Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (93 page)

Sensing that the Queen’s esteem for him was lessening, Oxford contemplated giving up his office unless she demonstrated her unequivocal support for him. On 20 October, he drew up a self-pitying memorandum. ‘This is the question: is it for the service of the Queen … that Mr H should continue to be employed, yea or no?’ he scrawled. He resolved that if the Queen failed to give him her approval, he would ‘find a hole to creep out at’, deeming it intolerable to stay on in ‘a service where his … sovereign is … ashamed to own him’. Evidently Anne managed to convince him that he had no reason to feel aggrieved with her. However, on 20 November his much-loved daughter died, and Oxford’s state of mind once again degenerated. From court, Dr Arbuthnot wrote that ‘everybody here shares in his grief, from her Majesty down’, but for the next few weeks Oxford was overcome by lethargy. While he made himself ‘invisible’, Bolingbroke did not fail ‘to supply his place at Windsor … with unusual assiduity’. When Oxford reappeared, he was at his most impenetrable, and on 8 December the Queen was moved to protest. She wrote, ‘I cannot help desiring you again when you come next, to speak plainly, lay everything open and hide nothing from me, or else how is it possible I can judge of anything?
I spoke very freely and sincerely to you yesterday and I expect you should do the same to her that is sincerely your very affectionate friend’.
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While the Queen still had reservations about Bolingbroke, it was understandable that she began to wonder whether it would be preferable to entrust her affairs to him.

Throughout much of 1713 the Queen’s ‘gout’ had been as unrelenting as ever. In July she had to stay away from the thanksgiving service held at St Paul’s to celebrate the peace, even though her failure to attend made her ‘very uneasy’. When she gave a formal audience to the French ambassador, the Duc d’Aumont, in July, ‘her Majesty did not rise from her chair as usual, by reason of her indisposition’, and towards the end of the month she still had ‘no very great use of her legs’. The following month things improved slightly, as often happened when she summered at Windsor. She was well enough to enjoy the racing at Ascot, and in late September she confounded expectations that she would never walk again by returning from chapel on foot, leaning on the Duke of Shrewsbury’s arm. In October she remained in relatively good health, a development that one foreign diplomat ascribed to her giving up drink. Her reputed fondness for alcohol nevertheless remained a subject for mockery, and a particularly disagreeable squib was affixed by High Tory satirists to her newly erected statue outside St Paul’s. It jeered that it was fitting she was depicted with her rump to the church, gazing longingly into a wineshop.
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In November she suffered a violent stomach upset, coupled with ‘stiffness in one of her knees’. As usual gout was blamed for this, so there was not undue concern. She made such a good recovery that on 18 December the Earl of Mar reported he had never seen her better, for ‘she walks without help even of a stick’.
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Within a few days, however, the Queen was assailed by an illness different from her usual afflictions.

