A Want of Kindness

by Joanne Limburg

  ‘I am sure I am mightily grateful to be receiving company again,’ says Anne, ‘but I am all the more glad when they have all gone, and it is just the two of us. Too much company tires me; it always did.’

  ‘It was a squeeze, wasn’t it?’

  ‘There were far too many people. Lord Carnarvon was quite put out – did you hear what he said when he’d pushed his way through?’ ‘No. What?’ ‘He said he hoped I would remember that he came to wait upon me, when none of that company did.’ ‘What, does he think you ought to pay him in gold for his visits?’ ‘Well, I could not even if I wished to: Sir Benjamin does nothing but tell me I have no funds.’ ‘My Lord Carnarvon must think you have the King’s ear – which you certainly should.’ ‘It should be obvious to him that I don’t. Nobody has it now but Shrewsbury and Keppel – even our Betty is put aside, which is a thing I never thought to see.’

  She hopes by mentioning Betty’s name to divert Sarah, but Sarah’s blood is up. Again.

  ‘But you are his heir, Your Highness.’

  ‘He receives me cordially enough, he has given me the late Queen’s jewels, I have my guard back – and he has been most civil to you, and permitted your Lord to kiss his hand again – and that last to me is more—’

  ‘Oh never mind that! He receives you with no more ceremony than he does any other lady, and not nearly often enough! He ought to see to it that you are kept informed of business – indeed, it would be most improper if you were not Regent next time he goes abroad.’

  ‘It would be an ugly thing indeed if he did not offer it me, but I must confess I feel myself unfit . . . and my heath . . . my condition . . .’

  ‘He will not leave till May – you will have been delivered of the child by then.’

  ‘Yes, but I cannot do it – I have been ignorant my whole life of . . . I cannot.’

  ‘Ignorance can be remedied, Your Highness.’

  ‘You know I cannot read so well – with my eyes.’

  ‘Then I will read to you.’

  Anne shakes her head.

  ‘The Prince – the Prince must be Regent – or on the Council, he may act on my behalf. I am unfit.’

  ‘But – forgive me – do you intend still to be “unfit” when you are Queen?’

  Anne has begun to twist her fringe-work this way and that in her hands; she becomes aware that it has grown damp with sweat, and lets it drop into her lap.

  ‘Your Highness?’

  ‘I am put in mind of something my late sister once said to me – I had forgotten it till now – she said that anyone who envied her the Crown was a fool.’

  ‘Then I must beg pardon for asking what I know is an impertinent question, but did you envy it?’

  ‘Sometimes – but mostly, I did not envy it – truly I did not – and I do not envy the King’s position now, although it is true he is a foreigner and should not properly have it. I only ever desired what was due to me in mine.’

  Ugly Things

  Anne does not get what is due to her position. She is not invited to be Regent; George is not asked to serve as one of the Lords Justice during William’s absences. The Irish lands, that were her father’s, and that she should have had long since, are given to Betty Villiers, who has been married off and made Countess of Orkney. The King has announced that she should take over the Duke of Leeds’ lodgings in St James’s, but not in such a way as to cause the Duke to make haste over it.

  Was there ever in all of history a princess so shabbily used, or so little respected? If it were not for the Marlboroughs, Lord Godolphin and – for she must own it – the Earl of Sunderland, then surely she would be as little regarded in this Kingdom as any country squire’s wife. Her own physician will not come away from a party to see her, and sends back word that her distemper is nothing but the vapours, that she would be as healthy as any other woman alive, if only she would believe it. If this were not humiliation enough, Dr Radcliffe must then spread this opinion about Court and town, along with another, shared by many, that Anne’s belly is but a false conception. Anne dismisses him. She does not reinstate him when he turns out to be correct. She takes her husband, her son and her stubborn bulk to Windsor for the summer, and wonders when God will be done with this chastisement.

  God must think better of the King, for although he has but lately taken his wife, he has now granted him a great victory at Namur. Lady Marlborough does not think that he deserves Anne’s congratulations, but her Lord and friends overrule her. Anne duly sends a respectful note, to which the King does not reply. It is as Lady Marlborough says: she will never get her due from Caliban.

  The Good Hope

  In one respect it hardly matters that Anne makes so mean a figure: the Duke of Gloucester is Prince of Wales in all but name, and the King loves him.

  Every day he seems less of a baby and more of a Prince. Now that Mrs Pack is dead – and not before he has learned to detest her as much as everyone else – there is no-one to tell him otherwise. When he hears Anne fret over him, he likes to show her how steady he is on his feet now, and to remind her how infrequent his fevers have become. It is not for her to keep him by her as if he were a girl, he says: she should only hear his catechism, and let him go.

  ‘Perhaps it is only because you are so often ill yourself, that you fear so much for me,’ he says. ‘But you should not. You should not fear, and you should not weep so much either.’

