Chapter 4
REBUILDING
BY 1700 THE girls who had played together in Richmond had grown into powerful women with status and responsibility. Mary had been a much loved and revered monarch, whose death was deeply mourned by her husband as well as the nation; her sister Anne was next in line to the throne and would become queen after William’s death. Meanwhile Sarah Jennings had married John Churchill, a brilliant soldier whose later ennoblement would make her the Duchess of Marlborough. Elizabeth had been the closest confidante of the king and had saved herself from notoriety by retreating into a respectable marriage. In the years immediately after the marriage, she gave birth to three daughters – Anne, Frances and Henrietta – in quick succession. Left alone in England with these young children to care for while Orkney was at war, she hoped she might seek solace in the company of Sarah Jennings. Besides their childhood connection, the two women were in similar marital circumstances – from 1702 Orkney held the post of major-general under Churchill’s command in Europe. But Elizabeth’s warmth towards Sarah was not reciprocated.
On 21 February 1702, William’s horse stumbled and the king broke a collarbone in the fall. On 5 March a pulmonary fever took hold. William collapsed after walking in the gallery of Kensington House, weakened rapidly, and died three days later. In William’s final hours, Archbishop Tenison – who had comforted the dying Mary – and William Bentinck remained by his side. Later that day, Anne was proclaimed queen.
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough was Elizabeth Villiers’s childhood friend and, later, her political rival.
Much of Anne’s life had been spent on the sidelines, waiting to assume power. Repeated miscarriages and severe gout had taken a dramatic toll on her happiness, health and appearance. By 1704, an acute swelling in her foot left her in constant pain and unable to walk. At a meeting with Anne in Kensington in 1706, the Scottish politician Sir John Clerk ‘had occasion to observe the Calamities which attend humane nature even to the greatest dignities of Life’. The queen’s face was ‘red and spotted’ and ‘rendered somewhat frightful by her negligent dress, and the foot affected was tied up with a pultis and some nasty bandages’.1
Anne was a woman who adored and despised with equal conviction, leaving no room for a middle ground. She particularly disliked Elizabeth on account of her ‘insolent’ affair with William; she was infatuated with Sarah, and was quick to grant the duchess three court offices, as well as privileges to stay at Windsor Lodge and an income of £6,000. Sarah also became the effective spokesperson of the Whig party at court. It must have been difficult for Elizabeth to watch her haughty childhood friend prosper from a change in regime while she was left out in the cold.
One of the first Whig causes that Sarah promoted to Anne was the deployment of English troops on the Continent, against France. In 1700 King Carlos II of Spain died, leaving the throne to his nominated successor Philip, Duke of Anjou, grandson to the French king, Louis XIV. If Anjou acceded to the Spanish throne, France and Spain would eventually be united under a single crown, which would also command Spain’s vast Mediterranean and South American empire. This was a terrifying prospect for England and Protestantism. As he had done in the 1690s, William once again joined forces with the Dutch Republic and Holy Roman Empire to forge a Grand Alliance, whose aim was to curtail French influence. In 1701 he pledged 40,0 troops to the cause, and, after his death, Sarah encouraged Anne to follow through with William’s Whiggish, interventionist policy. On 15 May 1702 war was declared on France by London, Vienna and The Hague.
The protracted war was to have a profound impact on the lives of military wives like Elizabeth and Sarah. In the 18th century, wars were fought seasonally, in campaigns that usually began in spring and ended in late autumn. Soldiers of lower rank were billeted in villages and towns on the Continent, while generals such as Marlborough and Orkney had the opportunity to return to England for the winter. Most of the English campaigns in the War of the Spanish Succession were fought in the Netherlands, and men returning to England typically sailed from the Dutch Republic.
Orkney returned to England whenever he was granted leave but his morale was often low and his health fragile. ‘I am strongly weary,’ he complained to his brother. ‘I am cut up with the scurvy, which breaks out upon my body in great blotches and with so violent aching that you can’t believe how uneasy I am.’2 To make matters worse, Orkney’s financial demons, which he had hoped his marriage would exorcise, had returned to haunt him with a vengeance. Parliamentary discontent with the Irish land endowments had not gone away, and in April 1700 William begrudgingly gave his assent to a bill that appropriated for public purposes the Irish estates that he had divided between his favourite courtiers.3 Elizabeth was summarily stripped of her £26,000 per year income. Orkney, who had married Elizabeth to alleviate his financial woes, now found himself encumbered with a large, dilapidated house and little money to renovate it.
