Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (99 page)

16

Not Equal to the Weight of a Crown?

On hearing of the Queen’s death, one gentleman, who was no admirer of Abigail Masham, mused mockingly, ‘What becomes of Mrs Margery?’ Others felt sorry for the favourite, who was reportedly ‘almost dead with grief’. Fearing that the Queen’s sudden demise had left Abigail and her husband ‘not perfectly easy in their affairs’, Jonathan Swift consoled her that ‘As you excel in the several duties of a tender mother, a true friend and a loving wife, so you have been the best and most faithful servant to your mistress that ever any sovereign had. And although you have not been rewarded suitable to your merits, I doubt not but God will make it up to you in another life’.
¹

Lord and Lady Masham were swiftly evicted from their lodgings in the various royal residences. Their apartment at St James’s Palace was subsequently allocated to the new Prince and Princess of Wales, giving some indication of the grandeur of Abigail’s housing arrangements in Anne’s reign. Samuel Masham also lost his office of cofferer, worth approximately £2,000 a year. Yet contrary to the fears of their friends, the Mashams were by no means left destitute. Only a fortnight before the Queen’s death Samuel Masham had purchased a manor house three miles from Windsor, enabling the couple ‘to retire and enjoy the comforts and domestic life’.
²

Soon after George I’s accession, a Whig pamphleteer clamoured for Lady Masham to be punished for having sought ‘to subvert and betray us into the hands of the Pretender’, fulminating that her ‘infamy and treason deserves to be writ among the black catalogue of traitors in our British annals’.
³
In fact, not only were Abigail and her husband left unmolested, but in 1716 Samuel Masham became a Remembrancer of the Exchequer, having secured the right in Anne’s reign to succeed to this post with its income of £1,500 a year. Although he and his wife were no longer prominent figures at court, nor were they pariahs. In 1728, a year after George II had succeeded his father on the throne, Lady Masham was actually called in to adjudicate on a dispute that had
arisen regarding the duties expected of the Queen’s Bedchamber Women.

Bolingbroke and Oxford fared less well under the new regime. Initially both men had been optimistic about their prospects, but it soon became apparent that George I was ill disposed towards them. Worse still, when a new Parliament with a Whig majority met in March 1715 there were unmistakable signs that the men responsible for concluding peace with France would be prosecuted.

On being ordered to surrender his papers, Bolingbroke panicked. In the early hours of 27 March 1715 he fled to France, and the following July he became the Pretender’s Secretary of State. Shortly afterwards he was joined in exile by the Duke of Ormonde, who by that time was also facing impeachment. In August the two fugitives were found guilty of treason when the British Parliament passed Acts of Attainder against them in their absence.

In Scotland the following month the Earl of Mar, another ostracised former minister of Queen Anne’s, raised the standard of revolt on behalf of the Pretender. However, although his forces could have posed a real danger to the new regime if well led and organised, Mar proved an uninspiring commander. Having failed to press home an attack on government troops, he retired to Perth instead of advancing into England. A Jacobite rising in Northumberland proceeded even more disastrously, and by the time that James Francis Edward arrived in Scotland to take charge in December, ‘the heart of the rebellion was broke’. Judging the situation hopeless, in February 1716 the Pretender returned to France, accompanied by the Earl of Mar.
⁴

Bolingbroke’s arrangements were blamed by many Jacobites for the failure of the rising, but he himself insisted that the Pretender would have fared better had he not rewritten a Declaration that Bolingbroke had drafted to mark the outbreak of rebellion. This falsely stated that Queen Anne had promised to secure her half brother his wrongfully withheld inheritance but, despite pretending that he had the late Queen’s endorsement, James Francis Edward had refused to pay her more than the most grudging of tributes. He baulked at describing her as ‘his sister … of blessed memory’, and changed Bolingbroke’s reference to God having taken ‘her to Himself’ by substituting the words ‘when it pleased Almighty God to put a period to her life’. As Bolingbroke furiously observed, ‘Not content with declaring her neither just nor pious in the world, he did little less than declare her damned in the other’. Despite the
fact that it was manifestly in ‘his interest … to cultivate the respect which many of the Tories really had for the memory of the late Queen and … to weave the honour of her name into his cause’, in this way James Francis Edward forfeited a good deal of natural support.
⁵

