Anne was not a gifted hostess, who could put guests at their ease with well-chosen remarks. In August 1711 Swift attended a Drawing Room given by the Queen at Windsor. At that time of year few people came to court, and the small gathering took place in Anne’s bedchamber. Swift described how ‘we made our bows and stood about twenty of us round the room, while she looked at us with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready and went out’. But if she could not enliven proceedings with sparkling conversation, she was at least unfailingly courteous and considerate. Lady Hervey reported that at a St James’s Drawing Room in April 1711 the Queen was ‘so particularly gracious’ to her ‘that it was taken notice of … She was not at rest till they brought me a stool over everybody’s head’.39
Towards the end of the reign Anne’s health became so bad that Drawing Rooms frequently were held without her, and it became ‘a rarity enough to be reckoned news’ when she attended. Swift was never bothered by her absence, for as far as he was concerned the principal object of the exercise was to cultivate acquaintances and secure himself dinner invitations. ‘I love to go there on Sundays and see the world’, he informed some lady friends who lived in Ireland. At one point he rather grandly proclaimed, ‘the court serves me as a coffee house’. His visits there afforded opportunities to chat with people ‘whom otherwise I should hardly meet twice a year’ and he acknowledged that in this way ‘one passes half an hour pleasant enough’. Others too appreciated the opportunities for socialising that Drawing Rooms afforded, but it is hard to contest Lord Chesterfield’s verdict that in Anne’s day these gatherings ‘were more respectable than agreeable and had more the air of solemn places of worship than the gaiety of a court’.40
If Drawing Rooms did not provide much in the way of excitement, at other times the court was even duller. One young man who was taken to see the Queen when ill health had caused her to shut herself away affirmed, ‘Her palace of Kensington where she commonly resided was a perfect solitude … Few houses in England belonging to persons of quality were kept in a more private way’. After visiting the Queen in the country in the summer of 1714, the Countess of Orkney told a friend, ‘I don’t make you a compliment to say you are wanted at Windsor, for after the respectful thoughts seeing the Queen gives, there is nothing but ceremony, no manner of conversation’. Once dinner was concluded, ‘we played … [cards] drank tea, bowed extremely and so returned’. An associate of the Duchess of Marlborough sneered that the Queen ‘never willingly draws any of her nobles from their own seats’. Instead she contented herself with the company of her Lord Chamberlain, a Bedchamber Lady, her doctor and a favourite Woman of the Bedchamber, apparently believing that these luminaries invested her court with lustre enough.41
At the beginning of the reign the Queen promised Sarah, ‘whatever hurry I am in (which indeed is every day very great)’, she would always be mindful of her needs. Before long however, she often had to apologise for not answering Sarah’s letters more promptly. On one Saturday evening in 1703 she explained that the whole day had been taken up with receiving visits, so that ‘till now, that it is almost nine a clock, I have not had one minute to myself’. As their relationship deteriorated, Sarah began to suspect that Anne merely pretended she could not attend to private correspondence, although the Queen protested, ‘When I have made any excuses for want of time I am sure it has been no feigned one’. Certainly her routine would have been taxing for a woman in better health. When writing to a Scots peer in 1707 she lamented ‘the continual hurry of business I have been in this winter’, and on one occasion confessed to Archbishop Sharp, ‘she was really so taken up with business that she had not time to say her prayers’.42
Things must indeed have been arduous to bring her to such a pass, for normally she was meticulous in her religious observance. Formal prayers were said twice daily by her chaplains, with a bell being rung to summon other members of the household. At six every evening the Queen generally withdrew to commune privately with God, a ritual she took very seriously. In 1712 her physician Sir David Hamilton was ‘pleased to see that devoutness she exercised in her closet’, and she had to be very unwell before illness was allowed to disrupt this routine. Her Scots Secretary of State the Earl of Cromarty scarcely exaggerated when he told the Scottish Parliament in 1704 that Anne’s time and energies were exclusively taken up ‘in exercises of devotion towards God and the administration of government’.43
When in London Anne divided her time between St James’s and Kensington Palace. King William had purchased the latter from the Earl of Nottingham in 1689 for £14,000, and then spent large sums enlarging and improving it. Located only a few miles from the centre of town, it was nevertheless semi-rural in character, and in the summer was infinitely preferable to St James’s, which the Queen noted became ‘very stinking and close’ at that time of the year. When Bishop William Nicolson was shown Kensington Palace for the first time in 1705, he pronounced ‘the whole much superior to the palace at St James’s’.44