Unlike Buckingham, who was governed by intense emotions, Orkney was an arch-pragmatist. He had planned his expenditure carefully against anticipated income from Ireland, and even then had still been worried about the scale of the works needed at Cliveden. ‘I own I always thought it too great for me even when my purse could have sure tended to such a place,’ he wrote to his brother after his finances had taken a turn for the worse.4 Another practical consideration in his decision to buy Cliveden had been its proximity to Taplow Court, which he was also in the process of buying. But Taplow Court also needed renovation, and together the two houses had become a burden: ‘now I may say I have got two old Houses upon my back,’ Orkney wrote. In the same situation, the Duke of Buckingham would simply have borrowed money but Orkney, who was even more in need of the capital, hated ‘the thought of paying Interest’.5 What started off as a pleasurable project had been transformed by the confiscation of the Irish lands into an incredibly stressful undertaking.
Despite his financial constraints, Orkney continued to develop his architectural plans. The kind of house he imagined was a world away from the pleasure palace created by Buckingham. Orkney wanted to renovate Cliveden into a place that would help him escape from the ‘hurry of life’, and considered Winde’s house, with its three tall storeys, red brick and steep roof, far too imposing. ‘The rooms are so high that I don’t like it, for there is 3 storeys they tell me 18 foot high besides Garretts,’ he complained.6 That the height of the house should be reduced was one of the few decisions Orkney made with any degree of certainty. Soon he was considering ‘several projects’ for Cliveden, and was being buffeted by conflicting advice from various architects. ‘My head is turned with different opinions,’ he wrote, ‘for not two men agree, and I have heard the opinion of several of the chief men in England.’7 Reading through Orkney’s fraught correspondence on the subject of the house, it is hard not to concur with the verdict of the Whig writer and politician Arthur Maynwaring, that Orkney, despite having other redeeming qualities, was ‘a very weak man’ – in a domestic setting, at least.
One of the ‘chief men’ Orkney consulted was Thomas Archer. Archer matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1686; five years later, he travelled to Europe, where he became fascinated by baroque architecture. One of his first commissions in England was in 1704, when the Duke of Devonshire asked him to draw up plans for the north range of Chatsworth House. Coincidentally, at the time Orkney approached him, Archer was also in the process of designing Heythrop in Oxfordshire, for the Duke of Shrewsbury. At Cliveden, Archer supported Orkney’s desire to reduce the height of the main house and suggested building wings at either side of the main block, to be used as offices. Orkney was impressed by this vision but continued to panic about the costs. ‘I am more embarrassed, for I find it will cost more than I expected considerably,’ he wrote once again to his brother. ‘I find what ever way one goes to work a great deal of money must be spent.’ Betraying a lack of courage in his convictions, he begged his brother to advise him. ‘I declare I don’t understand it well,’ he wrote
.8
By the beginning of February 1706 work had finally started on Cliveden. The overall plan was still uncertain but Elizabeth was more than capable of managing the house while Orkney was absent; level-headed, clear-thinking, and supremely organised, she would establish herself as a self-sufficient mistress of Cliveden, able to instruct and rally the men around her far more effectively than her wavering husband.
Chapter 5
‘THIS PLACE IS TOO ENGAGING’
BETWEEN SPRING AND late autumn each year, Elizabeth was tasked with managing the finances of the building project and making decisions about the works. Sometimes legal or financial business required her to visit the capital, where she often attended Queen Anne. The queen was now constantly in the company of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. But Elizabeth was far more comfortable at Cliveden, where she could throw off the shackles of her court finery – with its constricting bodices, long trains and extravagant head dressings – and embrace the short skirts and loose cotton dresses of a country lady.
