Whig peers such as Somers and Cowper were among those who promised that she could count on them, and the Duke of Somerset assured her personally that ‘he would stand by her with his life and fortune, even against her insolent general’. But the Queen was also touched by the support offered by Tories, for once her predicament became known ‘the backstairs were very crowded for two or three days’ with people from whom she had long been distant. ‘The Queen took it extremely kind’ when her uncle, the Earl of Rochester, declared his abhorrence of the proposed address. Other ‘known enemies of the Revolution’ (as Sarah put it) such as the Dukes of Buckingham and Leeds – ‘even such idiots as the Duke of Beaufort’ – proved equally keen to affirm their loyalty. According to Sarah, ‘This gave such a life to the Jacobite interest that many who had never come to court in some years did now run about with very busy faces’. Certainly the Queen felt a lasting sense of obligation to those who came to her rescue at this time, and four months later remained mindful of being ‘engaged in promises to several people upon that occasion’.12
Had Anne not succeeded in blocking the address, and a majority in both Houses had voted for it, she had no intention of submitting tamely. The States General’s envoy to Britain heard that if the address about Abigail had been presented, she had resolved to answer ‘that she would always very willingly comply with Parliament in all matters that concerned the public welfare, but that she would not let them prescribe anything regarding her domestic affairs’. Four months later the same source stated that the Queen felt so strongly about her right to retain Mrs Masham that she would ‘rather hazard her crown than dismiss her’. Fortunately it did not come to that. The address was due to have been moved in Parliament on 23 January, but in the event nothing was heard of it. The diplomat l’Hermitage heard that it was dropped because the Duke of Marlborough ‘wrote to his friends to stand in its way’ but, if so, many people believed the matter was not pursued only because ‘’twas not thought a proper time to move what they were not sure of carrying’.13
Marlborough was received by the Queen on the morning of 24 January, having come back to town the previous evening. Sarah related that Anne ‘made him great expressions of kindness, more than she had ever done before’, undertaking to ‘show him that it was in nobody’s power to make impressions … to his disadvantage’. The Duke lamented that the notion of him bearing any responsibility for the address proposal was ‘a fresh instance of his enemies imposing falsities on her’, and the Queen let it be understood that she attached no blame to him. In reality, however, she could not truly forgive those who had subjected her to this unpleasant experience. As one courtier sagely observed, ‘People may say … that all is made up and well again, but such breaches between great people are seldom or never so’. The episode had not only made the Queen resentful towards the Marlboroughs, but had opened up a breach in Whig ranks, exposing the ministry’s lack of cohesion.14
The Duke was eager to escape from the scene of his humiliation and so, when news came that Louis XIV wanted to renew peace talks, he took the opportunity to go abroad earlier in the year than usual. Declaring that his presence on the Continent was necessary both to formulate peace terms and to prepare for next year’s campaign, Parliament requested the Queen to authorise his departure. Godolphin drew up on her behalf a most effusive response, in which Anne praised Marlborough as ‘God Almighty’s chief instrument of my glory and my people’s happiness’. However, the Queen demanded that the wording was modified. Godolphin ‘argued it with her and … so far got the better … as to have the speech tolerable and to do no hurt’, with the result that on 20 February the Queen delivered the tepid announcement to the House of Lords that she was ‘very glad … you concur with me in a just sense of the Duke of Marlborough’s eminent services’.15
Before leaving London, Marlborough discussed Sarah’s position with the Queen. By then it was public knowledge that the Queen was on appalling terms with her Mistress of the Robes, having reportedly declared to more than one person ‘she has been so slighted by the Duchess of Marlborough that she can’t endure the sight of her’. Sarah herself would have been happy to retire provided that her places were bestowed on her daughters, but her husband knew that he ‘must … make ’em think abroad all was well again between him and the Queen’, and if Sarah left office ‘it would be a great contradiction to all that’. He therefore explained to Anne that he wanted Sarah to retain her posts for the time being, but that he hoped the Queen would permit her to remain in the country rather than performing her duties. Anne readily agreed that Sarah ‘might be where she herself pleased’ and ‘the Duke came from her well satisfied’. The Queen too felt the encounter had gone well, for she understood that Marlborough had absolved her of her promise to confer Sarah’s offices upon her daughters when the Duchess did resign. It soon emerged, however, that Sarah still expected the Queen to honour her undertaking, as became clear when the Duchess saw Anne on 18 February. Sarah remarked that she was glad that her daughters would succeed to her places before too long, ‘to which the Queen answered very roughly that she thought she should have been troubled no more about that’. The Duchess then reminded her that Anne had already agreed that her daughters could succeed her, and was aghast to gather that the Queen ‘looked upon her promise as nothing’.16
