Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  In June Anne accompanied her stepmother to Tunbridge. Mary Beatrice had herself suffered a miscarriage about the same time as Anne had lost her child, and was going to take the waters in order to aid her recovery. It was the first time that Anne had visited this fashionable spa, to which she subsequently returned on numerous occasions in hopes of increasing her fertility. On this visit, however, she did not drink the waters, as her underlying health was good. Although Tunbridge Wells was a popular resort, Anne was bored there, particularly after Sarah and George, who joined her for part of the time, left her alone with her stepmother. She was relieved when Mary Beatrice decided the waters did not agree with her and returned to court.164

  The rest of the summer was again spent touring southern England with the court. Towards the end of the year a rumour became current that Anne and George would go to Scotland on a visit, but when asked about this her father insisted ‘’twas never thought of’. He added happily, ‘God be thanked, she is not in a condition to make such a voyage, being four months gone with child’.165

  2

  Religion Before Her Father

  On 6 February 1685 King Charles II died. For his niece Princess Anne, the sudden snuffing out of her apparently healthy uncle – which coincided with her twentieth birthday – was a grim reminder of the precariousness of life. When Prince George became afflicted a few months later by ‘a giddiness in the head’, she was needlessly alarmed, confessing ‘I cannot help being frighted at the least thing ever since the late king’s death’.1

  The Duke of York now ascended the throne as King James II. At the outset of his reign he appeared to be in an exceptionally strong position. A Whig politician noted gloomily, ‘all the former heats and animosities against him … seemed to be now quite forgot amidst the loud acclamations’.2

  For Anne, as for other sincere Protestants, the fact that James was a Catholic was, of course, disturbing. James refused to be discreet about his faith. ‘He went publicly to mass’, and work started on building a sumptuous new Catholic chapel at Whitehall, which eventually came into use at Christmas 1686. However, concerns about this were to some extent stilled by the King’s apparent respect for the Church of England. He ‘ordered the [Anglican] chapel at Whitehall to be kept in the same order as formerly, where the Princess of Denmark went daily’. Anne reported ‘Ever since the late King died, I have sat in the closet that was his in the chapel’. During the services the officiating clergy performed ‘the same bowing and ceremonies … to the place where she was as if his Majesty had been there in person’.3

  The statement that James made at his first meeting with the Privy Council was also reassuring. He announced that although ‘I have been reported to be a man for arbitrary power’, he would nevertheless ‘make it my endeavour to preserve the government in Church and State as it is by law established’. He added that since he was aware that ‘the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy … I shall always take care to defend and support it’.4 His words were printed and circulated to widespread acclaim.

  The outlook for Anne’s friends, the Churchills, appeared excellent as John Churchill was given an English barony and visibly enjoyed ‘a large share of his master’s good graces’. Her uncles on her mother’s side were both awarded important appointments, with Clarendon being made Lord Privy Seal, and Rochester becoming Lord Treasurer. Although Anne was not personally close to them, both men were looked on as devoted to ‘the interest of the King’s daughters and united to the Church party’, so it was heartening that they were in positions of trust.5

  Prince George was made a member of the Privy Council by his father-in-law. However, it was a less significant advancement than it seemed, for most important decisions were made in the King’s chamber by an inner ring of royal advisers. In June 1687 a French diplomat reported that so little account was taken of George ‘he might as well not exist’.6

  On 19 May 1685 Anne was present at the opening of Parliament. She heard her father make a speech that was slightly menacing, despite the fact that he reaffirmed his determination to protect the Church of England. He warned the Commons that they must not presume to keep him short of cash, and ‘to use him well’. His words went down surprisingly favourably, for very few members had been elected who were not well disposed towards the Crown. The only hint of trouble occurred on 26 May, when a parliamentary committee petitioned James to enforce the laws against religious nonconformists, including Catholics. However, when James summoned its members and rebuked them, they backed down.

  Anne’s first child – a daughter, christened Mary – was born on 1 June 1685, and proved to be ‘always very sickly’.7 The Princess did not breastfeed the infant herself, for this would have been considered eccentric or even irresponsible. Instead, the baby was cared for by a full complement of servants, including a wet nurse, dry nurse, and rockers. The nursery was in the Cockpit, and Anne would later come to believe that London air had undermined the child’s health.

  Mrs Barbara Berkeley, whose husband Colonel John Berkeley was Anne’s Master of the Horse, was appointed the child’s governess. Described by another member of the household as ‘as witty and pleasant a lady as any in England’ Mrs Berkeley had known the Princess since childhood and had also long been on very close terms with Sarah Churchill. Anne manifested surprisingly little faith in Mrs Berkeley’s childcare skills, telling Sarah, ‘Though she be Lady Governess, yet I rely more upon your goodness and sincerity to me than I could ever do upon her for anything’.8

  Ten days after Anne had given birth, her father’s regime came under threat when the late King’s exiled illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, landed at Lyme Regis, intent on overthrowing James. In happier days the Duke had been one of the most glamorous figures at Charles II’s court, and as a child Anne had greatly admired his dancing. However, since Monmouth had allied himself with the exclusionists he had represented a threat to her as well as her father. This only became more explicit when he issued a proclamation on 20 June assuming the title of King for himself, but Anne’s main concern was for Sarah, whose husband was with the royal army sent to crush the insurrection. On 7 July ‘ye good news’ arrived not only that the rebels had been defeated at Sedgemoor but that Lord Churchill was unharmed.9 After being captured hiding in a ditch, Monmouth was brought to London and executed on 15 July.

