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Three days after this Anne, who had been ill since 5 November, was confirmed as suffering from smallpox.
Smallpox was a dreaded scourge and a virulent epidemic was sweeping through the court. A few days after Anne was diagnosed, Lady Frances caught the disease, which in her case proved fatal. Anne’s life was also feared for, and many at court believed that her soul too was imperilled. To avoid spreading infection her chaplain Dr Edward Lake had been ordered not to read prayers in her bedchamber, but he worried this would leave her vulnerable to the blandishments of her nurse, ‘a very busy, zealous Roman Catholic’. He alerted Bishop Compton to the danger, and the latter promptly ordered him ‘to wait constantly on her highness and do all the offices ministerial which were incumbent’. Quarantine precautions meant that after being with Anne, Lake could have no further contact with Mary. On going to take his leave of her, he found her ‘very disconsolate, not only for her sister’s illness’, but because she was worried that Anne was in need of her guidance. Lake did his best to reassure her, but Mary remained so haunted by the possibility that Anne would be converted that on her own deathbed, seventeen years later, she was tormented by visions of a Papist nurse lurking in the shadows.
Initially it had seemed that Anne’s attack of smallpox would be relatively mild. On 12 November, however, the disease grew much worse. She became covered with spots, and Lake found ‘her highness somewhat giddy and very much disordered’. Alarmed for her own safety, she begged Lake not to leave her. She remained ‘very ill’ for some days.
As more and more people at court were stricken with smallpox, William grew desperate to take his wife home to Holland. Utterly distraught at her impending departure, Mary was also still bothered by fears for her sister’s physical and spiritual well-being. She was unable to say goodbye herself, but charged the Duchess of Monmouth to take care of Anne and to accompany her often to chapel, and she left behind her two letters to be given to Anne when she was better. Mary bade farewell to the rest of her family at Gravesend. An onlooker reported ‘there was a very sad parting between the Princess and her father, but especially the Duchess and her, who wept both with that excess of sorrow’ that everyone present was moved.
However, within a fortnight of arriving in the Netherlands Mary had recovered from her homesickness and fallen deeply in love with her dour and uncommunicative husband.
During Anne’s illness, her father showed a touching solicitude for her. He ‘visited her every day … and commanded that her sister’s departure should be concealed from her; wherefore there was a feigned message sent every morning from the Princess to her Highness to know how she did’. Only on 4 December was she told that Mary had long since left the country, ‘which she appeared to bear very patiently’. In due course Anne made a full recovery, although there were fears her complexion would be permanently pitted. On 3 December she was allowed to visit her stepmother, who was still resting in her bedchamber after her confinement. Nine days later her little brother, who had been ‘sprightly and like to live’ at birth, died. It is often stated that Anne had unwittingly infected him with smallpox when she saw him for the first time, but this is questionable. It is not even certain that the child would have been present when she went to see Mary Beatrice; all the contemporary reports of his death blame negligence on the part of his nurses. Whatever the cause of his demise, the loss of the little male heir left the Duke and Duchess of York emotionally shattered. ‘The Duke was never known to grieve so much at the death of any of his other children’, while his wife was ‘inconsolable’.
With the death of Lady Frances, Anne needed a new governess. Lady Henrietta Hyde, wife of Anne’s uncle Laurence Hyde, was chosen. Known as a ‘great adversary of the Catholics’, she was well qualified to protect Anne against Popish influences but her appointment was not popular with other members of the household. On learning who was to replace Lady Frances, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake commented glumly, ‘Seldom comes a better’. In one respect, however, Anne’s life now improved, for she took over the lodgings at St James’s Palace which Mary had vacated.
On Easter Sunday 1678, Anne took communion for the first time. Much to the annoyance of her father, she had been confirmed some time before with her sister. Knowing that the Duke of York still felt aggrieved about this, Anne’s chaplain Dr Lake was mortified when she drained the contents of the chalice on receiving the sacrament. In great embarrassment he recorded in his diary, ‘Her Highness was not (through negligence) instructed how much of the wine to drink, but drank of it twice or thrice, whereat I was much concerned, lest the Duke should have notice of it’.
In the autumn of 1678 Anne had a chance to see her sister again. Having already lost a baby in April 1678, Mary was believed to be pregnant once more, but was ill and feeling low. In hopes that a sisterly visit would cheer her up, James gave permission for his wife and younger daughter to travel to Holland while he and the King were at Newmarket. The Duchess of York reported delightedly that she understood that Mary was ‘very anxious to see me and her sister; we have as great a wish to see her’.
On 1 October they set out accompanied by a ‘little company’ of high ranking ladies and courtiers, including the Duchesses of Monmouth, Richmond, and Buckingham, and Anne’s new governess Lady Henrietta Hyde. When informing William that they were on their way, the Duke of York had stressed that they did not want a tremendous fuss to be made of them, as the ‘incognito ladies … desire to be very incognito’. Despite this Prince William of Orange, who was not by nature the most open-handed of men, made a great effort to be hospitable. A member of the his staff was surprised when William spent ‘a pretty penny’ making Noordeinde Palace comfortable for his guests. By 17 October the party was back in England, and in his letter thanking William for his ‘kind usage’ of his womenfolk James reported that the Duchess was ‘so satisfied with her journey and with you as I never saw anybody’. For Anne too, the outing had been a success. She was much impressed by the immaculate cleanliness of the streets in Dutch towns, and observers commented on the affectionate reception she received from her sister. The visit also afforded her the first real opportunity of becoming acquainted with her brother-in-law. In later years there was a strong mutual antipathy between them, and William is supposed to have ‘often said, if he had married her, he should have been the miserablest man upon earth’. However, since he was noted to be in the gayest possible humour throughout her stay in Holland, one can perhaps conclude that he did not take against her instantly.
Anne and Mary Beatrice returned from this pleasant excursion to find England in the grip of wild panic. A charlatan named Titus Oates had alleged that he had uncovered a Jesuit plot to kill the King and overturn the government. When the magistrate who had recorded Oates’s depositions was found murdered on 17 October, this prompted an outbreak of anti-Catholic hysteria. On 1 November the Earl of Shaftesbury declared in Parliament that a ‘damnable plot’ had been uncovered, and in the ensuing frenzy Catholic peers were disabled from sitting in the House of Lords. The Duke of York was at least exempted from the bill’s provisions, but he was aware that he was ‘far from being secure by having gained that point’.
In December Catholic priests supposedly guilty of conspiracy were tried and executed, as was James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman, who was discovered to have been in treasonable correspondence with Louis XIV’s confessor.
