The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (42 page)

War was imminent, though William did not live to fight it. He had been in even poorer health than usual over the winter of 1701–2, but in late February he felt somewhat better and went out hunting in Richmond Park. His horse stumbled over a molehill and threw him. He suffered only a broken collarbone, but fever set in, and a few days later he died at Kensington Palace. For years, Jacobites would drink a toast to ‘the little gentleman in black velvet’ who had thrown up the earth that brought the ‘usurper’ down. It was also an article of faith among them that William had been riding that day a horse that had previously belonged to a Jacobite gentleman executed for his part in an assassination plot.

William had been disliked and resented. Yet one doesn’t have to be, like Macaulay, a fervent Whig to find him a man very worthy of respect. Voltaire accorded him that respect in his history of the reign of Louis XIV, and compared the two. William, he wrote,

left behind him the reputation of a great statesman, though he had never been popular; and that of a general to be feared, though he had lost many battles…His character was exactly opposed to that of Louis XIV; where Louis was affable, he was melancholy, reserved, serious, cold and taciturn. He hated women as much as Louis was attracted by them. Louis made war as a king, William as a soldier…He was proud as Louis but with that gloomy and melancholy pride which repels rather than imposes. Those who value higher the merit of defending his country and the expedience of acquiring a kingdom without natural right, of maintaining his position there without being loved, of ruling Holland with regal power and yet not tyrannising over her, of being the mind and leader of half Europe, possessing at once the resources of a general and the courage of a soldier, of persecuting no one for his religion, of despising all the superstitions of mankind, of being simple and unassuming in his manners – doubtless, such persons will give the name of ‘great’ rather to William than to Louis. But those who are more impressed by the pleasures and glitter of a brilliant court, by magnificence, patronage of the arts, zeal for public welfare, a passion for glory and a gift for ruling; who are more struck by the arrogance with which ministers and generals annexed whole provinces to France on a simple order from their king; who are more astonished at seeing a single state resist so many powers; who esteem a King of France who succeeds in bestowing Spain upon his grandson, rather than a Dutch stadtholder who dethrones his father-in-law; in a word, those who admire the protector rather than the persecutor of James will give the preference to Louis XIV.

Voltaire, as a French patriot, was scarcely impartial. Yet even he, admiring the glories of Louis XIV’s reign, could not withhold respect from the man whose thirty years of resistance to French aggression had stalled Louis’s ambition to be the supreme unchallenged power in western Europe.

Chapter 16

Anne (1702–14): End of an Old Song

Anne’s reign was glorious, if victories in war are a test of glory, far more so indeed than either Elizabeth Tudor’s or Queen Victoria’s. Yet Anne herself is all but forgotten, while they are remembered. Fairly enough, for both the first Elizabeth and Victoria were remarkable women; and poor Anne was not. She presided over a great war and she encouraged the most significant act of her reign – the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland. She was never a nonentity or cipher; ministers had to take her wishes into account. Nevertheless, few can have thought of the government as hers in reality. She was a very ordinary woman in an extraordinary position. On the other hand, she had principles – she was the only Stuart, except for her grandfather Charles I, to be devoted, heart, mind and soul, to the Church of England as by law established. She had affections that in a couple of cases amounted to passions, endured much unhappiness and ill-health with resolution, and had a sense of duty that more glamorous Stuarts lacked.

The younger daughter of James VII and II and his first wife, Anne Hyde, she was the last British monarch till Elizabeth II to have had one parent who wasn’t a foreigner, the first since the earlier Elizabeth to have spent all her life in England, except for one visit to Scotland when her father was sent there as viceroy. There was another point in which she resembled the first Elizabeth: each was the child of a mother who had been a commoner before her marriage. It would be fair to remember Anne as the most English of monarchs since the Union of the Crowns. After she became queen, she scarcely stirred from the south of England, thus setting a pattern followed by her Hanoverian successors until George IV visited first Ireland, and then Scotland.

