Читать книгу Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion - Anne Somerset - Страница 14

At the outset of William and Mary’s reign, the outlook for Anne appeared good. She assumed that the new King and Queen would feel grateful for the risks she and George had taken on their behalf, and also for the way Anne had agreed, after a bit of prodding, that William could mount the throne. So sure was she of receiving favourable treatment that in January 1689 she spoke airily of having an acquaintance raised to the peerage, expressing confidence that ‘such a thing would not be denied to the Prince and her’.¹

Initially all seemed well. George not only remained a member of the Privy Council, but in early April he was naturalised as an English subject and created Earl of Cumberland and Duke of Kendal. Although he continued to be styled Prince George of Denmark, he was now entitled to sit in the House of Lords and ranked as England’s foremost nobleman. Anne’s great friends, the Churchills, also looked set to prosper. In the April coronation honours Lord Churchill was raised in the peerage, taking the title Earl of Marlborough. Court observers tipped him to ‘be a great favourite’, and after being ‘extremely caressed’ by Mary upon the latter’s arrival, Sarah too flattered herself that ‘I was as like to make as great progress in the Queen’s favour as any in the court’.²

On 7 May 1689 England declared war on Louis XIV who, besides trying to extend French power within Europe, was championing the cause of the exiled James II. In March James had landed in Ireland, accompanied by a French army, with the ultimate aim of launching an invasion of England or Scotland. Army officers such as the Earl of Marlborough welcomed the outbreak of war, while Prince George likewise looked forward to proving himself in an important naval or military post.

As the summer advanced, some people became worried about the state of Anne’s pregnancy. By July she had become ‘monstrous swollen’ and, since it had never been made clear that the Princess had not really been pregnant in September 1688, it was naturally thought that the birth was worryingly overdue. Lady Rachel Russell fretted that ‘the Princess … goes very long for one so big’, while John Evelyn suspected that she was not with child at all, and that her abdomen was merely inflated by gas. However, Anne proved him wrong. At five in the morning of 24 July 1689 Anne was delivered of a son in Hampton Court Palace. To prevent allegations of trickery, Queen Mary was present for the entire labour, which lasted about three hours, ‘and the King with most of the persons of quality about the court came into her royal highness’s bedchamber’ for the birth itself.³

The boy was named William after the King, who stood as godfather when the baby was christened on 27 July. It was also announced that the child would be given the title of Duke of Gloucester. Anne took some time to recover from the birth, but Mary looked after her attentively. The Queen recalled that over the next fortnight she was ‘continually in [Anne’s] bedchamber, or that of the child’, and a contemporary praised the way she cared for them both ‘with the tenderness of a mother’.⁴

Although an optimist hailed the little duke as a ‘brave, lively-like boy’, one of Anne’s household servants described him as ‘a very weakly child’ who was not expected to live long. The first wet nurse chosen for him had nipples too big for him to fasten on to, but after a suitable replacement had been found he began to feed, and his prospects of survival improved. Then at six weeks ‘he was taken with convulsion fits, which followed so quick one after another that the physicians from London despaired of his life’. When they suggested that another change of milk might help, an urgent appeal was put out, and for days ‘nurses with young children came many at a time … from town and the adjacent villages’. It was specified that applicants must have only recently given birth themselves, and one woman who initially was taken on was sent away after a vigilant lady-in-waiting inspected the parish registers and discovered that she was lying about her child’s age. The position remained vacant until George caught sight of a woman named Mrs Pack, whose ugliness made her ‘fitter to go to a pigsty than to a Prince’s bed’, but nevertheless looked sturdy enough to do the job well. Sure enough, when she offered her breast, the child latched on, and within hours his condition visibly improved. Revered as the Prince’s saviour, Mrs Pack was accorded high status within the household, and ‘the whole time she suckled the Duke there were positive orders given that nobody should contradict her’.⁵

In fact, the child’s recovery may have owed little to the health-giving properties of Mrs Pack’s milk. His convulsions had probably been caused by an illness such as meningitis or a middle ear infection, and the passing of the crisis merely happened to coincide with Mrs Pack’s appearance on the scene. Furthermore, his recovery was not complete. An infection of this kind can interfere with the absorption of the cerebro-spinal fluid, causing arrested hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. It seems that this is what happened in this case.⁶

By 7 October the child was well enough for the Princess to move back to London. Motherhood now offered her a chance of personal fulfilment, but relations with the King and Queen were proving difficult. Once the excitement of their reunion had faded, Mary’s initial friendliness towards her sister had abated. Sarah, now Countess of Marlborough, attributed this to the two women having incompatible temperaments, as the Queen, who was naturally talkative, found her uncommunicative sister dreary company. As for William, he soon developed a strong antipathy for his sister-in-law. Judging that Anne and George ‘had been of more use to him than they were ever like to be again’ (as Sarah acerbically put it), the King saw no need to make much of the couple. He regarded George as unattractive and stupid, telling an English politician he was simply ‘an encumbrance’. In 1688 he had dismissed the Prince as incapable of weighty affairs, and he despised him for not being more assertive with his wife.⁷

William’s contempt for George was transparent. Always ‘apt to be peevish’, the King had ‘a dry morose way with him’, and he rarely took trouble to make himself agreeable. In Anne’s case, the King’s ‘cold way towards her was soon observed’, and he exacerbated matters with petty acts of rudeness. When he was sent gifts of fruit, he grudgingly allocated some to be passed on to Anne and George ‘but always took care to pick out the worst bunch of grapes or the worst peach that was in the parcel’. He was equally ungracious on other occasions. At one point Anne dined with the King and Queen while pregnant with the Duke of Gloucester, and the first peas of the season were served. ‘The king, without offering the Princess the least share of them, ate them every one up himself’. Anne later admitted to Sarah that she had found it difficult not to gaze longingly at the dish while the King gorged himself on the delicacy.⁸

Besides slighting Anne and George, the King showed little warmth towards the Marlboroughs. From the start, his attitude towards the two of them was very guarded, and as early as December 1688 he had growled that the couple ‘could not govern him, nor … his wife as they did the Prince and Princess of Denmark’.⁹ Although Marlborough was made a Privy Councillor and Gentleman of the Bedchamber, William remained impervious to his charm. This did not ease relations between the court at Whitehall and the Cockpit.

Before long Anne took umbrage on another count. Immediately after William and Mary had been proclaimed King and Queen, Anne had requested that she be given the famously luxurious Whitehall apartment formerly occupied by Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. This was granted, but the Princess then asked for another set of adjoining rooms for her servants, offering in return to surrender her lodgings at the Cockpit. She was angered to be told that the Earl of Devonshire had first call on the rooms she coveted, and that only if he consented to exchange them for the Cockpit could her wishes be met. Furiously Anne snapped ‘She would then stay where she was, for she would not have my Lord Devonshire’s leavings’.¹⁰ She retained the Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartment for the use of her son and his household, remaining herself at the Cockpit. This meant she was one of the most lavishly accommodated persons at court, but the episode left her feeling resentful.

However, what really envenomed relations within the royal family were disagreements over Anne’s allowance. On James II’s departure, payment of this had ceased, and within months the Princess was in debt. Partly this was because of her heavy gambling losses to Sarah amounting, according to one report, to as much as £15,000. However, the Prince and Princess of Denmark’s financial situation was also worsened by a sacrifice that George made at King William’s request. George’s only assets were lands that had once belonged to the Duke of Holstein, but which had been seized by the Danish crown more than a hundred years earlier. In 1689 war looked likely between Denmark and Sweden, until William mediated a settlement. When Sweden demanded that George’s lands should be returned to their original owner, King William personally guaranteed the Prince that if he surrendered them, he would be compensated in full. In July 1689 George ‘immediately and generously signed the release’ of the property, declaring ‘he desired no better security than the assurances his majesty had given him’.¹¹ Much to William’s relief, a Baltic war was thus averted, but the money owing to George would not be paid for years.

Although William was partly responsible for Anne and George’s shortage of cash, he showed little sympathy for their needs. William apparently ‘wondered very much how the Princess could spend £30,000 a year’.¹² The Princess was counting on her allowance being vastly increased and may indeed have understood that this had been promised to her when she had agreed William could become King. Months passed without the King giving any indication of how he intended to provide for Anne, causing her grave disquiet. It was true that William’s own financial situation was currently uncertain, as Parliament had only granted the Crown a revenue for one year. Nevertheless, he should at least have discussed the situation with the Princess, and striven to convince her that he would obtain her the best settlement in his power.

As a result the Countess of Marlborough became convinced that the Princess must fight for her rights. Rather than waiting for the King to act, she persuaded her mistress to press for an independent revenue to be settled on her by Parliament. To ensure support in the House of Commons, Sarah formed contacts with Tory Members of Parliament who were disgruntled that William’s first government was composed mainly of Whigs. The King and Queen were shocked by Anne’s readiness to exploit political divisions for her own advantage. When the matter was first raised in Parliament Mary was outraged to see Anne ‘making parties to get a revenue settled’, and an ardent Whig later warned William that the Princess’s intention was to secure herself enough money to be ‘the head of a party against you’.¹³

Mary at once confronted Anne, asking her ‘What was the meaning of those proceedings?’ When the Princess mumbled that ‘she heard her friends had a mind to make her some settlement, the Queen hastily replied with a very imperious air, “Pray, what friends have you but the King and me?”’ Anne was left fuming and Sarah later recalled that when the Princess recounted what had happened, ‘I never saw her express so much resentment as she did at this usage’.¹⁴

Undeterred, Anne and Sarah pressed on with their plans, and in August 1689 the Princess’s supporters in the Commons proposed that she should be awarded an income of £70,000 a year. After a debate, the matter was adjourned and soon afterwards the King prorogued Parliament. He still avoided talking to Anne on the subject of money, and told Mary not to bring it up with her either. Subsequently attempts were made to ensure that the matter was not revived when Parliament reassembled. William and Mary employed Sarah’s great friend Lady Fitzharding (the former Mrs Barbara Berkeley, who had fled London with Anne and Sarah during the Revolution) to apply pressure on Sarah. Lady Fitzharding, who had been reappointed as royal governess upon the birth of the Duke of Gloucester, used a variety of arguments. Having told Sarah she would harm herself and her family if she angered the King and Queen, she then cautioned her that Anne’s interests would be jeopardised if, as was likely, the measure her friend favoured was rejected by Parliament. She warned that in those circumstances William and Mary would consider themselves under no obligation to give Anne anything, and so the Princess would find herself destitute. However, she could not prevail on Sarah to abandon the project, which she pursued with a tenacity that she herself acknowledged verged on the demented.

