The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  Whether Elizabeth’s avowals of affection were sincere or driven by her desire to neutralise Sarah as an enemy is debatable. From her dealings with Shrewsbury, we do know that Elizabeth was capable of deploying emotions manipulatively. Maynwaring, for his part, did not appear to have been entirely convinced by Elizabeth’s contrition. He couldn’t resist adding, to the end of the story about Elizabeth’s crying and showing him the letter, a feline little aside that pandered to Sarah’s notion of her as promiscuous: ‘I can’t help telling that she mistook when she thought she had shewn me her letter to 240 [the Duchess of Marlborough], and gave me one she had writ to some man.’13 A year later, Maynwaring again mentioned Lady Orkney in a way that implies he distrusted her ostensible affection for the duchess. In a passage praising Sarah’s ability as a letter writer, he commented that ‘Those who wish you the worst will all own that nobody ever had such a knack of letter writing, as they call it; and I never heard any one say more upon that subject than I remember my Lady Orkney did at St. Albans.’14

  Sarah’s grudge against Elizabeth only intensified with time. In her memoirs, she finally confirmed Elizabeth’s suspicions about the origins of her rancour, writing that there were ‘very good reasons to believe … Mrs Villiers did a great deal’ to incite William’s anger against Marlborough. ‘Being a designing ill woman,’ she continued, ‘there was no doubt but she joined with everybody that were the duke of Marlborough’s enemy, at that time, in order to remove him from his employment.’ Though Sarah acknowledged that she had ‘received Elizabeth with… coldness,’ she put a wry, hard-headed spin on her conduct, arguing that she had only adopted this stance in order to save Elizabeth ‘from giving herself or me any further trouble.’ The only subsequent contact she entertained with Elizabeth, she claimed, was when she occasionally sent her an invitation to a party, though even that was ‘much against my inclination’. She justified this insincere behaviour with a remarkable piece of misanthropy: ‘The world was so very bad,’ she wrote, ‘that one must pass over such things unless one could have retired… out of it.’15 For all Elizabeth’s disagreements with the duchess, her correspondence of the early 1710s would be marked by a similar tone of cynical detachment.

  In the middle of November 1709, Maynwaring’s allegiance appeared to shift. In a letter to the duchess, he tentatively mooted Betty as a possible replacement as Whig spokesperson at court. ‘What think you of resigning your place and interest to my Lady Orkney? Do you think she could be prevailed upon to take it?’ he wrote, before protesting his own loyalty to Sarah a little too much. Maynwaring could also see what other Whigs could not – Sarah’s aggressive lobbying for the Whigs at court risked alienating the queen. Later that month, Anne’s instinctive sympathy for the Tories would be intensified by the decision of her Whig treasurer Godolphin to impeach a Tory clergyman, Henry Sacheverell, for preaching a sermon in which he questioned the right of a subject to resist tyranny – a key tenet of Whig political philosophy. Elizabeth was not only a more effective politician than Sarah, but she was also less tainted by association with the Whig ‘Junto’ and the Duke of Marlborough.

  Maynwaring was not the only one trying to recruit Elizabeth. She had also been corresponding with Robert Harley, a Tory who looked likely to lead the charge on the Whig ministry. Being unassuming, frank and devoid of pretension, Harley exhibited many of the characteristics that most appealed to Elizabeth. In an age where manners were carefully scripted and ceremony strictly adhered to, he enjoyed receiving guests without pomp, and drinking a bottle of claret with them. He had previously held a number of influential posts, including that of Speaker in the Commons, but had been ousted from his positions by Marlborough in 1708, and had been plotting revenge against the Whig leadership ever since. The surge of public sympathy for the Tories following the prosecution of Sacheverell provided Harley with a platform to make his own play for power. He set about persuading Queen Anne to dismiss her most influential Whig ministers and replace them with ministers of his own choosing. A sense of crisis developed when the Bank of England warned that a ministry under the wrong leadership could cause financial collapse – ‘all credit would be gone, stock fall, and the bank be ruined’ – and the Dutch States General sent envoys opposed to a ministry with Harley at its head.16 Harley’s plans for a new ministry were consequently hatched beneath a veil of secrecy; the Duke of Somerset, a prospective candidate, was summoned to Harley’s house in June 1710 in a sedan chair with the curtains drawn to conceal his identity.17

