William’s contempt for George was transparent. Always ‘apt to be peevish’, the King had ‘a dry morose way with him’, and he rarely took trouble to make himself agreeable. In Anne’s case, the King’s ‘cold way towards her was soon observed’, and he exacerbated matters with petty acts of rudeness. When he was sent gifts of fruit, he grudgingly allocated some to be passed on to Anne and George ‘but always took care to pick out the worst bunch of grapes or the worst peach that was in the parcel’. He was equally ungracious on other occasions. At one point Anne dined with the King and Queen while pregnant with the Duke of Gloucester, and the first peas of the season were served. ‘The king, without offering the Princess the least share of them, ate them every one up himself’. Anne later admitted to Sarah that she had found it difficult not to gaze longingly at the dish while the King gorged himself on the delicacy.8
Besides slighting Anne and George, the King showed little warmth towards the Marlboroughs. From the start, his attitude towards the two of them was very guarded, and as early as December 1688 he had growled that the couple ‘could not govern him, nor … his wife as they did the Prince and Princess of Denmark’.9 Although Marlborough was made a Privy Councillor and Gentleman of the Bedchamber, William remained impervious to his charm. This did not ease relations between the court at Whitehall and the Cockpit.
Before long Anne took umbrage on another count. Immediately after William and Mary had been proclaimed King and Queen, Anne had requested that she be given the famously luxurious Whitehall apartment formerly occupied by Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. This was granted, but the Princess then asked for another set of adjoining rooms for her servants, offering in return to surrender her lodgings at the Cockpit. She was angered to be told that the Earl of Devonshire had first call on the rooms she coveted, and that only if he consented to exchange them for the Cockpit could her wishes be met. Furiously Anne snapped ‘She would then stay where she was, for she would not have my Lord Devonshire’s leavings’.10 She retained the Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartment for the use of her son and his household, remaining herself at the Cockpit. This meant she was one of the most lavishly accommodated persons at court, but the episode left her feeling resentful.
However, what really envenomed relations within the royal family were disagreements over Anne’s allowance. On James II’s departure, payment of this had ceased, and within months the Princess was in debt. Partly this was because of her heavy gambling losses to Sarah amounting, according to one report, to as much as £15,000. However, the Prince and Princess of Denmark’s financial situation was also worsened by a sacrifice that George made at King William’s request. George’s only assets were lands that had once belonged to the Duke of Holstein, but which had been seized by the Danish crown more than a hundred years earlier. In 1689 war looked likely between Denmark and Sweden, until William mediated a settlement. When Sweden demanded that George’s lands should be returned to their original owner, King William personally guaranteed the Prince that if he surrendered them, he would be compensated in full. In July 1689 George ‘immediately and generously signed the release’ of the property, declaring ‘he desired no better security than the assurances his majesty had given him’.11 Much to William’s relief, a Baltic war was thus averted, but the money owing to George would not be paid for years.
Although William was partly responsible for Anne and George’s shortage of cash, he showed little sympathy for their needs. William apparently ‘wondered very much how the Princess could spend £30,000 a year’.12 The Princess was counting on her allowance being vastly increased and may indeed have understood that this had been promised to her when she had agreed William could become King. Months passed without the King giving any indication of how he intended to provide for Anne, causing her grave disquiet. It was true that William’s own financial situation was currently uncertain, as Parliament had only granted the Crown a revenue for one year. Nevertheless, he should at least have discussed the situation with the Princess, and striven to convince her that he would obtain her the best settlement in his power.
As a result the Countess of Marlborough became convinced that the Princess must fight for her rights. Rather than waiting for the King to act, she persuaded her mistress to press for an independent revenue to be settled on her by Parliament. To ensure support in the House of Commons, Sarah formed contacts with Tory Members of Parliament who were disgruntled that William’s first government was composed mainly of Whigs. The King and Queen were shocked by Anne’s readiness to exploit political divisions for her own advantage. When the matter was first raised in Parliament Mary was outraged to see Anne ‘making parties to get a revenue settled’, and an ardent Whig later warned William that the Princess’s intention was to secure herself enough money to be ‘the head of a party against you’.13
Mary at once confronted Anne, asking her ‘What was the meaning of those proceedings?’ When the Princess mumbled that ‘she heard her friends had a mind to make her some settlement, the Queen hastily replied with a very imperious air, “Pray, what friends have you but the King and me?”’ Anne was left fuming and Sarah later recalled that when the Princess recounted what had happened, ‘I never saw her express so much resentment as she did at this usage’.14
Undeterred, Anne and Sarah pressed on with their plans, and in August 1689 the Princess’s supporters in the Commons proposed that she should be awarded an income of £70,000 a year. After a debate, the matter was adjourned and soon afterwards the King prorogued Parliament. He still avoided talking to Anne on the subject of money, and told Mary not to bring it up with her either. Subsequently attempts were made to ensure that the matter was not revived when Parliament reassembled. William and Mary employed Sarah’s great friend Lady Fitzharding (the former Mrs Barbara Berkeley, who had fled London with Anne and Sarah during the Revolution) to apply pressure on Sarah. Lady Fitzharding, who had been reappointed as royal governess upon the birth of the Duke of Gloucester, used a variety of arguments. Having told Sarah she would harm herself and her family if she angered the King and Queen, she then cautioned her that Anne’s interests would be jeopardised if, as was likely, the measure her friend favoured was rejected by Parliament. She warned that in those circumstances William and Mary would consider themselves under no obligation to give Anne anything, and so the Princess would find herself destitute. However, she could not prevail on Sarah to abandon the project, which she pursued with a tenacity that she herself acknowledged verged on the demented.