On 17 December 1689 the matter came before Parliament again, occasioning ‘great heats’ when it was debated in the House of Commons. Lord Eland was one of those who urged that the Princess should be awarded £70,000 a year, though some members willing to confer an independent income on her thought £50,000 a more appropriate figure. Their opponents, ‘being influenced by the King, were for leaving that matter wholly to his Majesty’s discretion’. To those who urged that it was undesirable to give Anne a lot of money at a time when wartime taxation was heavy, Sir Thomas Clarges retorted ‘Is it not seasonable that the Prince and Princess and the Duke of Gloucester should have meat, drink and clothes?’ In response to concerns that the Princess could pose a threat to the King if he had no control over her finances, one member commented that disturbances were usually caused by ‘persons not at their ease; let the Princess be at ease’. William would have done well to heed these words, but the Solicitor General, John Somers, came closer to his master’s views when he growled, ‘granting a revenue by act of Parliament to a subject is always dangerous’.¹⁵

The next morning the King sent the Earl of Shrewsbury to urge Sarah to abandon her campaign. Shrewsbury tried first to enlist the Earl of Marlborough on his side but he refused point blank, confiding that his wife ‘was like a mad woman’ in her determination to push the measure through. When Shrewsbury saw Sarah herself he informed her that William was prepared to settle Anne’s debts and to give her £50,000 a year, although as this would not have statutory authority, it could be withheld if the King saw fit. Shrewsbury promised to resign if William reneged on his word, but Sarah correctly observed that his doing so would scarcely help the Princess. He then spoke directly to Anne, but found her equally unaccommodating. Appearing somewhat flustered, she told him ‘she had met with so little encouragement from the King that she could expect no kindness from him and therefore would stick to her friends’ in Parliament.¹⁶

With another parliamentary debate on the issue scheduled for that afternoon, the King opted for a partial retreat. The Comptroller of the Royal Household announced in the Commons that the King was content for Anne to be voted an allowance by Parliament, and moved that it should be set at £50,000 a year. This was approved by the House, and the matter should have ended there, but the ill feeling caused by the affair was not so easily dispelled. That evening Mary accosted Anne, and demanded to know what grounds she had for claiming that the King had been unkind to her. Anne could cite no specific complaints, whereupon Mary rebuked her sharply, telling her ‘she had shewed as much want of kindness to me as respect to the King and I both’. ‘Upon this,’ the Queen noted in her journal, ‘we parted ill friends’.

The King visited the Princess just before New Year on the grounds that it was ‘an ungenerous thing to fall out with a woman’, and said he had no desire to live on poor terms with her. Anne responded politely, but since she failed to follow this up by making friendly overtures to Mary, the Queen dismissed her words as empty.¹⁷

It was not money matters alone that caused tension within the royal family. William’s policies were far from universally popular and the King and Queen soon came to suspect that Anne was giving encouragement to their critics. William was viewed in some quarters as insufficiently protective of the Church of England. Already upset by the fact that episcopacy was abolished in Scotland following the Revolution, in March 1689 ardent Anglicans had been outraged when William had indicated that he favoured altering the law so that Protestant dissenters were no longer barred from public office if they did not take Anglican communion. The proposal stirred up so much fury among High Tories, who considered themselves the guardians of the Church of England, that it had to be abandoned, but they could not prevent the passage of a Toleration Act, which enabled dissenters to practise their religion. Those who found this deplorable were further angered by royal treatment of Anglican clergy, including eight bishops, who declined to take the oath of allegiance to the new monarchs on grounds of conscience. In February 1690 they were deprived of their benefices, fuelling the displeasure of those who condemned William for ‘manifestly undermining … the prosperity of the Church of England’.¹⁸

Anne showed herself sympathetic to such views by deliberately distancing herself from William and Mary’s approach to Church matters. When Mary changed the order of communion in the Chapel Royal, Anne pretended that ill health obliged her to receive the sacrament elsewhere. She also poured scorn on other innovations introduced by the Queen. Mary noted bitterly that her sister ‘affected to find fault with everything was done, especially to laugh at afternoon sermons and doing in little things contrary to what I did’. She considered it pointless to remonstrate, as ‘I saw plainly she was so absolutely governed by Lady Marlborough that it was to no purpose’.¹⁹

The King and Queen both believed that republicans posed a serious danger to the monarchy, while the supporters of James II (known as ‘Jacobites’ by 1690) threatened the kingdom’s stability in other ways. In the summer of 1690 the first of many plots to restore James was uncovered. Hostility from committed opponents of the regime was only to be expected, but Mary was haunted by the possibility that her sister was ‘forming a third’ party of malcontents.²⁰

Even if not actively disloyal, many people were disenchanted, and it was feared that Anne could exploit this. It had not taken long for anti-Dutch sentiment to surface in England, and comments later made by Anne show that she was not immune from such feelings. Taxation had reached levels unseen since Cromwellian times, which naturally made the government more unpopular. Mary had considerable charm, but William’s gruff manner won him few friends, and the fact that his asthma obliged him to live out of London at either Kensington or Hampton Court meant that ‘the gaiety and diversions of a court disappeared’, causing ‘general disgust’. By January 1690 Evelyn perceived ‘as universal a discontent against K[ing] William … as was before against K[ing] James’, and in these circumstances Anne’s behaviour made the King and Queen uneasy. Having themselves benefited during the last reign from Anne’s disloyalty towards the incumbent monarch, they now feared that she would turn on them. Their distrust of her was heightened by the fact that ‘her servants who had seats in Parliament were observed to be very well with those whom the court had least reason to be fond of’. Accordingly the Cockpit came to be regarded as a centre of disaffection, not least because it was reported that ‘many rude things were daily said at that court’.²¹

In April 1690 Anne made an attempt at rapprochement, visiting Mary following her recovery from a brief but worrying illness, and asking ‘pardon for what was past’. Unfortunately the Princess then spoiled the effect by asking that her allowance be raised by a further £20,000 a year, which William curtly rejected. The King and Queen did not doubt that Lady Marlborough had encouraged Anne to make this unwelcome demand, and this sharpened their dislike of both Sarah and her husband.²²

Anne in her turn felt hard done by, for she still believed she deserved an allowance of £70,000 a year. As it was, she remained perpetually short of cash, something that might have been largely attributable to Sir Benjamin Bathurst’s incompetent, or even dishonest handling of her finances. On several occasions when Anne applied to him for money he told her none was available, forcing her to delay settling her obligations. In the Princess’s view however, the fault lay not with poor management, but with William and Mary.

Matters did not improve when in June 1690 George accompanied William at his own expense on a military expedition against James II’s forces in Ireland. Throughout the campaign William treated him with insulting indifference, taking no ‘more notice of him than if he had been a page of the backstairs’. The King refused to let the Prince travel with him in his coach, and no mention was made of George in the official Gazette even though he had been close by the King when William was slightly wounded on 30 June. The following day George was at his side again when William crossed the river Boyne and won a notable victory against the Jacobite army. The result was that James fled back to France, leaving his Irish supporters to continue the fight against William in his name. To add to George’s frustration, while he was in Ireland he had great difficulty staying in touch with his wife, for couriers set off for England without waiting for his missives. The Earl of Nottingham had to write to Ireland to ask that in future George would be told whenever an express delivery was sent, because the Princess, who was pregnant once again, ‘was very uneasy that she had no letters by the last messenger’.²³

In England meanwhile, the two sisters had not become any closer in their menfolk’s absence. They should have been drawn together by mutual sympathy, for in addition to the usual strains experienced by the wives of men on active service, they had to face the possibility that their father would be killed during the campaign. Mary was under great stress at the time, for though William normally dealt with all affairs of State, in his absence Mary was ruling the country in conjunction with nine Lords Justices. She lamented that ‘business, being a thing I am so new in, and so unfit for, does but break my brains’, but Anne remained ‘of a humour so reserved I could have little comfort from her’.²⁴

While acknowledging that ‘for my humour I know I am morose and grave and therefore may not be so pleasing to her as other company’ Anne pointed out that she dined regularly with the Queen and was ‘with her as often and as long at a time as I could’. On most afternoons she stayed with her till three o’clock, but when she offered ‘to be oftener with her if I knew when she was alone’, the Queen did not seem keen on the idea. Anne reported that Mary told her ‘I might easily believe without a compliment she should be very glad of my company but that … she was glad when she could get some time to herself’.²⁵

In early September 1690 William and George returned from Ireland, even though the Jacobites had not been fully ousted. It was naturally a huge relief to Anne to have her husband safely back at home, but the joy of their reunion was soon marred. On 14 October Anne, who was then seven months pregnant, was ‘delivered of a daughter which lived about two hours and was christened and buried privately in Westminster Abbey’.²⁶ Fortunately the Princess was unaware that henceforth she would never produce any child that survived longer than this, but though she recovered swiftly from the physical ill effects of the birth, she was inevitably distressed by her loss.