Fear of Popery now reached such a peak that a sizeable section of the political nation was no longer prepared to tolerate the prospect of a Catholic king. In January 1679 Charles II dissolved Parliament, but a new one was summoned for the spring, and it was clear that when it met, the King would face calls to disinherit his brother. The country became so polarised that political parties emerged, with allegiances divided between those who favoured excluding James from the throne, and those who wished to preserve intact the hereditary succession. The two groupings soon acquired names, originally intended as insults. Those hostile to the Duke of York were known as ‘Whigs’, short for ‘Whiggamore’, a term formerly applied to extremist Presbyterian rebels in Scotland. Their more traditionalist opponents were dubbed ‘Tories’, after the lawless Catholic bandits who rampaged in Ireland. The labels would outlast the Exclusion Crisis, and bitter divisions along these lines would become so entrenched a feature of political life that when Anne came to the throne the two parties became her declared ‘bugbears’.
Because the situation in England was so fraught, the King decided that his brother must be sent out of the country prior to the meeting of the new Parliament in March 1679. Permission was initially granted for James to take Anne abroad with him, but this was rescinded after concerns were expressed that her religion would be endangered if she accompanied her father. On 3 March 1679 James and Mary Beatrice bid an emotional farewell to friends and family, upsetting Anne so much that she ‘cried as much as the rest to part company’. After briefly visiting his daughter and son-in-law at The Hague, James settled in Brussels, capital of the Spanish Netherlands. He ignored the advice of those who cautioned him that it would look bad if he based himself in a Popish country, curtly pointing out that ‘I cannot be more a Catholic than I am’.
When the English Parliament assembled, James’s absence did not appear to have made them more tractable. The King indicated that he was willing ‘to pare the nails’ of a Popish successor by giving Parliament the right to approve appointments to the Privy Council and to name judges if the monarch was a Catholic. However he insisted he would never allow them ‘to impeach the right of succession’ or interfere with ‘the descent of the crown in the true line’.
These concessions were rejected and an Exclusion Bill was introduced which passed its second reading in the Commons on 21 May. Six days later the King once again dissolved Parliament.
Charles believed that as yet it would be unwise to permit his brother to return to England, but in August he agreed to James’s request that his daughters Anne and Isabella could visit, ‘to help me bear my banishment with somewhat more patience’. Every precaution was taken to ensure that the two girls were not seduced into Popery while abroad. They were forbidden to visit Catholic churches and monasteries, and two Anglican chaplains who travelled with them read daily prayers in a chapel set aside for their use. Even the most limited contact with the outward manifestations of Catholicism filled Anne with distaste, and she professed herself shocked by glimpsing ‘images … in every shop and corner of the street. The more I see of those fooleries, and the more I hear of that religion, the more I dislike it’.
Anne and Isabella set out for Brussels on 20 August, but their father was not there to greet them. Two days after their departure Charles II had fallen seriously ill, and James had rushed back to England to be at his brother’s bedside. Anne and her younger sister remained in Brussels with the Duchess, and the letters Anne sent to Frances Apsley and her mother show that she was worried about her father’s difficulties. When Lady Apsley suggested that all the family would soon be permitted to return, she wrote ‘I wish it were so indeed’ but dismissed it as unlikely because now that the King was better, James was being sent back to Brussels. However, she refused to be discouraged, ‘for I have a good heart, thank God, or else it would have been down long ago’. She admitted too, that she was quite enjoying some aspects of life abroad. She was pleased with her accommodation in the Hotel des Hornes, which was ‘better than I expected, and so is all this place’. Brussels was ‘a great and fine town’ and ‘all the people here are very civil, and except you be otherways to them, they will be so to you … Though the streets are not so clean as they are in Holland, yet they are not so dirty as ours … They only have odd kinds of smells’. She had also been impressed when taken to ‘see a ball at the court incognito, which I liked very well’. The fireworks, dancing, and celebrations in honour of the King of Spain’s marriage to her cousin Marie Louise d’Orléans – with whom Anne had shared a nursery in France – ‘far surpassed my expectations’, and the ‘lemonade, cinnamon water and chocolate sweetmeats, all very good’, also met with her approval.
James was back in Brussels by the end of September. Since Anne and Isabella were scheduled to return to England after paying a brief visit to William and Mary, he decided to accompany them to The Hague, for ‘I would be glad to be with them as long as I could’. While he and the Duchess were there, a message arrived from Charles agreeing that James could now base himself in Scotland. On 8 October 1679 the Duke and Duchess of York left Holland with Anne and Isabella, fortunately unaware that they would never see William and Mary again. Having dropped off their two daughters in London, they travelled overland to Scotland, arriving in Edinburgh on 24 November. Three months later, they were permitted to return to England, but when Parliament met again in the autumn of 1680, the King decided that James must leave the country once more. On 20 October the Duke and Duchess were forced to set out for Scotland, this time by sea.
Parliament opened on 21 October and at once the Commons drafted a new Exclusion Bill, providing for James to be barred from the throne and perpetually banished. The implications were serious for Mary and Anne: as James put it, if the measure became law it ‘would not only affect himself, but his children too’ since those who had voted for it ‘would never think themselves secure under the government of those whose father they have excluded’. Some of the Whigs, possibly including their leader the Earl of Shaftesbury, would have liked Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to become king after his father. Whereas the first Exclusion Bill had expressly stated that on Charles’s death the crown should devolve upon the ‘next lawful heir’ who was Protestant – meaning Mary – the bill now introduced left the matter vague. After being modified in committee it once again specified that after James had been bypassed, the line of succession would carry on unaltered, but from Mary and Anne’s point of view the earlier ambiguity on this point was an ominous development.
As it was, the bill did not become law, for after passing the House of Commons without a division, it was thrown out by the Lords. In January the King dissolved Parliament and announced that a new one would meet in Oxford in the spring.
While the Duke of York was in Scotland, a suitor appeared on the scene for the Lady Anne. This was Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, who like Anne was a great grandchild of King James I. He was the son of the Duke of Hanover and his wife Sophia, the youngest daughter of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. By the spring of 1680 he was already being ‘much talked of for a husband for Lady Anne’, and in many ways he seemed an ideal choice, as he was ‘a Protestant, very young, gallant and handsome and indifferent rich’. One English diplomat described it as the ‘more fit match for her of any prince I know in Christendom’.
Sophia’s brother, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, lived in England, and in January 1680 he had set things in motion by writing to tell his sister that he had been approached about a marriage between George and Anne. ‘All the realm would like it, so think about it’, he urged her. Sophia and her husband were slightly sceptical that the ‘fine things’ her brother promised of the marriage would actually materialise, but they were ready to give it serious consideration. Later that year Prince George went on a European tour, and arrived in England on 6 December. The King was very welcoming, providing him with apartments at Whitehall. The next day Prince George was introduced to Anne, and ‘saluted her by kissing her with the consent of the King’. Since the Prince did not leave the country until 11 March 1681, he almost certainly saw Anne on other occasions, but with James absent and the monarchy in crisis there could be no question of concluding anything. Even after George Ludwig’s departure, however, the idea of a union was by no means abandoned, and an Italian diplomat stationed in England believed that Anne had fallen in love with the Prince.