The Cliveden estate included arable land, a vineyard and a kitchen garden, so there were plenty of seasonal tasks to be completed in the grounds, and the early autumn, just before Orkney returned from the campaign season, was always a particularly busy time. While Orkney was away his younger brother Archibald Hamilton came to stay and wrote to another of the Hamilton brothers, Lord Selkirk, about his and Elizabeth’s work overseeing the harvest in the searing heat of the autumn of 1707: ‘We are now as busy here getting in our Harvest… and in these parts most of the Corn is all in. Some time ago we had, I think, the hottest weather I ever saw in England.’1
Elizabeth sometimes consulted Archibald about plans for the house, and Archibald appears to have spent his time shooting and reading: ‘I have already killed & taken above 20 brace of Partridges besides some Pheasants,’ he wrote soon after his arrival. ‘This dos not hinder me of leisure hours enough that I read in… notwithstanding all I can not but say I have a good many thoughtful hours.’2 The only fault he could find in the place was that it was ‘too engaging’. Elizabeth spent her ‘leisure hours’ playing cards and writing letters. She was a prolific correspondent, although sometimes, on account of her poor spelling and scrawling handwriting, she preferred to dictate. Her letters were warm, lively and peppered with her inimitable wit and self-deprecation. A postscript of a letter Elizabeth wrote to Jonathan Swift in 1712 read: ‘When you read this I fancy you will think what does she write to me, I hate a letter as much as my lord Treasurer does a petition.’3
Even though there are many examples of Elizabeth’s letters, parts of the jigsaw remain missing. Very little of Elizabeth’s more personal correspondence, especially that concerning her children, survives. From everything we know about Elizabeth’s warm and affectionate nature it seems highly improbable and out of character that she would not write about her children. It is more likely that such letters were destroyed by subsequent generations. There are many known instances of Victorian descendants who, in the course of archiving their grandparents’ papers, employed a rigorous policy of sexual segregation: women’s letters were discarded, unless they happened to shed light on ‘male’ spheres such as politics, meaning that a crucial tonality in the voices of women like Elizabeth have, to some extent, been silenced.
Elizabeth’s surviving letters reveal that she took much interest in the health of her family and friends, and was well known for her home-made remedies. Writing to Lord Selkirk from Cliveden in July 1708, she passed on her prescription for alleviating his wife’s rheumatism and headaches. ‘In my opinion [the remedy] will help her if not cure her, if she takes it for weeks,’ she wrote earnestly. ‘Pray say how my lady Dutchess does.’4 The previous summer, Archibald had had a fall at Cliveden, sprained his hip and been confined to the house for ten days. Elizabeth, in full maternal mode, nursed him back to health and ‘was the only dr he had’. In a letter relaying the news to Archibald’s brother, Elizabeth wrote that ‘he had been very ill, as to extreme pain … he walks about the house, but easily,’ reassuringly adding, ‘but I don’t doubt he will be well in a few days.’5
Accidents and illness aside, Elizabeth revelled in her days at Cliveden and dreaded her trips to London, which was no longer the city it had been before she left for the Dutch Republic. The capital’s political and social life had been transformed by the events of 1688. Parliament now adhered to a strict timetable, and in order to access both Parliament and the court during the parliamentary season, members of the aristocracy began to reside in London for longer and more regular periods. This sudden influx of wealth and power prompted a flurry of building on the west of the city. Mass urbanisation wiped out what was left of rural and suburban areas between Piccadilly and Chelsea; coffee house – popular sites for political discussion and commercial negotiation – proliferated. But the squalor of the Restoration city had not been eliminated. In bad weather even the newly built west end was ‘foul with a dirty puddle to the height of three or four inches’, and vehicles and buildings were encrusted with grime. Smog was an endemic problem, often reducing visibility to only a few steps and leaving noxious deposits on buildings. One visitor remarked that St Paul’s Cathedral was so caked with soot that it looked like it was ‘built of coal’. Traffic jammed the streets and the vast quantity of dung generated by all the coach horses elevated pollution to intolerable levels.6
In July 1708, Elizabeth visited the city ‘in order to finish the purchase of Taplow [Court]’ as well to pay her respects to Queen Anne, who ‘honoured me most civilly’, and the Duchess of Marlborough who ‘[honoured me] wonderfully so’.7 Despite this unexpectedly warm reception, the sprawling metropolis with its mephitic air and filthy streets came as quite a shock to Elizabeth, who had grown accustomed to the serenity of country life. She ‘could not bare’ London, and rushed back to Cliveden before even waiting to receive a letter from her husband in Europe.