  Elizabeth was corresponding with Harley throughout this crisis. It is not entirely clear what her role was, but she was certainly giving him advice and may have been involved more deeply, for instance in negotiating potential positions for her husband. With typical humility, she played down the possibility of her having any role at all in Harley’s political plan: ‘If ’tis known that you see me,’ she wrote in July 1710, ‘it will be made of more consequence than ’tis possible to be with me who am not of weight enough to give a pretense for our acquaintance.’ In the carefully worded letter, Elizabeth maintained a fine balance between showing her support for Harley and protecting herself from scandal should his plan fail. ‘I hope you will soon be at Windsor, and then I flatter myself I may have occasion to invite you to Cliveden; but to show you that fear never governs me, if you choose to come by daylight appoint your own hour and I shall be at home, but if I don’t hear again in answer to this I shall expect you tomorrow as soon as it is dark with a great deal of satisfaction.’18 Although there is no record of the ensuing meeting, it is evident from Elizabeth’s excited tone how much she enjoyed the frisson of being caught up in political machinations.

  Whatever advice Elizabeth gave Harley in their meetings, it appears to have been sound. During the spring and summer of 1710, successive members of the Whig Junto were removed from office by Anne. With Lord Godolphin’s dismissal on 10 August, the rout was complete. There was no doubt in Godolphin’s mind who was responsible for the fall: he thought Elizabeth was ‘extreamly meddling’ in affairs of state.19 The new Tory ministry, with Harley as Chancellor of the Exchequer, immediately sought an end to the wars on the Continent.

  Following Harley’s appointment, the Duchess of Marlborough’s relationship with Queen Anne went rapidly downhill, and when it finally combusted it did so with a vengefulness and intensity characteristic of the duchess. Having been told by the queen to vacate her Whitehall apartments, Sarah stripped the place of everything that wasn’t screwed down, and some things that were: doorknobs and fireplaces joined the rest of the apartment’s furniture and fittings in the back of a cart bound for the duchess’s private residence.

  The only significant obstacle to Harley’s plan for peace with France was now the Duke of Marlborough himself. In order to topple the general, he would enlist the services of the brilliant Irish satirist Jonathan Swift who would, over the following years, become one of Elizabeth’s closest friends.

  The political and intellectual competition between Sarah and Elizabeth would have been unthinkable in the courtly environment experienced by Anna Maria, in which women were only able to exercise power informally, and most often through sexual relationships. The cultural change was rooted in the political debate surrounding the Glorious Revolution, which had resulted in the queen and king sharing power. It also had more practical causes: the perpetual state of war in the first 15 years of the 18th century took men out of the country for long periods of time, thrusting women into positions of unusual responsibility. This is exactly what had happened with Elizabeth and Sarah. It was a pattern that would be repeated 200 years later, during the carnage of the First World War, the ramifications of which would be even more profound, both for women in general, and for Cliveden’s 20th-century mistress, Nancy Astor.

  Chapter 6

  ‘THE WISEST WOMAN I EVER SAW’

  ‘HE HAS VERY particular eyes,’ Alexander Pope wrote of Jonathan Swift. ‘They are quite azure as the heavens and there’s a very uncommon archne
ss in them.’1 Swift had been born in Dublin but moved to England in early 1689, when Ireland stayed loyal to the banished Catholic king, and the standing of Irish Protestants such as himself suddenly looked precarious. After James was defeated by William in Ireland, Swift was free to return to his home country; he divided the rest of life between London, where he made an active contribution to politics, and Dublin, where he entered the church and was appointed Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1713.

