Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (39 page)

One of the most important figures in government was not officially a member of it. Robert Harley came from a dissenting background in Herefordshire. On entering Parliament in 1689, he had been reckoned a Whig, but after becoming estranged from the Junto peers in office under William, he had led the opposition to their ministry. Gradually he had evolved into a Tory of sorts, though he preferred to think of himself as belonging to no party. In 1701 he had been elected Speaker of the Commons with King William’s blessing, and in that capacity he helped guide the Act of Settlement through the Lower House. When William reverted to a Whig ministry, he hoped that Harley would be voted out of the Speaker’s chair, but in 1702 he was re-elected. In the remaining weeks of William’s life Harley had liaised with Sidney Godolphin to coordinate opposition to the new ministers. By this time he was also known to Anne, having been ‘first introduced to the Princess’ in William’s lifetime.
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As William lay dying, Marlborough and Godolphin were in regular consultation with Harley. It was he who drafted the speech the Queen made to Parliament on 11 March, and the one she gave when dissolving Parliament in May. Although Harley had no office apart from his Speakership of the Commons, he was soon intimately involved with many aspects of government. He would have policy discussions with Marlborough and Godolphin just before, or immediately after, meetings of the Cabinet, despite not himself belonging to it. He was already involved in intelligence gathering, and alive to the importance of propaganda. In August 1702 he suggested to Godolphin that, to counteract ‘stories raised by ill designing men’, it would be ‘of great service to have some discreet writer of the government’s side, if it were only to state the facts right’.
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The following year he would employ for this purpose Daniel Defoe, an indigent journalist who had been imprisoned by the Earl of Nottingham for writing a pamphlet satirising Tory hostility towards dissenters. In November 1703 Harley arranged for Defoe to be freed and then set him up as Editor of the
Review
, a new weekly journal whose first edition appeared the following February.

Even at this stage the relationship between Godolphin and Harley was not without friction. Godolphin, who was a man of few but well-chosen words, was doubtless maddened by Harley’s ‘talent in talking a great deal without discovering his own in anything’. One enemy of Harley’s claimed
he was so wedded to an ‘ambiguous and obscure way of speaking that he could hardly ever be understood when he designed it, or be believed when he never so much desired it’. He was often disingenuous for the sake of it, and was not above promising incompatible things to different parties. Inevitably he soon acquired a reputation for insincerity, and for believing ‘no government can be carried on without a trick’.
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Harley was small and portly, with a rubicund face that betrayed a love of good food and wine at odds with his puritanical upbringing. Outwardly genial, and the most convivial of hosts, he was nevertheless a hard man to fathom. Having grown to detest him, Sarah wrote a devastating pen portrait of this ‘cunning and dark man’. According to her, the ‘mischievous darkness of his soul was … plainly legible in a very odd look, disagreeable to everybody at first sight, which being joined with a constant awkward agitation of his head and body, betrayed a turbulent dishonesty within, even in the midst of all those familiar airs, jocular bowing and smiling, which he always affected’.
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Harley was unfailingly obsequious towards Marlborough and Godolphin, proclaiming his undying ‘reverence and affection’ for the men ‘by whose indulgence and too kind a recommendation’ he had obtained the Queen’s favour. In 1706 he wrote oleaginously to Godolphin, ‘Far be it from me to espouse any opinion of my own, or to differ from your Lordship’s judgement’, claiming a few months later to be so malleable that ‘if they should say Harrow on the Hill or by Maidenhead were the nearest way to Windsor I would … never dispute it, if that would give content’.
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It subsequently emerged, however, that Harley was less accommodating than he pretended. He had a political vision of his own, and when he discovered that Marlborough and Godolphin did not share it, he would work with steely determination to make his ideas prevail.