On 17 December 1689 the matter came before Parliament again, occasioning ‘great heats’ when it was debated in the House of Commons. Lord Eland was one of those who urged that the Princess should be awarded £70,000 a year, though some members willing to confer an independent income on her thought £50,000 a more appropriate figure. Their opponents, ‘being influenced by the King, were for leaving that matter wholly to his Majesty’s discretion’. To those who urged that it was undesirable to give Anne a lot of money at a time when wartime taxation was heavy, Sir Thomas Clarges retorted ‘Is it not seasonable that the Prince and Princess and the Duke of Gloucester should have meat, drink and clothes?’ In response to concerns that the Princess could pose a threat to the King if he had no control over her finances, one member commented that disturbances were usually caused by ‘persons not at their ease; let the Princess be at ease’. William would have done well to heed these words, but the Solicitor General, John Somers, came closer to his master’s views when he growled, ‘granting a revenue by act of Parliament to a subject is always dangerous’.15
The next morning the King sent the Earl of Shrewsbury to urge Sarah to abandon her campaign. Shrewsbury tried first to enlist the Earl of Marlborough on his side but he refused point blank, confiding that his wife ‘was like a mad woman’ in her determination to push the measure through. When Shrewsbury saw Sarah herself he informed her that William was prepared to settle Anne’s debts and to give her £50,000 a year, although as this would not have stat
utory authority, it could be withheld if the King saw fit. Shrewsbury promised to resign if William reneged on his word, but Sarah correctly observed that his doing so would scarcely help the Princess. He then spoke directly to Anne, but found her equally unaccommodating. Appearing somewhat flustered, she told him ‘she had met with so little encouragement from the King that she could expect no kindness from him and therefore would stick to her friends’ in Parliament.16
With another parliamentary debate on the issue scheduled for that afternoon, the King opted for a partial retreat. The Comptroller of the Royal Household announced in the Commons that the King was content for Anne to be voted an allowance by Parliament, and moved that it should be set at £50,000 a year. This was approved by the House, and the matter should have ended there, but the ill feeling caused by the affair was not so easily dispelled. That evening Mary accosted Anne, and demanded to know what grounds she had for claiming that the King had been unkind to her. Anne could cite no specific complaints, whereupon Mary rebuked her sharply, telling her ‘she had shewed as much want of kindness to me as respect to the King and I both’. ‘Upon this,’ the Queen noted in her journal, ‘we parted ill friends’.
The King visited the Princess just before New Year on the grounds that it was ‘an ungenerous thing to fall out with a woman’, and said he had no desire to live on poor terms with her. Anne responded politely, but since she failed to follow this up by making friendly overtures to Mary, the Queen dismissed her words as empty.17
It was not money matters alone that caused tension within the royal family. William’s policies were far from universally popular and the King and Queen soon came to suspect that Anne was giving encouragement to their critics. William was viewed in some quarters as insufficiently protective of the Church of England. Already upset by the fact that episcopacy was abolished in Scotland following the Revolution, in March 1689 ardent Anglicans had been outraged when William had indicated that he favoured altering the law so that Protestant dissenters were no longer barred from public office if they did not take Anglican communion. The proposal stirred up so much fury among High Tories, who considered themselves the guardians of the Church of England, that it had to be abandoned, but they could not prevent the passage of a Toleration Act, which enabled dissenters to practise their religion. Those who found this deplorable were further angered by royal treatment of Anglican clergy, including eight bishops, who declined to take the oath of allegiance to the new monarchs on grounds of conscience. In February 1690 they were deprived of their benefices, fuelling the displeasure of those who condemned William for ‘manifestly undermining … the prosperity of the Church of England’.18
Anne showed herself sympathetic to such views by deliberately distancing herself from William and Mary’s approach to Church matters. When Mary changed the order of communion in the Chapel Royal, Anne pretended that ill health obliged her to receive the sacrament elsewhere. She also poured scorn on other innovations introduced by the Queen. Mary noted bitterly that her sister ‘affected to find fault with everything was done, especially to laugh at afternoon sermons and doing in little things contrary to what I did’. She considered it pointless to remonstrate, as ‘I saw plainly she was so absolutely governed by Lady Marlborough that it was to no purpose’.19
The King and Queen both believed that republicans posed a serious danger to the monarchy, while the supporters of James II (known as ‘Jacobites’ by 1690) threatened the kingdom’s stability in other ways. In the summer of 1690 the first of many plots to restore James was uncovered. Hostility from committed opponents of the regime was only to be expected, but Mary was haunted by the possibility that her sister was ‘forming a third’ party of malcontents.20
