Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  Although the Queen was compassionate by nature, an appeal for clemency was only granted after careful consideration. In December 1702 the Earl of Nottingham noted that while willing to reprieve James Wilson, a boy ‘not twelve years old … condemned for cutting and stealing a couple of bags from off a horse in Piccadilly … the Queen leaves Mary Jones to the ordinary course of justice’. After discussing the case of Evan Evans and his brother William with the judge that tried them in 1706, Anne was ‘pleased to leave them to execution, for they are very notorious highwaymen and so have been for many years’. In March 1713 she was equally firm with regard to Richard Noble, a well-connected man who had run through his mistress’s husband with a sword. She talked to her physician Sir David Hamilton of ‘her unwillingness to save Mr [Noble], because it was so barbarous a thing’.20

  Much of Anne’s time was taken up by concerns relating to Church patronage. In the early years of the previous reign, Queen Mary, guided by the Earl of Nottingham, had largely overseen senior ecclesiastical appointments, but after her death Episcopal preferment was entrusted to a commission. Anne took such matters back into her own hands, much to the alarm of Thomas Tenison, who had been Archbishop of Canterbury since 1694. A martyr to the gout, Tenison was a hulking man ‘with brawny sinews and … shoulders large’, who was decidedly Low Church in outlook. Fearful that Anne would alter the balance of the Episcopal bench by promoting High Churchmen who voted with the Tories in the Lords, he tried to dissuade her from exercising her right to appoint bishops, but the Queen firmly rejected his advice. She informed Tenison that while it was understandable that William, as a foreigner, had felt obliged to leave the choice of bishops to a commission, ‘she was English, and having set herself to know the clergy by studying them for twenty years, she would dispense benefices herself to those she knew to be most worthy’. The Archbishop persisted, warning her that she would find it a weighty responsibility, but the Queen told him serenely ‘he mustn’t worry himself about it’.21

  The Queen in fact rarely welcomed advice from Tenison, observing darkly a few years later that, ‘as all the world knows’, he was ‘governed by [the Whigs]’. She far preferred the Archbishop of York, John Sharp, who also had been given his office in the last reign but was much more sympathetic to the Tories than his fellow Metropolitan. A distinguished figure whose ‘eyes flamed very remarkably at public prayers’ and who ‘had a certain vehemence in preaching’, Sharp was ‘pitched upon by the Queen herself for her counsellor and favourite among the clergy’. When informing Sharp that Anne wanted him to preach her Coronation sermon, the Earl of Nottingham declared, ‘I have good reason to believe that your Grace is more in her Majesty’s favour and esteem than any of your order’, and the Queen herself would tell Sarah that he was the only bishop she truly respected. She described Sharp as ‘a very reasonable as well as a good man’ but others regarded him as a dangerous political activist. According to the Whig, Burnet, Sharp was ‘an ill instrument and set himself at the head of the [High Church] party’; another Whig clergyman blamed him for encouraging the excesses of the lower clergy by putting ‘himself at their head as it were in direct opposition to his old friend Dr Tenison’.22

  In late 1702 Sharp was appointed the Queen’s Almoner after the former incumbent, the Whig Bishop of Worcester, was dismissed following complaints in the House of Commons that he had campaigned against a Tory MP seeking election. Because he had to discuss business matters relating to her charitable donations, Sharp ‘had now free access at all times to the Queen … The clergy crowed about him as the great favourite at court’. Anne used their meetings to consult him for spiritual advice, and he prided himself on being her ‘confessor’. On one occasion he noted in his diary, ‘I had a great deal of talk with her about the preparation for receiving the sacrament’; at another time they had a discussion on the difference ‘between wilful sins and sins of infirmity and … ignorance’. While such matters were indisputably part of his province, the Queen also occasionally permitted him to express his views on political developments. She informed him beforehand when she made changes to her ministry, and Sharp did not always hide his disapproval, using ‘hard words [such] as “Poor Queen! That he truly pitied her”’. According to Sharp’s son and biographer, ‘Her Majesty would then sometimes vindicate her proceedings, and at others look grave and be silent’.23