She could at least derive consolation from her son, who was now just over a year old. She had wanted the child to grow up at Richmond, as she had done, but since William and Mary insisted that the palace there was already fully occupied, she had instead installed him in a borrowed house in Bayswater. A year later she had taken, at an extortionate rent, a nearby property named Campden House, a Jacobean building with a fine hilltop view. Rooms were set aside there for Anne and George so they could stay overnight when visiting their son, and Anne grew very fond of what she referred to as ‘my cottage at Kensington’.²⁷

Most afternoons the child was taken out in a little coach drawn by Shetland ponies. His health remained a worry and Anne was understandably a nervous mother. When he started to toddle he proved even more unsteady on his feet than most children, an unrecognised early sign of the poor balance caused by his hydrocephalus. Anne proudly informed Sarah as soon as he was able to walk the length of a room, but added that ‘he is so mighty heedless I am afraid it will be a great while before one shall dare venture to let him go without leadings’. In the summer of 1691 she tried not to panic when he had an attack of diarrhoea, reassuring herself he was ‘in very good temper and sleeps well … and they tell me ’tis the best way of breeding teeth’. Later that year she thought about taking the child with her when she went to Tunbridge, despite the fact that Lady Fitzharding’s husband told her this was unwise. Defiantly Anne told Sarah, ‘His eloquence can’t convince me more than other people’s that I am in the wrong’, but in the end she thought better of it and left Gloucester behind.²⁸

Queen Mary was very fond of her nephew, giving him a beautiful set of ivory carpentry tools to play with, but the sisters’ mutual affection for the little boy did not draw them closer together. The fact that Anne was a mother may indeed have aroused Mary’s jealousy, for in a meditation written in 1691 she recorded that she was finding it harder than ever to resign herself to being childless. Relations between the Cockpit and Whitehall remained so frosty that Sarah became concerned, partly because she thought Anne needlessly made things worse. Not only did Anne maintain a gauche silence in her sister’s presence, but the contrast between her sullen demeanour towards Mary, and her effusive behaviour to Sarah was positively embarrassing.²⁹

When Sarah accused her of not trying hard enough to please the Queen, the Princess was adamant that ‘as for respect I have always behaved myself towards her with as much as ’tis possible’. She maintained she could not feign an affection she did not feel, for ‘if it were to save my soul, I can’t … make my court to any lady I have not a very great inclination for’. She also demurred at Sarah’s suggestion that she should be less demonstrative towards her in public, complaining ‘I think ’tis very hard I may not have the liberty of … being kind … to those I really dote on, as long as I do nothing extravagant’. Nevertheless she promised that if Sarah wished it, she would show more restraint.³⁰

Far from a thaw developing, Anne’s feelings towards her sister and brother-in-law soon became more glacial than ever. In early 1691 William had gone to the Continent to pursue the war against France, but Prince George’s hopes of military preferment were not fulfilled and a rumour that he would be made Admiral of the fleet proved false. Upset at being overlooked, George decided to serve as a volunteer in a Royal Navy ship commanded by Lord Berkeley. He informed William of his intention when the King paid a brief visit to England in the spring of 1691. The King, who was about to go abroad once again, merely gave his brother-in-law a farewell embrace, which George interpreted as consent. In fact, the King was appalled by the prospect of George going to sea, refusing to believe his brother-in-law simply wished to do his duty. As Mary darkly put it, ‘’Twas plain there was a design of growing popular’, and the King and she concluded that the Prince and Princess were set on courting sympathy for the way George had been treated.³¹

Before departing William instructed his wife to ensure that George did not go, though preferably without letting it appear that she had intervened. Mary began by asking the Countess of Marlborough to dissuade George, but she declined when it was stipulated that she must pretend she was doing this on her own initiative. The Queen next urged George directly to drop his plans, only to find that since his belongings had already been loaded aboard his ship, he believed it would be undignified to change his mind at this late stage. In desperation Mary then forbade him to go. Both Anne and George were angry at the way the Prince had been humiliated, and one foreign diplomat believed that this incident was the principal cause of the total breakdown in relations between the sisters that occurred the following year. For her part the Queen thought that all along the Denmarks had wanted her to issue a prohibition, ‘that they might have a pretence to rail and so in discontent go to Tunbridge’.³²

George currently had other grounds for grievance. Contrary to what had been promised, he had not been recompensed for the lands he had surrendered to the Duke of Holstein. After ‘two years fruitlessly spent’ trying to secure payment, he had not received a penny. In August 1691 he had accepted ‘with a kind of repugnance’ a compensation offer of £85,000, a figure he believed undervalued the properties’ true worth. Infuriatingly, however, the money was not made available, even though George had only settled on condition of prompt payment.³³

This coincided with another setback for Anne and George. For some time they had wanted the King to make some mark of favour to the Earl of Marlborough, who in the past three years had performed many services for William and Mary. He had been one of the nine Lords Justices appointed in the summer of 1690 to advise the Queen, and the following autumn he had conducted a remarkable military campaign in Ireland, resulting in the capture of Cork and Kinsale. Despite this the King and Queen remained suspicious of him, with Mary taking the view that he could ‘never deserve either trust or esteem’. Marlborough had recently been passed over for the position of Master of the Ordnance, and Anne and George wanted William to make a gesture that would go some way towards consoling him. Having understood that the King had agreed to make Marlborough a Knight of the Garter, George wrote to William on 2 August 1691 asking him to confer the promised honour, ‘it being the only thing I have ever pressed you for’. Anne seconded this request with a letter of her own. Robustly she told William ‘You cannot certainly bestow it upon anyone that has been more serviceable to you in the late Revolution nor that has ventured their lives for you as he has done ever since your coming to the Crown. But if people won’t think these merits enough, I can’t believe anybody will be so unreasonable to be dissatisfied when ’tis known you are pleased to give it him on the Prince’s account and mine’.³⁴ Unperturbed by the certainty of causing serious affront, the King ignored both pleas.

William and Mary had hoped that in time the Princess’s infatuation with Lady Marlborough would lessen, but of that there appeared no prospect. On the contrary, it was around now that Anne told Sarah that she was, ‘if it be possible, every day more and more hers’. By April 1691 she had also instituted a new system designed to tear down the barrier of rank that divided them. Sarah recalled that Anne became ‘almost unhappy in the thought that she was her superior. She thought that such friendship ought to make them, at least in their conversations, equals … She could not bear the sound of words which implied in them distance and superiority’.³⁵ They therefore agreed to adopt pseudonyms which masked the disparity in status between them, and to use these when writing or talking to one another. Anne took the name Mrs Morley, while Sarah called herself Mrs Freeman, and the arrangement extended to their husbands, who now became Mr Morley and Mr Freeman respectively.

Besides seeking to correct any imbalance in their relationship, the Princess demonstrated her devotion to her friend in a more material way. In the early spring of 1691 she wrote to Sarah, ‘I have had something to say to you a great while and did not know how to go about it; but now that you cannot see my blushes’ she was emboldened to offer the Countess of Marlborough an additional £1,000 a year as a reward for having secured Anne an increase in her allowance. She begged her to ‘never mention anything of it to me, for I should be ashamed to have any notice taken of such a thing from one that deserves more than I shall be ever able to return’. Considering that the Princess was still in pecuniary difficulties, it was a particularly munificent gesture; Sarah herself would later make the snide comment that since Anne’s ‘temper did not, of itself, frequently lead her to actions of great generosity’, it was more noteworthy still.³⁶

Mindful of the demands of Sarah’s young family, Anne permitted her lady-in-waiting to spend long periods at her house at St Albans. Such separations were painful for the Princess, and Sarah recorded ‘I had upon that many kind expostulations, but the necessity of my affairs and some indulgence to my temper required it’. While in the country, the Countess immersed herself in works of political controversy, translations of the classics, and contemporary drama, prompting Anne once to reproach her for wasting ‘spare minutes to look on Seneca’, which could have been spent writing to her.³⁷ She was right to perceive this as a threat, for as Sarah broadened her knowledge, the Princess appeared to her ever more dull and limited.

During Sarah’s absences the Princess had to settle for keeping in touch by letter, and as ever she demanded prompt replies. ‘I know dear Mrs Freeman hates writing’ she admitted, but since ‘one kind word or two’ sufficed her she felt it was not too much to ask for a daily affirmation of friendship. The Princess observed, ‘To what purpose should you and I tell one another, yesterday it rained and today it shined; as for news you will have it from those that are more intelligible’. To make their separations more tolerable Anne commissioned more than one portrait of Sarah, keeping a copy in miniature constantly with her. It was, she wrote ‘a pleasing thing to look upon’, if no substitute for seeing ‘the dear original whom I adore’.³⁸

When Sarah was away, the Princess eagerly accepted invitations to visit her in the country. She and George usually went for the day, even though the return journey by coach was about fifty miles. Having dined with her friend at St Albans on 12 June 1691, Anne and George were back in London shortly before midnight. Far from being tired out by the trip Anne declared to Sarah ‘If I could follow my own inclinations I believe I should come to you every day’. Sure enough, a week later she paid her another visit, returning so exhilarated that she again proclaimed her desire to repeat the experience whenever possible.³⁹

Although Anne happily underwent these exertions, her health was currently deteriorating. Both Bishop Burnet and Sarah write as if it had long been generally assumed that Anne was unlikely to outlive her sister, yet until 1691 she does not seem to have suffered from frequent illness. At some point in that year, however, she had a bad bout of fever and also became ‘so lame I cannot go without limping’. This was probably the first attack of the arthritis that later made her life a misery. As she made a slow recovery, she did have one cause for optimism: by the end of the year she was expecting another child.⁴⁰

By this time the Marlboroughs had effected a significant addition to Anne’s inner circle by establishing their friend Sidney Lord Godolphin in her confidence. Nicknamed ‘Bacon Face’, Godolphin was a short, lugubrious Cornishman who combined high skills at managing the public finances with a private weakness for gambling. Having been widowed in tragic circumstances, this ‘very silent man’ was noted for his ‘somewhat shocking and ungracious stern gravity’, and possessed a ferocious stare that many found intimidating.⁴¹ With a few intimates, however, Godolphin was less forbidding, and for both John and Sarah Marlborough he felt only admiration and affection.