Even if not actively disloyal, many people were disenchanted, and it was feared that Anne could exploit this. It had not taken long for anti-Dutch sentiment to surface in England, and comments later made by Anne show that she was not immune from such feelings. Taxation had reached levels unseen since Cromwellian times, which naturally made the government more unpopular. Mary had considerable charm, but William’s gruff manner won him few friends, and the fact that his asthma obliged him to live out of London at either Kensington or Hampton Court meant that ‘the gaiety and diversions of a court disappeared’, causing ‘general disgust’. By January 1690 Evelyn perceived ‘as universal a discontent against K[ing] William … as was before against K[ing] James’, and in these circumstances Anne’s behaviour made the King and Queen uneasy. Having themselves benefited during the last reign from Anne’s disloyalty towards the incumbent monarch, they now feared that she would turn on them. Their distrust of her was heightened by the fact that ‘her servants who had seats in Parliament were observed to be very well with those whom the court had least reason to be fond of’. Accordingly the Cockpit came to be regarded as a centre of disaffection, not least because it was reported that ‘many rude things were daily said at that court’.21
In April 1690 Anne made an attempt at rapprochement, visiting Mary following her recovery from a brief but worrying illness, and asking ‘pardon for what was past’. Unfortunately the Princess then spoiled the effect by asking that her allowance be raised by a further £20,000 a year, which William curtly rejected. The King and Queen did not doubt that Lady Marlborough had encouraged Anne to make this unwelcome demand, and this sharpened their dislike of both Sarah and her husband.22
Anne in her turn felt hard done by, for she still believed she deserved an allowance of £70,000 a year. As it was, she remained perpetually short of cash, something that might have been largely attributable to Sir Benjamin Bathurst’s incompetent, or even dishonest handling of her finances. On several occasions when Anne applied to him for money he told her none was available, forcing her to delay settling her obligations. In the Princess’s view however, the fault lay not with poor management, but with William and Mary.
Matters did not improve when in June 1690 George accompanied William at his own expense on a military expedition against James II’s forces in Ireland. Throughout the campaign William treated him with insulting indifference, taking no ‘more notice of him than if he had been a page of the backstairs’. The King refused to let the Prince travel with him in his coach, and no mention was made of George in the official Gazette even though he had been close by the King when William was slightly wounded on 30 June. The following day George was at his side again when William crossed the river Boyne and won a notable victory against the Jacobite army. The result was that James fled back to France, leaving his Irish supporters to continue the fight against William in his name. To add to George’s frustration, while he was in Ireland he had great difficulty staying in touch with his wife, for couriers set off for England without waiting for his missives. The Earl of Nottingham had to write to Ireland to ask that in future George would be told whenever an express delivery was sent, because the Princess, who was pregnant once again, ‘was very uneasy that she had no letters by the last messenger’.23
In England meanwhile, the two sisters had not become any closer in their menfolk’s absence. They should have been drawn together by mutual sympathy, for in addition to the usual strains experienced by the wives of men on active service, they had to face the possibility that their father would be killed during the campaign. Mary was under great stress at the time, for though William normally dealt with all affairs of State, in his absence Mary was ruling the country in conjunction with nine Lords Justices. She lamented that ‘business, being a thing I am so new in, and so unfit for, does but break my brains’, but Anne remained ‘of a humour so reserved I could have little comfort from her’.24
While acknowledging that ‘for my humour I know I am morose and grave and therefore may not be so pleasing to her as other company’ Anne pointed out that she dined regularly with the Queen and was ‘with her as often and as long at a time as I could’. On most afternoons she stayed with her till three o’clock, but when she offered ‘to be oftener with her if I knew when she was alone’, the Qu
een did not seem keen on the idea. Anne reported that Mary told her ‘I might easily believe without a compliment she should be very glad of my company but that … she was glad when she could get some time to herself’.25
In early September 1690 William and George returned from Ireland, even though the Jacobites had not been fully ousted. It was naturally a huge relief to Anne to have her husband safely back at home, but the joy of their reunion was soon marred. On 14 October Anne, who was then seven months pregnant, was ‘delivered of a daughter which lived about two hours and was christened and buried privately in Westminster Abbey’.26 Fortunately the Princess was unaware that henceforth she would never produce any child that survived longer than this, but though she recovered swiftly from the physical ill effects of the birth, she was inevitably distressed by her loss.
She could at least derive consolation from her son, who was now just over a year old. She had wanted the child to grow up at Richmond, as she had done, but since William and Mary insisted that the palace there was already fully occupied, she had instead installed him in a borrowed house in Bayswater. A year later she had taken, at an extortionate rent, a nearby property named Campden House, a Jacobean building with a fine hilltop view. Rooms were set aside there for Anne and George so they could stay overnight when visiting their son, and Anne grew very fond of what she referred to as ‘my cottage at Kensington’.27
Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Page 17