  Towards the end of July, Anne paid her second visit to Tunbridge Wells, leaving her daughter in London. The necessity of producing another child took priority over other maternal duties, and in hopes of promoting her fertility Anne took the waters for the customary six-week course. Prince George joined her for part of the time there, and by August there were hopeful signs that Anne had conceived again. The Princess herself was cautious, not wanting to raise hopes prematurely. She told Sarah, ‘The waters agree very well with me, but as for my being with child, I don’t believe it, though not having had anything since my month was out it is not altogether impossible’.10 Only in the autumn did she accept she was pregnant, and she remained confused about the date of conception.

  While at Tunbridge, the Princess relied on Sarah to keep her informed about her daughter’s health, having begged Sarah to ‘let me know the least thing that ails her’. After receiving a worrying report the Princess wrote, ‘I am sorry my girl has any soreness in her eyes for fear she should take after me in that’. The child was so sickly that it was decided that medical intervention was necessary. In fact, this much increased the danger, for only the strongest children were capable of surviving the ministrations of seventeenth-century doctors. Anne agreed that the infant should be given an incision, or ‘issue’, through which evil humours could be drawn out, but was assailed by doubts after authorising the procedure. She wrote anxiously to Sarah that she was now in ‘a mind to put it off till I am at London myself, though if I thought the deferring of it could be of any ill consequence I would send presently to Mrs Berkeley to let it be done and therefore I desire you would let [me] know your opinion about it’. Fo
rtunately by the time Anne returned to London in early September, the child was better. The Princess informed Sarah that she found little Mary ‘God be thanked, very well, and I think mightily grown since I saw her’, though displaying little of that ‘wit and awareness’ that Anne had been told to look for in her. She added, ‘She has at this time a scabby face which they tell me will do her a great deal of good. I beg a thousand pardons for giving you so particular a nasty account of her but … I could not hinder myself from doing it’.11

  Anne’s main worry at this time was financial, for despite having an income from England of £20,000 a year (with more coming from Denmark), she and her husband found themselves overstretched as both had large households. Anne had two ladies of the bedchamber, five dressers, four maids of honour, and a woman to look after them, a sempstress, starcher and laundress, two chaplains, four pages of the backstairs, two gentlemen ushers, two gentlemen waiters, plus a fully staffed stables with her own Master of the Horse. George had an even larger establishment and stables and coachmen of his own. In addition they had to pay kitchen staff. The documented wage bill came to more than £8,645 and this was almost certainly an underestimate. On top of these expenses were costs for food and clothing. According to Sarah, the Countess of Rochester spent additional enormous sums on Anne’s wardrobe. Although the Princess grumbled that she believed her clothes to ‘be much the worse for her looking after’, at the end of 1685 the Countess’s ‘accounts came to eight thousand pounds’.12

  On top of this came Anne’s gambling costs, which were by no means inconsiderable. Cutting back on this was difficult, for if Anne had absented herself from the tables, there would have been complaints. Stakes were high: in the summer of 1686 the Princess told Sarah ‘Yesterday I won three hundred pound, but have lost almost half of it again this morning’. Sarah clearly made regular gains from her card games with her mistress, but years later she criticised the Princess for being dilatory about settling her debts. In addition she carped that when Anne did pay, ‘she would throw down more than was necessary’.13

  By late 1685 Anne’s overspending had left her £10,000 in debt, ‘which was very uneasy to her’. According to a later account, she asked her uncle Lord Rochester to approach her father for more funds on her behalf, but he ‘excused himself … telling her she knew the King’s temper in relation to money matters, and such a proposal might do him hurt and her no good’. Thereafter Anne held a lasting grudge against him, complaining that neither he nor his brother Clarendon had ‘behaved … well to me … which one may think a little extraordinary’.14

  James did, in fact, do his best to ease his daughter’s financial difficulties. In November 1685 he ordered that £16,000 of ‘royal bounty’ should be given to her to discharge her debts. Three months later he granted Anne and George an additional £10,000 a year. By that time the extravagant Lady Clarendon had left her service and had been succeeded by Lady Sarah Churchill as First Lady of the Bedchamber. Sarah claimed that by acting a ‘faithful and frugal part’ she reduced the Princess’s annual wardrobe expenses to £1,600. Even so, Anne remained short of money.15

