Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  George had hoped to leave James’s camp with the other men, but he had to wait a while longer. Just as he was mounting his horse to ride towards William, James had invited him to share his coach for the homeward journey. Seated opposite his father-in-law as they jolted down muddy roads, George had to maintain a facade of loyalty for the rest of the day. Every time that news came that another officer had defected, he exclaimed in his execrable French, ‘Est-il possible!’ That evening he had supper with the King at Andover and ‘made it his business … to condemn those that were gone, and how little such people were to be trusted, and sure the Prince [of Orange] could put no confidence in such’. When the meal was over ‘Prince George waited on [James] in his chamber very late’. The King urged George to get some rest, but his son-in-law insisted that he would wait ‘till he saw the King in bed’. Touched by his kindness, James told him ‘he should not forget the respects he paid him’. Yet as soon as the King had retired, George hurried off to find his horse, and he and the Duke of Ormonde galloped westwards to join William. The King was not yet asleep when the news was brought to him.122

  James wished it to be thought that he took the reverse calmly. His authorised biography states that though somewhat ‘troubled at the unnaturalness of the action’, he consoled himself ‘that the loss of a good trooper had been of greater consequence’. He even managed a grim quip, asking sardonically, ‘is est-il possible gone too?’ However, when the Danish envoy, who was in the royal camp at the time, informed Christian V what his brother had done, he reported ‘Your Majesty cannot imagine the King of England’s consternation at this news’.123

  George was able to send a courier to London to tell his wife that he had made his move. For Anne the good news that George had escaped was cancelled out by her horror at hearing that the King was on his way to London, for she dreaded a confrontation with him above all else. Summoning Sarah Churchill to the Cockpit, she ‘declared that rather than see her father she would jump out at the window’.124

  When the Queen had heard that John Churchill had abandoned the King, guards had been placed at the doors of Sarah’s lodgings, but their attitude was ‘very easy’, and they scarcely restricted her freedom of movement. On the evening of 25 November further instructions arrived from the King that Sarah and Mrs John Berkeley should be taken into custody but again nothing was done about this, possibly because Anne appealed to the Lord Chamberlain not to execute the order and he ‘suffered himself in complacence to be delayed by the Princess’. The upshot was that Sarah was able to pay a discreet visit to Bishop Compton at his house in Suffolk Street and an escape plan was devised. Further delay would have been disastrous, for after nightfall the Queen received another express from her husband, ordering her ‘to secure the Princess of Denmark’. Because it was so late ‘her Majesty out of her good nature only ordered a strict guard to be set about the Princess’s lodgings and she not to be disturbed till the morning’.125

  It soon turned out that these measures were too lax. Anne’s stepmother had assumed she was already asleep, for she had been ‘in her ordinary way laid abed’ at the usual time. Yet once all her other servants had left Anne, Sarah and Mrs Berkeley ‘came privately to her’. Anne dressed hastily, and at one in the morning the three women made a stealthy exit through a little room where Anne usually sat on her close stool. This led to some ‘backstairs by which the necessary woman uses to go in and out for the cleaning’. Anne herself had never gone down this way before, and even at this moment of extreme tension could not help noticing that the walls were very shabby. One of the first things she did on reaching safety was to send directions to Sir Benjamin Bathurst that they should be repainted.126

  Once the little party reached the street, they found Bishop Compton waiting for them in a coach. Watched by a dozy sentry, who did not think to challenge them, they climbed aboard and were driven to the house of Compton’s nephew Lord Dorset in Aldersgate Street. Even there, however, Anne did not feel safe. Still in a panic about her father’s imminent return, she was desperate to leave London, but realised that if she tried to reach William and her husband in the west she ran the risk of being intercepted by royal troops. Accordingly it was decided that she should go north, where Compton had a good network of contacts. On the morning of 26 November the Bishop and the three ladies set off by coach, stopping that night at Dorset’s country seat, Copt Hall in Essex. At Hitchin in Hertfordshire they sat ‘taking some refreshment’ in a brewery cart while their horses were changed, and Sarah was heard joking that they were fortunate that they were not being driven in it to execution. Having resolved to head for Nottingham, where William’s supporter Lord Devonshire had seized control a week earlier, they continued on their journey via Castle Ashby, Market Harborough, and Leicester. At Nottingham, where Anne’s arrival was eagerly awaited, the citizens were alarmed by a false report ‘that two thousand of the King’s dragoons were in close pursuit to bring her back prisoner to London’. On 2 December they sallied forth to rescue her, but had not advanced far when they met the Princess sitting unharmed in her coach with Sarah and Mrs Berkeley. Anne was then ‘conducted into Nottingham through the acclamations of the people’.127

