her Scottish subjects, whose traditional loyalty to the House of Stuart and desire for independence inclined them towards Jacobitism. As long as the Scottish Parliament refused to endorse the Hanoverian succession, encapsulated in the Act of Settlement of 1701, there was a real possibility that the northern kingdom would go its separate way after the death of the new Queen. It was for this reason that William III had recommended union with Scotland in his last speech to Parliament, a policy Anne approved and would bring to fruition.
Like Elizabeth, Anne was a Protestant queen faced with the formidable task of rallying a divided nation against the most powerful Catholic king on earth. Elizabeth had shown that an image of feminine vulnerability, properly exploited, could arouse the gallantry and loyalty of the gentlemen of England. Less artfully, but just as effectively, Anne’s shyness manifested itself in blushing as she spoke, which some considered very becoming in a woman.
She continued the analogy with Queen Elizabeth when she adopted her motto: Semper Eadem, Always One and the Same. It was appropriate for a woman who was steadfast and loyal both to her principles and to her friends, although it would be a mistake to take that loyalty for granted. Sarah Churchill, Lady Marlborough, might be forgiven for thinking she was invulnerable and irreplaceable when the Queen wrote to her: ‘As for your poor unfortunate faithful Morley … if you should ever forsake me, I would have nothing more to do with the world, but make another abdication, for what is a crown when ye support of it is gone, I never will forsake your dear self, Mr Freeman nor Mr Montgomery, but always be your constant faithful servant, & we four must never part, till death mows us down with his impartial hand.’
Her dearest Sarah, or Mrs Freeman, was given the most prized offices of the court: Groom of the Stole, Mistress of the Robes and Keeper of the Privy Purse. Mr Freeman – Marlborough – immediately received the Garter William had denied him and, after his great victory at Blenheim two years later, was elevated to a dukedom, while Mr Montgomery – Sidney, Lord Godolphin – became Lord Treasurer or First Lord of the Treasury, effectively her chief minister. Convention dictated that Anne could not lead her armies in combat, the traditional arena of kingship, as William had done. Nor had she been able to have her husband named Commander-in-Chief of the allied forces. But her close friendship with the Churchills and William’s recognition of Marlborough’s abilities made his selection as her Captain-General inevitable. It was an excellent choice. With the addition of Robert Harley, this group were the brains and the energy behind Anne’s regime for the first eight years, but her own part should not be underestimated.
The Queen, who had ruined her health in a forlorn attempt to give England an heir, would now channel her maternal instincts into her role as monarch. She would be the mother of her people. Her coronation sermon was preached on Isaiah 49: 23: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their queens thy nursing mothers.’
The contrast between Anne and her Dutch predecessor was equally marked by her revival and exploitation of royal ritual and ceremony. If at thirty-seven she was almost an invalid, being carried to her coronation in an open chair, Anne still had something of majesty about her and, resplendent in full regalia, could rise to the occasion. Again, she identified herself with Elizabeth by reviving two activities closely associated with her: the royal progress and the public thanksgiving for military victory. In the early autumn of 1702, ostensibly for Prince George’s health, there was a progress to Bath, via Oxford and Cirencester, and in December that year she became the first sovereign since Elizabeth to attend a service of public thanksgiving in St Paul’s, for the naval victory at Vigo Bay. It is appropriate that Queen Anne’s statue now stands before St Paul’s, where she so often had occasion to give thanks over succeeding years.
Where under James II the nobility had skulked on its estates, avoiding the Catholic monarch both at court and when he travelled in their vicinity, and where under William III they had sulked over his obvious preference for his Dutch cronies, now under Anne they were to be drawn back into the monarch’s orbit. Thanksgiving days began with the Queen receiving the compliments of the nobility at St James’s, followed by a procession of the great officers of state and the law, the members of both Houses of Parliament, the foreign ministers and, finally, the monarch herself, her consort, and their respective retinues. The spectacle of the Queen, her court and the officers of state in full panoply, uniting with the people in celebration of the benefits of her reign, was purposely designed to impress and therefore the procession extended over several hours from St James along the Strand and up Ludgate Hill to the cathedral, so as to reach the widest possible audience.