On 24 December Anne not only began vomiting, but became shivery and feverish, suffering from heart palpitations, an alarmingly fast pulse and ‘flying pains all over her’. Alternately boiling hot and freezing cold, she experienced intense thirst, but also complained of a ‘smarting soreness on the inside of her right thigh’. When inspected it ‘appeared of a reddish brownish colour’ with ‘some pustules on it’. Almost certainly she had contracted erysipelas, a streptococcal infection of the skin. Initially it was thought that the gout had moved to the thigh, and that she had contracted a chill, for which cinchona, or Jesuit’s bark, was prescribed. When the pain in her leg grew more intense, Dr Shadwell correctly
diagnosed erysipelas, and an apothecary was called in to ‘embrocate’ the thigh. More cinchona was prescribed, in conjunction with Virginia snakeweed and Ralegh’s cordial, despite the fact Anne had taken such ‘a prejudice to the bark’ she was having difficulty swallowing it.
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The Queen appeared better by 31 December, though subsequently the infection would flare up again. Her health crisis had flung most of her ministers into a panic. Bolingbroke and several of his colleagues had rushed to Windsor as soon as they heard the news, and they implored Oxford to join them. For several days he failed to do so, possibly because he was ill himself, though Swift maintained he stayed in London to alleviate fears that the Queen was seriously unwell. If this was his intention he failed, for news of her illness spread like wildfire, and the Whigs did not conceal their excitement at the prospect that her reign might be cut short. Their leaders convened meetings, and there was ‘a great hurrying of chairs and coaches to and from the Earl of Wharton’s house’. On 29 December the Earl of Mar reported ‘I find here in town they had her dead on Sunday and some people thought fit to show … but very undecent countenances upon such an occasion’. When the Queen learned of Whig ‘expressions of joy’ at her supposed demise, she did not easily forgive it.
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On 23 January 1714 Lady Masham confided to Oxford that she feared the Queen was once again ‘far from well’, though she tried to hide her concerns from Anne. ‘Our business must be to hearten her, for she is too apprehensive already of her ill state of health’, she told the Lord Treasurer. By the following day, when a Danish friend of her late husband’s named Christian von Plessen visited the Queen, there could be no doubt that something was seriously wrong. She struck him as ‘half dead’, shocking him with her leaden complexion, swollen face and difficulty in speaking owing to shortness of breath. By the evening she had a high fever, stomach pains, and other symptoms identical to those experienced in December. The attack coincided with rumours that the French were massing a fleet at Brest, in order, it was said, to mount an invasion on behalf of the Pretender. This caused such alarm that there was a run on the Bank of England, but on 1 February the Queen was able to restore calm by writing to the Lord Mayor of London that she was over her ‘aguish indisposition’. She resumed attending Cabinet and signing papers, and on 6 February held a reception for her birthday at Windsor.
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On 13 February Bolingbroke wrote buoyantly ‘Our mistress has recovered to a miracle and is I think now at least as well as she was before her late sickness’. He was indignant at the Whigs’ continued insistence
that ‘her Majesty is still in a very dangerous condition’, but others who saw her at this time concurred that there was cause for concern. The Hanoverian envoy, Georg von Schutz, reported that she looked unhealthily bloated, despite not having regained her appetite following her illness. Her skin also had an alarming greenish tinge. Indeed, according to one source, her Christmas illness ‘so altered her Majesty’s complexion that she did not look like the same person as before; and therefore ’twas expedient from henceforward to use paint to disguise the discolourings; but this was kept so secret that it never was as much as whispered in her lifetime’.
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The ministers might not want to face the fact, but it seemed obvious that Anne was unlikely to survive into old age. In her exile on the Continent the Duchess of Marlborough took pleasure in the thought that ‘
that thing
’ (as she now termed the Queen) had a limited life expectancy. As for Bolingbroke, while he insisted that Anne was currently perfectly well, he had to concede that ‘still she has but one life and whenever that drops, if the Church interest is … [left] without concert, … without confidence, without order, we are of all men the most miserable’.
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This being so, both Oxford and Bolingbroke had to plan for the future. During the last year of Anne’s reign each separately cultivated links with the Pretender, although it does not necessarily follow they were actively working towards his enthronement. Divining what Oxford’s intentions were towards James Francis Edward is particularly difficult, not least because his thinking showed such a lack of clarity. Almost certainly, he never felt genuinely committed to the Pretender’s cause, for he was above all an improviser, rather than an ideologue.
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Knowing that his peace policy had incurred the Elector of Hanover’s disapproval would have inclined him to look with more favour on the idea that the Pretender should succeed Anne, but his feelings on the matter remained at best ambivalent. It must be stressed that almost every advance Oxford made towards the Pretender was accompanied by suggestions that were far from helpful to the young man. It may be, therefore, that Oxford’s sole aim was to lull the Pretender into dealing with him, ensuring that James did not pursue other initiatives that might endanger the kingdom. Oxford also wanted his ministry to keep receiving support from Jacobites in Parliament, and for this he needed the Pretender to believe he was his friend.

