Behind the Palace Doors (22 page)

Marlborough’s disgrace should have been his wife’s as well. But just two weeks after the earl’s dismissal, Anne came prancing into court with Sarah in tow. It was an astonishing breach of etiquette and a direct insult to the king and queen. Mary was livid. “I have all the reason imaginable to look upon your bringing her as the strangest thing that was ever done,” she wrote to her sister. Not only should Anne have known better than to bring Sarah to court, the queen asserted, but it was wrong of Anne to even retain Sarah in her household. “I know what is due to me,” Mary continued, “and I expect to have it from you. ’Tis upon that account I tell you plainly, Lady Marlborough must not continue with you, in the circumstances [in which] her lord is.”

Anne had no intention of dismissing her friend, even if it meant disobeying her sovereign. In her reply to Mary, she expressed surprise that the queen had even made the demand, “for you must needs be sensible enough of the kindness I have for my Lady Marlborough, to know that a command from you to part from her must be the greatest mortification in the world to me, and, indeed, of such a nature, as I might well have hoped your kindness to me would have always prevented.”

The honorable thing for Sarah would have been to resign, which is what some of her friends urged her to do. But Sarah wouldn’t budge. There was too much to be gained from her relationship with Anne, and according to a report from the Dutch envoy, “she hopes to maintain herself in the Princess’s favor for as long as possible.” Besides, Anne would never have suffered her absence anyway. “Mrs. Freeman … must give me leave to tell her, if she should ever be so cruel to leave her faithful Mrs. Morley, she will rob her of all the joy and quiet of her life; for if that day should come, I could never enjoy a happy minute, and I swear to you I would shut myself up and never
see a creature.” Thus, Sarah remained in Anne’s service and presided over a dramatic escalation of the feud between the royal sisters.

In a rather dramatic gesture of defiance, Anne abandoned “the Cockpit,” as her apartments at Whitehall Palace were known, and absented herself from court, writing to her sister sarcastically that she was “too much indisposed to give Your Majesty any further trouble at this time.” Mary retaliated by removing Anne’s guards and decreeing that anyone who visited her sister would not be welcome at court. In a final insult, William’s Dutch guards refused to salute Anne’s husband, Prince George, as he departed Whitehall. “I cannot believe it was their Dutch breeding alone without Dutch orders that made them do it because they never omitted it before,” Anne told Sarah, adding, “These things are so far from vexing either the Prince or me that they really please us extremely.”

Mary did come to see her sister in the spring of 1692, after Anne gave birth to yet another child who died almost immediately.
^‡
As Sarah reported, the queen “never asked how she did, nor expressed the least concern for her condition, nor so much as took her by the hand.” She did, however, reissue a by now familiar order: “I have made the first step in coming to you,” she said, “and now expect you should make the next by removing my Lady Marlborough.”

“I have never disobeyed you but in that one particular,” Anne replied, “which I hope will some time or other appear as unreasonable to you as it does to me.”

Of course it would never seem unreasonable to Mary that the wife of a disloyal subject be removed from her sister’s service. As the breach with Anne widened, the queen despaired that the
conflict might be the natural consequence of what she and her sister had done to their father. “In all this I see the hand of God,” she wrote, “and look upon our disagreeing as a punishment upon us for the irregularity by us committed upon the revolution.”

The sisters never were reconciled. It was only when Mary was on her deathbed that Anne rushed to be with her. But by then it was too late. Tireless in her troublemaking, Sarah later asserted that Anne had been deliberately kept away during her sister’s illness so as “to leave room for continuing the quarrel, in case the Queen should chance to recover.… How this conduct to a sister could suit with the character of a devout Queen, I am at a loss to know.”

With Mary dead, and William to follow seven years later, Sarah turned on her friend Anne with a ferocity that left poor Mrs. Morley shattered.