In 1689 King William had appointed Godolphin his chief Treasury commissioner. However, in addition to performing his public duties, Godolphin proved willing to act as an adviser to Anne and George. Once he had been brought by the Earl and Countess of Marlborough ‘into the service of the Morleys to counsel them in all their difficulties’ the Prince and Princess quickly came to depend upon his calm good sense and shrewdness. By the summer of 1691 it was noted that he appeared more attentive towards the Princess than the Queen, and that whereas he only came to court for council meetings, he was to be seen every afternoon playing cards at the Cockpit. He became so integral a part of Anne’s coterie that she and Sarah dubbed him with an alias of his own, so that in their parlance he went by, and answered to, the name of Mr Montgomery.⁴²

It was impossible to predict that another person who came into Anne’s life about this time would ultimately play an important part in it. Some time in 1690 or 1691 the Countess of Marlborough was informed that some close relations of hers were living in penury. Until that point she ‘never knew there were such people in the world’, for Sarah’s paternal grandfather had fathered twenty-two children, and his youngest daughter had lost contact with her siblings after marrying a merchant named Mr Hill. In the late 1680s Hill had gone bankrupt and died shortly afterwards, leaving his wife and four children destitute. Having learned of their plight Sarah gave them £10 for their immediate relief and then set about making more permanent provision for her first cousins. The oldest son (who died soon after Anne’s accession) was procured a place in the Treasury, while his younger brother Jack was enrolled in St Albans Grammar School. As Sarah later recalled, finding employment for their adult sisters posed more of a problem. Then aged twenty, the eldest girl, called Abigail, had been working in domestic service, but Sarah now took her into her own household. Sarah insisted she ‘treated her with as great kindness as if she had been my sister’ and even ‘nursed her up with ass’s milk’ when the young woman contracted smallpox; one may be sure, however, that Abigail was never allowed to forget her dependent condition.⁴³

A little later one of Anne’s Women of the Bedchamber, Mrs Ellen Bust, fell seriously unwell. Despite her qualms that Abigail’s previous menial employment made her ineligible for royal service, Sarah asked the Princess if Abigail could succeed to her position. Anne at once agreed that Abigail should ‘have any place you desire for her whenever Bust dies’, and said she was delighted to be ‘serviceable to dear Mrs Freeman’ whose ‘commands weigh more with me than all the world besides’.⁴⁴ Though it is possible Eleanor Bust lived on for a bit longer, before the end of the reign Abigail had been installed in Anne’s household. Furthermore, in 1698 her younger sister Alice was made a laundress to the Duke of Gloucester.

Abigail Hill would subsequently exert a powerful and destructive effect on Anne’s friendship with Sarah Marlborough, but this lay long in the future. In 1691 it was the Duke of Gloucester’s governess, Lady Fitzharding, who threatened to come between them. By an odd coincidence, in her letters to Sarah, Anne did not use Lady Fitzharding’s real name, but instead gave her the sobriquet ‘Mrs Hill’. Understandably this later caused confusion, as historians assumed she was referring to Abigail Hill. However, an often overlooked annotation by Sarah on one of Anne’s letters discloses the real identity of ‘Mrs Hill’.⁴⁵

Anne was no longer bothered by Sarah’s feelings for Lady Sunderland, regarding Lady Fitzharding as much more of a threat. Sarah made little effort to allay her anxieties. In 1691 she and Lady Fitzharding sat for a double portrait that showed them playing cards seated close together, an image of female intimacy that must have pained Anne greatly. On more than one occasion Anne’s jealousy caused her to flare up with Sarah, and she was then forced to apologise. After one such row she wrote, ‘I must confess Mrs Hill has heretofore made me more uneasy than you can imagine’, but added that she was now ‘ashamed and angry with myself that I have been so troublesome to my dear Lady Marlborough’. She continued contritely, ‘We have all our failings more or less and one of mine I must own is being a little hot sometimes’.⁴⁶

To Anne’s delight, a little later in the year Sarah had a falling out with Lady Fitzharding, but the rift did not last long. The Princess wrote in agitation ‘I hope Mrs Freeman has no thoughts of going to the opera with Mrs Hill’, entreating that ‘for your own sake as well as poor Mrs Morley’s … have as little to do with that enchantress as ’tis possible’. She warned her friend not to be taken in by Lady Fitzharding’s ‘deceitful tears’, excusing her impertinence by reminding Sarah ‘what the song says: “to be jealous is the fault of every tender lover”’.⁴⁷ None of this prevented Sarah from renewing her friendship with Lady Fitzharding, and it was not until the following year that Anne could reassure herself that ‘Mrs Hill’ was no longer a dangerous rival.

By the end of 1691 Anne had become so disenchanted with William and Mary that she was prepared to engage in outright disloyalty. Almost certainly she did so at the instigation of the Earl of Marlborough, and though in her memoirs Sarah insisted that her own support for the Revolution never wavered, she too probably condoned what now occurred. Earlier in the year Lord Marlborough had made several secret attempts to renew contact with his former master King James. Many English politicians were doing likewise, motivated not so much by a genuine desire to see James restored, but in the hope of protecting themselves from his vengeance if he did regain his throne. At the time this seemed far from unlikely, for William and Mary’s regime remained highly unstable. While William had been in Ireland in 1690 the French had inflicted a serious naval defeat on a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet, and if they had followed this up by mounting an invasion of England, the kingdom might well have fallen. Since then King William had at least gained control of all Ireland, and in October 1691 the Treaty of Limerick had provided for the evacuation of all remaining Jacobite forces from there. However, Louis XIV was still providing active support for James, and had established a court in exile for him and Mary Beatrice at the palace of Saint-Germain, outside Paris. This remained the centre of innumerable intrigues aimed at overthrowing William and Mary

Although it was not uncommon for leading men in England to make secret approaches to Saint-Germain, Marlborough went further than most of his contemporaries. Besides writing twice to James in 1691, he had informed a Jacobite agent in England that regret for his part in James’s deposition had left him unable to ‘sleep or eat, in continual anguish’. James sent word back that since Marlborough ‘was the greatest of criminals, where he had the greatest obligations’, he could only hope to receive pardon by doing James some ‘extraordinary service’. In the autumn of 1691 Marlborough was in fact causing trouble for King William in Parliament, but this was not enough to earn James’s gratitude.⁴⁸ Marlborough therefore had to find some other means of commending himself to his former master, and prevailing on Anne to send a penitent letter to her father provided a way of doing this.

On 1 December 1691 Anne wrote to tell James that she had long desired to make a humble submission to him, but had had to wait for a suitable opportunity. She entreated her father to believe ‘that I am both truly concerned for the misfortune of your condition and sensible, as I ought to be, of my own unhappiness … If wishes could recall what is past, I had long since redeemed my fault’. She averred that it would have given her great relief to have informed him of her ‘repentant thoughts’ before now, but hoped that James would accept that this belated avowal was sincere.⁴⁹

It is not easy to assess why Anne had decided to write this letter. Four months later, after hearing a rumour that the Princess had corresponded with Saint-Germain, a foreign diplomat stationed in England remarked that he found it ‘hard to conceive of this commerce between King James and the Princess, whose interests are so different’.⁵⁰ His puzzlement was very natural, for it is difficult to argue that Anne genuinely wanted her father to regain his throne. There is no indication that her own desire to succeed to the crown had diminished, and she desperately wanted her son to inherit it in due course.

It has been argued that her letter to her father was nothing other than a cynical stratagem aimed at strengthening her own position. According to this theory, what she dreaded above all was that William would betray her by making a peace with France which provided for the crown to revert to James’s son once William and Mary were dead. Certainly there were people in England who believed that William was contemplating a settlement on these lines, and such rumours could have convinced Anne that she must prevent an understanding developing between William and her father by distracting James with overtures of her own.⁵¹

It seems likely, however, that her thinking was slightly different. The need to insure the safety of herself, her husband and son obviously provided a powerful imperative in itself, and her desire of safeguarding the Marlboroughs would have been an additional incentive. She had convinced herself that William and Mary had behaved so monstrously to her that she was absolved of her loyalty, and felt under no obligation to be dragged down with them in the all too likely eventuality of her father’s restoration. Yet in seeking these advantages, she stopped short of committing actual treason. It was not yet illegal to correspond with the exiled King, and she did not offer to work for his restoration, or to overthrow the current monarchs. Her letter afforded her the solace of expressing remorse without committing her to undoing what she had helped to bring about.

Anne could hope that whereas Mary had put herself beyond redemption in her father’s eyes, James would be more inclined to forgive her transgressions. Not long before this, so it was said, James had been complaining of the conduct of his eldest daughter, but had broken off to speak ‘with tenderness of the Princess Anne’. Admittedly this had been too much for his supporter David Lloyd, who was heard to mutter ‘Both bitches by God!’ Anne may even have cherished a faint hope that if her father did recover his throne, she would not automatically be disinherited. It is notable that her letter contained no reference to her half brother, or apology for having cast doubt on his birth. There is no indication she had abandoned her belief that he was an imposter, and she could have deluded herself that James would one day acknowledge this to be the case. This was of course a ridiculous notion, but in Anne’s defence it should be noted that even some of James’s supporters in England remained sufficiently uneasy about the Prince to feel that James would be well advised ‘to satisfy the nation’ by letting it be known that Anne would succeed him. Since James was likely to die long before Mary, it would mean that Anne would ascend the throne much sooner than would otherwise have been the case.⁵²

Marlborough entrusted Anne’s letter to the reliable hands of the Jacobite agent David Lloyd, ironically the very man who had spoken so disparagingly of the Princess in her father’s presence. However, adverse winds and fears of capture prevented him from crossing the Channel for some weeks, and the letter had yet to be delivered when a dramatic development occurred. On 20 January 1692, King William abruptly dismissed the Earl of Marlborough from all his positions at court and in the army.

The King did not publicly explain his decision, but he believed that he had ample reason to act. Besides his conviction that Marlborough and his wife had deliberately inflamed Anne by feeding her ‘inventions and falsehoods’, William had a shrewd idea that Marlborough was in correspondence with Saint-Germain, and that he was encouraging Anne to follow suit. Much worse than this, in William’s eyes, was Marlborough’s campaign to promote disaffection in Parliament and the army by stirring up anti-Dutch sentiment.⁵³

The King and Queen feared that Anne was privy to all of Marlborough’s intrigues for, as Mary put it, ‘I heard much from all hands of my sister’. The night before Marlborough was dismissed, Mary confronted the Princess. Taking the view that Mary wished simply ‘to pick quarrels’, Anne angrily denied that he had done anything wrong. After reflecting on the matter, the Queen was ‘apt to believe’ that her sister was in fact ignorant of what Marlborough had in mind, but she did not feel more secure on that account. On the contrary, she concluded that although Marlborough had as yet avoided acquainting Anne and George with his plans, he was ‘so sure of the Prince and she’ that he was confident of bringing them in when he judged the time appropriate.⁵⁴ William and Mary assumed that Marlborough’s dismissal would automatically prise Anne from his and the Countess’s pernicious clutches, for the Princess would realise there could be no question of retaining the wife of a disgraced man in her service.