Having been dismissed from the Pretender’s service, Bolingbroke seemed irretrievably ruined, but astonishingly within a few years he had achieved a partial rehabilitation. George I believed it would be of value to him if Bolingbroke repudiated the Jacobite cause, and so was prepared to be magnanimous. For some years Bolingbroke’s homecoming was delayed because the King’s ministers were reluctant to alienate their own followers by showing him forgiveness, but in 1723 he was pardoned. He returned home to take up the role of elder statesman to the Tory party during their wilderness years.

George I and his ministers would have been relieved if in 1715 the Earl of Oxford had copied Bolingbroke and left the country to avoid trial, but he refused to ‘sully the honour of my royal mistress … now in her grave’ by taking flight. On 10 June 1715 a report produced by a ‘Committee of Secrecy’ on the conduct of peace negotiations with France was read to the Commons. Articles of impeachment were then drawn up against Oxford, accusing him not just of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’, but several counts of treason. Fortunately for him the government had been unable to uncover proof of any dealings with France prior to April 1711, but it was alleged that after that date Oxford ‘did assume to himself the regal power’ by treating with the enemy without the Queen’s authorisation. He was also said to have tried ‘to promote as far as in him lay the interests of the Pretender’, although scant evidence was advanced for this. When the articles of impeachment were sent up to the Lords on 9 July Oxford protested that he had ‘always acted by the immediate directions and commands of the late Queen’, but on 18 July he was sent to the Tower to await trial.
⁶

A good deal of time elapsed before the hearing took place. Eventually Oxford petitioned for his case to be tried, and his acquittal was assured when his supporters in the Lords demanded that the treason charges must be dealt with first. This was the weakest part of the case against him, and on 1 July 1717 he was formally discharged.

Oxford’s acquittal grievously disappointed the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Sarah was ‘almost distracted she could not obtain her revenge’, while her husband ‘wept like a child’ when Oxford received his
discharge. By that time Marlborough was already a much-diminished figure. In 1714 King George had reinstated the Duke as commander of the army, an honour that had not deterred Marlborough from insuring himself against a Jacobite restoration by sending £4,000 to the Pretender in 1715. Simultaneously, however, from his base in London he directed operations against the rebel forces, ensuring the rising’s failure. It was his last military achievement, for in May 1716 he suffered the first of several strokes, and from that time was never more than ‘a melancholy memento’ of his former self.
⁷
He lived long enough to see Blenheim Palace become habitable, before dying in June 1722.

His widow outlived him many years, dying in 1744 at the age of eighty-four. Two years earlier she had published her memoir
An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her First Coming to Court to the Year 1710
, on which she had been working for more than thirty years. As well as reproducing letters the Queen had sent her, Sarah related how Anne’s passionate love for her ‘by degrees was worked up to hatred and aversion’.
⁸
Yet though events were presented from Sarah’s point of view, many readers considered that she emerged in a far from sympathetic light.

Since Queen Anne’s death, the Duchess had acquired many new enemies. She had fallen out with her surviving daughters and most of her grandchildren, and the Whig party had long lost her allegiance. Her attitude to the new Hanoverian monarchy soon soured, and she developed a particular loathing for Caroline, Princess of Wales. Oddly, she was on rather better terms with several individuals she had detested in Queen Anne’s day. Although she turned him down, she was flattered when the widowed Duke of Somerset proposed. She even harboured kindly feelings for Jonathan Swift, declaring she had so enjoyed his
Gulliver’s Travels
she could forgive him anything.
⁹

With most of the world, however, the Duchess lived out of harmony. Her husband’s former chaplain told her that this was the inevitable fate of a person who exhibited ‘ill grounded suspicions, violent passions and a boundless liberty of expressing resentment of persons without distinction from the Prince downwards’. He informed her that, universally applied, her level of candour would ‘destroy society’, an assessment which, if Sarah found offensive, was certainly accurate.
¹⁰

