Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  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.”

  * The ceremony was unique in British history as the only time a king and queen were ever crowned together as co-monarchs. The procedures for anointing the sovereign were followed exactly for both of them, and a replica of the traditional coronation chair was made for Mary. It is now on display at the Westminster Abbey Museum, along with life-sized wax effigies of William and Mary.

  16

  Anne (1702–1714): A Feud Too Many

  I desire nothing but that she would leave off teasing and tormenting me.

  —QUEEN ANNE

  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.”

  Marlborough’s disgrace should have been his wife’s as well. But just two weeks after the earl’s dismissal, Anne came prancing into court with Sarah in tow. It was an astonishing breach of etiquette and a direct insult to the king and queen. Mary was livid. “I have all the reason imaginable to look upon your bringing her as the strangest thing that was ever done,” she wrote to her sister. Not only should Anne have known better than to bring Sarah to court, the queen asserted, but it was wrong of Anne to even retain Sarah in her household. “I know what is due to me,” Mary continued, “and I expect to have it from you. ’Tis upon that account I tell you plainly, Lady Marlborough must not continue with you, in the circumstances [in which] her lord is.”

  Anne had no intention of dismissing her friend, even if it meant disobeying her sovereign. In her reply to Mary, she expressed surprise that the queen had even made the demand, “for you must needs be sensible enough of the kindness I have for my Lady Marlborough, to know that a command from you to part from her must be the greatest mortification in the world to me, and, indeed, of such a nature, as I might well have hoped your kindness to me would have always prevented.”

  The honorable thing for Sarah would have been to resign, which is what some of her friends urged her to do. But Sarah wouldn’t budge. There was too much to be gained from her relationship with Anne, and according to a report from the Dutch envoy, “she hopes to maintain herself in the Princess’s favor for as long as possible.” Besides, Anne would never have suffered her absence anyway. “Mrs. Freeman … must give me leave to tell her, if she should ever be so cruel to leave her faithful Mrs. Morley, she will rob her of all the joy and quiet of her life; for if that day should come, I could never enjoy a happy minute, and I swear to you I would shut myself up and never see a creature.” Thus, Sarah remained in Anne’s service and presided over a dramatic escalation of the feud between the royal sisters.

  In a rather dramatic gesture of defiance, Anne abandoned “the Cockpit,” as her apartments at Whitehall Palace were known, and absented herself from court, writing to her sister sarcastically that she was “too much indisposed to give Your Majesty any further trouble at this time.” Mary retaliated by removing Anne’s guards and decreeing that anyone who visited her sister would not be welcome at court. In a final insult, William’s Dutch guards refused to salute Anne’s husband, Prince George, as he departed Whitehall. “I cannot believe it was their Dutch breeding alone without Dutch orders that made them do it because they never omitted it before,” Anne told Sarah, adding, “These things are so far from vexing either the Prince or me that they really please us extremely.”

  Mary did come to see her sister in the spring of 1692, after Anne gave birth to yet another child who died almost immediately.‡ As Sarah reported, the queen “never asked how she did, nor expressed the least concern for her condition, nor so much as took her by the hand.” She did, however, reissue a by now familiar order: “I have made the first step in coming to you,” she said, “and now expect you should make the next by removing my Lady Marlborough.”

  “I have never disobeyed you but in that one particular,” Anne replied, “which I hope will some time or other appear as unreasonable to you as it does to me.”

  Of course it would never seem unreasonable to Mary that the wife of a disloyal subject be removed from her sister’s service. As the breach with Anne widened, the queen despaired that the conflict might be the natural consequence of what she and her sister had done to their father. “In all this I see the hand of God,” she wrote, “and look upon our disagreeing as a punishment upon us for the irregularity by us committed upon the revolution.”

  The sisters never were reconciled. It was only when Mary was on her deathbed that Anne rushed to be with her. But by then it was too late. Tireless in her troublemaking, Sarah later asserted that Anne had been deliberately kept away during her sister’s illness so as “to leave room for continuing the quarrel, in case the Queen should chance to recover.… How this conduct to a sister could suit with the character of a devout Queen, I am at a loss to know.”

  With Mary dead, and William to follow seven years later, Sarah turned on her friend Anne with a ferocity that left poor Mrs. Morley shattered.

  On April 23, 1702, Anne was crowned queen to near universal acclaim. The reign of the dour Dutchman William III was over, and no one seemed to miss him. The new monarch, while warmly welcomed, hardly presented a regal figure. Eighteen pregnancies had ruined her health, and gout left her so crippled that she had to be carried to her coronation in a chair. Still, she aimed to be a moderate ruler in an era of venomous party politics, which would be a triumph in itself. But it ruined her relationship with Sarah.

  The new queen had showered her favorite with the highest honors upon her accession, and soon created the dukedom of Marlborough for her husband in recognition of his valor in fighting the French. But Sarah wanted something more: She wanted to be obeyed. Anne had always been willingly led by her domineering friend, but now she was the sovereign and a shift in the relationship was inevitable. Sarah refused to accept that. It was bad enough that the queen bored her, but for Anne to ignore her increasingly strident exhortations on behalf of the Whig Party was simply intolerable.


  The queen had a more natural affinity for the Tory Party, traditional supporters of the monarchy and of Anne’s beloved Anglican Church. She found Sarah’s aggressive Whig affiliation bewildering, particularly her wild assertion that all Tories were secret Jacobites conspiring to restore James II. “I own that I can not have that good opinion of some sort of people that you have,” the queen wrote to Sarah, “nor that ill one of others, and let the Whigs brag never so much of their great services to the country [in the Glorious Revolution] and of their numbers, I believe the revolution had never been, nor the Succession settled as it is now, if the Church party [Tories] had not joined with them, and why those people that agreed with them in these two things should all now be branded with the name Jacobite I can’t imagine.”

  Anne’s refusal to complacently accept direction, combined with the fact that she found court life stultifying, caused Sarah to stay away for extended periods. Yet her absences also made her paranoid that she was being supplanted in the queen’s affection by her own relative Abigail Hill, a bedchamber woman who Sarah believed was poisoning Anne’s mind against her.

  Sarah’s fears did not prompt her return to court. Instead, she bombarded the queen with shrill letters that essentially said Anne was too stupid, or stubborn, to see reason. In one particularly outrageous missive, fired off over Queen Anne’s persistent refusal to appoint Sarah’s son-in-law as secretary of state, she wrote: “I desire you would reflect whether you have never heard that the greatest misfortunes that ever happened to any of your family [the Stuarts] has not been occasioned by having ill advises and an obstinancy in their tempers that is very unaccountable.”