Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

by Anne Somerset

  As Anne left Bath on 27 September, one person reported ‘we hear the Queen and Prince think themselves better’ for their stay at the spa. However, towards the end of her Bath visit Anne was said to have developed gout in both feet, and a knee was also giving her serious trouble. Once back at Windsor, she was immobilised for some weeks, and on 21 October was still unable to walk. She asked Sarah not to inform anyone of her condition, because once it was known she would ‘be tormented with a thousand questions about it’. Anne always did her best to hide her poor health from her subjects, but her weakness was all too apparent once she returned to London. On 2 November it was noted that ‘she can’t set her foot to the ground, has a chair made so well that it is lifted with her in it into the coach, and then she moves herself to the seat and the chair taken away’.19

  Sarah was experiencing an attack of lameness herself, and Anne wrote she hoped it was ‘not the gout, knowing by too much experience how painful a complaint that is’. Yet in other ways the Duchess’s vigour was unimpaired, and she continued to nag Anne relentlessly. She repeated the accusation that the Queen was changed towards her, disregarding the fact that she was acting in the very manner most likely to bring this about. She wrote at such length about political matters that even she felt obliged to apologise, although the Queen protested there was no need. Maintaining that it was not in her nature ‘to check or be angry with people for speaking their minds freely’, she said she was hardly likely to start with Sarah.20

  The Tories, both in office and out, remained Sarah’s principal target. In the autumn of 1703 the Earl of Nottingham inconvenienced Marlborough by removing 2,000 troops from Flanders and despatching them to Spain without consulting the Captain-General, or warning the Dutch. Such actions only confirmed Sarah in the view that all Tories were irredeemably ill disposed. Even when favourable developments occurred, the Duchess alleged that the Tories were annoyed by them, and that the Queen was wilfully blinding herself to their faults. In October the Duke of Savoy, who had formerly been on Louis XIV’s side, aligned himself with the allies. In return for money and troops he agreed to take on the French, thereby adding to the cost of the war but greatly improving allied chances of success in Italy. When Sarah made snide comments about this, the Queen answered sharply ‘I will not say who is glad or sorry for it, nor whether my eyes are shut or open, but this I am very sure of, that [I] will … venture and do more for the true interest of this poor country than all those who boast so much of their good intentions towards it’.21

  On the night of 26 November 1703, southern England was struck by a devastating hurricane, which swept in about eleven o’clock, and wreaked havoc for the next eight hours. When dawn came Hampshire was ‘all desolation’, Portsmouth looked ‘like a city bombarded by the enemy’, and London alone had suffered a million pounds of damage. The wind had rolled up ‘great quantities of lead like scrolls of parchment … blowing them off the churches, halls and houses’. Westminster Hall and part of the City were flooded, and more than a hundred ancient elms were toppled in St James’s Park. As the Queen slept at St James’s Palace a ‘stack of chimneys … fell with such a terrible noise as very much alarmed the whole household’, whereupon she and Prince George had risen from their bed and watched the progress of the storm with the maids of honour. Next morning ‘the houses looked like skeletons and an universal air of horror seemed to sit on the countenances of the people’.

  A woman had been killed by the chimney collapse at St James’s, and there were many other deaths throughout the country. At sea, fifteen warships and numerous merchant vessels were lost, and approximately two thousand seamen drowned. The figure would have been still higher if the storm had not coincided with a high tide that prevented a larger number of ships being run aground on sandbanks. As it was, the nation was in shock at what some deemed a manifestation of divine displeasure, and a general fast, proclaimed for 19 January 1704, was ‘strictly observed’. On that day the Archbishop of York preached before the Queen, and the churches were ‘so crowded as few could get into them’.22