On 21 March 1681 Parliament met at Oxford. To avoid a complete rupture, the King offered a series of ‘expedients’ designed to safeguard the kingdom if his brother inherited the crown. James would become King in name, but would be declared unfit to rule. A regency would be set up to govern the country, with William and Mary installed as joint protectors of the realm. Despite bearing the title of King, James would be banished from his own dominions during his lifetime. Even these far-reaching proposals failed to satisfy the Commons. Instead they introduced another Bill of Exclusion, and disquietingly it once again failed to name a successor.
Charles was not prepared to accept this, and without warning dissolved Parliament a week after it had opened. The failure to reach a settlement, thought by some to presage disaster, marked the start of a royal recovery.
Bolstered by skilful financial management and payments from Louis XIV, with whom he had negotiated a secret agreement, Charles was able to survive without summoning another Parliament. By late May a royal adviser reported that ‘his majesty’s position has improved considerably since the dissolution’,
but the King did not yet feel sufficiently confident to bring his brother back to England. Instead he agreed that Anne could join her father. In March, her little sister Isabella had died, leaving both her parents desolate. Being reunited with Anne would, it was hoped, afford some consolation.
Anne went by sea, arriving at Edinburgh on 17 July, accompanied by a sizeable suite. At Holyrood Palace her father and stepmother kept ‘almost as great a court as at Whitehall’, shocking some Scots by giving balls and masquerades at which, allegedly, ‘promiscuous dancing’ took place. Riding, playing cards, and being ‘often with the Duchess’ left Anne with little time to write letters to friends such as Frances Apsley. Theatrical entertainments also kept her busy. After seeing his daughter and four of the maids of honour who had accompanied her give a performance of Mithridates to celebrate Mary Beatrice’s birthday in November, James reported proudly that all ‘did their parts very well, and they were very well dressed, so that they made a very fine show, and such a one as had not been seen in this country before’.
Despite the ‘gaiety and brilliancy of the court of Holyrood House’, they still felt homesick. In a letter to Frances Apsley, Anne said she hoped she would be reunited with her before too long, ‘though God and the King only knows when’. In the meantime, she asked Frances to ‘write me all the news you know, send me the Gazette and other printed papers that are good’.
In March 1682 James was allowed back to England for what was meant to be a short visit, but once there he was able to persuade the King that he should bring his wife and daughter home. James set sail on 3 May and only narrowly avoided drowning after his ship was wrecked with great loss of life, but he survived and was able to collect Anne and Mary Beatrice. They all sailed back to England in the aptly named Happy Return, reaching London on 27 May. James declared cheerfully that from now on ‘We will fix ourselves in this country, as we have travelled quite enough during the last three years’.
The outlook for the monarchy became so much better that within a few months James triumphantly informed Prince William of Orange ‘That seditious and turbulent party now lose ground every day’.
Charles had struck at his opponents in various ways, such as cancelling town charters, purging the judiciary and magistracy, and interfering with the urban electoral franchise. A combination of subsidies from France and increased customs revenue meant that the King could avoid summoning Parliaments, denying his enemies an arena in which to voice opposition. Having successfully resolved the political crisis, Charles now felt able to turn his attention to arranging a marriage for his niece Anne.
In August 1682 Prince Rupert renewed his match-making efforts on behalf of Anne and Prince George Ludwig of Hanover. He wrote his sister Sophia another letter on the subject of the ‘marriage in question’, telling her that ‘as for the young lady, I assure you she is intelligent and very well brought up’. By the end of the month Rupert reported that he had secured what he considered to be excellent terms, with the Duke of York offering to give Anne a dowry of £40,000 and an income of £10,000 a year. However, George Ludwig’s parents were simultaneously engaged in negotiations to marry their son to his first cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. The girl’s mother was not of royal birth, but Sophia of Hanover was mindful that ‘Miss Hyde’s lineage was no better’, and the Celle match was politically and financially advantageous.
The news of Prince George’s betrothal to Sophia Dorothea arrived in England early in September 1682, whereupon King Charles took ‘some exception’ at being ‘disappointed in our expectation of having the Prince of Hanover for the Lady Anne’. A British diplomat stationed in Hanover considered this unreasonable, as the negotiations for Anne’s hand had remained on an informal footing. He pointed out that ‘there never was any proposals made of either side’, but this envoy had other motives: he was about to be posted to another country, and he did not want to be forbidden from receiving the generous presents customarily given to departing envoys.
It would be alleged that Anne herself never forgot the ‘supposed slight’ of being spurned by Prince George Ludwig of Hanover. One account suggested that she had been offended because he had come to England with a view to marrying her and then ‘not liking her person he left the kingdom’. In fact, it was duty not desire that had led the Prince away from Anne: his mother noted he would ‘marry a cripple if he could serve the house’, while he felt a private ‘repugnance’ at the prospect of marrying Sophia Dorothea.
Conceivably, however, Anne did gain some inkling that George Ludwig’s parents did not consider her birth to be sufficiently illustrious, and this would hardly have made her better disposed to the House of Hanover.
It is possible too that the collapse of the marriage plan did cause her some pain. A letter from George to Prince Rupert’s mistress Peg Hughes suggests that she had been teasing him about Anne, telling him that he would do well to marry a girl who was so keen on him. After becoming engaged he wrote to Peg thanking her for the advice but saying that it was no longer possible for him to follow it. He continued stolidly,
I have never really been aware of the intentions of Madam the Princess Anne, and I do not know them now … It’s true that I recall you talked to me of her on several occasions, but as I took that as a joke I paid no attention. However you may be sure, Madam, that no one could be more the servitor of Madam the Princess than I, and the marriage I am about to make will not hinder that.
In the long term, Anne had no cause to regret the failure of the Hanover match. Her own later marriage to Prince George of Denmark was a source of great happiness, and was certainly more successful than George of Hanover’s union, which ended after his wife’s lover was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Having divorced Sophia Dorothea, George imprisoned her for life; as Queen, Anne would be dragged into the affair when Sophia Dorothea’s mother vainly appealed to her to secure her daughter’s freedom.
In autumn 1682, with her future still uncertain, Anne became involved in an embarrassing scandal. At the end of October the Earl of Mulgrave was expelled from court and deprived of his official posts and army regiment for ‘writing to the Lady Anne’. Mulgrave was a thirty-four-year-old rake whose arrogance had earned him the nickname ‘Haughty’. He prided himself on being ‘the terror of husbands’, and two years before this he had been sent to Tangier in a leaky boat for behaving too amorously towards the King’s mistresses. How far matters had gone between him and Anne was a matter for speculation. There was fanciful talk of a secret marriage, but Mulgrave himself insisted that his crime was ‘only ogling’. Others were sure he ‘had often presented her with songs and letters under hand’, and that the King had confiscated one compromising document. It was whispered too that Mulgrave had made ‘brisk attempts’ on Anne’s virtue and some thought he had gone ‘so far as to spoil her marrying to anybody else’.