She was married at the age of seventeen to Prince George of Denmark, an unremarkable man. Charles II’s verdict on him has been often quoted: ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober, but there is nothing in him’, though this may have been a light quip rather than a considered dismissal. The Prince had some reputation as a brave soldier, having once saved his elder brother’s life in battle, and was both hurt and offended when his brother-in-law William treated him with negligent contempt on his campaign in Ireland in 1690. The couple were however well suited, not least in bed. Anne became pregnant time and again, but there were twelve miscarriages, one stillbirth, and four children who did not survive infancy. One boy, William, Duke of Gloucester, gave hopes of living to be grown up, but even he died at the age of eleven. Burnet, who had been entrusted with his education for two years (and reported complacently that he had made ‘amazing progress’), tells us that Anne ‘attended on him during his sickness with great tenderness, but with a grave composedness that amazed all who saw it. She bore his death with a resignation and piety that were indeed very singular.’
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It is not to be supposed however that his death, and those of his brothers and sisters, and all the miscarriages, did not make Anne miserable; princesses and queens are not devoid of the feelings natural to women. It may be that this sad history served to forge a close bond between George and Anne. When he died in 1708, she lay on the bed by his side kissing him.

Her relations with her sister Mary were rarely good, partly because Mary as the elder took it upon herself to criticise Anne’s conduct and tell her how she should behave, partly because Mary was a chatterbox and Anne naturally taciturn. Like her father, James, she lacked vivacity and was inclined to be gloomy. She had reason to be so.

In compensation, she indulged in passionate friendships with other women, chief among them Sarah Churchill, Marlborough’s wife. Sarah was three or four years the elder, but they had played together as children. They were very different in character. Sarah was lively, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, Anne slow and heavy. Sarah dazzled her, and for years until her bossiness and ill-temper became unbearable, she was the person Anne loved most in the world. Some are determined that their relationship was physical, but passionate friendship amounting to love can exist between people of the same sex without them going to bed together. Nevertheless, the judgement of Sarah’s most recent biographer, Ophelia Field, that the Princess’s ‘marriage contained many of the qualities of a friendship, while Sarah’s relationship with Anne was developing into a fraught romance’
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can’t be discounted. Certainly some thought Anne’s feeling excessive; her father James criticised her ‘boundless passion’ for Sarah.

Sarah, in her memoirs, written in old age, long after Anne was dead, declared that while royalty generally believed that close association with inferiors detracted from their dignity, ‘The Princess had a different taste. A friend was what she most coveted.’
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She believed too that friends should be on equal terms, and suggested that they should address each other by assumed names, thus eliding the difference in rank. Anne became Mrs Morley and Sarah Mrs Freeman on account of what she called ‘my frank, open temperament’. Both detested Anne’s brother-in-law William. In their private language he was ‘Mr Caliban’.

Anne also disliked her stepmother, Mary of Modena. She may have been jealous of Mary’s vivacity – the Queen was her elder by only four or five years – but it was her proselytising Catholicism that she most resented and disapproved of. ‘She pretends to have a good deal of kindness for me,’ she told her sister, ‘but I doubt it is not real, for I never see proofs of it, but rather the contrary.’
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Her resentment was such that she added that before long it would be dangerous to be a Protestant in England. This was of course nonsense.

The birth of the Prince of Wales in the summer of 1688 infuriated her, and for a time she even subscribed to the belief in the absurd warming-pan story. In later years good sense asserted itself; she recognised that James Edward was her half-brother. But at the time when her father summoned his Privy Council in order to offer them proofs that the baby was indeed his son, Anne chose to absent herself from the meeting, on grounds of ill-health.