  The political outlook for the autumn of 1703 appeared no less stormy. In October the Queen had told Sarah she expected ‘nothing but uneasiness this winter and your coldness added to it will make it insupportable’. Her fears proved all too prescient. When Parliament reconvened, the Queen addressed it on 9 November, reminding both Houses that in view of the necessity of financing and fighting the war, it was essential that they avoid unnecessary ‘heats or divisions’. The Queen herself now accepted that this was not the time for legislation against Occasional Conformity, realising that it was inopportune to revive a measure that ‘had alarmed a great part of her subjects’ the previous year. Unfortunately the Tories in the Commons disagreed, and on 25 November a Bill against Occasional Conformity was reintroduced there. It was slightly less draconian than the Act proposed the previous year, but was still highly contentious. The High Church MP Sir John Packington nevertheless maintained that supporting it was an act of loyalty, reminding his listeners that Anne clearly had a strong ‘desire to see this bill succeed the last session … and I believe the reason why some persons opposed it was because the Queen seemed to espouse it’.23

  The bill passed the Commons with a large majority and was then sent up to the Lords. On this occasion George asserted himself and told his wife that he would not vote for it. Marlborough and Godolphin dared not follow his lead, for they knew that by voting against it, or abstaining, they would irrevocably alienate their Tory colleagues in the Cabinet. Nevertheless, Marlborough assured Sarah that he would privately indicate to other peers that he was not in favour, and he was confident that this would result in their rejecting it. He failed to calm the Duchess, who remained frantic at the possibility that the bill would pass. She wrote long letters to the Queen demanding that the Prince should not support the proposal, and fulminating at its cruelty. Anne was able to reassure her that the Prince intended to absent himself from the vote, but, while declaring that she regarded him as ‘very much in the right’ about this, would not condemn the bill itself. She told Sarah, ‘I see nothing like persecution in this bill. You may think it is a notion Lord Nottingham has put into my head, but upon my word, it is my own thought’. Having thus risked incurring the Duchess’s anger, the Queen implored Sarah, ‘never let difference of opinion hinder us from living together as we used to’, and asked for ‘one look before you go to St Albans’.24

  In the event the bill was not passed by the Lords when the division took place on 10 December. Godolphin and Marlborough both voted in favour, but their nominal support for the measure was not enough to placate the High Church party. Its members became increasingly critical of the pair – by now known, not altogether admiringly, as the ‘duumvirs’ – and even showed signs of disenchantment with Anne, from whom they had expected unquestioning support. Finding it hard to ‘forgive the Queen and the Prince the coldness that they expressed on this occasion’, many Tories and their allies in the clergy ‘no longer applauded her … but loaded her with severe reflections’.25

  In an attempt to win over these disaffected men, a measure originally considered in the reign of William III was now brought in with royal support. Currently bishops and richer clergy were required to pay taxes known collectively as ‘First Fruits and Tenths’. In February 1704 the Queen sent a message to the Commons proposing that this money should be diverted to supplement the stipends of clergy in very poor parishes. The measure was duly passed, though not without encountering some opposition from Whigs in the House of Lords. Its initial impact on clerical poverty was not very great: the sum involved was only £16,000 a year and a portion of that had already been allocated to individuals such as former royal mistresses or illegitimate children of Charles II. The scheme came to be known as ‘Queen Anne’s bounty’, but in 1708 Godolphin declared ‘he was confident not one clergyman in England was a shilling the better’ for it. Certainly, at the time it was introduced, it had little ‘effect in softening the tempers of
peevish men’.26

  At the end of 1703 the Queen was paid an official visit by her Habsburg ally, the former Archduke Charles. Now styled King Charles III of Spain by the allies, he was on his way to the Iberian peninsula to claim the crown they had conferred on him. After the young man landed at Portsmouth on 26 December, Prince George escorted him to Windsor, where Anne was waiting to receive him.