The French ambassador reported that Mulgrave’s disgrace was ‘as complete as it ever can be in this country’. It turned out not to be permanent, for having been awarded another regiment in 1684 he was made Lord Chamberlain a few months after James II’s accession. At the time, however, the episode not only exposed Anne to humiliation but was potentially very damaging. ‘Extraordinary rumours are current about this affair’ Louis XIV was told by his ambassador, and unflattering verses mocking Anne and Mulgrave were soon in circulation. One anonymous rhyme sneered that
‘Naughty Nan
Is mad to marry Haughty’.
For young women and girls the Restoration court was ‘a perilous climate … to breathe in’. In some ways it was a place of astonishingly lax morals. The sexual habits of the King and the Duke of York were widely emulated by rakes and libertines who looked ‘on the maids of honour as playthings’. One young lady in the Duchess of York’s household complained of ‘the impunity with which they attack our innocence’, but the same latitude was not extended to women. Even minor transgressions could result in disgrace and ruin, and their virtue was compromised by the merest hint of scandal. The Marquis of Halifax warned his daughter ‘It will not be enough for you to keep yourself free from any criminal engagements; for if you do that which either raises hopes or createth discourse, there is a spot thrown upon your good name … Your reputation … may be deeply wounded, though your conscience is unconcerned’.
Judged by these criteria, Anne had opened herself to censure.
Halifax cautioned his daughter that other women would be the first to criticise if she found herself in trouble, and certainly Anne’s sister Mary made a meal of her tribulations. When Frances Apsley (by this time a married woman herself) wrote to Holland to inform her of the scandal, Mary professed herself aghast. ‘For my part I never knew what it was to be so vexed and troubled’ she declared, adding, ‘Not but that I believe my sister very innocent; however, I am so nice upon the point of reputation that it makes me mad she should be exposed to such reports, and now what will not this insolent man say, being provoked?’
Another ramification of the affair was that Mrs Mary Cornwallis, of the Duchess of York’s Bedchamber – who was said to be ‘in great favour with the Princess Anne’ – was dismissed from her post and ‘ordered never to come into her presence more’. The French ambassador assumed that Mrs Cornwallis had acted as Anne’s confidante, and that ‘there had been a secret correspondence between her and Milord Mulgrave’. However, there might have been other reasons behind her dismissal. Mrs Cornwallis was a Catholic, and Bishop Compton reportedly voiced fears at the Council table ‘of the dangerous consequence such a woman’s being about the princess might have’. Much later the Duchess of Marlborough insinuated that there had been additional grounds for concern. She described Mrs Cornwallis as Anne’s ‘first favourite’ and noted that ‘the fondness of the young lady to her was very great and passionate’. The Duchess recounted that over the past three or four years ‘Lady Anne had written … above a thousand letters full of the most violent professions of everlasting kindness’, to this favoured companion, adding that King Charles ‘used to say “No man ever loved his mistress, as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis”’. Having thus implied that there had been something perverted about Anne’s affection for Mrs Cornwallis, the Duchess went on to suggest that the episode provided evidence of Anne’s inherent disloyalty. She observed that despite her ostensible ‘tenderness and passion’ for her female friend, Anne’s only gesture of solidarity was ‘sending a footman once or twice to desire [Mrs Cornwallis] to stand at her window’ so Anne could glimpse her as she went to walk in Hyde Park. Within a fortnight she ‘seemed as perfectly to have forgot this woman as if she had never heard of her’.
Anne wrote to Mary in Holland of her distress at being forced to part with her friend, but she received scant sympathy. Mary confided to Frances Apsley, ‘Had I known of the friendship at first I should have done all I could in the world to have broke it off, but I never knew anything … till such time as she was forbid when I heard it from my sister herself, and was very much surprised and troubled to find her concern as great’. She asked Frances to inform her if Anne formed another unsuitable connection ‘that I may endeavour to stop it … for I think nothing more prejudicial to a young woman than ill company’. It appeared that Mary now believed it was incumbent on her to monitor Anne’s friendships, an idea that would later lead to serious trouble.
The Mulgrave affair had underlined the desirability of finding a husband for Anne, now aged eighteen. The problem was that not many suitable Protestant princes were available. The King knew it would be almost suicidally provocative to follow up one adviser’s suggestion that Anne be married to Louis XIV’s cousin, the Catholic Prince de la Roche sur Yon, but Charles did want to match her with someone agreeable to Louis. In recent years there had been a diplomatic realignment as the King and the Duke of York had grown disenchanted with Prince William of Orange, whom they suspected of favouring exclusion. Instead Charles had accepted financial aid from the French King that enabled him to live without Parliament and acquiesced in his aggressive foreign policy.
Prince George of Denmark, younger brother of King Christian V of Denmark, was a suitor likely to meet with Louis XIV’s approval, because Denmark was an ally of France, and on poor terms with Holland. A distant cousin of Anne – who, like him, was a great grandchild of King Frederick II of Denmark – this George was nearly twelve years older than her. He had been ‘educated in a Prince-like manner’ and when only sixteen had impressed one diplomat with his ‘well grounded acquaintance with several sciences’. Unfortunately a harsh tutor had permanently dented his confidence. After struggling, when very young, to sustain a conversation with Sophia of Hanover, he explained he had been ‘brought up in so much fear that he could not rid himself of’ his shyness. She nevertheless concluded that he had ‘a very good nature and will not lack judgement’, and thought he would make a fine husband.
In 1668, aged fifteen, Prince George of Denmark had embarked on a European tour, visiting Holland, France, England, and Italy. When in England he was received at court by Charles II and the Queen, although he would not have seen Anne as she was in France at the time. He returned to Copenhagen in 1670, and a few years later ‘gained much reputation’ when he fought in the war between Denmark and Sweden. Having commanded part of the Danish army at Landskrona in 1676, the following year ‘he greatly hazarded his royal person and signalised his valour’ by saving his brother’s life at the Battle of Lunden. When peace returned to Europe he went travelling again, but his future remained unclear. In 1674 he had been talked of as a possible King of Poland, but the Poles had rejected him because he was a Lutheran, and alternative career opportunities were far from numerous. The Elector Palatine commented after meeting George that he did not envy ‘the fate of a brother of a King with children’, although he thought that George probably did not realise how bleak the outlook was.