During the reign of Queen Anne, Great Britain came into being and entered the ranks of great powers, but Anne is generally accorded little credit for this. A century ago one historian remarked, ‘When we speak of
the Age of Queen Anne, we cannot possibly associate the greatness of the era with any genius or inspiration coming from the woman whose name it bears’.
¹¹

It was Great Britain’s involvement in the War of Spanish Succession that principally accounted for the nation’s enhanced prestige, and Anne’s presence on the throne is usually seen as incidental to this. Even the decision to embark on the conflict was not hers; instead, as she observed, ‘At my coming to the crown, I found a war prepared for me’.
¹²

Rather than Queen Anne, the Duke of Marlborough is hailed as the towering figure whose brilliance as a general shaped the nation’s fortunes and elevated Britain’s standing in foreign eyes. Anne is not even commended for having given him command of her forces, as his appointment is supposed to have owed more to her fondness for Marlborough’s wife than a dispassionate appraisal of his abilities. Having fortuitously entrusted her army to a military genius, she irresponsibly deprived him of his post after her ‘female jars’ with the Duchess assumed an unwarranted significance. With the Queen’s mind possessed by what Sarah called the ‘foul polluting principle’ of her obsession with a Bedchamber Woman, while Marlborough ‘triumphed so abroad, Mrs Masham triumphed at home’. In this way, according to Sarah, Anne ‘at last preferred her own humour and passion before the safety and happiness of her own people and of all Europe’. The Duchess commented witheringly, ‘Nobody but the Queen could put Abigail and her brother in competition with the Duke of Marlborough’, predicting that ‘Mrs Morley’s proceedings to my Lord Marlborough will be as matchless in story as his successes are’.
¹³

Anne’s detractors allege that she was guilty not only of allowing private quarrels to impinge on state affairs, but also of indulging political prejudices at the expense of the national interest. Ignoring the fact that ‘the military spirit was much more vigorous’ in the Whigs, and that they were both ‘more keen against France … and better versed in the arts of finding out funds’, she obstinately inclined towards the Tories. As the Duchess of Marlborough put it, in her usual reductive manner, ‘Without the Whigs the war could not have been carried on, nor consequently she could not have been Queen’.
¹⁴
When political realities forced her to bring the Whigs into government, she treacherously turned them out of office at the first opportunity, with the predictable result that she betrayed her allies by bringing the war to a premature end.

Anne’s early biographer, Abel Boyer, asserted ‘The first nine years of her reign eclipse the most glorious of any of her predecessors’, and her
doctor Sir David Hamilton observed, ‘How glorious would her memory have been to all posterity if at that time she died’. As it was, however, the ‘mismanagement of the latter part of her reign … sullied the rays of her preceding glories, and almost extinguished the very remembrance of those victories which her arms had obtained, by an ignominious peace’.
¹⁵

Such at least was the Whig narrative of Queen Anne’s reign. Yet it can be argued that Anne was a surprisingly successful ruler of a country that (as the Duchess of Marlborough observed) ‘has never been thought very easy to govern’ and was notoriously ‘subject to revolutions’. It was her misfortune to rule at a time when, as she grumbled to the Duke of Marlborough, ‘both parties have it too much in their heads to govern’ but she nevertheless valiantly strove to preserve a political equilibrium. She believed that, because she placed herself above party, she was more closely attuned to the desires and aspirations of her subjects than politicians pursuing selfish sectarian ends. When Sir David Hamilton suggested in August 1713 that there was widespread anger in the country about the French failure to observe peace terms, the Queen retorted, ‘It was party and faction that was discontented and not the body of the nation’. Far from showing the ‘infatuation’ and ‘blind passion’ for the Tories of which Sarah accused her, after the change of ministry in 1710 she continued stubbornly to adhere to what Jonathan Swift called her ‘confounded trimming and moderation’.
¹⁶