  The cutler has made for him at his request a basket-hilted sword – a proper one, not wooden – and he carries it whenever he can. He has a Huguenot tutor, M. Hautecourt, whose only task is to teach him about fortification. He has lately acquired some new interests to place alongside soldiering: he has grown to enjoy his lessons with Mr Pratt, and has also taken to sea-faring. They have had a ship made for him, complete with masts and guns, from the toy-makers in Cannon Street. It is called The Good Hope; he boards it daily with his men, who are more often sailors than soldiers now

  By the summer of his sixth birthday, he is considered strong enough to come for the first time to Windsor. Within two days of his arrival, he brings his mother a full report of a battle he has fought in St George’s Hall, with the Bathurst boys and young Lord Churchill, who were visiting from Eton College. The stairs and the balcony were a castle, which the boys from Eton had to defend from Gloucester’s army. The castle men were allowed one sortie before they were routed. He tells Anne that it was a very hotly fought battle, with many casualties; Gloucester was himself bruised a little when Peter Bathurst charged into him.

  ‘But I did not stop fighting because of that,’ he says. ‘I only stopped because the fighting was over and it was time for Atty to blow the wind back into the dead with her pipe.’

  Gloucester has not yet been allowed to learn to ride, but he is permitted to follow a hunt in his coach, wearing boots and spurs as if he were on horseback. When Anne asks him afterwards if he does not think the crying of the hounds the most glorious sound that ever was, he owns that he still prefers the sound of cannon firing, and of drums, but the baying hounds are almost as good.

  At the end of the chase, a buck is driven out in front of his coach, and he watches as its throat is cut by one of his father’s pages. One page puts his hand into the wound, rides up to Gloucester and smears his face with blood. When this is done, Gloucester smears blood over Lewis, then Lord Churchill and lastly the Bathursts. The next day there is another hunt, this time to celebrate his birthday, and he is responsible for dividing the slaughtered buck between the nobler members of the household. He does very well, except that he forgets to put aside a portion for Lady Fitzharding, and when she teases him about this, he weeps like any three­year-old. Anne assures him that he has done very well indeed, and he soon recovers his composure.

  Having spent his first Windsor summer in good health, Gloucester returns to Campden House, where he is judged strong enough to begin lessons in boxing and
fencing. There is talk of his receiving the Garter soon: one of his boy drummers, Harry Scull, has even been dreaming of his investiture, and the prescience of his visions is confirmed that winter, when Lord Stafford dies, leaving a vacancy in the Order. The King sends Bishop Burnet to bring the news.

  ‘Does the thought of the Garter make you glad?’ he asks.

  ‘I am gladder of the King’s favour to me,’ says Gloucester, without any need of a prompt.

  The King shows his favour by summoning Gloucester at once to Kensington, where he ties the Order, with the emblem of St George on it, around his nephew’s neck himself.

  ‘And when he did so,’ he tells his mother, ‘I felt myself grow strong enough to slay a dragon.’

  18th February 1696

  O merciful God, I pray that I may always fully and entirely resign myself to your disposal, so that whatsoever state I am, I may be therein content. Lord, grant I may never look with murmuring on my own condition, nor with envy on other men’s . . . Forgive your servant: I meant to read Allestree’s ‘Collect for Contentedness’ all through, for his words are such that cannot be improved upon, least of all by one who has so mean stock of them as I, but I find I cannot finish – my eyes hurt, and they are full of tears besides. It is the condition of other women I must endeavour not to envy, for again you have suffered me, in your wisdom and mercy, to be delivered of another dead child, a daughter. As I have found before, so I find again that among the evils I am subject to when these calamities happen is the envy I feel for more fortunate women – for Lady Marlborough even – who have their quivers full of living healthy children. Besides knowing it is a sin it pains me more than I could ever express that such ugly feelings should have those I love as their object . . . Please I beg you grant me the grace to overcome them, for I desire above all things not to be so tormented.

  I must instead study to be thankful, ever thankful – for the blessings you have given me: that I may come now to Court again, and the Court come to me; for my lodgings at St James’s and Windsor; that although I am sick often you have seen fit to preserve my life so that I might yet have a living child again; for the friendship of the Marlboroughs and my Lord Godolphin; most of all for the preservation of the life of my poor boy, for the liveliness and the wit that he has, and for the love the King bears him.

  I know full well it is only for my boy’s sake that His Majesty receives me, for he always keeps me waiting when I go, and would surely not see me at all if he could do so without its being murmured about . . . I flatter myself that I behave towards him with all the duty, respect, meekness and submission that I owe to him as King, and I pray that I may continue to do so, for I must own I was used to lose my temper with the late Queen over such matters, and I cannot but regret it a little now that our quarrels can never be made up in this world.

  I should thank you too for the preservation of the King’s life, that by your grace and mercy the late plot to murder him was found out and prevented, and the invasion that was to come with it – I am in truth mightily grateful for this, as I can hardly bear to think what would have become of all us poor Protestant English if my father had been restored . . .

  But he is my father still, and I have written to him to ask him to give his blessing for me to have the Crown after the present King, if I were to arrange for some restitution afterwards, but I have no hopes of his agreement or of his true forgiveness on such terms.