It could be assumed that George would regard marriage to the English King’s niece as an enticing prospect. The French ambassador to England, Barrillon, played Cupid by putting George’s name forward as a husband for Anne in February 1683. The King received the idea warmly, and James too was enthusiastic, as this would undermine the Prince of Orange’s position in England. In March Barrillon reported that the English were ‘waiting impatiently’ for the Danes to make overtures on George’s behalf, and within a few weeks Charles II’s Secretary of State, the Earl of Sunderland, was discussing terms with the Danish envoy, the Sieur de Lente. By the end of April matters were far enough advanced for the Danes to be told that George’s lack of wealth was not a problem, as Anne would be provided with money for his upkeep. The only hitch came when the Sieur de Lente sounded out Barrillon as to whether the King could be prevailed upon to alter the succession in George’s favour by disqualifying William of Orange from inheriting the crown. Barrillon replied that at the present juncture the King was doing everything possible to preserve intact the hereditary succession, so it would be most inopportune to try and modify it in this way.
On 3 May the Danes made a formal proposal, which was ‘very well received’. Later that day it was publicly announced that the King ‘had admitted of a proposal of marriage between Prince George and his niece, for which purpose he was coming over’. Until this point even the majority of the Council had been kept in ignorance of the negotiations, for fear they would oppose the match. A portrait of Anne was sent to Denmark for George to inspect prior to setting out, and possibly Anne was shown a painting of George too. Even if she had not liked what she saw, there was little she could have done, for when it came to marriage a princess could not realistically expect to have any account taken of her preferences. In one respect, however, Anne was fortunate. It was agreed that George would ‘live and keep his court in England’, freeing Anne from the necessity of starting life anew in a foreign country.
It was settled that Anne and George would receive an annual income of £20,000, comprising £10,000 a year from the King and the remainder from her father. This was to be supplemented by George’s own revenues, which derived from lands confiscated from the Duke of Holstein and conferred on him at the end of the last war between Denmark and Sweden. The income was estimated at £15,000, but rarely yielded so much in practice. As a wedding present the King also conferred on his niece the grant of the Cockpit lodgings at Whitehall, ensuring that she and her new husband were comfortably accommodated.
The news of Anne’s forthcoming marriage was not universally well received. Some people expressed concern that George was a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist, but, according to Gilbert Burnet, the main reason the marriage ‘did not at all please the nation’ was that ‘we knew that the proposition came from France’. The French, meanwhile, congratulated themselves on having arranged a match designed ‘to imbue the Prince of Orange with bitter distress and to put a curb on the Dutch’.
As expected, Prince William of Orange was duly ‘filled with consternation’ when his father-in-law informed him that the Danish proposal had been accepted. Quite apart from the unfavourable political implications, he knew Prince George and considered him a dolt, and had no desire to have him as a brother-in-law. William at once requested permission to come to England, but since it was clear that his object was to avert the marriage, he was told that a visit would not be convenient at this point. William had to settle for writing to his uncle Charles, warning of the perils of letting French power go unchecked, but the King felt free to ignore this. Charles was equally unimpressed when he was informed that William had been enraged to learn that as the son of a king, Prince George would take precedence over him at the English court. William was told there could be no question of modifying the rules in his favour, whereupon his emissary declared that he would never come to England while George was there.
Some people concluded that Louis XIV’s whole object in arranging this marriage was to match Anne with a prince who would not ‘be able ever to prejudice him or strengthen the Protestant interest’. However, as the Duke of Ormonde pointed out, France and Denmark would not necessarily remain allies forever. In his view it was undeniably ‘time the lady should be married and … fit she should have a Protestant, and where to find one so readily, they that mislike this match cannot tell’. And indeed, in time Prince George grew ‘strongly opposed’ to the power of France. After Charles II’s death he even criticised the late King for having been too much in pocket of Louis XIV.
Having been urged by King Charles to come to England without delay, George set out as soon as the terms of the marriage contract had been outlined to him, arriving on 19 July. He found England in a state of alert, for a ‘horrid conspiracy’ had recently been thwarted. Various notables had planned to stage risings in different parts of the country, while a subset of extremists had actually proposed to assassinate the King. Consequently the atmosphere at court was somewhat strained, and ‘his majesty very melancholic and not stirring without redoubled guards’. On 13 July Lord Russell had been tried and found guilty of treason, and another suspect, Lord Essex, had committed suicide in the Tower. The day after Prince George’s arrival in England several minor figures in the plot were executed, and Lord Russell’s black-draped scaffold was being constructed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, ready for his execution on 21 July.
It hardly formed the ideal backdrop to a royal wedding celebration.
After landing Prince George was taken to meet the King, the Duke of York and their respective wives. ‘From thence he waited on the Lady Anne’ at St James’s Palace where he ‘saluted her cheek’ with a kiss. One observer declared that the ‘handsome fresh coloured young prince’ made a good impression on all he encountered. ‘I think nobody could please better and more universally in one afternoon than he hath done’ declared an enthusiast, and another approving report described George as ‘a very comely person, fair hair, a few pock holes in his visage, but of very decent and graceful behaviour’. Others were more guarded. John Evelyn summed him up as having ‘the Danish countenance, blond, a young gentleman of few words, spake French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy’. The French ambassador, who should have been basking in his diplomatic triumph, was very sparing in his praise. ‘His person has nothing shocking about it, he appears sensible and reserved’, was his initial tepid comment. A little later he added that George struck people as ‘neither good nor bad, but he is a bit fat’.
On 23 July Anne and George went to the theatre and sat in one box together. Over the next few days they got to know one another better, with Anne informing Frances Apsley ‘the Prince stays with me every day from dinner to prayers’. After prayers, they would see one another again until the time came for Anne to go to Whitehall to play cards. On the strength of this brief acquaintance Anne was able to form a positive opinion of her prospective bridegroom, and the day before the wedding Frances Apsley wrote to Mary to let her know. Mary replied ‘You may believe ’twas no small joy to me to hear she liked him and I hope she will do so every day more and more, for else I am sure she can’t love him, and without that ’tis impossible to be happy’.
The wedding took place on 28 July 1683 at St James’s. It was a muted affair, as the King had said ‘he did not want any pomp and ceremony’. The service was performed by Bishop Compton, and was attended only by Anne’s immediate family. Afterwards the King and Queen were guests of honour at the wedding supper, and stayed at St James’s till the couple were bedded. It is not recorded if Charles showed the same exuberance as he had on William and Mary’s wedding night, when he had drawn the bed curtains with a lusty cry of ‘Now nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’
Almost immediately the royal family left London for their summer holidays, and the newlyweds accompanied them to Windsor. After a time they moved on to Winchester, where the King was planning to build a great palace. As Queen, Anne had hopes of bringing this project to conclusion, but it was never finished. In Hampshire she and George had a bucolic honeymoon, during which Anne enjoyed buck and hare hunting.
Afterwards, the court continued on a westward progress, stopping to see Salisbury Cathedral and Wilton. They then sailed along a stretch of the South coast on the royal yacht before returning to London via Winchester.