  That night Lord Devonshire gave a banquet for the Princess. ‘All the noblemen and the other persons of distinction then in arms had the honour to sup at her royal highness’s table’. Anne was ‘very well pleased’ with her reception, and ‘seemed wonderful pleasant and cheerful’.128

  Hearing that Anne was in town, large numbers of local gentry and nobility arrived there, often bringing armed men with them. However, when Anne tried to enlist their support for the movement against James, she sometimes encountered difficulties. For example, the Earl of Chesterfield turned down her request that he subscribe to the ‘Association’, a document whose signatories pledged to exact retribution on all Catholics if William came to any harm. Since James himself theoretically could fall victim to such vengeance, Chesterfield refused, to Anne’s visible displeasure. The Earl noted wryly, ‘I have made my court very ill; but I have the satisfaction of having acted according to my conscience’.129

  On 8 December Bishop Compton received orders from William, instructing him to bring the Princess to meet him and her husband at Oxford. Accompanied by about 1,500 horsemen and two companies of foot soldiers, Anne set off the following day. One young man in her train recalled, ‘Through every town we passed the people came out … with such rural and rusty weapons as they had, to meet us in acclamations of welcome and good wishes’. The Princess spent two nights at Leicester before passing through Coventry, Warwick, and Banbury. At Warwick on 12 December she heard the momentous news that her father had fled the country and that his army had been disbanded. Her uncle Clarendon was pained to hear that ‘she seemed not at all moved, but called for cards and was as merry as she used to be’. Once she was back in London, Clarendon took her to task for this, but his niece told him sulkily that she had seen no reason to disrupt her usual routine as ‘she never loved to do anything that looked like an affected constraint’. The Princess was fortunate that Clarendon made no rejoinder, for he had recently become aware that Anne had known herself not to be pregnant when she had told her father that she could not attend the council meeting on 22 October. The discovery had profoundly shocked him, prompting him to declare ‘Good God! Nothing but lying and dissimulation in the world!’ Now he could, with justice, have retorted that Anne was scarcely entitled to maintain that she despised all forms of pretence.130

  The Princess was still in high spirits when she ‘made a splendid entry’ into Oxford on 15 December. The Bishop of London featured prominently in her impressive cavalcade, ‘riding in a purple cloak, martial habit, pistols before him and his sword drawn’, a ‘strange appearance’ that one observer considered ‘not conformable to … a Christian bishop’. George had already been in Oxford for a day or two, and Anne was reunited with him in Christchurch quadrangle. The couple greeted each other ‘with all possible demonstrations of love and a
ffection’ and that evening they were ‘entertained by the university at a cost of £1,000 at the least’.131

  After resting for a couple of days Anne and George moved on towards London. By the time they re-entered the capital on 19 December, Anne perhaps realised she had another cause to congratulate herself. Her earlier pretence that she was pregnant had been a cynical ploy. However, she had actually conceived around the end of October, and despite the stress and exertion of her flight, had not miscarried.

  Anne had been away from London for less than a month, but much had happened during that time. On the morning of 26 November it had emerged that she was missing when her woman of the bedchamber Mrs Danvers went to wake her at eight o’clock. ‘Receiving no answer to her call, she opened the bed [curtains] and found the Princess gone’. Pandemonium ensued: her ladies assumed she had been abducted, and some even began shrieking ‘the Princess was murdered by the priests’. When the news was carried to the Queen, she too ‘screamed out as if she had been mad’.132 The truth only started to appear when the sentry on night duty was questioned and revealed the mysterious goings on he had seen outside the palace, but it was some time before Anne’s whereabouts could be established.