A few days after Marlborough’s dismissal, Anne received an anonymous letter, cautioning her that his misfortunes had been caused by spies within her own household. In particular her mysterious source begged her to ‘have a care of what you say before Lady Fitzharding’, who allegedly leaked much damaging information. Anne’s correspondent warned that her enemies at court were ‘not ignorant of what is said and done in your lodging’, entreating her to persuade ‘poor deluded Lady Marlborough’ to be less trusting.⁵⁵

Anne was only too ready to comply, for it greatly bothered her that Sarah was currently ‘as much bewitched … as ever’ by Lady Fitzharding. She accordingly implored ‘dear Mrs Freeman to have a care of Mrs Hill for I doubt [fear] she is a jade, and though one can’t be sure … there is too much reason to believe she has not been so sincere as she ought’. The Princess added bitterly ‘I am sure she hates your faithful Morley’, but as yet she could not prevail on Sarah to sever the friendship.⁵⁶

The King and Queen had meanwhile been waiting impatiently to hear that the Countess had been dismissed from the Princess’s household, but Anne made no such move. Then, to Mary’s astonishment and outrage, on 4 February Anne took Sarah with her when she attended the Queen’s Drawing Room at Kensington Palace. Not wanting to risk an upsetting scene in public, Mary made no comment at the time, but neither she nor William were prepared to let the matter drop. The following day Mary penned a blistering letter to her younger sister, explaining that since she knew that what she had to say would ‘not be very pleasing’, she thought it best to communicate in writing. She then declared that while the Earl of Marlborough was not welcome at court, it was ‘very unfit Lady Marlborough should stay with you, and … I have all the reason imaginable to look upon your bringing her as the strangest thing that ever was done’. She continued, ‘but now I must tell you, it was very unkind in a sister, would have been very uncivil in an equal, and I need not say I have more to claim … I know what is due to me and expect to have it from you’.

In a slightly more emollient tone the Queen carried on, ‘I know this will be uneasy to you and I am sorry for it … for I have all the real kindness imaginable for you and … will always do my part to live with you as sisters ought … for I do love you as my sister, and nothing but yourself can make me do otherwise’. Mary said she was confident that once Anne had ‘overcome your first thoughts … you will find that though the thing be hard … yet it is not unreasonable’. Assuring her sister she looked forward to a time when they could ‘reason the business calmly’, she concluded ‘it shall never be my fault if we do not live kindly together’.⁵⁷

For Anne this letter came as a clarion call to battle. Her conscience apparently untroubled by her approach to Saint-Germain, she clung fiercely to the belief that she had an inalienable right to choose her own household. She set herself against what she considered spiteful bullying, as much out of self-respect as because the prospect of losing Sarah appalled her. Her letters to Sarah now became marked by a visceral hatred of her sister and brother-in-law, containing ‘violent expressions’ that at times alarmed even Sarah.⁵⁸ Besides giving vent to a virulent anti-Dutch prejudice, she referred to the King and Queen as ‘the monsters’; William was given some additional epithets of his own, notably ‘Caliban’ and ‘the Dutch abortive’.

As soon as Mary’s note arrived Anne alerted Sarah that she had received ‘such an arbitrary letter from the Q[ueen] as I am sure [neither] she nor the King durst … have writ to any other of their subjects’. The Princess dismissed this as the sort of provocation ‘which, if I had any inclination to part with dear Mrs Freeman would make me keep her in spite of their teeth’, declaring herself ready to ‘go to the utmost verge of the earth rather than live with such monsters’.⁵⁹

The following day the Princess sent a reply to her sister that blazed with indignation. Mary was right, she said, to think that her letter would come as a terrible shock, for the Queen could hardly doubt how much it would pain Anne to dismiss Sarah. Declaring herself satisfied that her friend ‘cannot have been guilty of any fault to you’, she requested Mary to ‘recall your severe command’, which struck her as ‘so little reasonable … that you would scarce require it from the meanest of your subjects’. Confident that ‘this proceeding can be for no other intent than to give me a very sensible mortification’, Anne stated ‘there is no misery that I cannot readily resolve to suffer’ to avoid parting with the Countess of Marlborough.⁶⁰

The King and Queen were enraged by Anne’s letter. William responded with a message delivered by the Lord Chamberlain ordering Sarah to vacate her lodgings at the Cockpit. It was arguable that he had no right to do this, for the Cockpit was Anne’s personal property, but the Princess decided not to argue the point. Instead she resolved that if Sarah could not live with her in London, she would remove to the country. She at once made arrangements to lease Sion House, situated a few miles west of the capital, from the Duke of Somerset. Although she retained the Cockpit for use during brief visits to London, most of her furniture was sent down to await her arrival.

Before withdrawing the Princess paid her sister a farewell visit, ‘making all the professions that could be imagined’ in hopes of softening her. In vain, however, for the Queen remained ‘insensible as a statue’. When the brief interview ended, the Lord Chamberlain failed to escort Anne to the palace door. Forced to find her own way, Anne could not even make a speedy exit, as her servants were not waiting with her coach, having assumed the visit would last longer. Still smarting at this additional indignity, on 18 February Anne was ‘carried in a sedan [chair] to Sion, being then with child, without any guard or decent attendance’.⁶¹

Prince George endorsed this drastic action, although he had done nothing to encourage the quarrel. A foreign diplomat noted that he ‘remains very calm in the midst of this commotion, as if it was none of his concern’. However, his equanimity was tested when he went to London for the day on 23 February and the royal guards in St James’s Park did not present arms to him as he passed. Anne had no doubt that the King had instructed them to slight him, commenting viciously ‘I can’t believe it was their Dutch breeding alone without Dutch orders that made them do it’. She assured Sarah fiercely that ‘these things are so far from vexing either the Prince or me that they really please us extremely’.⁶²

At Sion the Marlboroughs were given their own apartments, and when the King sent a further ‘peremptory message’ demanding Sarah’s removal, Anne simply ignored it. Soon afterwards the Duke of Gloucester was brought down to Sion with his governess, though Anne did agree that he should be taken to see the Queen before his departure. To avoid burning bridges irrevocably, Prince George went to take leave of the King before William went abroad on campaign on 4 March, but his presence was barely acknowledged.

Sarah later stressed that, not wanting to make things more difficult for Anne, she repeatedly ‘offered and begged the Princess to let me go’, but when she did so her mistress invariably ‘fell into the greatest passion of tenderness and weeping that is possible to imagine’. She entreated Sarah ‘never to have any more such cruel thoughts’, since ‘I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of all the world without you’. Anne declared that if Sarah abandoned her, ‘I swear to you I would shut myself up and never see a creature’, and argued that Sarah was not responsible for her breach with William and Mary. ‘Never fear … that you are the occasion’, the Princess urged, ‘it would have been so anyway’, for ‘the monster is capable of doing nothing but injustice’. Before long Sarah came to accept that Anne and George were somehow to blame for her and her husband’s misfortunes, rather than the other way round.⁶³

When Sarah queried whether Prince George supported his wife’s stand, Anne reassured her ‘he is so far from being of another opinion, if there had been occasion he would have strengthened me in my resolutions’. Anne also made light of the possibility that the King would strip her of her parliamentary allowance, leaving her with just the money granted by her marriage treaty. While hoping that Godolphin would use his influence to protect her, she proclaimed that if necessary she was ready to endure financial hardship. ‘Can you think either of us so wretched that for the sake of twenty thousand pound, and to be tormented from morning to night with flattering knaves and fools, we would forsake those we have such obligations to?’ she demanded. The Princess opined that Sarah surely could not ‘believe we would ever truckle to that monster’, for besides the distress of their separation, it would entail intolerable humiliation. She put it to Sarah:

Suppose I did submit, and that the King could change his nature so much as to use me with humanity, how would all reasonable people despise me? How would that Dutch abortive laugh at me and please himself with having got the better? And, which is more, how would my conscience reproach me for having sacrificed it, my honour, reputation and all the substantial comforts of this life for transitory interest … No, my dear Mrs Freeman, never believe your faithful Morley will ever submit. She can wait with patience for a sunshine day, and if she does not live to see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again.⁶⁴

On 17 April the embattled Princess Anne suffered another appalling blow. In her seventh month of pregnancy she went into premature labour, experiencing more severe pain than in previous childbirths. She sent word to the Queen ‘she was much worse than she used to be, as she really was’, but elicited no response. In the end the child was delivered by the ‘man midwife’ Dr Chamberlen, one of a famous dynasty of accoucheurs whose forebear had invented the forceps. He was paid £100 for his efforts, but could not save the baby, a boy who was born alive but died within minutes.⁶⁵

A foreign diplomat resident in England commented ‘it is thought this event will bring about a reconciliation’, but things turned out otherwise. That afternoon, when the Princess had not physically recovered from her ordeal, let alone from the heartbreak of losing another child, Mary visited her at Sion. Unfortunately she came not in a spirit of forgiveness, but intent on imposing her will. Her mood was not improved when she was given what she considered a ‘poor reception’, taking offence at being ‘obliged to go up through the backstairs to her sister’s apartment unattended by any of her royal highness’s servants’. Even the sight of Anne lying in bed looking ‘as white as the sheets’ failed to excite her compassion. According to Sarah (who was not present), ‘the Queen never asked her how she did, nor expressed the least concern for her condition’. Instead she stated curtly, ‘I have made the first step by coming to you, and I now expect you should make the next by removing my Lady Marlborough’. Sarah claimed Anne answered ‘with very respectful expressions’ that ‘she had never in all her life disobeyed her except in that one particular, which she hoped would some time or other appear as unreasonable to her Majesty as it did to her’. A German diplomat later suggested that her response was rather less civil. He heard that Anne snapped that ‘if the Queen had only come to talk against that lady, she could save herself the trouble of coming another time’. With that, the Princess rolled over on her side, turning her back on her sister.⁶⁶ It was the last time the two women would ever meet.

Sarah heard that, on her way back from Sion, Mary showed some remorse for having been so unbending, but soon afterwards news arrived that convinced the Queen that her tough approach was the right one. Towards the end of April intelligence reports revealed that a Jacobite invasion was about to be launched. A French fleet had been fitted out, with orders to clear the way for James II to cross over from Normandy, where he was waiting with a large army. Having decided that leniency to Anne would be interpreted as weakness, on 27 April the Queen issued an official announcement prohibiting anyone in the royal household from visiting Anne at Sion, and making it plain that anyone who did so could not attend court.