Back in the capital, Anne and George moved into the suite of rooms allocated them at the Cockpit in Whitehall. This was part of a complex of buildings situated on the western side of King Street, spanned by Whitehall Palace. As its name suggested, Henry VIII had built it as an arena for cock fights, but it had long since been converted into lodgings for favoured courtiers. It was a spacious and luxurious apartment, measuring 210 feet in length and 140 feet at its widest part, and overlooked St James’s Park. The King had paid £6,500 to buy back the lease from its most recent occupant, and then conferred it in perpetuity on ‘Lady Anne … and … her heirs male’ in return for a peppercorn rent of 6s. 8d.
As Anne and George settled down to married life together, it soon became apparent that they were remarkably compatible. With the sole exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, everyone agreed that they were an exceptionally devoted couple. Twenty-five years later it was said at George’s funeral, ‘Never did a happier pair come together’. Anne was described as ‘an extraordinarily tender and affectionate wife’ while George ‘lived in all respects the happiest with his princess that was possible’. George was so notable for his marital fidelity, ‘a virtue … not often to be found in courts in these degenerate and licentious ages’, that it was said that envy itself would ‘bear witness to the chastity and entire love of this most happy pair’. He and Anne had an admirable ‘conformity of humour, preferring privacy and a retired life to high society and grand entertainments’. They were both (as Anne herself put it) ‘poor in words’, but with each other they were completely at ease. At a time when some aristocratic husbands and wives led virtually separate existences Anne and George were unusual for their companionable way of life. One observer noted ‘The Prince and she use to spend extraordinary much time together in conversation daily, scarce any occurrent can cause an intermission’.
George was an amiable and undemanding man. ‘Blessed from heaven with … a mild and sweet temper’, he was ‘mighty easy to all his servants’ and invariably ‘affable and kind in … his addresses’. At a time when men were entitled to act as domestic tyrants, he was a particularly easy-going husband, permitting himself, in the opinion of some people, to be ‘entirely governed’ by his wife. His conciliatory disposition was so well known that when Anne and her sister Mary fell out after the Revolution, Sophia of Hanover had no doubt that George bore no responsibility for the rift. Only the Duchess of Marlborough stuck a discordant note, alleging that Anne loved the Prince less than commonly supposed, and that he had a spiteful side. According to her ‘His great employment, when he was not engaged in play, was to stand upon a stair head or at a window and make ill natured remarks upon all that passed by. And this became so remarkable that the Princess was often known to be uneasy at the figure his highness made whilst he was entertaining himself with so princely an amusement’.
George came to look on England as ‘my native country … by the most endearing tie become so’, and developed into ‘so hardy an Englishman that it was visible to all who were about him’. He acquired a reputation for being ‘the most indolent of all mankind’, but he did enjoy country sports such as hunting and shooting. Unfortunately he was not active enough to counter his tendency to plumpness. On his arrival Charles had advised him ‘Walk with me, hunt with my brother and do justice to my niece and you will not be fat’, but though Anne’s numerous pregnancies show that George conscientiously carried out the last injunction, this did not prevent him becoming alarmingly overweight.
One reason for this was that he was a heavy drinker, even for the time. During Anne’s reign he was summarised as a man who was ‘very fat, loves news, his bottle and the Queen’. His prodigious intake of alcohol does not seem to have soured his temper, but neither did it make him particularly convivial. The Duchess of Marlborough stated that Charles II had hoped to ‘discover of what he was made, in the way of drinking; but declared upon the experiment that he could compare him to nothing but a great jar or vessel, standing still and receiving unmoved and undisturbed so much liquor whenever it came to its turn’. Lord Dartmouth recorded a similar anecdote of George, writing that King Charles had told his father ‘he had tried him, drunk and sober, but “God’s fish! There was nothing in him”’. It would have wounded George had he heard this, for he admired Charles as a shrewd politician. After his death he often approvingly quoted the late King’s maxims, fortunately without realising that he himself was the subject of one of Charles’s most celebrated aphorisms.
Prior to George’s coming to England, Charles had told some courtiers that ‘on enquiry he appeared to be … a quiet man, which was a very good thing in a young man’. George certainly appreciated a restful existence. Soon after his arrival he wrote fretfully that the court would soon be on the move, whereas ‘sitting still all summer … was the height of my ambition. God send me a quiet life somewhere, for I shall not be long able to bear this perpetual motion’. His inertia led people to dismiss him as dull, stupid, and lazy, though possibly he was underestimated because he never acquired a perfect grasp of English. Bishop Burnet noted that George ‘knew much more than he could well express; for he spoke acquired languages ill and ungracefully’. Not everyone dismissed his intellect as negligible: a German diplomat who encountered him shortly before Anne’s accession reported that George had been lucid when discussing state affairs, ‘about which he appeared to me to be very knowledgeable’. He added that although George did not meddle in politics ‘he gave me to understand that he was very particularly informed of all that happened and very curious to know everything about the disputes between the two parties’. A French ambassador also paid tribute to George in 1686, noting that although he appeared ‘ponderous … he has very good sense’.
Anne herself was always furious if people were dismissive of her husband and had a touching faith in his abilities.
Initially George hoped to prove himself by occupying an important post. When the marriage terms were being negotiated the Danish envoy had suggested to Barrillon, the French ambassador, that the Prince should be made Lord High Admiral. Barrillon had made it clear this was out of the question, but said that in time George would surely be given a prestigious job. This never materialised. Although George was made a Knight of the Garter in 1684, he was not given a place on the Privy Council. When he proposed sending a personal emissary to see Louis XIV, the idea was quashed on the grounds ‘he should not think of becoming a figure in his own right’.
During William and Mary’s reign George became resentful when his merits were overlooked and, in the Duchess of Marlborough’s sarcastic words, ‘took it exceedingly to heart that his great accomplishments had never yet raised him above pity or contempt’.
In his early years in England, however, he accepted his nondescript status without protest.
The Princess Anne of Denmark, as she was officially styled, was now in a position to perform a favour to Frances Apsley, her old friend. Frances had married a former financier (rudely described by a critic as an ‘old city sponger’) named Sir Benjamin Bathurst, and had written to the Princess begging that her husband might be given a post in her establishment. Anne wrote back to assure Frances that she could still rely on ‘your Ziphares, for though he changes his condition yet nothing shall ever alter him from being the same to his dear Semandra that he ever was’.
She applied to her father and was granted permission to appoint Bathurst as Treasurer of her Household.
Anne had to accept ‘a person very disagreeable to her’ as her First Lady of the Bedchamber. This was her aunt the Countess of Clarendon, who was imposed upon her by another of her Hyde relations, the Earl of Rochester. He insisted that his sister-in-law was given this prestigious position, even though ‘she was not a likely woman to please a young princess’. The Countess was ‘very learned but … she had such an awkward stiffness it greatly disgusted the Princess’. However, Anne was permitted to exercise some choice over the appointment of her Second Lady of the Bedchamber. Initially her father and Rochester had wanted the post to be awarded to Lady Thanet but the Princess ‘begged she might not have her’, having conceived a desperate longing to appoint the woman who had now become her greatest friend.