  Anne’s escape caused a sensation. According to one observer ‘The Papists reckon the loss of the Princess as great as that of the army’. For the King, who arrived back in London that afternoon, it was a crushing personal blow. He was already emotionally shattered at being abandoned by men he had trusted, but this was ‘nothing in comparison of the Princess’s withdrawing herself’. The shock was the greater because, even though Prince George had already left him, he had been confident his daughter would not budge from Whitehall for fear of jeopardising her pregnancy. The news exacerbated ‘those most dreadful anguishes of spirit’ which already burdened him. Bursting into tears, he uttered the piteous cry, ‘God help me! My own children have forsaken me!’ One court lady formed the impression that James was ‘so … afflicted after the Princess Anne went away, that it disordered his understanding’, and others too talked of the King looking physically ill and appearing almost deranged over the next few days.133

  Two days after Anne’s flight a letter from her to the Queen was published in the London Gazette. In this deeply insincere document, Anne explained that when ‘the surprising news of the Prince’s being gone’ had arrived, she had spontaneously decided to absent herself ‘to avoid the King’s displeasures, which I am not able to bear’. ‘Never was anyone in such an unhappy condition, so divided between duty and affection to a father and a husband’, she lamented, before blaming ‘the violent counsels of the priests’ for having caused such trouble. She declared that she would not return until she heard ‘the happy news of a reconcilement’, but expressed confidence that a settlement satisfactory to all could be reached. ‘I am fully persuaded that the Prince of Orange designs the King’s safety and preservation and hope all things may be composed without more bloodshed by the calling a Parliament’. She concluded, ‘God grant a happy end to these troubles, that the King’s reign may be prosperous, and that I may shortly meet you in perfect peace and safety; till when, let me beg of you to continue the same favourable opinion that you have hitherto had of your most obedient daughter and servant’.134

  On 27 November the shattered King met with a group of about forty bishops and peers. They persuaded him to send commissioners to negotiate with William – who was now advancing with his army – and to summon a new Parliament to sit in January. However, although James did as they bid, he told the French ambassador that he intended that his wife and child should flee abroad, and when they were safe he would follow them. The baby Prince had been taken to Portsmouth earlier in the month and James now ordered the Earl of Dartmouth to send him to France. When Dartmouth refused, the King brought the child back to London and started making alternative travel arrangements.

  The King’s commissioners met with the Prince of Orange at Hungerford on 8 December, and the following day William named his terms for a truce. All Catholics were to be dismissed from government and an amnesty granted to those who had supported William. Parliament must be summoned, and the Prince of Orange would be allowed to come to London while it sat. In the meantime the expenses of his army must be met out of the public revenue.

  If James had been willing to accept these terms, he might have retained his throne. It was inevitable that Parliament would demand that the Prince of Wales be brought up as a Protestant but, if the King had swallowed this, there was a chance that his son would be recognised as his heir. William’s more ardent supporters were certainly appalled that he could conceive of a settlement that left the baby’s rights intact.

  Late on the night of 9 December the Queen and her child slipped unseen out of the palace and were in France within twenty-four hours. The following afternoon James heard from his commissioners, but he still remained determined to follow the Queen. Realising what the King had in mind, the Earl of Ailesbury begged him to reconsider, but James would not listen. He told the Earl, ‘If I should go, who can wonder after the treatment I have found?’ naming his daughter’s desertion as a key factor in his thinking. Undeterred, Ailesbury urged the King to march with a body of horse to Nottingham. He argued that ‘Your daughter will receive you or she will not. If the latter, and that she retires perhaps towards Oxford, all will cry out on her; if she doth stay to receive your Majesty, you will be able to treat honourably with the Prince of Orange’.135 It was fortunate for Anne that the King rejected this advice, so she was never given this dilemma.

