Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Read online

  Queen Anne

  The Politics of Passion

  A Biography

  Anne Somerset

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE SOMERSET

  The Life and Times of King William IV

  Elizabeth I

  Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I

  The Affair of the Poisons

  Ladies in Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day

  For Dad, with love

  The book is also dedicated to the memory of my husband, Matthew Carr. He was always the first person to be shown the typescript of my books and although he died before he could read it all, he delighted me with his enthusiasm for the sections he did see. It is one of many ways in which he is greatly missed.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Other Books by Anne Somerset

  Dedication

  The House of Stuart

  List of Illustrations

  Author’s Note

  1 But a Daughter

  2 Religion Before Her Father

  3 Sure Never Anybody Was Used So

  4 We Are Now in a New World

  5 These Fatal Distinctions of Whig and Tory

  6 The Weight and Charge of a Kingdom

  7 Nothing But Uneasiness

  8 Entire and Perfect Union

  9 Guided by Other Hands

  10 Passions Between Women

  11 Making the Breach Wider

  12 The Heat and Ferment that is in This Poor Nation

  13 I Do Not Like War

  14 The Great Work of Peace

  15 The Last Troublesome Scene of Contention

  16 Not Equal to the Weight of a Crown?

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE HOUSE OF STUART

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  James II, when Duke of York, with Anne Hyde and their two daughters, Princess Mary and Princess Anne c. 1674–80. By Sir Peter Lely and Benedetto Gennari. (The Royal Collection © 2011)

  The Lady Anne as a child. Artist Unknown. (Royal Collection © 2011)

  Queen Anne when Princess of Denmark. By Willem Wissing and Jan van der Vaardt. (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

  Sarah Churchill (later the Duchess of Marlborough) with Lady Fitzharding, 1691. By Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Prince George of Denmark on horseback, 1704. By Michael Dahl. (Royal Collection © 2011)

  Princess Anne of Denmark with the Duke of Gloucester, c. 1694. After Kneller (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Queen Mary II. After Willem Wissing. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  William, the Duke of Gloucester, with his friend, Benjamin Bathurst. After Thomas Murray © The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Queen Anne, 1703. By Edmund Lilly. (© Queen Anne, 1703, Lilly, Edmund (fl.1702–d.1716)/Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Sidney Godolphin. After Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  The Duke of Marlborough. By Sir Godfrey Kneller. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Queen Anne with Prince George of Denmark. By Charles Boit, 1706. (Royal Collection © 2011)

  Print of ‘Her Majesties Royal Palace at Kensington’. (© British Museum)

  Tapestry showing the French Marshal Tallard surrendering his baton to the Duke of Marlborough after the Battle of Blenheim in August 1704. (Image reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace Image Library)

  Robert Harley Earl of Oxford. By Jonathan Richardson. (© Private Collection/Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Sophia Electress of Hanover. (Royal Collection © 2011)

  Portrait believed to be of Abigail Masham. (© Philip Mould Ltd London/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. By George White, after Thomas Murray. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Prince James Francis Edward Stuart (the Pretender). Studio of Alexis Simon Belle. (© The National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Anne in the House of Lords. By Peter Tillemanns. (Royal Collection © 2011)

  The Battle of Malplaquet, 11 September 1709, c. 1713. By Louise Laguerre. (© National Army Museum, London/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Satirical print of Bolingbroke dictating business relating to the Treaty of Utrecht. (© British Museum)

  Queen Anne and the Knights of the Garter. By Peter Angelis. (© The National Portrait Gallery)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For the sake of clarity I have updated spelling and punctuation used in original documents. Furthermore, in almost all cases when Anne or her contemporaries used the abbreviations ‘ye’ and ‘yt’ in their letters, I have modernised the archaic usage by substituting ‘the’ and ‘that’. Very often Anne and her ministers ciphered their letters by substituting numbers for names. In such cases I have omitted the numbers and replaced them with the relevant name in square brackets.