On 27 February 1710 the trial of Dr Sacheverell began. In the weeks before his impeachment public feeling had become dangerously inflamed, for the decision to prosecute had ‘revived those disputes which had laid buried for fifteen years and upward’. A foreign diplomat reported that ‘the fermentation is so great’ that the legitimacy of the Revolution was now regularly debated, causing such bitterness that at Christmas 1709 ‘all freedom of conversation was banished and instead of it disputes and quarrels … succeeded, amongst the most intimate acquaintance and nearest relations’. Although Sacheverell had been given bail on 14 January, his supporters still depicted him as a martyr, and his case so polarised political opinion that one young lady commented in disgust, ‘This damned priest has made all people declare themselves of some party’.17
The excitement was heightened by the fact that Sacheverell had become an unlikely heartthrob among Tory ladies. There was a brisk trade in portrait prints of him for, despite his plump features and protuberant eyes, ‘a good assurance, clean gloves, white handkerchiefs well managed’ somehow gave him a spurious appeal.18 Everyone in London society was desperate to obtain tickets for the trial in Westminster Hall and, once it started, fashionable ladies queued up to take their seats at seven in the morning.
The Queen was not numbered among Sacheverell’s admirers. Since the matter had not been raised in Cabinet, she had taken no part in the decision to proceed against him, but she did not dispute he had preached ‘a bad sermon and that he deserved well to be punished for it’. Almost certainly, however, she would have preferred it if, instead of being subjected to a show trial, Sacheverell had been called before the bar of the House of Commons and chastised lightly. The passions that were stirred up by the case disturbed her greatly, and she later told her physician ‘that his impeachment had been better let alone’. Nevertheless, she was careful to maintain a stance of strict neutrality. Just before the trial began Abigail Masham (herself a Sacheverell supporter) tried to draw Anne on the subject. She reported to Harley ‘I was with my aunt last night on purpose to speak to her about Dr Sacheverell and asked her if she did not let people know her mind in the matter. She said no, she did not meddle one way or other, and that it was her friends’ advice not to meddle’. Ruffled by the Queen’s discretion, Abigail wanted to know ‘who she called her friends?’19
Sacheverell’s trial lasted three and a half weeks, and the Queen attended most days, sitting in a curtained-off area. Alleging that Sacheverell had sought to ‘blacken the Revolution’ of 1688, the Whigs sought to use the impeachment as a showcase to parade their own principles. Robert Walpole, acting as one of the managers for the Commons, affirmed that ‘The very being of ou
r present government is the resistance that was necessarily used at the Revolution’, while his colleague James Stanhope accused Sacheverell of insulting Anne herself by implying ‘the Revolution … was a usurpation’. He contended that Sacheverell’s real aim was to bring about the restoration of James Francis Edward, for ‘the true object of these doctrines is a prince on the other side of the water’.20
At no time did any of the Commons managers suggest that the Pretender was not really James II’s son. The warming pan baby story was tacitly acknowledged to be a fiction, and instead it was affirmed that King James’s violation of the contract between monarch and people had entitled them to rise up against him. One shrewd observer would later argue that it was unwise to take this approach, because ‘One of the principal things that drew the nation so unanimously into the Revolution was the supposed illegitimacy of the Pretender … Nothing can weaken the Revolution so much as to the dispossessing the people of this notion’.21
The same person thought that if Anne was persuaded that the Pretender was her ‘true brother’, it would be ‘very natural’ if she inclined to him.22 Others too have supposed that after the Sacheverell trial Anne could no longer delude herself that the Pretender was not her father’s son and that her attitude towards him changed from this point. There is, however, no evidence for this view. It seems that Anne was one of the few people who continued to subscribe to the myth of the supposititious child but, even if doubts did creep in about its substance, she believed that other reasons besides his birth disqualified James Francis Edward from wearing the crown. However, for those whose sympathies leaned that way, the Sacheverell trial could be said to have validated the Pretender’s claim. Paradoxically, an event that was designed to vindicate the Revolution, actually put heart in the Jacobites.