The gallery at Kensington housed a magnificent art collection, with paintings ascribed to Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Much to Anne’s annoyance King William had shipped back to Holland some works of art presented to Charles II by the States General on his restoration, including a particularly fine Gerrit Dou of a young mother. She applied to the Dutch government for its return, but was turned down. This cannot have heightened her appreciation of the full-length portraits of William and Mary that adorned the Council Chamber. The Queen’s dressing room contained likenesses of Edward VI and her idol Queen Elizabeth, while Prince George’s bedchamber was hung with a portrait he had purchased himself of Anne as a child, and another of her with the Duke of Gloucester.45 Inspired by his pride in the navy, George also commissioned Sir Godfrey Kneller and Michael Dahl to execute a portrait series of fourteen admirals
Whereas English painting did not greatly flourish under Anne, English craftsmen produced remarkably fine furniture during her reign. Although the embargo on trading with the enemy made it difficult for cabinet-makers to import the finest walnut wood from France, in other ways it stimulated the skills of native designers and encouraged the development of a distinctive vernacular style. Anne played her part in supporting this branch of the decorative arts. Circa 1705, for example, she commissioned two gilt wood and lacquer pier tables for St James’s Palace, bearing the cipher AR and a crown. They were made by the Royal Cabinet Maker Gerrit Jensen in association with the gilder Thomas Pelletier, who were paid £44 for the pair. In July 1998 these magnificent pieces sold at Sotheby’s London for £1,651,000.46
Compared to other monarchs, Anne was insignificant as a patron. This did not prevent the architect John Vanbrugh (who was also a playwright and impresario) from decorating the ceiling of his newly-built Theatre Royal in London’s Haymarket with a representation of Anne as protectress of the arts, being feted by the muses. This was not wholly undeserved, as the Theatre Royal did in fact provide a rare instance when the Queen supported a cultural venture. Presumably because she was grateful to Vanbrugh for work he was currently carrying out at Kensington, she attended a private preview concert at the theatre shortly before its official opening in November 1704. Before long it emerged that the great height of Vanbrugh’s auditorium meant the Theatre Royal had appalling acoustics, so audiences could scarcely hear a word the actors uttered. The ceiling had to be lowered, covering up the image of Queen Anne as high priestess of culture.47 It was, perhaps, a not altogether inappropriate fate for this particular work of art.
One of the few things that Sarah regarded as praiseworthy in the Queen was that ‘she was never expensive, nor made any foolish buildings’. One reason for Anne’s restraint was of course that so much public money was lavished on the Marlboroughs’ palace at Woodstock that she had little to spare for her own construction projects. The Queen would have liked to finish Charles II’s palace at Winch
ester and to rebuild Whitehall, but neither scheme proved feasible, and the design by an Italian architect that the Duke of Shrewsbury sent over from Rome for a new palace to rise on the ashes of Whitehall never progressed further. Instead the Queen confined herself to making some improvements to St James’s. In April 1702 it was reported that she intended to extend the chapel there, ‘turning it into the form of a cathedral’. Three months later Sir Christopher Wren submitted an estimate of £3,775 for this and other works, including the erection of a portico with pillars of Portland stone. On consideration the Queen decided against enlarging the chapel, and instead asked Wren to produce a revised scheme. The new plans submitted in March 1703 were both more ambitious and more expensive, with an estimated cost of £5,000. In the end the work ran over budget but the results were pleasing, with a new wing made of brick projecting westwards on the south side of the palace overlooking the park. This provided space for a new council chamber and a large drawing room on the first floor. Despite the addition of an exterior colonnade, St James’s remained architecturally unimpressive. One foreign visitor described it as ‘a straggling, low and irregular building’, but it did at least now have ‘large and handsome rooms’. The Queen’s private apartments, in another part of the palace, were also attractive. Sarah recalled that her dressing room and closet ‘were both pretty, one looking into the garden and park and the other into the second court, furnished agreeably with pictures and a couch’.48