Harley was re-elected Speaker in October 1702, and was happy to remain in a position that allowed him to operate out of sight as a supreme political fixer. For the moment this suited Marlborough and Godolphin, not least because, as they were both in the Lords, they relied on Harley’s expertise in Commons procedure to secure majorities for legislation. Well aware that no one knew ‘better all the tricks of the House’, they ‘depended on him as the fittest man they had to manage the … Commons … It was left chiefly to him as his province’.
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Godolphin also depended on Harley to oversee details of ecclesiastical preferment, for the Lord Treasurer had little personal interest in such matters. He was therefore happy to delegate to one who had links with both wings of the Church, and who made a point of having ‘a clergyman
of each sort at his table on Sunday’. He told Harley gratefully, ‘I shall not move in anything of this kind but as you will guide me’, assuring his colleague in late 1702 that ‘the Queen is full of hopes from … the pains you take in it, that the differences among the clergy may be moderated’. By that time Harley had undertaken several interviews with Anne on this question. In July 1702 he was admitted up the backstairs for discussions with her, and after another audience with her three months later he noted exultantly, ‘She was most graciously pleased to use most gracious expressions towards me, beyond my deserts’.
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At Anne’s accession one county worthy was confident ‘she will be Queen of all her subjects and would have all the parties and distinctions of former reigns ended in hers’. Marlborough assured the Grand Pensionary of Holland, ‘Her Majesty is firmly resolved not to enter into any party, but to make use of all her subjects’, but one shrewd observer doubted whether Marlborough and Godolphin could prevent power being concentrated in Tory hands. Having observed the influence of Rochester, he commented sagely, ‘Much is said of the moderation the two fore-mentioned Lords will maintain … but when I consider whom they are linked with, I can’t think them at liberty to act but as others will allow them’.
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In the event a bare minimum of Whigs were given places in the court and ministry, leaving them feeling excluded, particularly since key figures, the Lords Somers and Halifax, were removed from the Privy Council. Anne had wanted the Duke of Shrewsbury to be her Master of the Horse, but when he refused to return from Italy to take up the post, it was conferred on the Whig Duke of Somerset. He already had a place in Cabinet, having previously been named as Lord President of the Council, an office that now went to a moderate Tory, the Earl of Pembroke. The Whig Duke of Devonshire remained Lord Steward, and at Godolphin’s request another Whig, Henry Boyle, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Earl of Wharton was deprived of his two Lord Lieutenancies, and dismissed as Comptroller of the royal household. Although at one point the Duke of Devonshire threatened to resign unless Wharton was retained, the ejection of this famous rake who flaunted both his infidelity to his wife and his outspoken views on republicanism, was not entirely surprising. What was controversial, however, was that, despite Marlborough’s efforts to prevent this, Wharton was replaced as Comptroller by Edward Seymour, a fanatical Tory from the West Country. The Prussian Resident in England commented, ‘those who pay attention to the affairs of this country think it ought to have
been easy for the Queen to obliterate these odious names of Whig and Tory … but she has let the opportunity escape by giving a white staff … to a hot-headed party leader who leads an irregular life’.
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The Whigs’ bitterness was enhanced by the activities of Sir Nathan Wright, who was kept on by the Queen as Keeper of the Great Seal. ‘A faithful tool of the Tories’ with a ‘fat broad face’, Wright promptly started to remodel county Commissions of the Peace in the interests of his party. Whig JPs who could aid their candidates at election times were replaced with violent Tories. Even Lord Somers, ‘believed to be the best Chancellor that ever sat in the chair’, was dismissed from the Commission of the Peace in Gloucestershire.
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In 1706 Robert Harley would assert, ‘The Queen began her reign upon the foot of no parties’, but the Whigs could be forgiven for questioning this. In her defence, however, the Queen could point out that the lower levels of administration, such as the customs office, were left relatively unscathed by political purges. It was ‘generally believed that the Earl of Rochester and his party were for severe methods and for a more entire change quite through all subaltern employments’, but this was successfully resisted. When finalising the appointments of officials in public service, Godolphin congratulated himself on escaping lightly, telling Sarah, ‘Something is to be said for most of those consented to, which are much fewer than I thought would have been pressed’. Sarah, admittedly, disputed this, for to her eyes everything appeared ‘governed by faction and nonsense’, with jobs going to individuals ‘at the dispose of two or three arbitrary men’.
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On 25 May 1702 Anne arguably exacerbated matters in her dissolution speech to Parliament. Probably at the suggestion of her uncle, Rochester, she stated, ‘My own principles must always keep me entirely firm to the interest and religion of the Church of England and will incline me to countenance those who have the truest zeal to support it’. Defoe believed that by irresponsibly endorsing the Tories she squandered ‘the fairest opportunity in the world to have united us all’. As it was, the Tories boasted that with the support of ‘a Church of England Queen … the dissenters must all come down’, filling the nonconformists with ‘terrible apprehensions’.
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Buoyed up by royal backing, the Tories did very well in that summer’s elections, gaining a decisive Commons majority. When the new Parliament met in late October, Tories in the Lower House signalled their desire to trample upon their enemies at home by presenting the Queen with a militantly phrased address. Hailing Anne as Anglicanism’s
protector, it stated, ‘Your Majesty hath been always a most illustrious ornament to this Church and have been exposed to great hazards for it; and therefore we promise ourselves that in your Majesty’s reign we shall see it perfectly restored to its due rights and privileges … which is only to be done by divesting those men of the power, who have shown they want not the will to destroy it’.
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The Queen’s Continental allies were alarmed to see the Tories so much in the ascendant. The Dutch in particular were unhappy that power had been entrusted to men whose commitment to fighting France was not absolute, and who were known for their ‘passionate railing’ against Holland. Marlborough tried to soothe their fears. He was adamant that if the Tories failed to uphold the Grand Alliance and carry on the war with requisite vigour, the Queen ‘would put her affairs into other hands’, but this was something ‘which at that time few could believe’.
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In January 1703 the predominantly Tory Parliament voted to increase the army by 10,000 men, but this was dependent upon the Dutch giving up all trade with the enemy for one year.

