If Harley did intervene in this way, he was not the only one to aid the lovers, for Anne too played her part. After Masham had been made a Colonel in May 1707, the Queen contacted Robert Harley several times that summer and asked him to ensure that Masham’s regiment was not sent to fight on the Continent. Each time, she stipulated that he must arrange this discreetly, as she did not want her Secretary at War, Henry St John, to know of her request. On 6 September she wrote, ‘You will take care the regiment I am concerned for may not be ordered [abroad], and forgive my impertinence in troubling you so often on this occasion, since it is my concern for my friend that is the occasion of it’.25 The fact that Anne, who normally referred to Abigail by her surname, in the manner of an employer addressing an inferior servant, was happy to confer on her the appellation of ‘friend’ is certainly very remarkable.
Probably in early June 1707 Abigail secretly married Samuel Masham. The wedding took place at Kensington Palace, in the apartment of another somewhat mysterious figure, whom the Duchess of Marlborough balefully referred to as ‘the Scotch doctor’. This was Dr John Arbuthnot, medical man, mathematician and – in due course – political satirist for the Tories. In 1703 he had become physician to Prince George after successfully giving him emergency treatment when he fell ill at Epsom. Two years later he had been appointed physician extraordinary to the Queen, ‘by her Majesty’s special command in consideration of his good and successful services performed as physician to his Royal Highness’.26 A key member of Harley’s inner coterie, he had lodgings in both of the Queen’s London residences.
Although there is no evidence that Harley was present at the wedding, he knew all about it, and other members of his family soon heard that their relation was now a married woman. However, the news was successfully hidden from the Duchess of Marlborough, even though convention required that Abigail should not only have notified her patroness beforehand but even sought her permission. The Duchess noted that at the time it had not occurred to her that Abigail could have taken such a step without her knowledge, for though she had registered that her cousin had been avoiding her recently, she had thought little of it. She was of course also unaware that the Queen herself had attended the marriage, but on 11 June 1707 Anne asked Sarah to provide her with £2,000 from the Privy Purse – almost certainly as a wedding present for Abigail – and this did attract the Duchess’s attention. She had in fact already felt some twinges of unease regarding her cousin’s trustworthiness, which she had passed on to her husband. On 22 May Marlborough had sought to allay her concerns, writing casually, ‘If you are sure that [Abigail] does speak of business to [the Queen], I should think you might speak to her with some caution, which might do good, for she certainly is grateful and will mind what you say’. Now when Sarah alerted him to the Queen’s unusual request for funds, he again tried to reassure her, pointing out that ‘play [i.e. gambling] and charity may take up a great deal’.27 For the time being, the Duchess avoided a direct confrontation with either the Queen or Abigail, but during a visit to the Queen in June, Sarah passed such dark comments that Anne found herself on the verge of tears. She could only conclude that the Duchess had ‘heard some new lie of her poor unfortunate faithful Morley’. Begging Sarah to believe that ‘I am on the rack and cannot bear living as we do now’, she wrote imploring her ‘to open your dear heart, hide nothing’, so that their problems could be sorted out. However, she suggested that Sarah communicate by letter, and with hindsight the Duchess took this as proof that Anne ‘feared blushing’ if the subject of Abigail was brought up.28
At length Sarah decided to put an end to the suspense, and on 17 July she had a showdown with the Queen ‘in the closet within the gallery’ at Windsor Castle. Anne had hoped that the meeting ‘would set everything right’ between them, but it proved so stormy that Sarah assumed that ever after the Queen would be ‘afraid of another gallery visit’. Anne was adamant that Sarah had failed to intimidate her, writing defiantly that having done ‘nothing to deserve your ill opinion, I can bear any reproaches that my dear Mrs Freeman is pleased to make’.29