  For the next three days the eighteen-year-old was ‘entertained and owned as if he had been an adopted son’ of hers, with banquets, gaming, music, and dancing. In some ways Charles was an awkward guest, who stood very much upon his dignity. He and Anne were able to communicate in French, but George’s attempts to talk to him in ‘high Dutch’ were met with silence. On the whole, however, the young King made a favourable impression, and one observer commended his ‘art of seeming well pleased with everything without so much as smiling once all the while he was at court’. Many people were taken with his delicate appearance, coupled with a majestic bearing, and one young lady declared her enthusiasm for his cause ‘wonderfully increased, he looks so very good’.27

  In early January Charles sailed for Portugal, from whence it was intended he would go to Spain to fight for the throne that was currently his in name only. Anne could congratulate herself on having staged a successful visit which had demonstrated solidarity with a leading ally. As for Charles, he would later declare himself ‘happy in the maternal affection of so great a Queen, but unfortunate in giving her and her subjects so much trouble’.28

  By this time problems had arisen on account of a supposed Jacobite plot that had come to light in Scotland. The English Secretary of State, the Earl of Nottingham, once remarked gloomily that Scotland constituted ‘a large gap for the Prince of Wales to enter at’ and there could be no doubt that Jacobite sentiment was stronger in that ‘boiling nation’ than England. Anne herself acknowledged as much, for though she was apt to infuriate Sarah by maintaining that in England, only an infinitesimal number of people were for the Prince of Wales, she did agree that ‘there were a few Jacobites in Scotland’. Sometimes Scottish supporters of the cause manifested their sympathies by ‘drinking the Prince of Wales’s health … as publicly as we drink the Queen’s in England’, doing this so enthusiastically on the young man’s seventeenth birthday that thirty carousers were ‘still half fuddled’ the following morning. Arguably, such displays did not mean much, but the situation in Scotland was so precarious that the English had to remain on the alert. As Godolphin pointed out to the Scots Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Seafield, only those ‘engaged in a different interest’ could take satisfaction in the outcome of the 1703 Scottish Parliament, ‘of which latter sort I fear you have more among you than you are yet aware of’.29

  Godolphin might insist that ‘the Queen is Queen of Scotland upon the foot of the Revolution’, but there were important people in Scotland who deluded themselves that Anne thought otherwise, and some of them scarcely bothered to hide where their aspirations lay. The Bishop of Salisbury remarked to the Duke of Atholl – who in 1703 had a place in the Scots ministry – that he ‘hoped none in Scotland thought of the Prince of Wales’. He was scandalised by Atholl’s reply that ‘he knew none that thought of him as long as the Queen lived’. In horror, the Bishop warned that once the Jacobites were confident that James would succeed the Queen’s life would be in danger, but Atholl ‘seemed to have no apprehensions of that’.30

  Others in Scotland were not content to wait passively for Anne to nominate her half brother as her heir, but instead dreamed of overthrowing her. Obviously it is hard to estimate their numbers, but the Scottish Jacobite, George Lockhart, noted that English Jacobite sympathisers were – in contrast to their Scottish counterparts – ‘much more cautious and not near so forward … all there being of opinion no attempt was to be made during the Queen’s life’.31 When Louis XIV sent a secret agent named Nathaniel Hooke to Scotland in 1705 to sound out Jacobite opinion, he was received by a number of prominent figures. They included the Duke of Hamilton, although admittedly his commitment to James Francis Edward’s cause appeared less than absolute: at his encounter with Hooke, Hamilton insisted on meeting in a dark room so that, if he was subsequently questioned by the authorities, he could honestly swear that he had never seen an enemy emissary.

  It was understandable, then, that when the Duke of Queensberry received intelligence of a Jacobite plot involving the Dukes of Atholl and Hamilton, and numerous others, he took it seriously. Unfortunately, his informant was the treacherous and unreliable Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat, who had a motive to discredit the Duke of Atholl because he had been outlawed for raping Atholl’s sister. It would later be alleged that Queensberry had listened eagerly because Lovat’s claims implicated so many prominent Scots that it would look as if Queensberry alone was loyal, providing him with an excuse for the failure of the 1703 Parliament and making his position impregnable.

  On 17 December 1703 the Queen informed the English Parliament that the government had recently learned of ‘ill practices and designs carried on in Scotland by emissaries from France’ and announced that the matter was being investigated. Sensing an opportunity to gain political advantage, Whigs in the House of Lords tried to take over this enquiry by setting up their own committee, alleging that the Tory Secretary, Nottingham, had been scandalously slow to act on Queensberry’s warnings.