The relationship between the monarchy and the City of London was reinforced by the procession’s pausing at Temple Bar, where the Queen was greeted by the Lord Mayor, who surrendered the City sword and made a short speech of welcome, inviting her to enter. Provincial progresses equally served to inspire civic expressions of loyalty to the monarch, as communities spared no expense to prove they were as loyal as the capital. Like Elizabeth, Anne would bestow her company on various country houses, being careful to divide her favour equally between Whigs and Tories. When the Whigs hijacked the progresses for their own political purposes, Anne ceased to make them, only resuming them after the fall of the Whigs in 1710 and the rise to power of Harley and the Tories on a platform of moderation and national unity. It was a clear example of Anne’s refusal to be used.
For a regime embroiled in a costly and unpopular war, the enthusiasm generated by the Queen’s first progress to Bath could be seen as setting the seal of popular approval on its policies. Anne was able to boast to Parliament of her reception in the Tory West Country, in spite of the fact that the Tories were opposed to a land war in Europe and advocates of a naval war in which France and Spain would be attacked on the high seas and in their colonial empires, before promptly asking for supply for the next year, specifically for Marlborough’s next land campaign.
A queen who would be a mother wanted to give expression to her motherly instincts by touching her people. Convinced that they were God’s representatives on earth and imbued with a strong mystical sense of their sovereignty, the first four Stuart monarchs in England had all touched for the King’s Evil, or scrofula, following Christ’s example of healing by touch. Anne knew very well that her power derived from Parliament, that she was an elected monarch, albeit hereditary, but nevertheless, motivated by sincere religious conviction as well as a desire to court popularity, she revived the practice which her Calvinist brother-in-law had discounted as papist superstition. She was the last English monarch to do so, inspiring devotion and reverence for the monarchy. As a child, Samuel Johnson had received Queen Anne’s touch and all his life retained a solemn memory of the lady in diamonds.
‘There are now in London several thousands of people, some of them ready to perish, come out of the country waiting for her healing,’ Archbishop Sharp noted early in the reign. Fasting beforehand, Anne regularly touched up to 200 sufferers at a time, twice weekly, during the court season. ‘I desire you would order 200 pieces more of Healing Gold, for I intend (if it please God) when I come from Windsor to touch as many poor people as I can before the hot weather comes,’ she wrote to Sarah, referring to the medals she gave the afflicted. ‘I do that business now in the Banqueting House, which I like very well, that being a very cool room, and the doing of it there keeps my own house sweet and free from crowds.’
Nothing was more liable to upset the Queen than division and strife among her people. ‘As long as I live,’ she told Godolphin, ‘it shall be my endeavour to make my country and my friends easy.’ As the symbol of national unity, Anne saw the monarchy as being above politics, harking back to Elizabeth’s day before the advent of party, when the sovereign was the sole focus of loyalty, and at the same time anticipating the constitutional monarchy of the future. It was a time of transition, of bitter party rivalry, yet a time when political affiliation was still fluid. Anne, doggedly holding on to the crown’s prerogatives, found the whole idea of party politics anathema.
Respecting the Revolution settlement as she did, Anne’s reign was free from the kind of constitutional strife between crown and Parliament or the politically motivated violence that characterized those of her predecessors. The Queen’s reputation for mercy and clemency meant there were no political beheadings, even of captured Jacobites, and her womanly compassion meant that she personally mitigated the sentences of certain criminals condemned to death or transportation. She ‘rules a willing people, not by the terror of rods and axes, but with the indulgent tenderness of a common parent’, one sermonizer commented, reiterating the maternal theme. Anne’s benevolence was consistent with her avowed desire to ‘be Queen of all her subjects … who would have all the parties and distinctions of former reigns ended and buried in hers’.