In the course of the interview Sarah raised a number of contentious subjects, beginning with Anne’s inexcusable desire to appoint Smallridge rather than Potter as Regius Professor. She also attacked Robert Harley, and would later take pleasure in reminding the Queen ‘how angry you were with me’ when she gave an unflattering assessment of his character. Finally, she touched on the subject of her cousin Abigail, suggesting that she discussed politics with the Queen. Appearing ‘much offended’, Anne snapped back she wished ‘nobody meddled with business more than Mrs Hill’.30
The next day Sarah decided to probe further in a letter. By her own standards, she showed some delicacy when approaching the subject of Abigail, assuring the Queen she would be ‘much offended at myself if I did her any wrong’. Trying to be tactful, she explained ‘Since you say she does not speak to you, I do believe she does not directly meddle in anything of that nature, but without knowing it or intending it, she is one reason of feeding Mrs Morley’s passion for Tories’. She pointed out, in what she believed to be a reasonable tone, that Abigail’s circle of friends were all known opponents of the Whigs and hence the sort of people who would be inclined ‘to make wrong representations of all things and all people’.31
The Queen wrote back promptly to insist that ‘the suspicions you seem to have concerning your cousin Hill’ were groundless, as Abigail was ‘very far from being an occasion of feeding Mrs Morley in her passion as you are pleased to call it, she never meddling with anything’. She also denied that Abigail only associated with Tories, for though it was inevitable that anyone who was ‘so much in the way of company’ inevitably encountered people of that persuasion, she was polite to them purely ‘out of common civility’.32
This was too much for Sarah. Abandoning all pretence of restraint, she wrote another long letter full of accusations. She concluded by observing that while ‘Mrs Morley seems most desirous to vindicate a person that I have said as much good of as one can do of anybody … I can’t agree to what Mrs Morley says as to the clearing of her from being infected by the company she keeps, for … though it is true she does not have many visitors, it is as certain that all the people she does converse with are Jacobites, open or in disguise … Tories that are Tackers or opposers of you in whatever lies in their way’.33
It is not clear how the Queen responded to this. However, over the next month Sarah managed to persuade Godolphin that Abigail posed a serious threat to his political plans and by 16 August he was sufficiently concerned to alert Marlborough to the situation. He wrote, ‘I reckon one great occasion to Mrs Morley’s obstinacy … about the clergy proceeds from an inclination of talking more freely than usually to [Abigail]. And this is laid hold of and improved by … [Harley] to insinuate his notions which, in those affairs … are as wrong as is possible. I am apt also to think he makes use of the same person to improve all the ill offices to [the Whigs] which both he and that person are as naturally inclined to as [the Queen] is to receive the impressions of them. Now this must needs do a great deal of mischief’. The Lord Treasurer declared that things had reached a point where it was necessary for him and Marlborough to speak ‘very plainly at the same time’ to the Queen.34
After receiving a letter from Sarah in the same vein, Marlborough informed Godolphin that he was greatly concerned to hear all this, and agreed they should warn the Queen that unless things changed, they would be unable ‘to carry her business on with success’. Sarah and Godolphin then read to the Queen the letters they had recently received from the Duke, but far from admitting herself at fault, Anne was merely angry at the trouble Sarah had caused. On 25 August she wrote to Marlborough that she understood that the Duchess had convinced him that Anne ‘had an entire confidence in Mr Harley’, but that this was quite wrong. ‘I am sure I have a very good opinion of Mr Harley and will never change it without I see cause’, she told her general, ‘but I wonder how Lady Marlboro
ugh could say such a thing when she has often been assured, from me, that I relied on none but Mr Freeman and Mr Montgomery’.35 As a result of the Queen’s disclaimers Godolphin appears to have accepted that he had somewhat overreacted, and that his troubles were not all attributable to Harley.