From the start the mob had been on Sacheverell’s side. He came to court every day in a showy coach that had been loaned to him, making his way through cheering crowds and occasionally sticking his hand out to be kissed. As the Queen was carried towards Westminster in her chair, the crowd swarmed about her shouting ‘God bless your Majesty and the Church! We hope your Majesty is for Dr Sacheverell’. Despite the display of loyalty, the Queen looked ‘very pensive’. It did not take long for the mood of the crowd to turn ugly, and for anger to boil up against dissenters. On 28 February some meeting-houses in London had their windows broken. The following evening violent riots broke out, and for four hours the mob rampaged through London. Burgess’s meeting-house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ransacked and its contents burnt, and other meeting-houses in the capital suffered similar destruction. Passers-by were forced to drink the health of Sacheverell and one of the Commons managers who was waylaid only narrowly escaped lynching. By 9 p.m. it was feared that the mob were planning to storm the Bank of England, and Sunderland went to St James’s Palace to warn the Queen. On hearing the news she was reportedly ‘seized with paleness and trembling’, but she soon recovered her composure and ordered the Secretary to send her Horse and Foot Guards to disperse the mob. When Sunderland expressed concern about the palace being left undefended, she answered staunchly, ‘God would be her guard’.23
The troops sent out to deal with the crisis successfully restored order. One rioter had his hand cut off at the wrist by a cavalryman’s sabre, and there were also several arrests. Two of the supposed ringleaders of the disorders were convicted of treason, but later pardoned. The Queen ordered that the damage to the meeting-houses should be repaired at public expense.
The morning after the riots Sacheverell’s trial resumed, and on 7 March he spoke in his own defence. He delivered a ‘studied, artful and pathetic speech’, ‘exquisitely contrived to move pity’ and ‘done in so fine a manner … with so harmonious a voice that the poor ladies wet all their clean handkerchiefs’. Even some Tory peers, such as Rochester and Nottingham, were in tears. On 16 March the scene switched to the House of Lords, where the peers debated the evidence for some days before giving their verdict. The Queen came to listen to most of their discussions, even though they went on for hours and ‘no bear garden was ever more noisy’.24
Despite Anne’s strictly impartial demeanour, this could not stop ‘secret whispers’ being ‘set about that though the Queen’s affairs put her on acting the part of one that was pleased with this scene, yet she disliked it all’. To the disappointment of Sacheverell’s supporters, however, she did nothing that betrayed approval for him. When, late one evening in the Lords, the Earl of Nottingham was making a long speech in the doctor’s favour, the Queen abruptly left the House, ‘which blew’d the good Lord’. On another night, as she stood up to leave at 10 p.m., the Duke of Somerset offered to escort her home, ‘but she told him, no, not without he brought a lord of the other party, for she would not have a vote lost on any score’. Towards the end of the trial the Earl of Kent asked her for her views and ‘the Queen told him she thought the Commons had reason to be satisfied that they had made their allegations good, and the mildest punishment inflicted upon the doctor she thought the best’.25
The outcome of the trial was as the Queen desired. A majority of peers voted Sacheverell guilty on every count, but the only penalties imposed were a prohibition on him preaching for three years and for his sermon to be burnt. One lady commented acidly, ‘this might have been done without putting the nation to £60,000 charge, besides the terrible animosities that are raised throughout the kingdom’. Hailed as ‘rather … an absolution than a condemnation’, the light sentence was perceived as a humiliation for the ministry, and was celebrated with bonfires and illuminations. The mood of the public remained unsettled for weeks. On 29 March, six days after the trial had ended, Anne wrote in concern to the Lord Mayor about the ‘continuance of these riots and tumults’ in London, and a fortnight later she was still worried by ‘the heat and ferment that is in this poor nation’. At the end of April the Imperial Resident in London declared that England had not appeared so unstable since Cromwell’s time.26 The government had stirred up so much indignation that addresses were presented to the Queen from every part of the kingdom asking for new elections. While not endorsing the more extreme sentiments voiced in these papers, Anne was ‘spirited by the addresses’. They showed how unpopular the ministry had become, presenting her with an opportunity to liberate herself from the Junto.27