  Gilbert Burnet was shocked that Anne received ‘but thirty thousand pounds a year, which is so exhausted by a great establishment that she is really extreme poor for one of her rank’. Roger Morrice also thought that James treated Anne shabbily and was even under the illusion that she had had ‘no addition … to her pension since this King came to the throne’. Having heard in May 1687 that Prince George was so ‘greatly in debt’ that he could hardly pay for his visit to Denmark that summer, and that Anne had been ‘forced to put off many of her servants and two coaches and six horses and other appurtenances suitable to her quality’, Morrice noted indignantly, ‘the father starves Princess Anne and Prince George her husband’. Yet this was unfair, for shortly after this Anne and George were granted an additional £16,000 ‘as the King’s free gift and royal bounty’.16

  Parliament had been adjourned while James dealt with Monmouth’s invasion, but when it reassembled on 9 November 1685, difficulties soon arose. The King had enlarged the army to help him suppress the rebellion, and when doing so had given commissions to several Catholics, despite the fact that this contravened the Test Act of 1673. In an arrogant speech he informed Parliament he had no intention of dismissing these officers now that peace had been restored. On 16 November the Commons presented an address respectfully reminding James that such commissions were illegal. ‘With great warmth’ James responded that ‘he did not expect such an address from the House of Commons’.17

  When the King’s speech was debated in the House of Lords on 19 November, there were ‘high speeches’ from many peers, with Anne’s former preceptor Bishop Compton expressing himself particularly fiercely. The King prorogued Parliament the following day. Soon afterwards he began depriving men who expressed opposition of their employment. By December 1685, sixteen army officers who had supported the Commons’ address had been cashiered, and James also dismissed two Members of Parliament who held administrative posts. He indicated that ‘all persons that should hereafter offend’ could expect the same treatment. Bishop Compton was dismissed from the Privy Council and his court office of Dean of the Chapel Royal. It was believed he had been disgraced not just for too ‘freely speaking in the House of Lords’, but also ‘for his being industrious to preserve the Princess Anne in the Protestant religion, whom there were some endeavours to gain to the Church of Rome’.18

  Those alarmed by James’s behaviour consoled themselves that he would be succeeded by the Protestant Mary of Orange. However, some people feared that if Anne converted to Catholicism, her father would reward her by disinheriting Mary and making his younger daughter his successor. The French ambassador Barrillon certainly saw this as the best way for James to proceed, though he acknowledged in March 1685 that some would regard the proposal as ‘chimerical and impracticable’. Another French diplomat named Bonrepos, who arrived in England at the end of the year, did his best to advance the scheme. In the spring of 1686 he asked the Danish envoy in England if Prince George would be interested in his wife succeeding to the throne in preference to Mary, which would be feasible if George changed faith. To Bonrepos’s delight, the Dane replied that he had already discussed the matter with George, who was ready to receive instruction. Bonrepos’s excitement mounted when he understood that Anne too wished to be instructed. To encourage her he presented her with some theological works, which she received politely. Bonrepos concluded that although Anne appeared ‘timid and speaks little’, she was ‘intelligent and highly ambitious’, and well aware of her own interests.19

  It turned out that Bonrepos had been over optimistic. The King sounded a note of caution after receiving a message from the Pope urging him to do everything possible to bring about Anne’s conversion. He indicated that it would not be easy to achieve, for she had been ‘brought up by people who inspired in her a great aversion for the Catholic Church, and she has a very stubborn nature’. Nevertheless, being mindful of how her mother had been won over to Catholicism, James did not repress all hope of Anne undergoing a similar miraculous transformation. He gave his daughter testimonials written by her mother and the late King Charles II (who had been secretly received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed), explaining their reasons for converting, but Anne was unimpressed by what she read. Apart from this her father did not apply direct pressure on her to change faith. He only confronted her after noticing that whenever Anne dined at court, she made a point of talking while a Catholic priest was saying grace. When the Princess admitted she had done this deliberately, James was understandably annoyed. In a letter to her sister Mary, Anne recounted her father had protested ‘it was looking upon them as Turks … and he … saw very well what strange opinions I had of their religion’. However, he added that ‘he would not torment me about it, but hoped one day that God would open my eyes’.20

  Despite the fact that James had actually made no effort to intimidate Anne into abandoning h
er faith, it was widely feared that he was harassing her relentlessly. In the spring of 1686, a worried Mary of Orange started writing to her sister, urging her to remain true to her beliefs. Anne replied ‘I hope you don’t doubt but that I will be ever firm to my religion whatever happens … I do count it a very great blessing that I am of the Church of England, and as great a misfortune that the King is not’. This did not assuage Mary’s doubts, and a few months later Anne wrote again, promising ‘I will rather beg my bread than ever change’ religion. In the spring of 1687 she gave a fresh undertaking that ‘neither threatenings nor promises’ could alter her resolve.21

  It was wounding for Anne that her sister believed her to be so weak. She could not take comfort in the fact that her father was being so considerate to her, for Mary suggested that this was just to lull her into a false sense of security, and upbraided Anne for being ‘too much at ease’. Denying that she was complacent, Anne agreed her father was more likely to ‘use fair means rather than force’. She told her sister that she remained in ‘great expectation of being tormented’ but ‘you may assure yourself that I will always be on my guard’. In late summer 1687 she told a court lady that James had ‘never in his life, no indeed, never in his life’ confronted her about religion, only to add, ‘But I expect he will’.22