As party warfare between Whigs and Tories reached a new intensity, fanned by a burgeoning press newly liberated from the restraints of censorship, Anne valiantly tried to steer a middle course. Like William before her, she believed it was her prerogative to choose whichever ministers she pleased, regardless of their party affiliation. Her natural inclination, as a Stuart and the granddaughter of Clarendon, was towards the Tories, who had been such firm supporters of the monarchy and of her beloved Anglican Church. But she could not condone the extreme High Church Tories, men such as Lord Nottingham, or her uncle, Lord Rochester, any more than she could the extremists of the other party, the Whig Junto.
Anne, whose goal was ‘to keep me out of ye power of ye Mercyless men of both partys’, determined to form a ‘mixed ministry’ of moderates, with her dear friends Marlborough and Godolphin, who were loosely Tory, and Robert Harley, who with his Nonconformist, parliamentarian background had come from the Whigs. They all agreed that the continuation of the war was essential. With Lord Marlborough leader of the Grand Alliance and Captain-General of the allied forces, it was Godolphin’s job at the treasury to ensure that the army received its pay and supplies, while Harley was to use his considerable political skills to manage Parliament.
In spite of Marlborough’s great victories at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, accomplished in the Queen’s name, the country became increasingly divided between those who wanted to continue the war, among them those Whigs making money from it, and those who wanted peace. Tired of the bloodshed and the expense of it all, Anne yearned for peace, the more since her relationship with the Marlboroughs began to deteriorate and she looked to the Tories to provide a get-out from the war, which would release her from them.
It seems that her friendship with Sarah had been under strain right from the beginning of the reign, Anne later telling her erstwhile favourite: ‘it has not been my fault that we have lived in ye manner we have done ever since I came to the crown.’ Sarah was impatient with the idea of sovereignty and the awe and respect it should be accorded, having witnessed at first hand royalty’s all-too-human faults and weaknesses. Gaining in confidence all the time, Anne was only too aware of what was due to her as queen. Sarah failed to see that frank, open discussion which had been encouraged between a princess and a friend was inappropriate between a queen and a subject. She took at face value Anne’s polite insistence:
I beg my dear Mrs Freeman would banish the hard thought out of her head that I can ever be displeased at anything that comes from you, for sure I must be void of all reason if I were not sensible that there can not be a greater mark of kindness than telling one every thing freely, it is what has always been my request to you to do, & I do again beg you would continue that goodness to your poor unfortunate faithful Morley.
Contrary to what people thought and came to believe, largely thanks to Sarah’s biased account in her Conduct in which she claimed that Anne ‘wou’d not go to take the air unless somebody advised her to it’, Sarah knew that Anne had always been her own person. She was tenacious and independent, with her own ideas and all her father’s obstinacy. If she lacked Sarah’s volubility, her silence was a useful attribute at times when it was necessary to keep her position ambiguous or flexible and her leading politicians off-balance. With the impatience of a quick-witted person at someone reflective and stubborn, Sarah became increasingly frustrated by Anne’s dogged refusal to fall in with her wishes in the matter of party politics.
No one knew better than Sarah how greatly Anne feared her half-brother, James Francis Edward, whom she had not seen since his infancy. Not only did he have a better claim to the throne than she did, as their late father’s only legitimate son, but he was a living reminder of Anne’s betrayal of her father, and of the lies and duplicity she had used to oust them both from the throne. Sarah tried to convince Anne that the Tories were all secret Jacobites at heart, but Anne was too level-headed to accept such a generalization:
I own I can not have that good opinion of some sort of people that you have, nor that ill one of others, & let the Whigs brag never so much of their great services to the country & of their numbers, I believe the revolution had never been, nor the succession settl’d as it is now, if the Church party had not joyned with them, & why those people that agreed with them in these two things should all now be branded with ye name of Jacobites I can’t imagine.