  By the time of his 1710–13 stay in England, Swift had already published his first satire Tale of a Tub and was in high demand as a political propagandist. Though he had started out writing in support of the Whigs, in early 1710, during the Sacheverell trial, he defected to the Tories. Soon he was attending Robert Harley’s exclusive dinner parties, which were effectively meetings of the cabinet-in-waiting, and in July that year, Harley took him to Windsor for the first time. It was during one of these visits that Swift became ‘mightily acquainted’ with Elizabeth, who, he wrote, ‘lives at a fine place, five miles from hence, called Cliffden’.2

  Swift’s greatest contribution to the Tory cause would come a year later in the form of his anti-war pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies, in which he identified the true motive of the war as ‘the aggrandising of a particular family’ – namely the Marlboroughs. ‘The duke was to command the army,’ wrote Swift, ‘and the duchess, by her employments, and the Favour she was possessed of, to be always near her majesty’s person; by which the whole Power, at Home and Abroad would be devolved upon that Family.’ The Whigs had been supported he said, by profiteers, ‘whose Perpetual Harvest is War’. The idea that the war was being prolonged for the power and profit of a small clique became enormously influential. The pamphlet sold 10,0 copies, and on 30 December the Duke of Marlborough was unceremoniously dismissed from all his offices, to be replaced in the field by the Duke of Ormond.

  Elizabeth was receptive to the ideas in Swift’s pamphlet, but she was more than just an appreciative audience. Beginning in 1710 when the two were introduced through Harley, Elizabeth often hosted Swift at Cliveden. On 9 October 1712, Elizabeth spent from two in the afternoon until eleven at night engrossed in conversation about politics with Swift. He was enchanted by her quicksilver intelligence, describing her as ‘the wisest woman I ever saw’, ‘a woman of quality, who had excellent good sense’, and ‘a person of as much good natural sense and judgement as I have known’.3 Swift shared Elizabeth’s sense of humour and was an intellectually worthy companion for her. The strength of their kinship lay in a united outlook. Since Queen Anne’s accession, Elizabeth had become more circumspect about court life and was bored by its affectations. ‘How vain is ambition if these are the ornaments of courts’, she wrote of the louche figures who adorned Windsor. ‘And upon serious consideration what is valuable but friendship maintained by true worth and how hard is that to be found uninterrupted by circumstances or malice.’ Her relationship with her rival Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, cannot have been far from her mind when she expressed these sentiments. When writing to younger women less jaded by experience, Elizabeth tried to rein in her cynicism. ‘If I let myself run as far as my experience can lead me, I shall make you hate the world too early,’ she wrote to Lady Harley, Robert’s daughter-in-law.4 Swift shared Elizabeth’s suspicions about court life. On 26 April 1713, he noted in his journal, ‘I was at court today, and a thousand people gave me joy; so I ran out. I dined with Lady Orkney.’5

  One of Swift’s favourite authors was the cynical French moralist La Rochefoucauld, who had a profoundly unromantic notion of love, arguing that while Venus, the goddess of love, may have presided over romance, real power lay in the hands of her son Cupid, a force of mischief and absurdity. Swift agreed with the importance of Cupid’s role. He thought that love, especially men’s love of women, could spring from all sorts of irrational feelings, including lust, and was particularly taken by one of Elizabeth’s favourite aphorisms: ‘in men, desire begets love, and in women, love begets desire’.6 While there was no doubt a frisson in discussing these matters with Swift, infidelity no longer interested Elizabeth. Instead of seducing the writer, she mothered him, nursing him when he was ill, and insisting he take her remedies: ‘Lady Orkney is my physician. It is hiera picra, two spoonfuls, devilish stuff!’ he recorded.7

  As the demand for Swift’s company escalated, so did the rivalry between his female companions. Swift’s closeness to the Duchess of Hamilton, wife of Orkney’s spendthrift older brother, James, is particularly evident from his journal entries following the Duke of Hamilton’s death in a duel. Hamilton fought Lord Mohun in Hyde Park on 15 November 1712. He stabbed Mohun first, but ‘while the Duke was over him, Mohun, shortening his sword, stabbed him in at the shoulder to the heart.’8 Hamilton collapsed on his way across the park, and died shortly after. As soon as he heard about the tragedy, Swift rushed to the duchess’s side to comfort her: ‘She has moved my very soul,’ he wrote in his journal. The duel became a public sensation, inspiring prints and ballads and renewing old arguments about duelling, much as Shrewsbury and Buckingham’s fight had done over 40 years before. The duchess openly despised Elizabeth and flew into a jealous rage when she learned that Swift was frequently dining with her. She ‘could not have patience when people told her I went often to Lady Orkney’s’, Swift noted with amusement, adding, in case there was any doubt, that ‘they hate each other’.9