During the Sacheverell trial, the Duchess of Marlborough had yet another acrimonious encounter with Anne. The Queen’s ladies-in-waiting were in attendance when she went to Westminster Hall, but since Anne forgot to invite them to sit down, it appeared that they would have to stand behind her chair during the entire proceedings. Accordingly, Sarah had asked if they might be seated, and without hesitation the Queen had answered ‘by all means, pray sit’. To Sarah’s chagrin, however, the Duchess of Somerset and Lady Hyde did not avail themselves of the privilege. Scenting ‘a deep plot’ on the Duchess of Somerset’s part to make the Queen think ‘I had done something that was impertinent’, Sarah went to see Anne early the next morning and asked her to confirm that she was happy for her ladies to be seated. Understandably irritated, the Queen snapped, ‘If I had not liked it, why do you think I would have ordered it?’28
The incident confirmed Sarah in the suspicion that the Duke and Duchess of Somerset were causing trouble for her. ‘A man of vast pride’, the Duke of Somerset was in theory a Whig, but of late his relations with Marlborough, Godolphin, and the Junto had cooled. He absented himself from the Lords’ vote on Sacheverell, and was one of those suspected of spreading the rumour that the Queen desired Sacheverell’s acquittal. Sarah claimed that in 1704 Anne had described him as a ‘fool and liar’ and had wanted to dismiss him for leaking Cabinet secrets. Since then, however, he had successfully ingratiated himself with her. During the summer of 1709 he was not ‘three days absent’ while the Queen was at Windsor, and by the following spring he had become ‘one of the greatest favourites’ who was with her ‘more hours in the day … than Abigail’.29
The Queen’s
change of heart owed much to the fact that she had grown very fond of his wife. ‘The best bred as well as the best born lady in England’, the red-haired Duchess had experienced a turbulent youth. As a teenaged heiress she had been married against her will to the much older Thomas Thynne. She had fled to the Continent to avoid living with him, and while she was overseas a foreign adventurer named Count Konigsmark had murdered Thynne. The Duchess of Marlborough was among those who believed ‘she would have married her husband’s murderer’ and was somehow implicated. In fact, after Konigsmark had escaped abroad, the young widow had married the Duke of Somerset, making him extremely rich but in return being ‘treated … with little gratitude or affection’. She had become a Lady of the Bedchamber at the start of the reign and, by being ‘soft and complaisant, full of fine words and low curtseys’, as Sarah bitterly put it, she made herself agreeable to the Queen.30
Sarah recalled that when Mrs Masham first came into favour, she and the Duchess of Somerset ‘used to laugh and be very free on the subject of Abigail’. Now Sarah feared that the Duchess had informed the Queen that Sarah habitually spread ‘Grub Street stories’, and ‘often spoke of her in company disrespectfully’. Sarah believed that the Duke of Somerset was also disseminating ‘the most villainous lies’ about her.31
Sarah decided that she must see the Queen in order to vindicate herself, but Anne had reached the point where she could not bear to be alone with the Duchess of Marlborough. When Sarah requested a private audience on 3 April, the Queen initially assented and then changed her mind, saying it would be easier for both parties if Sarah communicated by letter. Sarah persisted, and the Queen again agreed to meet, only to cancel the appointment once more because she had gone to Kensington. Undeterred, Sarah wrote she would come to her there, saying that she could not take the sacrament at Easter until she had resolved matters. She announced, ‘I will come every day and wait till you please to allow me to speak to you’, but rashly promised that Anne need make no answer to what she had to say.32
Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Page 56