Sarah bombarded the Queen with letters, lecturing her endlessly on the merits of the Whigs, and as good as told her that she was too stupid to make her own decisions. ‘I must own I have ye same opinion of Whig & Tory that ever I had, I know their principles very well, & when I know my self to be in ye right, nothing can make me alter mine,’ Anne replied. As Marlborough warned his wife: ‘You know that I have often disputes with you concerning the Queen, and by what I have always observed that when she thinks herself in the right, she needs no advice to help her to be very firm and positive.’
When the High Church Tories introduced the Occasional Conformity Bill, targeting those who attended communion at the Anglican Church only occasionally so as to qualify for public office, as a means to undermine the Toleration Act of 1689, suppress the Dissenters and snub the Whigs, Sarah rushed to the defence of the Whigs and to press her arguments on the Queen, who replied: ‘I can’t forbear saying that I see nothing like persecution in this Bill, you may think this is a notion Lord Nottingham put in my head, but upon my word it is my own thought.’
Just as she resisted the Whig extremists, Anne had no intention of being intimidated by the High Church Tories. No one was a more loyal daughter of the Church than Anne, but in the final resort she could not support their Occasional Conformity Bill. This infuriated them, but she still showed her preference for the Established Church over her Nonconformist subjects by yielding her income from first fruits and tenths – Queen Anne’s Bounty – to support the poor parish clergy. Later she would have Nicholas Hawksmoor build new churches in London’s sprawling suburbs, so that her people would not be won over to dissent. She did not need Tories such as Lord Nottingham, or, indeed, Whigs such as the Duchess of Marlborough, to tell her where her duty lay.
Matters took a turn for the worse when a Whig majority was returned to the Commons in the election of 1705. Now the Whig extremists, the Junto, demanded that one of their own have a ministerial position. Thinking that as the Marlboroughs’ son-in-law he would have the best chance of being accepted, their chosen candidate was Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland. Anne, whose weakness was to let her personal likes and dislikes of people influence her decisions, loathed him. She bitterly resented Whig attempts to foist him on her, and, more particularly, she resented the fact that the once moderate Marlborough and Godolphin were pressuring her to fall in with the plan. The war could not be continued, they argued, without Whig support, so that some concessions had to be made to the extremists. Godolphin even threatened to resign if the Queen refused to accede to their demands. While she retaliated that ‘he should do as he pleas’d, with all she cou’d find enough glad of that staff’, in reality, the prospect alarmed her, as she was not yet ready to dispense with his services. When she was, three years later, she dismissed this dedicated minister as perfunctorily as Charles II had done her grandfather Clarendon.
‘Whoever of the Whigs thinks I am to be hectored or frightened into a compliance, though I am a woman, is mightily mistaken in me,’ she warned Godolphin in 1705. ‘I thank God I have a soul above that, and am too much concerned for my reputation to do anything to forfeit it.’
It went against all Anne’s instincts to give in, telling Godolphin in exasperation:
All I desire is my liberty in encouraging & employing all those that concur faithfully in my service whether they are call’d Whigs or Torys, not to be tyed to one, not to ye other, for if I should be so unfortunate as to fall into ye hands of either, I shall look upon my self tho I have the name of Queen, to be in reality but their slave, which as it will be my personal ruin, so it will be ye destroying of all government … Why for God’s sake, must I who have no interest, no end, no thought but for ye good of my country, be made so miserable as to be brought into ye power of one set of men, & why may I not be trusted, since I mean nothing but what is equally for ye good of all my subjects?
Anne had to back down in the matter of Sunderland in order to secure the necessary supplies for the war which had yet to be concluded, but it meant that Marlborough and Godolphin had forfeited her trust. They had failed to protect her from the extreme Whigs.