Anne meanwhile had made a gesture intended to signal that she would not be coerced by Sarah into abandoning the Hills. In what the Duchess indignantly termed ‘an equivocating letter’, the Queen informed Sarah that she had now decided to act on her recommendation and take on Alice Hill as an extra Woman of the Bedchamber, ‘for though [Abigail] Hill does not complain, I see her so very much fatigued every morning that she goes out of waiting, I think it would be cruel not to give her some ease’. She added that people might naturally gain the impression that she was hoping to enlarge her household further, and asked Sarah to tell any lady who applied to her, that the Queen would not be recruiting any more Bedchamber staff. This brought forth a snide reply from the Duchess, saying that the situation was unlikely to arise, as by now fewer people approached her with suits of this sort, because her standing was not what it was. ‘I believe the secret begins to be discovered, especially at court’, Sarah hissed, adding that years of ‘unkind and unjust usage’ from the Queen meant that she had ceased to be upset about this upon her own account. Instead, ‘my greatest concern now is to think of the prejudices it must do Mrs Morley when the true cause of it is known, which will make her character so very different from that which has always been given by her faithful Freeman’.36 This was the first time that Sarah hinted that there was something morally reprehensible about Anne’s relationship with Abigail, a theme upon which she would subsequently expand.
The date was drawing nearer when Parliament would assemble, and yet the political crisis was no closer to resolution. On 4 September Marlborough wrote to the Queen, once more begging her to follow Godolphin’s advice if she did not want to endure ‘trouble and distraction’ in the coming session of Parliament. At the request of Godolphin and Sarah, he also attempted to patch up relations between his wife and the Queen. He reminded Anne ‘that nobody could serve you with more zeal and true affection than [Sarah] has done for many years’, and said he believed that his wife’s judgement had been vindicated, for she had ‘foreseen some things which I thought would never have happened’.37 The letter had little effect other than to show how much things had changed from the days when Anne had been on such close terms with Sarah that Marlborough had sometimes been made to feel like an interloper.
Godolphin too was playing his part. The day after yet another fraught audience with the Queen, he wrote in early September to hammer home the message that she could not afford to alienate the legislature. ‘The liberties of all Europe, the safety of your Majesty and of these kingdoms, the future preservation of the Protestant religion, the strength of your government and the glory of your reign depend upon the success of the next session of Parliament and indeed upon every session of Parliament while this war lasts’, he declared. Unfortunately he then struck an ill-judged note by alleging that the Queen was being irrational, a line invariably adopted by Sarah, and which never failed to irritate Anne. He demanded, ‘What colour of reason can incline your Majesty to discourage and disoblige’ those Whigs who had been so helpful in recent years, asserting brusquely that Anne’s reluctance to break her promise to Blackall and Dawes was not ‘a real objection but an imaginary one’. He ended that it pained him ‘that after all the disinterest and faithful duty and affection’ he had shown her, ‘your Majesty is not yet sensible I would never give you the least moment of uneasiness’ unless it was unavoidable. Accordingly, he sought her permission to retire.38
Much distressed, Anne implored him to reconsider, telling him that by resigning he would not only ‘expose me to ruin, but betray your country and your friends’. ‘If you should put it in practice I really believe it will be my death’, she declared, asking him to believe that the ‘concern I have been in’ since seeing him last was ‘not to be imagined by any but me that have felt it’. She was adamant, however, that her commitment to Blackall was sacrosanct, for if she broke her word she ‘could not answer it neither to God Almighty nor my self, my conscience and honour, being too far engaged in that matter for me to alter my intentions’. Doing so would ‘expose me to the contempt of all mankind’, and she therefore trusted that Godolphin would not press her further on this point. Yet though she professed herself distraught at the prospect of losing her Lord Treasurer, her defiance towards the Whig leaders was as implacable as ever. ‘Whoever of the Whigs thinks I am to be hectored or frighted into compliance, though I am a woman, are mightily mistaken in me’, she proclaimed fiercely. ‘I thank God I have a soul above that, and am too much concerned for my reputation to do anything to forfeit it’. Perhaps somewhat startled by her own vehemence, Anne finally requested Godolphin not to ‘let this be seen by anybody, no, not by my unkind friend’.39