When Oxford had declared in March 1713 that he was anxious to help the Pretender, his overtures had been received with delight at the
exiled Jacobite court, and James himself remarked that now there was ‘everything to hope’ from him. With Oxford’s aid he envisaged being reinstated as Anne’s successor without recourse to the legislature, calculating that if he arrived in England during a parliamentary recess, ‘my friends, animated by my presence, and the others being disconcerted’, would fulfil his every wish. James’s half brother, the Duke of Berwick, was thinking along similar lines, although he admitted his ideas might appear ‘rather chimerical’. He urged that James should travel secretly to England to see his sister, who could then take him before Parliament. Berwick imagined she would declare, ‘Gentlemen, here he is! … I … require of you instantly to repeal all the acts passed against him and acknowledge him immediately as my heir and your future sovereign’. Berwick was confident that such a proceeding, which did not entail distasteful ‘cringing’ to Parliament, would be received without ‘the least opposition’.
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Despite these fanciful expectations, over the next nine months Oxford did nothing to aid the Pretender. He had promised he would send an agent to discuss matters with James, but the emissary never materialised, and the Lord Treasurer did not reply to the letters James and the Duke of Berwick sent him. Far from inviting the Pretender to England, Oxford periodically suggested that James should move farther from his homeland by leaving Lorraine. He also repeated his earlier demands that the Pretender dismiss his Secretary Lord Middleton. When Abbé Gaultier returned to England in September 1713 after spending some months in France, he found Oxford evasive on the subject of the Pretender. The Duke of Berwick had to acknowledge, ‘The long silence … would look like a put off, were it not that [Oxford’s] interest is certainly tied’ with James’s.
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The fact was, even if Oxford did desire to reinstate the Pretender in the succession, he was well aware of the difficulties involved. Despite the Duke of Berwick’s blithe assumption that Parliament was ‘well disposed’ to James, the Lord Treasurer knew otherwise. One knowledgeable contemporary believed that ‘in either House of Parliament scarce one in twenty was at bottom for altering the present settlement’. Recent estimates of Jacobite numbers in Parliament have accepted that there were only in the region of fifty MPs, and perhaps twenty peers, a lower figure than once thought. Against these men were ranged not only the Whigs but a significant number of Hanoverian Tories, who, as Bolingbroke later observed, would never accept the Pretender as their king even if he became Protestant.
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Lord Berkeley was sure that the Whigs overstated the danger of the Pretender securing the crown. While he conceded the position might be different in Scotland, it was his belief that ‘there is such an aversion to popery that … the generality thinks of nothing after the Queen but the House of Hanover’. Perhaps the Pretender’s best hope lay not in active support but in the reluctance of many men to fight in defence of the Act of Settlement. One moderate Tory, who was himself loyal to the Hanover succession and who believed that ‘a majority in Parliament are not enemies to the constitution’, was nevertheless dismayed to hear many members of his party ‘talk of the P[retender] coming as a matter that if it could be effected without blood might be well enough acquiesced in … while at the same time they … talk slightingly of the H[anover] family’. Yet even if Lord Guilford was right in thinking that if the Pretender was brought over ‘most of us … would submit with good grace’, there was still a sizeable contingent who would have been prepared to plunge the country into civil war.
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Oxford would also have been acutely aware that the Queen would not countenance adopting James Francis Edward as her heir. Bolingbroke would later say that he knew better than to mention the Pretender to her because she ‘did never like to hear of a successor’, and there is no reason to suppose that Oxford ever dared broach the subject with her.
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The Pretender himself may have blindly believed that his sister was sympathetic towards him, but he deluded himself on this score.

The fact that many of the Elector of Hanover’s advisers were also convinced that Anne was scheming to disinherit him and his mother should not be taken as proof that this was so. When Georg von Schutz arrived in England as Hanoverian Resident in the autumn of 1713, he swiftly concluded that Anne was still haunted by guilt over the Revolution. ‘It is certain she attributes the loss of her children to the dethroning of her father’, he pronounced confidently, declaring her ‘totally prejudiced against us’. ‘She will endeavour to leave the crown to the greatest stranger rather than … the Electoral family’, he prophesied, adding that ‘She is confirmed in these sentiments by those who are continually with her and possess her favour’.
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