Despite the vast sums expended by William and Mary on Hampton Court, the Queen spent surprisingly little time there, perhaps because she associated it too strongly with her hated brother-in-law. She mainly used it to hold Cabinet meetings when she was summering at Windsor, returning to the Castle as soon as they were finished. Work continued on the interior of the palace, with the Queen’s Gallery, in which hung Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, being completed in Anne’s reign. When Antonio Verrio was commissioned to decorate the Queen’s Drawing Room, he took as his theme British naval power, painting the ceiling with a tableau representing Anne as Justice being crowned by Neptune. On one wall the four continents pay tribute to Britannia enthroned, and on another Prince George in naval uniform reviews the fleet as Lord High Admiral.49
Windsor Castle was the Queen’s favourite country residence, and she tried to spend some months there every year. Having been remodelled and refurbished in the reign of Charles II, the Castle had a magnificent baroque interior, in which carving by Grinling Gibbons and paintwork by Antonio Verrio were much in evidence. Although the Duke of Gloucester had died at Windsor, the Castle provided the Queen with happy memories of her son, as he had enjoyed holidays there. He had particularly liked the scenes from the life of the Black Prince painted on the walls of St George’s Hall, and had once declared solemnly, ‘This will be a good place to fight my battles in’.50
Much as the Queen loved the Castle, when at Windsor she spent much of her time in a ‘neat little palace’ on its southern side, purchased from Lord Godolphin late in William’s reign. Dating originally from the early seventeenth century, it was embellished and improved by the Queen, who ‘delighted in her little house’, and ‘retired often thither from the Castle when she would be free from company’. One visitor was particularly charmed by its ‘fresh and lively’ drawing room hung with curtains of crimson damask. Her dogs made themselves so comfortable there that the Queen once had to buy a new silk coverlet for a bed they had ripped to pieces. In this delightful yet unpretentious residence, Anne enjoyed gracious living on a modest scale. Her first-floor apartment overlooking the garden was quite commodious, comprising anteroom, presence room, bedchamber, dressing room, and a closet. All had marble fire-places of different colours, and the house was also equipped with modern conveniences, as both Anne and Prince George’s closet had ‘a seat of easement of marble with sluices of water to wash all down’.51 It was perhaps fitting that Anne was so devoted to this ‘little box’ made of brick with dormer windows and plain wainscoted rooms. Although actually built a century earlier, it was similar in some respects to those beautifully proportioned manor houses that were currently springing up over the country, and which can be accounted one of the glories of Anne’s reign. Certainly it was a house more in the ‘Queen Anne style’ than Vanbrugh’s imposing baroque edifice at Blenheim.
The Queen much enjoyed the opportunities Windsor afforded for hunting, following the hounds in her two-wheeled horse-drawn chaise. Within weeks of her accession she went hare hunting there, and the following August Narcissus Luttrell heard that she engaged in ‘the divertissement of hunting almost every day in an open caleche in the forest’. She drove herself, prompting Swift to describe her somewhat fancifully later in the reign as going across country ‘furiously, like Jehu’. To facilitate her progress special rides were cut to run for twenty miles through the park, ‘fit for her Majesty’s passage with more ease and safety in her chaise or coach’. In addition an avenue of elms and limes connecting the Castle and her principal hunting grounds in Windsor Forest was planted in 1708, being known thereafter as ‘Queen Anne’s Ride’.52
During her youthful visits to Newmarket, the Queen had acquired an interest in horseracing. She could now indulge this fully, having inherited not only a house but also a stud at Newmarket, on which she spent £1,000 a year. The ‘Keeper of her Majesty’s running horses at Newmarket’ was Tregonwell Frampton, reputedly ‘the oldest and cunningest jockey in England’. Having previously looked after William III’s racehorses, Frampton overcame his notorious misogyny to train several winners for the Queen, who always addressed him as ‘Governor Frampton’. Anne visited Newmarket four times during her reign, and would have gone more often had ill health not prevented it. George was also keen on racing, and in 1705 the Queen gave him a horse named Leedes that cost a thousand guineas. At various times the two of them paid for gold plates and cups to be awarded as prizes for races run in Newmarket and Yorkshire, usually costing £100. Anne’s most lasting contribution to the sport, however, came in the summer of 1711, when she ordered her Master of the Horse to mark out a four-mile-long racecourse on Ascot Common. On 11 August, she and all the court attended what was already described as a ‘famous horserace’ there, which became an annual tradition.53 On that day the winning horse was owned by Godolphin’s son, Lord Rialton, and Anne presented him with a prize worth £100. She never had a winner at Ascot herself, but was more successful elsewhere, although sadly she died without becoming aware that one of her horses had triumphed at York on 30 July 1714.