Anne had known Sarah Jennings since 1673 when she had come to court to be one of the Duchess of York’s maids of honour. After she had been at court a couple of years Sarah began to be courted by an army officer who was ten years older than her, named John Churchill. Prior to this he had been garrisoned in Tangier, had fought in the war against Holland, and served for some months in the French army after England made peace with the Dutch. As the brother of the Duke of York’s mistress, Arabella Churchill, he had opportunities, being ‘a very smooth man, made for a court’, to ingratiate himself with James. After being appointed one of James’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber in 1673, Churchill became his Master of the Robes four years later, and by 1680 was described as ‘ye only favourite of his master’.
With the patronage of the Duke of York, he went from being a Lieutenant Colonel of the Duke of York’s regiment in 1675 to senior brigadier three years later. He was not, however, a wealthy man, and his hopes of marrying Sarah Jennings had initially seemed slight as his parents had been determined to match him with an heiress. It was only when Sarah’s brother died, improving her own financial expectations, that this difficulty was resolved. With the encouragement of the Duchess of York the couple were able to marry, probably in late 1677. It was a love match on both sides, and though in subsequent years Sarah would test his patience to an extraordinary degree, her husband’s devotion to her never wavered.
John Churchill accompanied the Duke of York on many of his travels, and when possible his wife went with him, so she and Anne saw a lot of one another over the years. Sarah was in Brussels when Anne visited her father in 1679, and they were also together in Scotland in late 1681. However it does not seem to have been until after the Mulgrave affair and the sacking of Mary Cornwallis that Anne became really attached to Sarah. When Sarah had a second daughter in February 1683 Anne accepted an invitation to become godmother to the child, who was named after her. The following month John Churchill (who had been created Lord Churchill in December 1682) informed his wife ‘Lady Anne asks for you very often, so that I think you would do well if you writ to her to thank her for her kindness in enquiring after your health’.
Sarah was truly an extraordinary woman. As a boy the actor Colley Cibber was transfixed when he caught sight of her in 1688, becoming utterly enraptured by ‘so clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect’. With her red-gold hair, she was physically dazzling, and she also radiated vitality. She was not well educated, and said herself that throughout her youth she ‘never read, nor employed my time in anything but playing at cards’ but, even so, her mind was her most singular feature. She had an alert intelligence and a lacerating wit, and though her humour was always abrasive, it was undeniably entertaining to those who were not objects of her scorn. Endowed with what she called ‘a very great sprightliness and cheerfulness of nature, joined with a true taste for conversation’,
she had a gift for memorable expressions, coupled with utter confidence in her opinions. In time her outspokenness and her inability to see things from other people’s point of view would become destructive, but to Anne at this point Sarah’s vibrancy and exuberance seemed supremely attractive qualities. Despite the fact that their personalities could hardly have been more different, Anne found herself irresistibly drawn to this self-assured and dynamic woman.
It appears that it was Sarah herself who suggested to a delighted Anne that she should become her lady-in-waiting. The Princess was already so slavishly devoted to Sarah that she wrote humbly thanking her ‘for your kindness in offering it’ and assuring her ‘’tis no trouble to me to obey your commands’. Knowing that she had to secure her father’s consent to the appointment, she urged Sarah to ‘pray for success and assure your self that whatever lies in my power shall not be wanting’. Since Lord Churchill was in such favour with the Duke of York, one might have thought that the Duke would have had no objection to Sarah’s advancement, but unfortunately James was taking advice from the Earl of Rochester about who should have the place. Sarah said that Rochester wanted ‘one … that would be entirely obedient to him’ in the household, ‘which he had experienced I would not be’ and therefore he and his wife ‘did all they could to hinder’ her appointment.
When it appeared that she would not be able to give Sarah the position, Anne grew distraught. She sent Sarah a letter that was almost incoherent with emotion, imploring her not to blame her for the setback. ‘Oh dear Lady Churchill’, she wrote frantically, ‘let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it because I gave you my word so often that I would never give my consent to any, no more I have not, but have said all that was possible for one to say’. Anne explained that she had delayed telling Sarah how gloomy the outlook appeared because
I was yet in hopes that I might prevail with the Duke, and I will try once more, be he never so angry; but oh, do not let this take away your kindness from me, for I assure you ’tis the greatest trouble in the world to me and I am sure you have not a faithfuller friend on earth nor that loves you better than I do; my eyes are full, I cannot say a word more.
She became even more agitated when she heard that Sarah was about to go to Windsor, leaving her behind, and protested ‘this cruel disappointment is too much to be borne without the loss of your company’. Anne’s next letter, however, brought better news, for, as she had promised, she had raised the matter again with her father, and this time won him over. Jubilantly Anne reported, ‘The Duke came just as you were gone and made no difficulties but has promised me that I shall have you, which I assure you is a great joy to me’.
As Anne’s Second Lady of the Bedchamber Sarah received a modest salary of £200 a year, but the real value of the position lay in Anne’s assurance to her that she would be ‘ready at any time to do you all the service that lies in my power’. Sarah admitted that she cultivated the relationship with great care, and ‘now began to employ all her wit, all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert and entertain and serve the Princess’. She succeeded triumphantly, for Anne’s liking for her ‘quickly became a passion, and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid’. Being with Sarah afforded her such intense delight that Anne begrudged letting her out of her sight. One account of their relationship based on Sarah’s own reminiscences described how ‘They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of a tedious, lifeless state … This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. [The Princess] used to say She desired to possess her wholly and could hardly bear that [Sarah] should ever escape … into any other company’.
In retrospect Sarah claimed that the hours she spent closeted with Anne were ‘a confinement indeed for her’ and even stated that Anne’s ‘extremely tedious’ company ensured that she would ‘rather have been in a dungeon’ than with her mistress. Since Anne was not naturally talkative, Sarah had to work hard to keep the conversation flowing, but Sarah also complained that anything the Princess did have to say was characterised by ‘an insipid heaviness’. Sarah was nevertheless careful to hide from the Princess that she found her a bore. Anne was led to believe that even if her passion for Sarah was not reciprocated in full, neither was it completely unrequited. One of Anne’s earliest letters to her friend refers to ‘poor me (who you say you love)’. In 1706, four years after Anne’s accession to the throne, Sarah wrote to her, reminding her of the ‘passion and tenderness’ she had ‘once had’ for Anne.
Anne once protested ‘’tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart’; on another occasion she declared ‘If I writ whole volumes I could never express how well I love you’. She insisted that ‘Nothing can ever alter me’, and that her ‘kindness’ for Sarah could ‘never end but with my life’. Years later, once it had emerged that Anne had overstated the immutability of her love, Sarah noted bitterly, ‘Such vows … strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards’.