Hanover was another of Anne’s allies that keenly watched political developments in England. It was one of those German states which, in return for payment, provided troops to fight alongside Grand Alliance forces, and naturally therefore the Elector wanted to be confident that England was resolute about waging war. Yet he and his mother also had more particular concerns, as they craved reassurance that Anne and her ministers would maintain the Protestant Succession.

The Electress Sophia initially professed to be unworried that the Tories were in favour, declaring they had ‘as many honest men … as the other side’. She claimed too that in view of her advanced age, she had no expectation of outliving the much younger Anne, despite the fact that, ‘God be thanked, I would not exchange my health for the Queen’s or Prince George’s, and have no illness other than having entered my seventy-third year’.
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While unable to repress all hope that Anne would predecease her, Sophia was mindful of the German proverb, ‘Creaking carts go far’.

The Queen wrote to the Electress, assuring her that at all times she would ‘uphold your interests and give you every proof of my friendship and affection’, signing the letter ‘Your affectionate sister and niece’. At the end of April it was announced that the Elector was to be made a Knight of the Garter, yet despite such gracious gestures, Sophia soon came to feel that Anne’s attitude left much to be desired.
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Sophia was disappointed that when Anne’s Civil List allowance was under discussion, the Queen did not ask for any kind of financial provision to be made for her. Some people even suspected that Anne only handed back £100,000 of that year’s revenue in order to avoid giving the Electress any money. In May 1702 it was decreed that Sophia should be mentioned by name whenever prayers were said for the royal family, but a damaging rumour gained currency that Anne had opposed the step in Cabinet. A French spy believed that Anne bore ill will towards the Hanoverians because of their humiliating treatment of her many years earlier. He reported to the French foreign minister, ‘The Duke of Hanover once refused to marry the Princess Anne because of the humble birth of her mother and the Queen remains deeply resentful of that refusal … Several who were then at court have confirmed this’.
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