Her disaffection was such that she welcomed the Dutch invasion, sending a note of her approval to William. Macaulay declared that she did so because ‘she had no will but that of the Churchills’, but this is to underestimate her attachment to the Church of England and her undoubted, if exaggerated, fear of popery. When Churchill deserted his master, Anne was alarmed for the fate of her adored Sarah, since they were both then still in Whitehall. She feared that Sarah would be arrested and her papers examined, papers in which there was certainly evidence of treasonable conspiracy. ‘Strong affection,’ Macaulay wrote, ‘braced the feeble mind of the Princess. “I will jump out of the window,” she said, “rather than be found here by my father.”’ Such a hazardous means of escape was unnecessary. Anne and Sarah slipped out of the palace by night, the Princess reportedly still in dressing gown and slippers. When their absence was discovered, the Princess’s old nurse cried out that her dear mistress had been murdered by the papists. Wild rumours flew round London: that Anne had been carried off to prison, that she had been beaten by her cruel stepmother, that her life was in danger. It was all nonsense; she was on her way to Nottingham to join the northern supporters of William. Meanwhile, her husband also absconded. When James heard of Anne’s flight, he exclaimed: ‘God help me! My own children have forsaken me.’

Anne would later repent of her desertion of her father, or at least express repentance. In 1691 she wrote to him asking his forgiveness. James was not impressed; no forgiveness was forthcoming. In any case Anne’s sincerity may be questioned. She wrote this letter when Marlborough was also making overtures to the king he had abandoned, and assuring him of his regret and undying devotion.

Likewise it was William’s understandable distrust of Marlborough, as much as the King’s chilly manner, that occasioned Anne’s hostility to her brother-in-law. When Mary died in 1694, William found it expedient to be reconciled to his successor, which in turn made it necessary for him to admit Marlborough once again to his favour. He recognised Marlborough’s qualities, and, as renewed war with France became imminent and his own health deteriorated, accepted that Marlborough would be his real successor as the leader of the Grand Alliance against Louis. On her accession, Anne made Marlborough a Knight of the Garter and captain-general of the army; Sarah was in high heaven.

For almost ten years Marlborough, with the assistance of his friend Lord Godolphin on the home front, conducted the most uniformly successful war in British history. His task was never easy. The army he commanded was an allied one. If he had complete command of his English, Scots and Irish regiments, he had to employ rare diplomatic skills to keep on good terms with the Dutch and the various German states joined in the war against France. His charm, courtesy, intelligence and determination usually enabled him to do so. To make a comparison with the 1939–45 war, he was required to combine the diplomatic and managerial ability of an Eisenhower with the fighting qualities of a Patton or Montgomery. His succession of great victories – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet – was unprecedented in British military history and has never been matched since. The victory at Blenheim in 1704 was the first great battle won by an English commander on the Continent since Agincourt almost three hundred years previously. Till near the end Anne gave him steady support; that was all that was required of her.

This was the more remarkable because within a few years of becoming queen, her relationship with Sarah began to turn sour. The cause was only in part personal. Certainly Sarah became more demanding, more critical, more assertive and more tiresome than ever. When she found that she was being supplanted in Anne’s affections by a distant cousin, Abigail Hill (Mrs Masham), a lady of the bedchamber, her tantrums were insupportable. It is scarcely surprising that Anne, frequently in poor health, became weary of the woman she had once adored, who now increasingly bored and irritated her. But there were political differences too.

Inasmuch as Anne had political principles of her own, she was, as a devout member of the Church of England, inclined to Toryism. As a queen, however, she disliked party, and preferred to promote national unity. Sarah, on the other hand, was a fierce Whig, and insisted that the Tories were all Jacobites – even though Marlborough himself was, as the son of an old Cavalier family, by upbringing and instinct a Tory. Sarah’s animus against the Tories was sharpened by their growing disenchantment with the war, a disenchantment that in time hardened into outright opposition. This was partly because the land tax raised to pay for the war bore heavy on Tory squires, but also because only the City of London, and the great Whig families connected with the money power, derived any benefit from continued hostilities. Moreover, the Tories came to believe that the war was being fought in the interests of the Dutch and the Habsburg emperor, and not of England. It seemed that England was fighting, and paying, to put a Habsburg prince on the throne of Spain – something the Spaniards themselves opposed, and which, after the victory at Almanza in 1707 of a Franco-Spanish army, commanded by the Jacobite Duke of Berwick, seemed doomed to failure. As the Tories turned against the war – and in consequence against Marlborough himself – Sarah’s attachment to the Whigs grew fiercer and she became quite intolerable to the Queen.