Anne tried to find a way out of the impasse and build a bridge with the Tories through her bedchamber attendants, who had constant access to her when she was incapacitated by illness. As Marlborough and Godolphin moved inexorably towards the Whigs, their former colleague Robert Harley was moving towards the Tories. Anne’s patronage was evenly distributed, so that the members of her household were both Whigs and Tories, but her favourite physician, Dr John Arbuthnot, was a High Tory and the bedchamber woman, Abigail Hill, was also a Tory. Ironically, she was a poor relation of Sarah’s, but equally closely related to Harley on her father’s side. Harley took the trouble to court Abigail’s favour, as a channel to the Queen, but could not muster enough support to defeat the Whigs, so that Anne was forced to dismiss him. Marlborough did not endear himself when he wrote advising her ‘to have no more resentments to any particular person or party [meaning Sunderland and the Whigs], but to make of such as will carry on this just war with vigour, which is the only way to preserve our religion and liberties, and the crown upon your head’.
It was not the first occasion Anne had to exercise patience. She would bide her time.
Anne’s health had been impaired for a while. In the summer of 1703 she was virtually an invalid, so lame that she could hardly cross the room except on two sticks. The physicians diagnosed gout, but this is unusual in a woman, especially a pre-menopausal woman, and unlikely.
In 1707 Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a Scot who had come to England to discuss the union of the two kingdoms, found her in a pitiable condition. If the Queen had ‘two bodies’ – the one symbolic of the power of the crown, the body politic, the other her mortal body – it was decidedly the mortal one he was seeing:
Her Majesty was labouring under a fit of the gout, and in extreme pain and agony, and on this occasion everything about her was much in the same disorder as about the meanest of her subjects. Her face, which was red and spotted, was rendered something frightful by her negligent dress, and the foot affected was tied up with a pultis and some nasty bandages.
What are you, poor mean mortal, thought I, who talks in the style of a sovereign. Nature seems to be inverted when a poor infirm woman becomes one of the rulers of the world.
When he visited her again, the ‘despicable’ situation had not improved, and he was struck by her isolation:
The poor lady, as I saw her twice before, was again under a severe fit of the gout, ill dressed, blotted in her countenance, and surrounded with plaisters, cataplasisms, and dirty-like rags … I believe she was not displeased to see any body, for no court attenders ever came near her. All the … adoration offered at courts were to her ministers … her palace of Kensington, where she commonly resided, was a perfect solitude, as I had occasion to observe several times. I never saw anybody attending there but some of her guards in the outer rooms, with one at most of the gentlemen of her bedchamber. Her frequent fits of sickness, and the distance of the place from London, did not admit of what are commonly called drawing-room nights, so that I had many occasions to think that few houses in England belonging to a person of quality were kept in a more private way than the Queen’s royal palace of Kensington.
Even when Anne was not ill, court life was not what it was under her scandalous, profligate uncle. Burnet’s verdict was that ‘she laid down the splendour of the court too much’. Anne’s virtues of frugality and good management were practically middle class – if such a class had existed at the time – but were also dictated by the fact that England was engaged in a prolonged and costly war. Outlawing the sale of office as corrupt, her court offered few of the material, political, social or cultural opportunities that had made attendance at previous Tudor and Stuart courts so attractive. Her poor eyesight meant that she had little interest in the visual arts or in literature, although she did love music and patronized Handel, who wrote his only birthday ode in her honour. Her shyness and poor conversational abilities made the drawing rooms, which she held twice weekly during the season if she was well enough, a trial. For wit and debate, in the age of Swift, Defoe, Addison, Steele and Pope, people turned to the coffee-houses. To make their fortunes, there was the City and the ever wider world beyond St James.
There were intervals when Anne was blessedly free of pain, such as when Jonathan Swift described her at Windsor ‘hunting the stag till four this afternoon … she drove in her chaise above forty miles.’ Anne could no longer ride, but she was not deterred from hunting ‘in a chaise with one horse, which she drives herself, and drives furiously, like Jehu, and is a mighty hunter, like Nimrod’.