Anne declared herself unmoved by this tightening of the screw. Nevertheless, the ruling left her effectively isolated. One person heard ‘Her highness has but a melancholy court at Sion’, and a foreign diplomat reported that ‘at present there is almost no one who does not condemn her behaviour, apart from declared Jacobites’. Even her own servants were disgruntled at finding themselves stranded at Sion, and some were suspected of passing information back to court. Others did their best to bring about Sarah’s dismissal. In particular, a Mr Maul, who despite having gained a place in Prince George’s household with the Countess’s aid, now tried to persuade his master that Sarah must be sacrificed. George answered ‘he had so much tenderness for the Princess that he could not desire to make her so uneasy as he knew the parting … would do’. Having failed to get his way, Mr Maul went into a sulk. Anne described to Sarah ‘in what ill humour he waited on the Prince and her at dinner, how he used to hurry the meat off the table and never speak one word to ’em’. In revenge Anne ‘took a sort of pleasure to sit at dinner the longer’, which Sarah noted was ‘a thing very unusual with her, who generally the first thing she thinks of is to send her servants to dinner and to make ’em easy’.⁶⁷

Anne remained adamant that though so many people had shown themselves ‘base and false’, she would ever be constant. She would not hear of Sarah resigning, begging her not to ‘deprive me of one of the greatest comforts of my life’. Insisting that she did not mind living out of London, she told Sarah, ‘Mrs Morley … is so mightily at her ease here that should the [here, a word has been deleted: possibly ‘monsters’] grow good natured and indulge her in everything she could desire, I believe she would be hardly persuaded to leave her retirement – but of these great changes I think there is no great danger’.⁶⁸

At this juncture, however, with the invasion scare at its height, the outlook dramatically worsened. On 4 May 1692 the Earl of Marlborough was sent to the Tower on suspicion of treason, after an unscrupulous informant concocted evidence that he had been plotting to seize the Queen. Anne was appalled, not just because ‘it is a dismal thing to have one’s friends sent to that place’, but also because she feared that Sarah would be restrained from seeing her by some kind of legal injunction. Before long there were even reports that the Princess herself faced confinement. Anne heard ‘by pretty good hands’ that as soon as the wind turned westerly, enabling the French fleet to sail for England, she and George would be placed under guard.⁶⁹

Marlborough urged his wife to stay with Anne at Sion, but instead she came to London to work for his release. Having not yet recovered from the illness that had followed her traumatic childbirth, the Princess was left fretting that she could not be on hand to provide comfort. Haunted by the memory of her friend being ‘in so dismal a way when she went from hence’, Anne begged her to look after herself. ‘I fancy asses’ milk would do you good’, she fussed, saying that ‘next to hearing Lord Marlborough were out of his enemies’ power’, the best news she could hope for was that Sarah was bearing up under the strain.⁷⁰

As tension mounted on account of the expected invasion, the Jacobite Lord Ailesbury sent his wife to Sion in a bid to persuade Anne that she should repeat her flight of 1688 and go over to the enemy. Anne was already in bed when Lady Ailesbury arrived about ten at night, but she agreed to receive her and sent her other ladies out of the room. Suspecting that some were listening at the door, Lady Ailesbury ‘begged of her highness to speak with a low voice’, and then delivered her sensitive message. She explained that in the belief that ‘the King your father, if wind permit, might very well be in twenty-four hours in the kingdom’, her husband had arranged for ‘upwards of 5000 men’ to be on hand to escort the Princess if she made a dash to join the invading forces. Lady Ailesbury reminded Anne that she had ‘exerted herself’ in the same manner in 1688; ‘Why may not you as well get on horseback … for to restore him to what you assisted in taking away from him?’ In his memoirs Lord Ailesbury stated that though Anne ‘seemed melancholy and pensive’, she heard this in a ‘very attentive’ manner. Then, ‘fetching a sigh’ she allegedly declared, ‘Well Madam, tell your Lord that I am ready to do what he can advise me to’. It seems unthinkable, however, that Anne genuinely contemplated taking up Ailesbury’s offer. After giving birth the previous month, she had been severely weakened by a fever, and it was not until 22 May that she described herself as being ‘able to go up and down stairs’. In the circumstances a gruelling cross-country ride would have been quite out of the question.⁷¹

On 20 May Anne took an entirely different initiative by asking the Bishop of Worcester to deliver a message to the Queen, requesting permission to pay her respects now that she was strong enough to leave her house. Mary sent back a coruscating reply. ‘’Tis none of my fault we live at this distance’, she spat, ‘and I have endeavoured to show my willingness to do otherwise. And I will do no more. Don’t give yourself any unnecessary trouble, for be assured it is not words can make us live together as we ought. You know what I required of you, and I now tell you, if you doubted it before, that I cannot change my mind but expect to be complied with … You can give me no other marks that will satisfy me’.⁷²

Anne was meditating her next step when she learned that Sarah’s youngest child, a boy of two, had died. Hot on the heels of this came news on 21 May that English warships had defeated the French fleet at the Battle of La Hogue two days earlier, forcing James to abandon his projected invasion. Distracted by her quarrel with the Queen, Anne could barely break off to offer her friend her sympathy. She assured Sarah that she was ‘very sensibly touched’ by her misfortune, ‘knowing very well what it is to lose a child’, but observed that in cases like theirs, when ‘both know one another’s hearts so well … to say any more on this sad subject is but impertinent’. Then, ‘for fear of renewing [Sarah’s] passion too much’, she changed the subject.⁷³

Doubtless hoping that Sarah would find the latest details of her feud with Mary a welcome distraction, Anne informed her of the letter she had just received. ‘I confess I think the more it is told about that I would have waited on the Queen, but that she refused seeing me, it is the best, and therefore I will not scruple saying it to anybody when it comes my way’, she confided to Sarah. ‘Sure never anybody was used so by a sister!’⁷⁴

The Princess also reported that when news arrived that Jacobite hopes had been dashed by the Battle of La Hogue, Lady Fitzharding and Mr Maul had urged her to congratulate Mary on the victory. Anne wrote that from the first she had been disinclined to do so, ‘and much less since I received this arbitrary letter’. She was pleased to take this dig at Lady Fitzharding, whose relationship with Sarah had already suffered because she had avoided her after Marlborough’s arrest. In October 1692 Anne would note happily, ‘God be thanked ’tis not now in her power to make me so uneasy as she has formerly done’.⁷⁵

The informer who had invented evidence against Marlborough was soon exposed as a liar, but for the time being the Earl remained in prison. Fortunately the Habeas Corpus act ensured that he could not be kept there much longer. Anne told Sarah that it was a comfort that he would have to be freed before the end of the current legal term, ‘and I hope when the Parliament sits, care will be taken that people may not be clapped up for nothing, or else there will be no living in quiet for anybody but insolent Dutch and sneaking mercenary Englishmen’.⁷⁶ He was released on 15 June, but remained in disgrace, with the Queen personally striking his name from the register of Privy Councillors. Anne, however, was as supportive as ever, extending an invitation for him to visit her and George at Sion before he went back to the family home at St Albans.

Sarah spent much of the summer at her country house, while Anne remained at Sion. Occasional treats were provided by outings to Sarah’s home. After a trip to St Albans in late July, Anne informed her hostess that she and Prince George ‘got home in three hour and it was then so light she repented she had not tried Mr Morley’s patience half an hour longer’.⁷⁷

At this time, Anne had various concerns about her health, complaining in April of suffering from ‘my old custom … of flushing so terribly after dinner’. This might have been an early sign of erysipelas, a streptococcal skin infection often associated with lupus, and which results in facial inflammation and blemishes. Her favourite physician Dr Lower had died in 1691, and she was now mainly in the hands of the well-respected but irascible Dr Radcliffe. As always Anne was desperate to conceive again, but her menstrual cycle had become alarmingly unpredictable. In her letters to Sarah she referred to her period as ‘Lady Charlotte’, a mysterious term that could perhaps have been a distasteful joke at the expense of Lady Charlotte Beverwort, who had become one of her ladies-in-waiting in 1689. Sarah later noted that the Princess was apt to be ‘unkind’ about her new attendant, even though the poor woman ‘deserved well from her’. At any rate, Anne’s letters in the late summer of 1692 are full of laments about the vagaries of ‘Lady Charlotte’. On 1 August, for example, she described herself as being ‘in a very splenetic way, for Lady Charlotte is not yet come to me’. While thinking it unlikely that she had conceived again after so short an interval, she was fearful that ‘if I should prove with child ’tis too soon after my illness to hope to go on with it’. On the other hand, ‘if I am not, ’tis a very ugly thing to be so irregular’.⁷⁸

In hopes of improving matters, in August it was decided that the Princess and her husband should go to Bath again, accompanied by Sarah. However, when they arrived there it proved impossible to escape the family quarrel, for the Queen sent orders to the Mayor of Bath that he should not escort the Princess to church on Sundays. Anne loftily dismissed this as ‘a thing to be laughed at’ but she was less amused when Sarah was given an unpleasant reception by the townsfolk, who disapproved of her husband’s supposed disloyalty. When going through the streets Sarah was insulted so loudly that she did not dare show herself at the baths, putting her in a very bad mood.⁷⁹

Perhaps in order to try and defuse such hostility, Anne made a public announcement ‘that no Jacobite or Papist shall come into her presence’. Her show of loyalty was undermined by the reports of a government double agent sent down to Bath by the Earl of Portland and Lord Nottingham. This was Dr Richard Kingston, a former royal chaplain who posed so successfully as a Jacobite that he was expert at winning the confidence of people loyal to James II. After provoking them to make outrageously indiscreet comments (never verified by a second witness) he passed them on to his employers. He had been trying to infiltrate Anne’s circle for some weeks. In July he had boasted, ‘I grow more and more in the intrigues of Sion House, who are in both with the Jacobites and the republicans’.⁸⁰ Now he was welcomed when he came to see Anne at Bath and, according to his own account, she unburdened herself to him while Prince George was out of the room.