Godolphin delayed carrying out his threat to resign, hoping that he could yet prevail on the Queen to accommodate the Whigs. In late September Marlborough wrote to her again, saying he was in despair ‘to see everything that has been hitherto so prosperous running so fast to ruin’, and warning that he and Godolphin could ‘put no other construction’ upon her refusal to follow their advice ‘but that of your being guided by other hands’. But while the Duke was happy to support the Lord Treasurer in this way, he did not believe their careers were inextricably linked. Although Godolphin had understood that Marlborough would resign with him, the Duke explained that if the Lord Treasurer left office, he would cease to be involved in domestic politics, but would not give up his military command. The fact that Marlborough was prepared to stay on as general came as a shock to the Lord Treasurer, and forced him to reconsider his own position. By 7 October, although still despondent that ‘nothing is fixed here to make [Parliament] succeed’, he had resolved to do nothing ‘so shameful as to abandon [the Queen] but upon a joint measure with Mr Freeman’.40
Sarah meanwhile had been busy elsewhere, trying to find out exactly what Abigail had been up to recently. Her enquiries revealed that the situation was much worse than she had suspected, for until this point, ‘though I saw she was doing mischief, I did not think she could have been such a devil to me’. The first thing Sarah learned, in early September, was that Abigail had married Samuel Masham (who by then was in Ireland with his regiment) earlier in the year. Sarah had a right to feel affronted that her cousin had ‘married without telling me, which she ought not to have done, no more than any of my children’, but decided to overlook the lapse, attributing it ‘to bashfulness and want of breeding rather than anything worse’. Going to Abigail to offer her congratulations, she offered to break the news to the Queen, and was taken aback when Abigail said she believed Anne had already heard of it from the gossip of the Bedchamber Women. Unsettled by this, Sarah went to the Queen and reproached her for keeping the secret from her, only to be shaken to the core when Anne blurted out, ‘I have a hundred times bid Masham tell it you and she would not’. The Queen’s use of Abigail’s married name, and her incautious admission that she talked with her so frequently, showed how calculated the deception had been. Worse was to come, for on investigating further Sarah discovered that Anne had attended the wedding herself, having been spotted making her way unattended to Dr Arbuthnot’s lodging ‘by a boy of the kitchen at Kensington’. Sarah was left in no doubt that ‘my cousin was become an absolute favourite’, for it soon emerged that Anne was regularly ‘locked up with Abigail after dinner when the Prince was in one of the rooms asleep’, and that Mrs Masham ‘was generally two hours every day in private with her. And I likewise then discovered beyond all dispute Mr Harley’s correspondence and interest at court by means of this woman’.41
On the evening of 22 September the Duchess came across her cousin as she went through the drawing room at Kensington on her way to see the Queen, and though decorum was preserved, it was an icy encounter. Abigail breat
hlessly reported to Harley, ‘as she passed I had a very low curtsey, which I returned in the same manner, but not one word passed between us; and as for her looks, indeed they are not to be described by any mortal but her own self’. Next day Sarah wrote to Abigail complaining ‘you have made me returns very unsuitable to what I might have expected’, and she then left court to go to Woodstock. On her way there she received a disingenuous letter from Abigail, which said she feared the Duchess had been told ‘some malicious lie of me’, and avowing that incurring her displeasure would be ‘the greatest unhappiness that could befall me’. Sarah replied that she was acting on her own observations and that she would explain further when next they met.42
Quite some time would elapse, however, before the Duchess had things out with her cousin. On 30 September the Queen and Prince George went to Newmarket for just over a fortnight, and Mrs Masham accompanied her mistress there. Even after the trip was over and Abigail returned with the Queen to St James’s Palace, she contrived not to see her cousin for another twelve days. Sarah complained to the Queen that Abigail was avoiding her, whereupon Anne countered that such behaviour was ‘very natural’. At length, however, a meeting took place, and Sarah wasted no time berating Abigail for her treachery. Informing her angrily that ‘the Queen was much changed towards me and that I could not attribute this to anything but her secret management’, she argued that Abigail’s concealment of how often she saw Anne privately ‘was alone a very ill sign and enough to prove a very bad purpose at bottom’. Abigail was not in the least discomposed. Having denied that she ever discussed business with Anne, she nonplussed Sarah by telling her sweetly that ‘she was sure the Queen, who had loved me extremely, would always be very kind to me’. ‘To see a woman, whom I had raised out of the dust, put on such a superior air’ left Sarah dumbstruck, and the Duchess was still spluttering incoherently when Abigail calmly took her leave.43
Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Page 46