The Princess submitted to frequent separations to enable Sarah to spend time at her own house at St Albans and to be with her husband when he was waiting on the Duke of York. ‘This absence … though be it never so short, it will appear a great while to me’, Anne declared when Sarah was away. She consoled herself by keeping in touch by letter, saying it constituted her ‘greatest pleasure’. Sarah later complained that Anne’s letters were never interesting, even if ‘enlivened with a few passionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough’. At the time, however, Sarah was more appreciative, delighting Anne by being ‘so kind [as] to be satisfied with my dull letters’. Anne herself conceded ‘I am the worst in the world at invention’, but since Sarah encouraged her to write to her at length the Princess was able to convince herself that her letters were welcome.
Anne admitted that there was something compulsive about the way she wrote so frequently to her friend, sometimes more than once a day. ‘You will think me mad, I believe, for troubling you so often’, she told Sarah apologetically, but despite acknowledging that her behaviour was slightly odd, she expected prompt replies to every letter, notwithstanding the burden it placed on her friend. The Princess explained, ‘If I could tell how to hinder myself from writing to you every day I would, that you need not be at the trouble of writing so often to me, because you say it does you hurt, but really I cannot … for when I am from you I cannot be at ease without enquiring after you’. She would declare petulantly that unless she received a letter the next morning ‘I shall conclude with reason that I am quite forgot and ne’er trouble you any more with my dull letters’.
Anne asked Sarah to show her letters to nobody else, but Sarah insisted that hers to Anne were destroyed. As a result we do not know the tenor of her replies. Sarah later encouraged the assumption that they were more restrained in tone than Anne’s effusions, but this is open to question. Towards the end of her life Anne told a third party that Sarah ‘wrote to me as [I] used to do to her’.
The Princess accepted that Sarah’s strongest feelings were reserved for her husband, and she let it be understood that the same applied to her and George. When telling Sarah that she had ‘no greater satisfaction’ than being in her company she qualified this by saying that this was ‘next [to] being with the Prince’. However her love for George hardly had the same needy intensity that characterised her relationship with Sarah. Although she missed him when they were apart, she bore his absence with an equanimity that was lacking during separations from Sarah.
If Anne did not contest that Churchill took priority over her in Sarah’s eyes, she nevertheless claimed ‘the little corner of your heart that my Lord Churchill has left empty’. Believing herself entitled to ‘possession of the second place’, she was reluctant to share it with other women, but to her distress found herself contending with ‘a great many rivals’ who vied with her for Sarah’s attention. Anne’s jealousy and resentment of these ladies who were ‘more entertaining than I can ever pretend to be’ made her ‘sometimes fear losing what I so much value’, and would cause tension in years to come.
Sarah would later assert that Anne very early in their relationship sought to eliminate the awkwardness arising from the disparity in rank between them by proposing that they adopt pen names when corresponding with one another. In fact the arrangement whereby they referred to each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman only came into being about two or three years after the 1688 Revolution. Before that Anne invariably addressed Sarah as ‘my dear Lady Churchill’, and Sarah’s style towards her remained markedly deferential. By September 1684 Anne was uneasy enough about this to entreat Sarah ‘not to call me your Highness at every word, but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another’, but Sarah was very cautious about taking up her offer. The following July the Princess again protested at Sarah’s ‘calling me at every three words your Highness’. Yet even when Anne insisted, ‘Ceremony is a thing you know I hate with anybody and especially with you’, Sarah would not abandon the formal tone. She affected to believe that Anne had been joking when she had urged her to be less mindful of etiquette, and a few months later Anne felt impelled to tell her friend, ‘I hope you are not so unjust to me as to believe … that I did it to laugh at you, for I am sure … I never will be so base’.
In view of Sarah’s punctilious observance of protocol when writing to the Princess, it is surely right to be sceptical of her claim that from the very beginning of their relationship, she was always forthright with Anne. In her memoirs she boasted that having ‘laid it down for a maxim that flattery was falsehood to my trust and ingratitude to my greatest friend’, she decided that she could best serve Anne ‘by speaking the truth’. Thinking ‘it was part of flattery not to tell her everything that was in any sort amiss in her’, Sarah took pains to be ‘not only honest, but open and frank, perhaps to a fault’.
Sarah claimed that her lack of sycophancy caused no problems as Anne promised ‘never to be offended at it, but to love me the better for my frankness’. Early on in the relationship the Princess assured Sarah ‘you can never give me any greater proof of your friendship than in telling me your mind freely in all things’. Not long afterwards Anne noted appreciatively ‘I do not believe there is so much truth in anybody as there is in you’ but, in fact, it does not seem that Sarah had yet tested Anne’s devotion by being over-critical. The only indication of anything amiss between them comes in one of Anne’s first letters to Sarah, when Anne upbraids Sarah for having a groundless ‘unkind thought’ about her. She expresses incredulity that ‘my dear Lady Churchill’ could ‘be so cruel as to believe what she told me’ and begs distractedly, ‘Oh come to me tomorrow … that I may clear myself’.
According to Sarah, a major cause of tension between them had arisen just at the time she entered Anne’s employment. Sarah felt passionately that many of those arrested in the summer of 1683 for having conspired against the King had been falsely charged with treason, and she was overcome ‘with an horror and an aversion to all such arbitrary proceedings’. However it transpired that ‘these notions … [were] very disagreeable and contrary to those of her mistress’. Anne accepted that those accused were guilty, and not only approved of the death sentences meted out, but also endorsed the subsequent crackdown on ‘fanatics’ or dissenters, who were held to have been associated with the plot. It is not clear whether Lady Churchill dared remonstrate with her about this. In one account it is stated that Sarah could not keep silent on the subject as ‘it was impossible for one of her open temper not to declare, with some warmth, her real sentiments of things’. Far from reproving her lady-in-waiting for being so outspoken, Anne ‘seemed … not to be displeased with this open sincerity’. Another version of Sarah’s memoirs suggests, however, that despite being ‘sorry not to find that compassion in the breast of another person’, Sarah had been much more circumspect. She recalled, ‘All I could prevail on my self to do was to say nothing, but I could not commend and flatter and rail at the unfortunate sufferers’.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that it was not until much later in their relationship that Sarah became more confrontational in her dealings with Anne.
The Princess of Denmark was undeniably besotted with Lady Churchill. This raises the question of whether Anne was also sexually attracted to her, particularly since Sarah herself later insinuated that Anne had lesbian tendencies and had a physical relationship with her dresser, Abigail Masham. However, it never seems to have occurred to Sarah that it could be inferred from this that Anne’s passion for her had likewise been erotically charged. She clearly differentiated between her relationship with Anne in which, in her own eyes, there had been not a hint of deviancy, and Anne’s baser connection with Abigail.