  Sharp was particularly influential when it came to guiding the Queen in her choice of bishops. His son claimed that Anne rarely made a decision on Episcopal appointments ‘without his advice and, generally speaking, consent first obtained’. He did not always attain his desires, as sometimes ministers intervened to override his suggestions. However, Sharp had ‘more success [with the Queen] than any one man in her reign, though not so much as he might have expected could she always have followed her own judgement or inclination’.24

  The Queen also concerned herself in lesser ecclesiastical appointments. In 1705 Archbishop Tenison was upset when she took back into her own hands the distribution of livings hitherto awarded under the Lord Keeper’s jurisdiction. The following year the Duchess of Marlborough urged the Queen to surrender back to the Lord Keeper his traditional rights, but Anne told her firmly, ‘I think the Crown can never have too many livings at its disposal; and therefore though there may be some trouble in it, it is a power I can never think reasonable to part with’. Once she realised the extent of Sarah’s Low Church sympathies, the Queen became wary of listening to her recommendations about ecclesiastical preferment, and Sarah admitted she had ‘less opinion of my solicitations’ in this area than any other. This did not prevent the Duchess approaching Anne in 1704 to ask that her protégé Benjamin Hoadly be awarded a desirable benefice. It was a controversial request in view of the fact that Hoadly was a rancorous character of such radical views that one contemporary described him as ‘a republican priest’. Anne wrote to Sarah, ‘as to the living you writ about, you may easily imagine I will do anything you desire but intending to be always very careful in disposing anything of this nature I hope you will not take it ill … if I may get the Archbishop of York to inform himself if [the gentleman] be proper for it’. Hardly surprisingly, Sharp saw to it that the place in question went to another applicant.25

  Anne revived the practice of touching to cure scrofula (also known as ‘the King’s evil’), a marvellous power that English hereditary monarchs supposedly derived from Edward the Confessor. Her father and uncle had both touched those afflicted with this tubercular infection of the lymph nodes, which caused swellings in the neck and other debilitating symptoms such as fever and malaise. According to one estimate, Charles II touched about 100,000 sufferers in the course of his reign, but William III had discontinued the practice, much to the annoyance of many of his subjects. In October 1702 a foreign diplomat noted that ‘the late King did himself great harm among the people by not taking on the custom of his ancestors, treating it as a superstition’. When Anne began holding ceremonies to touch the sick, a few individuals were dismayed, complaining that the practice was based on ‘nothing … but monkery and miracle’, but in general the decision was very popular. The Tories in particular were delighted that the Queen had resumed an activity that could be interpreted ‘as a visible proof’ of her hereditary right.26

  Special ceremonies were regularly held at which the Queen laid hands on sufferers, and then concluded the rite by giving each person brought before her a piece of ‘healing gold’ strung on a white ribbon. The expense entailed was considerable. In June 1707 alone the Privy Purse accounts record an outlay of £688 17s. 6d. on 1,670 pieces of gold. When Anne was in London, the ceremony usually took place in the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, which, as she told the Duchess of Marlborough, suited her on account of it ‘being a very cool room, and the doing it there keeps my own house sweet and free from crowds’. ‘Infirm persons, one by one … [were] presented unto the Queen upon their knees’ while her chaplain knelt at her side intoning blessings. Whereas past monarchs had been calle
d upon to wash the affected part, and Queen Elizabeth had enthusiastically applied her ‘exquisite hands’ to the diseased, ‘pressing their sores and ulcers … not merely touching them with her finger tips’, Anne confined herself to a brief stroking of their necks.27

  It is clear that Anne herself took this aspect of her duties very seriously. In 1714 it was reported, ‘the Queen disorders herself by preparing herself to touch … She fasts the day before and abstains [from meat?] several days, which they think does her hurt’. The fact that scrofula is a disease with recurring periods of remission meant that sometimes it appeared that the Queen had effected a cure, encouraging the belief that she genuinely possessed healing powers. One High Church divine went so far as to assert ‘to dispute the matter of fact is to go to the excesses of scepticism, to deny our sense and to be incredulous even to ridiculousness’.28 Hardly surprisingly, however, there were cases which did not respond to treatment from her. Dr Samuel Johnson was brought before her as a toddler, but the Queen could not prevent his scrofula from leaving him permanently scarred and damaging his eyesight. As an adult the Doctor expressed understandable scepticism about the royal touch, although he always wore the piece of healing gold Anne had given him.