Neglected by Sarah, whose official duties, if not gratitude for the Queen’s boundless generosity to her and her family, should have brought her to court, Anne found the comfort she needed in the soothing presence of Abigail Hill, now Lady Masham. When she was in pain and discomfort, Abigail was always there with a kind word, a dish of tea, and a pleasant tune on the harpsichord, quiet and unassuming, in contrast to the strident, volatile Duchess.
Jealous of the bedchamber woman who she felt had usurped her place as the Queen’s confidante, Sarah made a rare appearance at court at the end of July 1708, bringing with her a scurrilous verse, probably written by Arthur Maynwaring, an unsavoury associate of the Whigs:
When as Queen Anne of great Renown
Great Britain’s Sceptre sway’d,
Besides the Church, she dearly love’d
A Dirty Chamber-Maid.
O! Abigail that was her Name
She stitch’d and starch’d full well,
But how she pierced this Royal Heart,
No Mortal Man can tell.
However, for sweet service done
And Causes of great Weight,
Her Royal Mistress made her, Oh!
A Minister of State.
Her Secretary she was not
Because she could not write
But had the Conduct and the Care
Of some dark Deeds at Night.
Not content to leave it at that, Sarah followed it up with a letter in which she accused the Queen of lesbianism:
I remember you said … of all things in this world, you valued most your reputation, which I confess surpris’d me very much, that Your Majesty should so soon mention that word after having discover’d so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can be no great reputation in a thing so strange & unaccountable … nor can I think the having no inclination for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours.
It was outrageous. It is impossible to imagine anyone having the audacity to speak to Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria in this way and get away with it. There was, of course, no truth in the accusation. The passionate friendship Anne and Sarah had once enjoyed had no sexual dimension, and there is no reason to suppose that Anne Stuart, even if she had been that way inclined, would have had a relationship with a servant. She was far too conscious of her rank and dignity. The Queen could not dismiss Sarah from office while her husband was deemed essential to the war, but their friendship was now beyond repair.
‘I believe no body was ever so used by a friend as I have been by her ever since my coming to ye crown,’ Anne wrote sadly to Marlborough. ‘I desire nothing but that she would leave off teasing & tormenting me & behave herself with the decency she ought both to her friend & Queen, & this I hope you will make her do.’
The death of Prince George, her dearest husband and best friend, in November 1708, prompted Anne to retreat almost as fully as Queen Victoria was to do after the death of Albert over a century and a half later. Poor health and mourning gave her the excuse not to go to St Paul’s to give thanks for the victories of a Whig general in a war she and her subjects had now grown tired of.
The impeachment by the Whigs of Dr Henry Sacheverell, the crypto-Jacobite who had preached an incendiary sermon attacking the Revolution Settlement and the Hanoverian succession – indeed, questioning by what right Anne sat on the throne – united the fragmented Tory Party against the government. Anne was sufficiently interested in the outcome of Sacheverell’s trial to attend it, just as, like Charles II, she attended debates in the House of Lords. By 1710 Marlborough, who was so full of his own power that he was demanding to be made Captain-General for life, was being accused of prolonging the war for private profit.
The opposition was in agreement that the Queen should be rescued from the tyranny of the Marlborough family and that England should get out of the war, but this is not to say that she was a passive victim of events. Her manipulation of the situation, using her backstairs link with Harley and the Tories, was subtle and effective. She chose her moment well, when more might be gained from diplomacy than arms and when the tide of public opinion swung decisively in the opposition’s favour.
The Tories saw the Queen’s desire for peace as consistent with her concern for her people. It was conveniently overlooked that Anne had supported the Whig war for so long, but, on the other hand, ‘perfidious Albion’ was going to do very well out of opening separate peace talks with France, gaining Gibraltar, parts of the West Indies, and uninhibited access to the lucrative slave trade, which would provide the financial underpinning for the wars of the eighteenth century.
