Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

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The fact that Anne and Sarah were both happily married could be seen to militate against the possibility that there was a sexual component to their relationship. Their regular pregnancies leave no room for doubt that both were sexually active with their husbands. The two of them were acutely conscious that it was part of their wifely duties to produce as many offspring as possible, and they unselfconsciously exchanged information about the likelihood that they were expecting babies.

There is much debate both as to the existence of lesbianism in seventeenth-century England and regarding the extent of awareness that women could sexually desire other women. According to the memoirs of the French Comte de Gramont, at the court of Charles II, ‘they were simple enough … never to have heard tell of such Grecian refinements in the art of love’. However, as the century progressed, imported translations of French pornography appear to have widened consciousness of lesbian eroticism. References in literature suggest that awareness of the phenomenon was growing, and with that came the notion that it was socially subversive and something to be feared. In 1667 the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle published The Convent of Love in which the heroine is horrified to find herself falling in love with a foreign princess, and fears being punished by the goddess Nature for transgressing her laws. Only when the princess is revealed as a man in disguise is the situation resolved.

It may be that women who were erotically drawn towards their own sex were able to indulge their desires without fear of detection, because men were blind to the existence of lesbian passion. A poem written for another girl at court by Anne Finch, a maid of honour to the Duchess of York, has been cited as an instance of this. In these verses the author wishes she could be transformed into a mouse (a symbol of female lust) so as to nestle unobtrusively in her friend’s bosom and enjoy her ‘soft caresses’ without been suspected by ‘jealous [male] lover’.

Whether or not the men of the period deluded themselves in imagining that women could never be their sexual rivals, it was by no means unusual for women to enjoy what has been termed ‘romantic friendships’ with one another. Because it was assumed that these relationships were platonic, this was generally condoned. In the course of what Lord Halifax called these ‘violent intimacies’ and ‘great dearnesses’ it was regarded as perfectly acceptable for women to employ endearments when addressing one another that nowadays would be considered only appropriate between lovers. For example, when Lady Shaftesbury wrote to her friend Lady Rachel Russell in 1683 she signed her letter ‘unimaginably, passionately, affectionately yours’. It is worth noting, too, that Anne was not the only female correspondent of Sarah who addressed her in impassioned terms. Lady Sunderland wrote to her on one occasion ‘I long to embrace you … I love you beyond expression’, while another letter assures Sarah that she cannot imagine ‘how full my heart is of love and tenderness for thee … I am for ever and ever my dearest with a heart flowing, tender and sincere’.

It must be stressed that during the seventeenth century, impassioned, asexual love was looked on as admirable in both sexes, and friendship was idealised. The views expressed by the sixteenth-century sage Michel de Montaigne in his essay ‘On Friendship’ were widely influential. While deploring homosexuality, he praised the kind of ‘highest friendship’ that ‘takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway’. Anne’s grandfather the Earl of Clarendon declared that friendship was ‘more a sacrament than marriage’, and John Evelyn took a similar view. He pointed out that marriage was an unequal partnership subject to law and contract, whereas a freely undertaken friendship was ‘implanted by God alone’ and hence innately virtuous. The poetess Katherine Philips, whose verses were first published three years after her death in 1664, has been called ‘the high priestess of the cult of friendship’. Her poems expressed passionate love for other women, but stressed that the bond between them was sublimely spiritual and unsullied by any carnal element. In recent years there has been much debate as to whether her poems actually had an erotic subtext, but Philips’s contemporaries never doubted her purity.

It might seem farfetched to suggest that in forming such a close attachment to Sarah, Anne was influenced by these ideas. She was not a wide reader, and nor was she closely attuned to the intellectual currents of the time. Nevertheless these theories were swirling about the court, and were so much in vogue that Anne could hardly fail to be aware of them. Certainly she had either read, or had some acquaintance with Montaigne’s essay on friendship, and regularly quoted his maxim that passing on information to a friend ‘was no breach of promise of secrecy … because it was no more than telling it to oneself’. As well as being personally drawn to Sarah, she was interested in the abstract concept of friendship. She was aware of its obligations, and eager to be bound by what a contemporary called its ‘reciprocal and eternal’ laws. She was determined that her rank should not prevent her from achieving the personal fulfilment that friendship could provide, and believed that her bond with Sarah would add an emotional richness to her life which it was unrealistic to expect from marriage. Sarah herself stressed that Anne deliberately set out to cross the boundaries that customarily isolated royalty from lesser beings. As she recalled, ‘Kings and princes for the most part imagine they have a dignity peculiar to their birth and station which ought to raise them above all connection of friendship with an inferior … The Princess had a different taste. A friend was what she most coveted, and for the sake of friendship, a relation which she did not disdain to have with me, she was fond even of that equality which she thought belonged to it’.

Having married a man to whom she was ideally suited and found a friend in Sarah, all appeared well in Anne’s life. By late 1683 she was known to be pregnant, completing the rosy picture. The pressure on her to produce an heir – preferably male – was immense. In 1680 the physician of her sister Mary (who remained childless) complained of being constantly pestered on the orders of Charles II, who wanted to know whether his niece was pregnant, ‘since the future of three crowns depended on it’. In early May 1684 the King and Queen came up to London, intending to stay until Anne was delivered, but on 12 May the Princess had a stillborn child. While this was obviously upsetting, no one could know that this would be the first of a heartbreaking sequence of miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality that Anne was fated to endure. At the time her family’s disappointment was tempered by the fact that the baby appeared to have been dead in the womb for some days, which could have endangered her own life. In Holland Mary declared that she regarded her sister’s escape as ‘almost a miracle’.

In June Anne accompanied her stepmother to Tunbridge. Mary Beatrice had herself suffered a miscarriage about the same time as Anne had lost her child, and was going to take the waters in order to aid her recovery. It was the first time that Anne had visited this fashionable spa, to which she subsequently returned on numerous occasions in hopes of increasing her fertility. On this visit, however, she did not drink the waters, as her underlying health was good. Although Tunbridge Wells was a popular resort, Anne was bored there, particularly after Sarah and George, who joined her for part of the time, left her alone with her stepmother. She was relieved when Mary Beatrice decided the waters did not agree with her and returned to court.

The rest of the summer was again spent touring southern England with the court. Towards the end of the year a rumour became current that Anne and George would go to Scotland on a visit, but when asked about this her father insisted ‘’twas never thought of’. He added happily, ‘God be thanked, she is not in a condition to make such a voyage, being four months gone with child’.