After complaining to Kingston of the Mayor being given orders ‘to slight her’, Anne asked her visitor ‘several questions concerning her father, as where he was and what he intended, and seemed well pleased’ when Kingston said he understood there was to be an invasion that winter. She then bewailed both her father’s misfortunes and ‘the iniquities offered by their majesties to her’, expressing hopes that all ‘would be … redressed at the sitting of the next Parliament’. At this point an unidentified lady interjected, ‘I hope Madam, your good father will do it himself before that time’. ‘More had been said’, Kingston explained in his report to Nottingham, ‘but the Prince his game at billiards was ended and put a period to our discourse’. Before signing off he provided the final detail ‘that the Princess, discoursing her sufferings, often made a parallel between herself and Queen Elizabeth’.⁸¹

One must be wary about accepting Kingston’s uncorroborated account, for Anne’s behaviour seems uncharacteristically incautious. She had, for example, been much more reserved when Lord Ailesbury had approached her after the French naval defeat at La Hogue. Ailesbury observed that ‘the face of affairs was much altered’ since his wife had visited her at Sion. To this the Princess replied ‘“Yes, greatly,” … with a melancholy face’, but when Ailesbury suggested that her father would be greatly comforted by ‘a tender line from her’, she muttered, ‘It is not a proper time for you and I to talk of that matter any farther’.⁸²

On Anne’s return from Bath in late September, her relations with her sister remained as distant as ever. The Princess temporarily went to live with her son at Campden House, having discontinued her lease of Sion. One evening she was being carried back towards Kensington in her sedan chair after spending the day in central London, when the Queen overtook her in her coach. ‘No notice taken of either side’, it was reported.⁸³

Whether or not Kingston had been telling the truth, the Princess was not completely cut off from Saint-Germain. Her letter had taken a long time to reach her father. The Life of James II states that it was delivered to him in May when he was in Normandy, although puzzlingly, James’s Secretary of State, Lord Melfort, marked on his copy that it was received in early July, according to the French calendar. On 18 July James wrote a reply which he stipulated was to be passed on to his daughter by the Earl of Marlborough ‘or his lady’. ‘I am confident that she is truly penitent since she tells me so’, he began, ‘and as such I … do give her that pardon she so heartily desires from me, providing she will endeavour to deserve it by all her future actions; she knows how easy a thing it is for me to forgive thoroughly and the affection I have ever had for her, and may believe that my satisfaction is greater to see her return to her duty than ever my resentment was for her departing from it’.⁸⁴

Whereas previously James had made it plain that Marlborough could expect no mercy if he regained his throne, he now professed himself ready to forgive him. Persuading himself that the communication from his daughter provided ‘a more than ordinary mark of that lord’s sincerity’, in September he sent an agent to England to tell Marlborough (or ‘my nephew John’, as he was codenamed) that ‘I am satisfied of your good intentions to me by what you have done, and if you continue to do so you may assure your self of pardon for what’s passed’. He also asked Marlborough to act as his intermediary with Anne and George in all future transactions. ‘I do trust you as my factor with your late partners of your trade’, James told him, ‘and I do desire them to trust you in what you shall say to them from me, and I will take my measures of them from what you shall inform me of them and treat them accordingly’.⁸⁵

James seems to have envisaged keeping in fairly regular touch with his daughter, but as far as we know, Anne did not renew contact for some years after this. From the Princess’s point of view, her letter had served its purpose, but now that James’s restoration seemed less likely, writing again was not worth the risk.

In the autumn of 1692 Anne moved to a fine new London residence, having rented Berkeley House in Piccadilly from the Earl of Berkeley. Anne had agreed that Lord Berkeley and his mother could have her lodgings at the Cockpit in exchange for his house, but they kept posing additional demands relating to their accommodation there. The Princess noted irritably ‘Considering how impertinent and peevishly both her son and she have behaved themselves in all this business, I have no reason to comply with them in all they desire’, but at length all was resolved. Grumbling somewhat unreasonably to Sarah about being ‘straitened for room’ the Princess took possession of her palatial new home.⁸⁶

The fact that visiting the Princess entailed automatic exclusion from the King and Queen’s presence ensured that Anne’s court was almost deserted. The Jacobite Lord Ailesbury and a few ladies with similar sympathies came to Berkeley House ‘because … all of that interest rejoiced much at the quarrel’; otherwise only the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was currently out of office, ventured there to play whist. His presence could not disguise the fact that the Princess was ‘as much alone as can be imagined’, living ‘under so great a neglect’ that, were it not for her ‘inflexible stiffness of humour, it would be very uneasy to her’. Anne professed to have no regrets. In February 1693 she wrote defiantly to Sarah ‘You cannot expect any news from Berkeley House, but as dull and despicable as some people may think it, I am so far from … repenting … that, were the year to run over again, I would tread the same steps’.⁸⁷

Still smarting over his arrest the previous year, the Earl of Marlborough allied himself with the political opposition. At the end of 1692 he had voted for the Place Bill, which sought to prevent any Member of Parliament accepting government office. It was a measure which one observer believed ‘sapped the foundations of monarchy and tended to a republic’, but Marlborough prevailed upon Prince George to give it his support as well. After it was narrowly defeated in the Lords, a foreign diplomat was astonished when George was amongst those who registered a formal protest at its rejection.⁸⁸

In January 1693 Prince George’s brother, Christian V of Denmark, wrote urging him to make up with the King and Queen, but Anne would not hear of it. She believed that King Christian had probably intervened at William’s request, ‘by which ’tis very plain Mr Caliban has some inclinations towards a reconciliation, but if ever I make the least step, may I be as great a slave as he would make me if it were in his power. Mr Morley is of that same mind and I trust in heaven we shall never be better friends [with William] than we are now, unless we chance to meet there’. George undertook to write ‘to desire his brother would not engage himself in this business’, while the Princess reiterated to Sarah that ‘her faithful Morley … will never part with you till she is fast locked in her coffin’.⁸⁹

The little Duke of Gloucester provided the only remaining link between Anne and her sister and brother-in-law. Both Mary and the King (who, surprisingly, got on well with children) were very fond of the little boy. Anne would have liked to have restricted his visits to them, but was told, probably by Marlborough and Godolphin, that this would be unwise. Once, after arranging for her son to see his aunt, the Princess told Sarah ‘it goes extremely against the grain, yet since so much better judgements than mine think it necessary, he shall go’. William and Mary were at pains to publicise the fact that Gloucester was not comprehended in the family quarrel. As Sarah waspishly put it, the Queen ‘made a great show of kindness to him and gave him rattles and several playthings which were constantly put down in the Gazette’. When the child was ill the Queen would always send a Bedchamber Woman to his home to gain an accurate report on his health, although this was done in a manner contrived to be deliberately insulting to Anne. ‘Without taking more notice of [the Princess] than if she were a rocker’, the royal emissary would address all questions to Gloucester’s nurse.⁹⁰

Such incidents occurred all too frequently, for Gloucester’s health gave constant cause for concern. To try and minimise the symptoms of hydrocephalus which had afflicted him from an early age he had an ‘issue in his poll [head] that had been kept running ever since his sickness at Hampton Court’. It was hoped that by permanently keeping open a small incision in the scalp, harmful humours would have an outlet through which they could escape, but hardly surprisingly the treatment proved ineffectual. Fluid continued to accumulate within the child’s cranium, with the result that his head became abnormally large. By 1694 ‘his hat was big enough for most men’ and when the time came to measure him for a wig, it was difficult to find one that fitted him. Consequently he had a strange appearance, as even Anne acknowledged. Writing to tell Sarah in 1692 that her son currently looked ‘better I think than ever he did in his life’, she qualified this, ‘I mean more healthy, for though I love him very well, I can’t brag of his beauty’.⁹¹

Although Gloucester was ‘active and lively’, the hydrocephalus affected his balance. ‘He tottered as he walked and could not go up or down stairs without holding the rails’. When he fell over, as often happened, he could not raise himself unaided. Instead of being recognised as a symptom of his illness, his debility was attributed to ‘the overcare of the ladies’ in charge of him. An attendant recalled, ‘the Prince of Denmark, who was a very good-natured pleasant man, would often rally them about it’.⁹²

Presumably because he was worried about toppling over, when aged four or five Gloucester refused to move unless adults held his hand on either side. Until then, most unusually for a child of his age, he had never been whipped, for ‘the Princess, who was the tenderest of mothers, would not let him be roughly handled’. However, this refusal to walk on his own was considered a dangerous whim which could not be indulged. First Prince George took the child to task for it, showing him the birch as Anne looked on. As this had no effect, Gloucester was beaten, with the punishment being repeated when he persisted in his ‘very unaccountable fancy’. After that his will was broken.⁹³

To modern sensibilities this is a horrific story, an almost unbearable tale of brutish treatment meted out to a child who was struggling with a challenging physical disability. Before condemning Anne and George, one should, however, place it in context, for corporal punishment for the young was virtually universal at the time. It must be borne in mind that even John Locke, the very embodiment of the early English enlightenment, argued that small children were animals controllable only by pain and that it was appropriate to inflict physical punishment in moderation before they had developed powers of reasoning.⁹⁴

In other ways Anne was the most solicitous parent. Such was her concern for her son’s welfare that she admitted ‘’tis impossible to help being alarmed at every little thing’. One of Gloucester’s servants recorded, ‘If he tottered whenever he walked in her presence, it threw her into a violent perspiration through fear’, and this was far from being her only worry, as the child was delicate in other ways. He suffered from severe fevers in 1693, 1694, and 1695, and on each occasion was subjected to a variety of unpleasant medical treatments. In 1693 his back was blistered by doctors who believed this would lower his temperature, causing the poor child such pain that he begged his servants to rescue him from his tormentors. He was also dosed with ‘Jesuits’ powder’, made from cinchona bark, an effective treatment for fever but potentially dangerous in large quantities. When Gloucester had a recurring bout of fever the following spring, despite being desperate for a cure – for ‘methinks ’tis an ugly thing for such a distemper to hang so long upon one of his age’ – Anne hoped that Dr Radcliffe would be able to prescribe a different remedy. After initially taking his medicine ‘most manfully’, the little boy had grown ‘so very averse to the powder … it would be almost impossible to force it down’. It also constipated him severely, so instead he was given a mixture of brandy, saffron, and other ingredients, reputed to cure every kind of ague. At first the only result was to make the child vomit, but after that he began to recover.⁹⁵