The reception at court was perhaps not as genuine as Elizabeth had hoped. By the autumn of that year, she was already confiding to Arthur Maynwaring that her childhood friend was – once again – being venomous. Had Sarah decided to settle her grievance, she could have benefited from Elizabeth’s experience in supervising and managing a large estate, for at the same time as the Orkneys were working on their plans for Cliveden, Sarah and her husband had embarked on their own ambitious building project at the royal manor of Woodstock. In late January 1705, Queen Anne had announced to the Commons that she intended to give Marlborough both the manor, which encompassed 15,000 acres of land, and ‘sufficient money to build a house of a scale commensurate with his triumph’. The triumph she was referring to was the momentous Allied victory of 1704 at the Battle of Blenheim, which would give the palace its name. The architect Sir John Vanbrugh was appointed to design Blenheim Palace, and had soon completed a scale model of his proposed building, an exuberant baroque masterpiece. Plans for the project occupied Marlborough during the 1705 campaign: in July he wrote to Sarah from Loos, giving her instructions for the display of the ‘two suites of hangings that were made at Brussels’, and suggesting that she use ‘one of the marble blocks’ for the room ‘where you intend your buffet’.8
Marlborough clearly discussed the process of remodelling a house with Orkney, who recounted some of his friend’s advice in a letter to Lord Selkirk: ‘Duke Marlb, bid me get my whole design and do one part this year and so by degrees.’ Given that Orkney was working from his own relatively meagre budget as opposed to a generous state fund, this would have been a sensible policy, but Orkney was impatient to start building. ‘Truly as for what Housing [I] desire,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t be without any of it immediately.’9 His urgency is unusual: perhaps he was motivated by a spirit of competition with his military superior.
Elizabeth’s diplomatic style was well suited to supervising a building project, but with her confrontational and waspish demeanour Sarah managed to alienate almost everyone working at Woodstock. She squabbled with artist Sir James Thornhill over t
he price of an allegorical painting he had done on the ceiling of the hall, and her relationship with Vanbrugh ended with her banning him from the grounds in order that he would never see his finished building.
Sarah was a mercurial character whose moods swung pendulously from elation to despair. She had the habit of brooding on her grievances, rather than taking them up with the offending party. Elizabeth had complained about this tendency in 1704, when she appealed to her friend not to ‘condemn without leaving room to have exactly the truth known’.10 Sarah did not modify her behaviour and four years later this trait still frustrated Elizabeth, who felt that Sarah was credulous of rumours and did not give her the opportunity to deny them. After he and Elizabeth had visited St Albans together, Arthur Maynwaring, who was a confidant of both women, reported to Sarah on Elizabeth’s frustration, using a code in case anyone else read the letter (‘240’ was his code for the Duchess of Marlborough herself): ‘She [Elizabeth] found 240 was mightily changed towards her of late; that some devil had told lies of her, which every body knew they might do safely, since 240 would never tell another, nor give people an opportunity of clearing themselves.’ Elizabeth was convinced that Sarah’s anger still, ultimately, stemmed from an old grudge over King William’s dismissal of the Duke of Marlborough, which, given Elizabeth’s relationship with William, Sarah felt she could have prevented: ‘And she did run over a world of old histories even before 39 [Marlborough] was displaced by the king,’ Maynwaring continued. ‘And told me who did that, and how faithful a part she had always acted to him, however she had been misrepresented.’11 Despite her perceived mistreatment, Elizabeth professed a serious and enduring affection for her childhood friend. Maynwaring reported that during his conversation with Elizabeth, she ‘cried, and protested that she never had so much inclination to serve or oblige anyone in her life; and to convince me of it, she shewed me a letter which she had writ some time ago, with 240’s answer; and said that, if every word of that was not true, she must be the greatest fiend on earth.’12
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 12