  In Scotland, meanwhile, there was widespread fury that Queensberry had been so eager to accept Lovat’s word, and also that the English House of Lords was interfering in a matter that was the province of the Scots Privy Council. Several of those incriminated by Lovat sent a deputation to London to complain to the Queen, and on 8 March 1704 she received them graciously, pleased to discover they were not ‘such fierce barbarians as they had been represented’. She now regarded Queensberry as ‘a great liar’. He may have been ‘a complete courtier’ with the ‘habit of saying very civil and obliging things to everybody’ but the Queen had been angered by the way he had mishandled the Scottish Parliament and then blamed everyone else for it, and also (according to Sarah) suspected him of having cheated her in a financial matter. Besides this, Anne believed he had ‘betrayed the secrets to Lords for his own ends’ by encouraging the Whigs to mount their own investigation into the so-called ‘Scotch Plot’.32 She began to think it would be advisable to employ new ministers in Scotland.

  The committee of peers did not uncover any conclusive evidence regarding the plot but on 22 March the House of Lords pronounced that their investigation had proved the existence of ‘a dangerous conspiracy … for the raising of a rebellion in Scotland … in order to … the bringing in the pretended Prince of Wales’. They added that in their view nothing had encouraged this so much as the failure to settle the Scottish succession on Sophia of Hanover, and urged the Queen to remedy this forthwith. This amounted to an implicit criticism of both Queen and ministry for being lackadaisical on the issue, though Anne could at least take comfort in the fact that on the following day a motion declaring that the Earl of Nottingham ‘had not done his duty’ when investigating the plot failed to carry.33

  Despite escaping formal censure, Nottingham was enraged by the attacks on his integrity, and decided that it was no longer possible for him to work with any Whigs. He went to both the Queen and Godolphin and said he would resign if the ministry was not remodelled along purely Tory lines. In particular he wanted the Duke of Somerset (who had chaired the Lords’ committee on the Scotch Plot) and Archbishop Tenison removed from the Cabinet. The Queen did not want to part with Nottingham and for a moment it appeared that she might give way to his ultimatum. However, after she and Godolphin had ‘a little talk’ she abandoned ‘these sort of notions’.34 Instead she agreed to dismiss the Earl of Jersey and Sir Edward Seymour, two of the most fanatical Tories in office. The pair were replaced by more moderate men, with the Earl of Kent becoming Lord Chamberlain instead of Jersey. Known as ‘Bug’, and notable principally for ‘money and smell’, Kent was not exactly an
asset to the court, but at least his politics were inoffensive, in that he was only loosely affiliated to the Whigs.35

  Jersey’s dismissal ‘greatly surprised him and everyone else’, but the Queen was now convinced she had done the right thing. No longer disturbed by the likelihood that Nottingham would leave office, she wrote cheerfully to tell Sarah that she had ‘sent a message [to Jersey and Seymour] which they will not like. Sure this will convince Mrs Freeman that I never had any partiality to … these persons’. With mischievous good humour she added, ‘Something more of this nature it is believed will soon happen that will not be disagreeable to Mrs Freeman’. Sure enough, on 22 April Nottingham resigned from his post as Secretary. His departure came as a great relief to Marlborough and Godolphin, who had found him an increasingly difficult colleague. However, they were aware he would now ally himself with the embittered Earl of Rochester and was likely to prove an implacable political foe.36

  Nottingham’s place as Secretary of State was taken by Robert Harley. Until that point, although officially he was only Speaker of the House of Commons, he had exerted great influence. Besides managing Commons business, he had taken an active role in intelligence work, ecclesiastical preferment, propaganda matters and much else. An acquaintance who wrote to him following his appointment as Secretary remarked ‘it is scarce worthwhile congratulating you for having that in name which before you had in reality’. However, Harley professed regret at being ‘pressed into the public service in a difficult and dangerous position’, being well aware that his new prominence would result in members of both parties gunning for him. His admirers nevertheless believed that Marlborough and Godolphin had come to depend upon him to such an extent that his position was unshakeable.37