  Everyone in the King’s service is now to take the Oath of Association that says I shall succeed my brother-in-law, so it looks as if it shall come to pass – should you suffer me to outlive him. I must confess that I cannot always hinder myself from thinking upon this prospect with some satisfaction, both for my own sake and my poor boy’s – and I wonder if it is not this – this ambition, this pride, this desire for a Crown that can only come to me through the death of one whose life I should wish to be preserved – I wonder if it is not this ambition, that I can hardly speak of – I wonder if it is not on account of this that you have so many times chastised me.

  20th September 1696

  Gluttony, lust, envy, wrath, covetousness . . . as Anne’s sins are multiplied, so are the curses that strike her womb. She knows very well that she has a plethoric constitution, so ought not to gorge on rich foods when she is with child and her body cannot discharge the excess blood in the usual way; the excess humour that results from this overindulgence can offend the body and cause abortion. She knows this, but she cannot help her eating. She has also been told many times that she and the Prince ought to refrain from venereal embraces when she has a child already in the womb, as the dangers attendant on this are twofold: firstly, there is always the possibility, especially in the earlier and later months (remember the apples?), that the bands which fasten the child to the womb might be fatally loosened; secondly – and it appears that this is what has happened in this case – there is the possibility that the womb, which should remain closed, might come to open in the fervour of libidinous congress, so as to admit the seed which delights it so much, resulting in the conception of a second child, the presence of which will then overburden the womb, causing it to miscarry. The midwives and the physicians alike tend towards this latter explanation, as there were quite certainly two unripe children expelled in the twenty-four hours of Anne’s travail, one of seven months’ growth, and the other, as far as could be judged, of no more than two or three.

  Anne Dances

  The King has arrived back for the winter, weary, ill and foul-tempered. Anne is to host a ball at St James’s to celebrate his birthday: she knows perfectly well that he does not wish it, but they both know that there must be a celebration of some kind, and that she must be the hostess. She will have to sit up next to him: the Court will dance towards the pair of them, and keep their sharp eyes on them while they do. Everybody will be looking at her, noting how stout her figure has become, how red and mottled her complexion. She can do nothing about either of these – and heaven only knows, she has tried – but her hair is still pretty, so she can have that dressed as well as she can, with the late Queen’s beautiful jewels in it, and take care that no-one should find any fault with her dress.

  Of course somebody will, since the generality of the world disapprove of every fashion they did not bring up themselves. She would very much prefer to wear a manteau to the ball, for she is so often stiff enough in her movements without the further strictures of a gown, but when she asks Lady Fitzharding for her opinion on the matter, she replies with an air as if she did not think it respect enough for a ball. Anne writes to Sarah to ask her if she agrees that she will not be thought fine enough in a manteau, but Sarah is of the same mind as Lady Fitzharding, so she resigns herself to an evening of stately discomfort.

  The pleasant discovery, the blessing of the ball, is that she is well that day, quite free of pain, and even able to dance herself. She and the Prince dance a minuet together by themselves, and are applauded as much as if they had lost none of their old grace. Later on, she dances the Parson’s Farewell with Lord Marlborough, who is a delight as a partner, slim and graceful as any man half his age. He has lately been accused of plotting with the Jacobites again, but as his accuser is Sir John Fenwick, who all the world knows is a scoundrel, one who would say anything to save his own skin, nobody at Court gives the story much credit. If Marlborough himself is troubled, you would never know it from his dancing.

  Anne does not dance with the King. The King does not dance with anybody. He prefers to spend the evening scowling. He does not at all desire to be in such a noisy, crowded room as this, and he would have everyone know it. Anne, who has chosen the musicians herself, and taken the greatest care over everything, expected all along to be offended by him, and she is. It comes to her, with no little pain, that she need never have fretted so much over her dress, for tomorrow nobody will be talking about anything except the King’s being out of temper.

  She is quite correct in her
assumption. The King’s ill humour is the chief topic of discussion the next day, and the rest of that week and even for a few weeks more, until it gets about that Anne has been suffering from convulsion fits again, and there is that to chew over instead.

  Love for Love

  In the three wintery months that have passed between the King’s birthday and Anne’s, events have moved with a spring-like quickness. Marlborough’s accuser, Sir John Fenwick, has been discredited before all of Parliament and soon after deprived of his life; as a result, the Kingdom has been well rid not only of one of its worse troublemakers but also of one of its most uncivil men, whose tormenting of the late Queen as she fled from her burning home has never been forgotten, least of all by the King. It must be said, however, that the excision of this latest malignancy has not been accomplished without a serious cost to the body as a whole. Sir John was so very liberal with his accusations as to provide certain persons with the perfect opportunity to settle old scores, a chance which they seized at: now Godolphin is out of government, and Shrewsbury is in it only in name.

  The King’s humour is in no way improved by any of this. He spent the anniversary of his late wife’s death shut up all alone, and the rest of the winter trying to cure his spleen with drink. During the day, he has barely uttered a word to anyone, not even to Portland – perhaps especially not to Portland, whom his new favourite Keppel is bent on driving away. Most nights, the King has been closeted up with Keppel, drinking beer and talking Dutch. It is regrettable, his dependence on this young man, who seems to think of little else but his own dissolute pleasures, and is impudent to boot. When Anne hears that the King has made him Earl of Albemarle, she is properly disgusted.