  Belief in her powers was widespread across the social spectrum, and access to her had to be rationed to avoid her being overwhelmed. She increased the number of sufferers she touched in a single session from forty to three hundred, but many were still turned away. Archbishop Sharp told one interested party that ‘there are now in London several thousands of people, some of them ready to perish, come out of the country waiting for her healing’, so it was pointless for anyone else to apply before these individuals had been served. When Anne was in Bath in the autumn of 1702, the Queen ordered her chief surgeon to examine the people hoping to be touched by her, ‘of whom but thirty appeared to have the evil, which he certified by tickets as is usual, and those thirty were all touched that day privately’. This vetting was not invariably done, although it was a desirable precaution. Years after Anne was dead one old man, who recalled being touched by her as a child, said he had never had the King’s evil, but ‘his parents were poor and had no objection to the bit of gold’.29

  Persons with friends at court sought to exploit their connections to gain access to a healing session. When a surgeon urged Mary Lovett to have her little girl touched in May 1714, Mary was worried that she had ‘not … interest enough to do’ it. To her delight, Lady Denbigh intervened, whereupon the Queen promised to hold a special ceremony for Mary’s daughter and another girl. ‘Everybody says as long as I have hopes of getting her touched I must do nothing else with her’, Mrs Lovett wrote excitedly. She had great hopes of success because she had heard of people ‘who the Queen touched last year that had several sores on them, but are now as well as I am. Pray God grant the like effect of my poor Bess’. After the ceremony took place Bess was told by her mother to ‘take care of her gold and wear it about her neck both night and day, and rub the place that swelled with it every morning’.30 Whether or not Bess showed any improvement is unknown, but if she continued to be unwell there could be no question of any recourse to Anne’s Hanoverian successors, as the Queen was the last British monarch to touch for scrofula.

  Towards the end of the reign Burnet criticised Anne because she ‘laid down the splendour of a court too much and eats private; so that except on Sundays [when she processed to church in state] and a few hours twice or thrice a week at night in the drawing room, she appears so little that the court is as it were abandoned’.31 Certainly the days had passed when the nation’s elite looked to the court to provide them with their pleasures, and in comparison with the splendours of Versailles, the court appeared pitifully dreary. Yet despite her invalidism and retiring nature, the Queen was aware of her social obligations, and did her best not to neglect them.

  Although Burnet complained that the Queen took her meals in private, early in the reign a Prussian diplomat observed her dining in public at Windsor. He watched as a Lady of the Bedchamber served Anne and George on bended knee, offering them dishes that were ‘refined enough, but fairly frugal’. Since Anne and George were both so overweight, he was surprised that they partook of only three courses comprising three dishes each, with fruit to finish. However, surviving menus do not suggest that Anne’s meals were light affairs. Dishes on offer included pigeon pottage, chicken patty, sirloin of beef, chine of mutton or veal, turkey, geese or quails, pheasants, partridges, ragout of sweetbreads, and rabbit fricassee. As accompaniments there were side-plates of vegetables such as morels and truffles, peas or artichokes and pistachio cream, with dessert to follow.32