On April 23, 1702, Anne was crowned queen to near universal acclaim. The reign of the dour Dutchman William III was over, and no one seemed to miss him. The new monarch, while warmly welcomed, hardly presented a regal figure. Eighteen pregnancies had ruined her health, and gout left her so crippled that she had to be carried to her coronation in a chair. Still, she aimed to be a moderate ruler in an era of venomous party politics, which would be a triumph in itself. But it ruined her relationship with Sarah.

The new queen had showered her favorite with the highest honors upon her accession, and soon created the dukedom of Marlborough for her husband in recognition of his valor in fighting the French. But Sarah wanted something more: She wanted to be
obeyed
. Anne had always been willingly led by her domineering friend, but now she was the sovereign and a shift in the relationship was inevitable. Sarah refused to accept that. It was bad enough that the queen bored her, but for Anne to ignore her increasingly strident exhortations on behalf of the Whig Party was simply intolerable.

The queen had a more natural affinity for the Tory Party, traditional supporters of the monarchy and of Anne’s beloved Anglican Church. She found Sarah’s aggressive Whig affiliation bewildering, particularly her wild assertion that all Tories were secret Jacobites conspiring to restore James II. “I own that I can not have that good opinion of some sort of people that you have,” the queen wrote to Sarah, “nor that ill one of others, and let the Whigs brag never so much of their great services to the country [in the Glorious Revolution] and of their numbers, I believe the revolution had never been, nor the Succession settled as it is now, if the Church party [Tories] had not joined with them, and why those people that agreed with them in these two things should all now be branded with the name Jacobite I can’t imagine.”

Anne’s refusal to complacently accept direction, combined with the fact that she found court life stultifying, caused Sarah to stay away for extended periods. Yet her absences also made her paranoid that she was being supplanted in the queen’s affection by her own relative Abigail Hill, a bedchamber woman who Sarah believed was poisoning Anne’s mind against her.

Sarah’s fears did not prompt her return to court. Instead, she bombarded the queen with shrill letters that essentially said Anne was too stupid, or stubborn, to see reason. In one particularly outrageous missive, fired off over Queen Anne’s persistent refusal to appoint Sarah’s son-in-law as secretary of state, she wrote: “I desire you would reflect whether you have never heard that the greatest misfortunes that ever happened to any of your family [the Stuarts] has not been occasioned by having ill advises and an obstinancy in their tempers that is very unaccountable.”

This kind of audacious attack clearly indicated that something in Sarah had snapped. She had “grown into a shrew,” P. F. William Ryan wrote colorfully in his early-twentieth-century study of Queen Anne’s court, “a virago, afraid of nothing, in
love with nothing, a mad woman when crossed, so disastrously had the natural tyranny of her disposition been pampered by the compliance of those who had learned to dread her tongue.” No wonder the ailing queen was beginning to prefer the quiet company of her servant Abigail Hill.

Anne was actually growing frightened of her once beloved Mrs. Freeman, though she wasn’t quite prepared to part with her. “I agree that all Lady Marlborough’s unkindness proceeds from [the] real concern she has for my good,” the queen wrote to her minister Sidney Godolphin, “but I can’t hope as you do, that she will ever be easy with me again. I quite despair of it now, which is no small mortification to me, however I will ever be the same, and ready on all occasions to do her all the service that lies in my poor power.”

As it turned out, Sarah’s abuse of the queen had barely even begun. She raged at the influence she believed Abigail had on Anne, and went so far as to assert that they were lesbians. “I remember you said … of all things in this world, you valued most your reputation,” Sarah wrote spitefully, “which I confess surprised me very much, that Your Majesty should so soon mention that word after having discovered so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can be no great reputation in a thing so strange and unaccountable, to say no more of it, nor can I think the having no inclination for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours.”