  Towards midnight on 10 December James left the palace and headed for Kent, where a boat was waiting for him. However, before the ship set sail, it was boarded by a party of local fishermen, who mistook James for a Catholic priest and carried him off as their prisoner to the Queen’s Head inn at Faversham. Meanwhile in James’s absence London had threatened to degenerate into anarchy, with anti-Catholic riots resulting in the destruction of much valuable property. When a committee of peers and bishops learned on 13 December that James was in custody they resolved to bring him back to the capital, even though the Common Council of London had recently invited William of Orange there as well. On 16 December James had been much heartened to be acclaimed by the crowds as he drove back into London and he now looked forward to meeting William at ‘a personal conference to settle the distracted nation’.136

  By now, however, William had decided it was too late for an arrangement of that kind. He had been delighted to hear that James had fled, and had at once decided to go to London, rather than meeting with Anne at Oxford. While on his way he was appalled when it emerged that James had been detained in Kent, and he was still more upset by the King’s return to London. At Windsor William had a conference with his supporters. He rejected advice from extremists to imprison James in the Tower or remove him to Holland, saying that Mary ‘would never bear it’, but he resolved to send his father-in-law out of London. Accordingly soldiers were despatched to Whitehall, where James was sleeping, and the King was informed that William expected him to leave the next day. On the morning of 18 December the King set off for Rochester, Kent, protesting bitterly at being ‘chased away from his own house by the Prince of Orange’. That afternoon William entered London, accompanied by a large number of cavalry, and took up residence at St James’s Palace ‘in extraordinary great grandeur’.137

  Anne and George returned from Oxford the following day, and William promptly ‘called to see them at the Cockpit’. By now some people were disquieted by the way the King had been treated, calling his eviction a ‘gross violation’. Burnet, who had come over from Holland with the Prince as his chaplain, noted in concern that ‘compassion has begun to work’ but Anne, for one, appeared proof against this emotion. One report even claimed she went to the theatre that evening, bedecked in orange ribbons.138

  For the moment, no one could tell how the situation would be resolved. The deadlock was broken by the King. As he explained to Lord Ailesbury, he was convinc
ed that if he remained in England he would be imprisoned in the Tower ‘and no King ever went out of that place but to his grave’.139 Since William had seen to it that his father-in-law was lightly guarded at Rochester, James was able to make another escape on the night of 23 December, and this time he made it to France. The next day a committee of peers agreed that a Convention Parliament should meet in a month’s time. William was invited to take over the administration of government in the interim, and he agreed to this on 28 December.

  Events had moved very fast, and a backlash against William was only to be expected. One influential Member of Parliament told Clarendon that he had welcomed William on his arrival in the West Country, ‘thinking in a free parliament to redress all that was amiss; but that men now began to think that the Prince aimed at something else’. While Anne’s feelings are hard to define, she gave some indication of unease and perhaps even remorse when talking with the Bishop of Winchester. The Bishop told her he had visited her father at Rochester and that though in general he had appeared in good health ‘nothing troubled him so much as his daughter Anne lest she should for grief miscarry’. Since Anne knew that she had in fact been deceiving her father about her pregnancy, this could hardly fail to touch her conscience, but unfortunately our source for this story deliberately omitted her response, noting only ‘she concluded that discourse thus: “If he had not gone so suddenly to Rochester, she would have sent to him”’.140

  It is probably safe to say that Anne had never thought that the Prince of Orange might gain the throne following his invasion. Certainly Sarah Churchill maintained that the possibility had not occurred to her. ‘I do solemnly protest that … I was so very simple a creature that I never once dreamt of his being king’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I imagined that the Prince of Orange’s sole design was to provide for the safety of his own country by obliging King James to keep the laws of ours, and that he would go back as soon as he had made us all happy’.141 Yet while one can be sure that Anne had not foreseen that William would be crowned, it is less easy to know what sort of settlement she had anticipated. She was unlikely to have been satisfied by any settlement that left her brother’s right to the crown intact, although she could hardly have conceived that her father would agree to his son being disinherited. Perhaps she envisaged a solution along the lines proposed by Charles II back in 1681 whereby James would retain the nominal title of King but would be banished for life. William and Mary would serve as regents, and then, since the Prince of Wales would be rejected as an imposter, on James’s death, Mary would become Queen. On the other hand, Anne may not have thought things through in such detail.