Anne derived immense pleasure from gardens. Early in the reign she stole away from St James’s to spend the day walking in the garden at Kensington which, as she told Sarah, ‘would be a very pretty place if it were well kept, but nothing can be worse’. Shocked that William had ‘allowed four hundred pound a year for that one garden’, she drove a hard bargain when she took on the celebrated nurseryman Henry Wise to oversee her grounds, asking Lord Godolphin to make ‘due enquiry … of what was … reasonable’, and then refusing to pay more than £20 an acre. William had paid £57, but though Wise grumbled that less than £24 an acre would ruin him, he accepted the contract. Despite Anne’s attempts to keep costs down, her outlay on garden design and planting was sizeable, and she outstripped her predecessor by spending nearly £26,000 in her first four years at Kensington alone. Apart from uprooting the box hedges planted by William because she disliked the smell, she developed thirty acres to the north of the palace, more than doubling the area under cultivation. A new wilderness was laid out, and a former gravel pit was converted into a sunken garden, creating a ‘beautiful hollow’.54
In 1705 the Queen built an orangery near Kensington Palace, possibly jointly designed by her Surveyor of the Office of Works, John Vanbrugh, and his subordinate, Nicholas Hawksmoor. The first plans for this ‘stately greenhouse’ were drawn up in June 1704, but Vanbrugh persuaded Anne to sanction a more elaborate structure costing £6,126, more than double the original estimate. According to Defoe, this delightfu
l building, with its high and airy interior divided by fluted columns and pilasters, and decorated with carvings by Grinling Gibbons, was used by Anne as ‘her summer supper room’.55
Anne indulged her passion for horticulture at other royal residences. At Hampton Court, she sanctioned the planting of the famous maze. In addition, towards the end of the reign, work began on constructing a great formal garden with a large canal on the north side of Windsor Castle. St James’s Park also received attention. She widened the canal, laid out new paths, planted new trees and installed a herd of the ‘finest coloured deer’ there. Contemplating such improvements comforted Anne at times of tension. One person observed how the Queen, when ‘disturbed by … domestic contentions, somewhat to divert her thoughts gave orders to beautify St James’s Park’.56
Anne’s gardens afforded balm to her soul, but it was friendship in which she hoped to find most solace. Early in the reign she not only looked for emotional support from Sarah, but counted Marlborough and Godolphin as friends, believing that together ‘we four’ formed a tight-knit quartet who would stand by one another in challenging times. About a year after her accession she wrote to Sarah, ‘The unreasonableness, impertinence, and brutality that one sees in all sorts of people every day makes me more and more sensible of the great blessing God almighty has given me in three such friends as your dear self, Mr Freeman and Mr Montgomery, a happiness I believe nobody in my sphere ever enjoyed and which I will always value as I ought’. Yet even when she wrote this, fissures had started to appear in her relationship with Sarah, and with hindsight Anne would come to believe that their estrangement dated from the beginning of her reign. She was sure the blame for it lay with Sarah alone, once telling her former friend, ‘It has not been my fault that we have lived in the manner we have done ever since I came to the crown’.57
Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Page 33