Several weeks later, on the way to a thanksgiving service for the Duke of Marlborough’s victory over the French at Oudenaarde, Sarah berated the queen for not wearing the heavy jewels she had laid out for her. Anne was responding as their coach arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral, when the duchess snarled, “Be quiet!” This was truly no way to treat a queen, but Sarah was unrepentant. In fact, she added to the grievous insult by sending Anne a nasty note chastising her for what had transpired: “Your Majesty chose a very wrong day to mortify me, when you
were just going to return thanks for a victory obtained by Lord Marlborough.”

The already precarious relationship between Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman was further fractured after the death of Anne’s beloved husband in 1708. Perhaps there was no time in the queen’s life when she needed a true friend more. Alas, all she found was Sarah.

The duchess swooped into Kensington Palace and found Anne at Prince George’s deathbed, weeping and kissing him tenderly. She decided the queen should leave the scene, but Anne silently demurred, pointing to her watch to indicate that she needed more time. After indulging this, reluctantly, Sarah gripped Anne’s arm firmly to lead her away. Then the dreaded Abigail crossed their path. Sarah was outraged by the acknowledgment the queen accorded her loyal servant, writing that “at the sight of that charming lady, as her [Anne’s] arm was upon mine, which she had leaned upon, I found she had strength to bend down towards [Abigail] like a sail, and in passing by, went some steps more than was necessary, to be nearer her.”

Such was the depth of Sarah’s sympathy that she actually mocked the queen’s sorrow by noting how she ate two hearty meals in the midst of it. She also decided to remove Prince George’s portrait from Anne’s bedroom because, she lamely explained, “I thought she loved him, and if she had been like other people ’tis terrible to see a picture while the affliction is just upon one.” The queen thought otherwise, and was reduced to pleading with Sarah for the portrait’s return: “I cannot end this without begging you once more for God sake to let the dear picture you have of mine, be put into my bedchamber for I cannot be without it any longer.”

Having satisfied her duty to serve the newly widowed queen—her way—Sarah swept out of court and away from Anne, though she did continue to harass her. Now she wanted to expand the Marlboroughs’ apartments at St. James’s Palace,
which Anne refused to allow. Sarah, “being resolved that I would vex her a little longer,” insisted that the queen’s denial be repeated publicly, certain it would be thought strange, she wrote, “that after the service Lord Marlborough had done her, she would not give him a miserable hole to make him a clean way to his lodgings.”

The Duke of Marlborough made the mistake of entering Sarah’s quarrel with the queen and taking his wife’s side. He wrote to Anne, threatening to resign his services at the conclusion of the war with France, and “hoping that in time you will be sensible of the long and faithful services of Lady Marlborough and that God will bless you with the opening of your eyes.”

This was too much for Anne, who, in her response to Marlborough, poured out all the hurt and anger that had accumulated within her. “You seem to be dissatisfied with my behaviour to the Duchess of Marlborough,” she wrote.

Sarah launched a fierce tirade against the queen in a series of long missives. She not only threatened to publish Anne’s gushing letters but once again essentially accused her of having a homosexual affair with Abigail. The friendship was now finally
and irretrievably dead. Still, Sarah sought to vindicate herself and asked for a personal interview with the queen. Anne would not agree, however, and commanded the duchess to put her thoughts in writing. Of course Sarah didn’t listen.

Several days later she again wrote to Anne and insisted she speak to the queen: “If this afternoon be not convenient, I will come every day, and wait till you please to allow me to speak with you. And one thing more I assure Your Majesty which is,
that what I have to say will have no consequence either in obliging you to answer
or to see me oftener hereafter than will be easy to you.”

The two women did meet for the last time that afternoon at Kensington Palace. Queen Anne was as cold and hardened as her statue in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. “There is nothing you can have to say but you may write it,” she kept repeating after every point Sarah tried to make. Then, in response to the duchess’s direct questions, Anne was equally noncommunicative: “I shall make no answer to anything you say.”

Furious at the queen’s intransigence, and desperate about the power and influence she saw slipping away, Sarah was reduced to threats and blackmail. “Such things are in my power,” she declared, “that if known by a man, that would apprehend and was a right politician, might lose a Crown.”