  There was plenty for Anne and George to drink at every meal, though it should not be assumed that they consumed their full allowance. Apart from beer and ale, they were provided daily with two bottles of claret, two bottles of white wine, two bottles of Rhenish wine and three bottles of sherry. It was rumoured that in addition to all this, Anne was an ‘admirer of spiritous liquors’, with her supposed fondness for strong drink earning her the cruel nickname ‘Brandy Nan’. One foreign visitor to the country was informed in 1710 that while the Queen ‘no longer drinks so much brandy and liqueurs’ she still occasionally indulged herself with what was euphemistically called ‘cold tea’. While it would be understandable enough if Anne took drink as a form of pain relief, one should beware of being too credulous of such reports. The Jacobites had also put it about that the late Queen Mary was a secret drinker, who supposedly became ‘maudlin in her cups’ after imbibing ‘cool tea in liberal sups’. A contemporary biographer of Queen Anne insisted that the allegation that she was addicted to drink was an ‘undeserved calumny’, while Sarah, who rarely lost an opportunity to attack Anne, stated that she ‘never went beyond such a quantity of strong wines as her physicians judged to be necessary’.33

  Although the court was no longer the nation’s social hub, the Queen usually held large parties or balls to mark her birthday. Every four years the birthday of Prince George, born on Leap Year’s Day, was also celebrated in style. On some years there were ballet performances by professional dancers, such as Hester Santlow, famous for her ‘melting lascivious motions’. Plays were also sometimes staged at St James’s. In 1704 Dryden’s All for Love was performed on Anne’s birthday; three weeks later the Queen and Prince were reportedly ‘both extremely diverted’ by a production of Sir Solomon Single that enlivened George’s quadrennial birthday festivities.34

  Odes set to music were another traditional royal birthday entertainment. In 1711 the Queen was ‘extremely well pleased’ with a dialogue in Italian in her Majesty’s praise sung by the castrato Nicolini, and set to music by George Frederick Handel. Two years later the Queen awarded the composer a pension of £200 after Handel penned the music for another birthday ode.35

  During Queen Anne’s reign, opera in the Italian style became all the rage, a craze that prompted one elderly lady to enquire of Jonathan Swift ‘what these Uproars were that her daughter was always going to’. The Queen herself was an opera fan, but staging such works at court posed a challenge. Rather than featuring full operatic productions, the Queen’s birthdays tended to be enlivened by sung concerts, as in 1712, when Anne listened to a miscellany ‘collected out of several Italian operas’, performed by ‘Nicolini Grimaldi and the other best voices’.36

  In former times music had been one of Anne’s principal sources of enjoyment. A Dutch diplomat recorded that before she came to the throne, violins and oboes were always playing in the background as she took her meals, ‘and whenever some extraordinary musician visited the country she always wanted to hear them’. After the Duke of Gloucester’s death, such diversions no longer afforded her the same pleasure, and as Queen she scarcely had leisure to listen to her court musicians. From time to time, however, an exception was made, and a private performance was put on for her benefit. In June 1707, for example, £16 2s. 6d. was paid to ‘the boy that sung before the Queen’. Anne was also
a patron of sacred music. At the service to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, a Te Deum composed by Handel was sung for the first time. In keeping with her High Church tastes, the Queen reversed the orders issued by her late sister that music should feature less in services held for regular worship in the Chapel Royal. She so valued the vocal talents of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal that they were required to move with her from palace to palace. Yet when a foreign visitor attended a religious service in St James’s Palace he was unimpressed by what he heard, considering the singing just ‘tolerable, though hardly such as befits a royal chapel’.37

  For those who wished to come to court, receptions known as Drawing Rooms were held at St James’s Palace or Windsor Castle. Since anyone correctly dressed was free to attend, they were often ‘prodigious crowded’. Gambling was the only entertainment on offer, and the Queen usually passed some of the time playing a hand of basset. By convention, ladies did not have to remain standing once Anne was seated at the gaming table, but this scarcely made for comfort as they crammed in on both sides of her, ‘so close sometimes that the Queen could hardly put her hand in her pocket’. Understandably Anne found these grim affairs something of a trial, but she was conscious that it was her duty to attend whenever her health permitted. Once, when suffering from period pains caused by that ‘visitor that always gives one some uneasiness of some kind or other’, the Queen remarked to Sarah, ‘I shall not be the better I believe for the heats of the Drawing Room, but one cannot put off that for this reason’.38