Her worries about Gloucester’s health meant that by 1693 the Princess invariably referred to her son as ‘my poor boy’, rather than just ‘my boy’, as in the past. However, although his hydrocephalus affected his physical stability, in other ways he developed well. He hated dancing, condemning it as girlish, but was reportedly ‘very quick in learning any manly exercise’. Soldiering obsessed him and he had his own troop of boys that he drilled in Kensington gardens, glowing with pride when the King and Queen came to see them. As he grew older he rode twice daily and during summer holidays at Windsor developed ‘a passion for the chase’. Despite doing lessons on his own, he was not cut off from other children, and hero-worshipped Sarah’s son, John Churchill, who was a year or so older. He also liked playing with the male children of other members of the household, calling them his Horse Guards. One of his servants recalled ‘He was apt in finding excuses for his boys or for us, when we were blamed for letting him do what he should not do, or for speaking words that did not become him’. Being affectionate by nature, the only person of whom he was not particularly fond was his former wet nurse, Mrs Pack. When she died unexpectedly in 1694, Queen Mary asked if he was sad, to which he answered firmly ‘No, Madam’.⁹⁶

Though in some cases hydrocephalus causes mental impairment, Gloucester was a promising schoolboy. His tutor was his mother’s chaplain, Samuel Pratt, who taught him his letters and the ‘use of globes, mathematics and Latin’. In addition he was taught French from an early age. He was an unusual, observant child, who would stay quiet for long periods and then suddenly delight people with his ‘shrewd comical expressions’. When he was only three, Anne reported how ‘he sometimes comes out with things that make one laugh’, but unfortunately she considered them the kind of thing ‘what is not worth repeating in a letter’. He never lost this gift, for in later years he would sometimes break a long silence with ‘lively and witty sallies’ that convinced a foreign observer that ‘there was more to this prince than first appeared’.⁹⁷

Gloucester probably saw more of his parents than most upper-class children of the time. They came to him most mornings, and after he had had his own midday meal he often went to watch them eating their dinner. His aunt and uncle also loved it when he visited, for he ‘pleased the King and Queen much with his pretty jocular sayings’. On one occasion Mary was very amused when she offered him a beautiful bird that belonged to her and he gravely declined it, saying, ‘Madam, I will not rob you of it’. ‘He remembered everything that was talked of, though he did not seem to pay attention at the time’, a manservant of his recalled. ‘He never was told anything of King James, nor of the pretended Prince of Wales’, but somehow acquired an understanding of the troubled family history. When he was five, King William came to Campden House before going abroad on campaign, and the child solemnly offered to let him take his company of boy soldiers to Flanders. He then added that though he would be happy for them to see action against the Turk or the King of France, he did not want them fighting his grandfather. On another occasion he disconcerted Queen Mary by observing ‘his mamma once had guards but now had none’.⁹⁸

By the end of 1692 Anne was pregnant again. In hopes of bringing her pregnancy to a successful conclusion she began dosing herself with a patent medicine that she had obtained without consulting the doctor. Only George and Sarah were aware that she was taking it, but Anne insisted that since ‘I am no further gone I fancy it can do me no harm’. She explained to Sarah that ‘Being so desirous of children, I would do anything to go on’, and suggested that if the child she was carrying was weak, this course of treatment would ‘comfort and strengthen it’. Sarah evidently expressed concern, but Anne would not listen. ‘I have no manner of apprehensions that the medicine I take will do me any harm, but quite contrary, I am the most pleased with it in the world’, she informed her friend. She added that ‘but that I have had so many misfortunes’, she would feel confident that this time all would be well.⁹⁹

Whether or not the medicine was in any way responsible, before long Anne was experiencing worrying symptoms. She wrote to Sarah on 19 March 1693 ‘I have been on the rack again this morning’. Although ‘the violence of it has not lasted so long as it did yesterday’, she asked Sarah to summon Dr Radcliffe, for in addition to enduring pain she had had an attack ‘that has frighted me a little’. In some discomfort she had got out of bed that morning and gone to sleep in a chair, only to be woken by a ‘starting and a catching in my limbs. This is a thing which I would not speak of to Sir Charles [Scarborough] nor before my women but only to D[octor] R[adcliffe] … for malicious people will be apt to say I have got fits’. She was right in thinking that something was seriously wrong, for on 24 March she ‘miscarried of a dead daughter’ at Berkeley House.¹⁰⁰

After Anne’s earlier optimism this latest setback was particularly shattering. To make matters worse, for much of that summer she was plagued by ill health. Sarah was away at St Albans caring for her sick mother, and Anne begged Sarah not to ‘make yourself sick with sitting up and grieving’, fearful that she was denying herself time to eat and sleep. Anne’s hopes of visiting St Albans were frustrated by what was diagnosed as an attack of gout. It is in fact improbable that this was the real problem, as gout is very unusual in pre-menopausal women. Furthermore, gout only affects one joint at a time, but Anne suffered simultaneous pain in more than one place. It is far more likely that she was really suffering from migratory polyarthritis, a key symptom of lupus. For the moment it rendered her incapable of walking and tormented by pain in the hip, but the Princess declared she would ‘with pleasure endure ten thousand fits of the gout’ in order to provide ‘relief to my dear Mrs Freeman’.¹⁰¹

Sarah’s mother died on 27 July, and Anne wrote to reassure her that she had cared for the old lady in an exemplary fashion throughout her final illness. By this time Anne’s so-called gout was getting better. ‘I have been led about my chamber today and was carried into the garden for a little air’ she reported, ‘and the uneasiness that stirring gives me now is very inconsiderable’. Unfortunately she was then assailed by an attack of piles, but she said she was willing to endure this provided she was spared the far worse pain that had afflicted her earlier.¹⁰²

At the end of August Anne had grounds for hoping that she was pregnant but she told Sarah rather fatalistically that ‘I do not intend to mind myself any more than when I am sure I am not with child’. True to this resolve she went on a hunting expedition soon after, driving herself in her own chaise, as she was no longer fit enough to ride. She reported that in Sarah’s absence the outing had not been much of a success, but she resolved to do it again ‘for my health’s sake, for besides taking the air one has some exercise, and I intend to use as much as I can’.¹⁰³ Once accustomed to it, she came to enjoy this way of hunting, the only form of outdoor recreation she was capable of pursuing.

In the late summer of 1693 there were reports that Anne’s former bête noire, the Earl of Sunderland, was on the point of brokering a reconciliation between the Princess and the King and Queen. He had now returned from exile and was acting as minister ‘behind the curtain’ to William III. Bells were rung in celebration after it was rumoured that Anne had gone to see her sister, but the claims proved unfounded. Sunderland only managed to persuade the Earl of Marlborough to stop voting against the government in the House of Lords. Prince George followed Marlborough’s lead, but in other respects the royal feud continued unabated.

The rift in the royal family weakened the monarchy at a time when it was already far from popular. The war with France was going badly, with the English sustaining heavy losses at land and sea in the summer of 1693. In the circumstances it would have been understandable if William had seized on an opportunity to make peace by offering to make the Prince of Wales his successor. However, when the French made a proposal along these lines at informal peace talks conducted that autumn through a Dutch intermediary, William declared himself offended by the mere suggestion. Soon afterwards negotiations were abandoned.¹⁰⁴

On 21 January Anne once again ‘miscarried of a dead child’, the fourth such disaster to have occurred since Gloucester’s birth. Bereft at her loss, within a few weeks she became so seriously ‘indisposed of an ague’ that ‘her Majesty, notwithstanding the present unhappy misunderstanding, out of her great affection and kindness sent to enquire how her royal Highness did’. Then the four-year-old Duke of Gloucester went down with an intermittent fever that proved difficult to shake off. In some ways the child manifested an extraordinary resilience, appearing ‘mighty merry and … as well as ever he was in his life’ only an hour after emerging from a prolonged bout of sickness, but Anne still worried that a recurrence would prove fatal. ‘I shall not be at ease till ’tis quite gone’, she wrote to Sarah, and was greatly touched when the Countess offered to come to her side if Gloucester relapsed. ‘Sure there cannot be a greater comfort in one’s misfortunes than to have such a friend!’ the Princess exclaimed gratefully.¹⁰⁵

That summer Anne rented a house at Twickenham in hopes that the air there would restore both her and her son to full health. She also took a ‘course of steel by Dr Radcliffe’s order’, and this seemed to yield beneficial results, for by August she believed that another baby was on its way. Perhaps suspecting that she had lost her last child by being too active, she went to the other extreme, remaining indoors and taking no exercise at all. She ‘stayed constantly on one floor by her physicians’ advice, lying very much upon a couch to prevent the misfortune of miscarrying’. These precautions failed to prevent her from developing troubling ailments, for towards the end of year she was again limping from pain in her hip.¹⁰⁶

Anne had been living this quiet existence for four months when the Queen fell ill on 22 December 1694. An epidemic of smallpox was currently raging, and within a few days it became evident that Mary had caught the disease. Anne sought permission to visit her, and though William sent word that an interview might upset Mary and put the Princess at risk of miscarrying, Anne was undeterred. Accordingly Lady Fitzharding went to Kensington Palace on her behalf, and forced her way in to the Queen’s bedchamber to present her mistress’s request directly. According to Sarah the ‘Queen returned no answer but a cold thanks’, but William took the trouble to write to the Princess assuring her that as soon as the Queen was well enough to see her, she would be welcome. The Countess of Marlborough, however, was sure that ‘the deferring the Princess’s coming was only to leave room to continue the quarrel if the Queen lived’.¹⁰⁷

On 28 December Mary died. At the end she declared ‘that she had nothing in her heart against her sister and that she greatly loved the Duke of Gloucester’, but the chance of a personal reunion had now vanished forever. It is charitable to accept that Anne was genuinely distressed at losing her sister, but her letter of condolence sent to William that same day might appear calculated. Having expressed her ‘sincere and hearty sorrow’ for Mary’s loss, she assured him ‘I am as sensibly touched with this sad misfortune as if I had never been so unhappy as to have fallen into her displeasure’, asking permission to commiserate with him in person. In doing so she took the statesmanlike advice of her male advisers, who in their turn were guided by the Earl of Sunderland. He had convinced Marlborough and Godolphin that prolonging the estrangement further would damage both parties, and had undertaken that the King would be receptive. The Countess of Marlborough was infuriated by this conciliatory approach, and later grumbled that the Princess’s letter was ‘full of expressions that the politicians made nothing of, but it was a great trouble to me to have her write’. She continued resentfully that ‘After such usage … nobody upon earth could have made me have done it, but I was never the councillor upon such great occasions’.¹⁰⁸