The Marlboroughs did not go quietly. ‘I can’t help but think the nation wou’d be of opinion that I have deserv’d better than to be made a sacrifice to the unreasonable passion of a bedchamber woman,’ Marlborough complained. Sunderland, meanwhile, raised the question of Abigail Masham in Parliament, demanding her dismissal. Anne was incandescent with rage. She was no more inclined to bow to pressure to dismiss one of her servants now than she had been in the late Queen her sister’s time, when Lady Marlborough’s dismissal was being demanded.
Sarah was threatening that ‘such things are in my power … that might lose a crown’. She would publish the Queen’s letters to her, letters containing such protestations as ‘I wish I may never see the face of Heaven if ever I consent to part with you’ and ‘I wish I may never enjoy happiness in this world or the next, for Christ Jesus sake do not leave me.’ Obviously, they would cause an international sensation. As Anne told Sir David Hamilton: ‘when people are fond of one another, they say many things … they would not desire the world to know.’ Sarah was finally dissuaded from publishing the letters, but she did not leave her apartments at St James’s without ripping out the fixtures and fittings. In retaliation, Anne ordered a temporary halt to the construction of Blenheim Palace, her gift to the Duke for his first great victory, angrily saying ‘that she would not build the Duke a house when the Duchess was pulling hers to pieces’.
Elizabeth, Duchess of Somerset, replaced Sarah as Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stole, while Masham took charge of the Privy Purse. Sir David Hamilton was pleased to note that this Duchess ‘is of the first quality and in that respect suitable to you. She seems to converse with a courteous calmness which makes her the more suitable to Your Majesty’s temper.’ The Queen could only agree and so soothing did she find the Duchess’s company that she insisted on retaining her despite her husband’s being a fierce Whig.
The ‘Jacobite peace’ with France fuelled speculation that Anne was secretly in favour of her half-brother succeeding her. Not only did James Francis Edward receive this impression, but also he was convinced that Anne had made such a promise to their father. Knowing the threat from the Jacobite quarter was real, it served her purpose to keep their hopes of the succession alive, while having no intention of sanctioning it. When Hamilton repeated the rumours to her in the autumn of 1712 that ‘things looked as though the Pretender was designed and all in places who are for him’, Anne replied, ‘O fye, there is no such thing. Do you think I am a child, and to be imposed upon?’ She assured the bishops that her zeal for the Church of England and the liberties of the nation was unimpaired.
Both Whigs and Tories in opposition had flirted with the House of Hanover, insisting that the Electress Sophie, Anne’s designated successor by the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement, or her son or grandson should take up residence in England. Soon Sophie and her son George were demanding not just the invitation, but also a civil list allowance. Like Elizabeth, Anne had no intention of tolerating a rival court which would become the focus of opposition. She fired off letters to Sophie, her son and grandson, telling them in no uncertain terms that their presence would not be welcome, that it would lead to disturbances among her subjects and put the succession of their family in jeopardy. The harshness of her letter came as such a disagreeable shock to the eighty-four-year-old Sophie – who might otherwise have been England’s fifth queen regnant – that she died within days.
Only two months later, Anne too was slipping out of the world. On 30 July 1714 she suffered a stroke. Speechless, one of her last acts before her death two days later was to hand the treasurer’s staff of office to the moderate Whig, Lord Shrewsbury, who would ensure the smooth accession of George I. She had worked tirelessly for her country and acquitted herself well. ‘I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveller,’ Dr Hamilton told Jonathan Swift, ‘than death was to her.’
After the arrival of German George, there was nostalgia for the days of ‘Good Queen Anne’, the last properly English monarch for a very long time. The last of her dynasty, Anne had also proved the most successful of the Stuart sovereigns. She prosecuted a successful war, won a favourable peace, defended the Church and ensured the monarchy would remain Protestant, while maintaining the toleration the Nonconformists had won at the Revolution, respected the constitutional proprieties, and finally accomplished the union of her great-grandfather’s two kingdoms of England and Scotland. It was no small thanks to Queen Anne that the new kingdom of Great Britain emerged as a power in the world.