  The rivals also made and bought gifts for their mutual friend. In a bid to ingratiate herself, the duchess made Swift a pocketed belt with a special pouch for his snuff box, for him to wear in the summer when it was too hot for waistcoats. Not to be outmanoeuvred, Elizabeth announced that she was giving Swift ‘a writing table of her own contrivance [design], and bed nightgown’.10 The gifts are indicative of the kind of interests Swift shared with each woman: the duchess’s husband had given Swift a pound of snuff that was ‘admirable good’, and the writing table was a nod to Elizabeth’s interest in Swift’s work.11 The nightgown that Betty promised never materialised. ‘Lady Orkney has just sent to invite me to dinner; she has not given me the bednightgown’, Swift wrote in disappointment on 12 December.12 The following month, however, she presented Swift with a far more extravagant token of her affection – an original portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Kneller was the most popular and highly sought-after painter at court, the Lely of his day, so this was more than just a gesture on Elizabeth’s part. Swift thought the painting was ‘very fine’, but inevitably, writing to Stella, his ‘perfect Friend’ back in Dublin, he felt the need to deliver a backhanded compliment so the extravagant gift did not arouse suspicion: Kneller had ‘favoured her squint admirably’, he wrote.13

  According to Swift the majority of men believed it the duty of women ‘to be fools in every article except what is merely domestic’, and the majority of women agreed, except for those who had ‘as little regard for family business as for the improvement of their minds’. He vehemently disagreed with this myopic view and Swift often complained that Elizabeth did not do herself justice with her woeful spelling, telling a friend that ‘a woman of quality, who had excellent good sense, was formerly my correspondent, but she scrawled and spelt like a Wapping wench.’14 His criticisms, while caustic, were not intended to offend – they were his eccentric way of redressing the gender imbalance in the field of education. In an unfinished essay Of the Education of Ladies he criticised ‘the modern way of training up both sexes in ignorance, idleness and vice’. He was committed to changing popular perception that the least valuable qualities in a woman were ‘some taste of wit and humour… able to read and relish history, books of travels, moral or entertaining discourses’.15

  Elizabeth’s own interest in education is most apparent in her endowment of a school in Ireland. As part of the ongoing English effort to anglicise the Irish middle classes, there had been a tradition of royalty and aristocracy setting up schools in the colony. In 1690, when King William triumphed in the Battle of the Boyne, Mary implored him
to uphold this tradition: ‘I have been also desired to beg you not to be too quick parting with the confiscated estates,’ she wrote, ‘but consider whether you will not keep some for public schools to instruct the poor Irish.’16 William ignored Mary’s wishes, but as soon as she was granted the Irish lands five years later, Elizabeth took matters into her own hands by allocating a portion of her estates for the establishment of a school at Midleton, County Cork. The school survived the appropriation of her lands in 1698, and eventually opened its doors in 1717; the original 18th-century buildings are still in use by the school today.

  Chapter 7

  ‘I HAVE TIRED MYSELF WITH FRIGHT’

  ON THE MORNING of 23 May 1706 in the Flanders countryside, Orkney was preparing to lead his men in an assault against French troops. The battlefield on which the Allied and French armies were to engage was dotted with rustic villages. Orkney was responsible for leading the attack in the north of the field. In order to reach the French lines, his men had to cross the marshy valley bottom, and a stream called the Petite Ghee. As they crossed the stream they would be vulnerable to attack from the skilled Walloon infantry, who had occupied cottages and made barricades on a ridge overhead. It was a perilous mission. As soon as Orkney ordered the advance, the sound of Walloon gunshots filled the air. The English eventually ‘got over with ten or twelve battalions’, but suffered a heavy death toll.1 In desperation, the bodies and body parts of dead and dying soldiers were used as ‘foundations’ to enable the soldiers to cross the marsh and stream.2 It was a horrifying spectacle, and the indignity and loss of life was appalling.