  Throughout Anne’s lifetime, England used the Julian Calendar, while continental Europe followed the Gregorian system. During the seventeenth century, the date in Europe was ten days ahead of England’s; with the start of the eighteenth century the gap between England and Europe widened to a difference of eleven days. When dealing with events that took place in England, I give dates according to the Julian Calendar. However, when describing events that occurred on the Continent, or when quoting letters sent from abroad, I generally give a composite date, separated by a forward slash, indicating the date according to both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Whereas in Stuart England, the calendar year started on 25 March, I have simplified things by taking it to begin on 1 January.

  It is notoriously difficult to compare the value of money in the past with modern monetary values. However, as a very rough guide it should be noted that the National Archives’ Currency Converter Service calculates that £1 in 1710 would have a spending worth of £76.59 in 2005.

  1

  But a Daughter

  The opening weeks of the year 1665 were particularly cold, and the sub-zero temperatures had discouraged the King of England, Charles II, from writing to his sister Henrietta in France. He was always a lazy correspondent, and having little news to impart thought it pointless ‘to freeze my fingers for nothing’. In early February, however, he took up his pen to report that the two of them had acquired a new niece. On 6 February, shortly before midnight at St James’s Palace in London, their younger brother James, Duke of York, had become a father to a healthy baby girl. Being without a legitimate heir, the King would have preferred a boy, and since Henrietta herself was expecting a child, Charles told her that he trusted she would have ‘better luck’ in this respect. In one way, however, the Duchess of York had been fortunate, for she had had a remarkably quick labour, having ‘despatched her business in little more than an hour’. Charles wrote that he wished Henrietta an equally speedy delivery when her time came, though he feared that her slender frame meant that she was ‘not so advantageously made for that convenience’ as the far more substantially built Duchess. The King concluded that in that event, ‘a boy will recompense two grunts more’.1

  The child was named Anne, after her mother, and if her birth was a disappointment, at least it did not cause the sort of furore that had greeted the appearance in the world of the Duke and Duchess of York’s firstborn child in 1660. That baby had initially been assumed to have been born out of wedlock, but whe
n it emerged that the infant’s parents had in fact secretly married just before the child’s birth, there was fury that the Duke of York had matched himself with a loose woman who was not of royal blood. Many people shared the view expressed by the diarist Samuel Pepys ‘that he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward, it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.2

  The scandal was particularly regrettable because the monarchy was fragile. Charles II had only been on his throne since May 1660, after an eleven-year interregnum. In 1649 his father, King Charles I, had been executed. This followed his defeat in a civil war that had started in 1642 when political and religious tensions had caused a total breakdown in relations between King and Parliament. During that conflict an estimated 190,000 people – nearly four percent of the population – had lost their lives in England and Wales alone; in Scotland and Ireland the proportion of inhabitants who perished was still higher. Charles I had been taken prisoner in 1646, but refused to come to terms with his opponents and so the war had continued. By 1648, however, the royalists had been vanquished. Angered at the way the King had prolonged the bloodshed, the leaders of the parliamentary forces brought him to trial and sentenced him to death. England became a republic ruled by a Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and it seemed that its monarchy had been extinguished forever.

  When the royalists’ principal stronghold of Oxford had fallen in the summer of 1646, Charles I’s twelve-year-old son, James, Duke of York, had been taken into the custody of Parliament. However, in April 1648 he had managed to escape abroad, dressed as a girl. His older brother Charles was already on the Continent, having been sent overseas by their father two years earlier. James was only fourteen when news arrived that his father had been executed on 30 January 1649. In the ensuing decade all attempts to place Charles on his late father’s throne failed, and a lifetime in exile appeared inevitable for the royal brothers.

  In 1656 James spent some time at the French court. While there, he met with his elder sister Mary, widow of the Dutch prince, William II of Orange, who was visiting Paris, accompanied by her maid of honour, Anne Hyde. Anne was the daughter of Edward Hyde, a pompous and severe lawyer from Wiltshire who had become a leading adviser to Charles I shortly before the outbreak of civil war. After his master’s execution, he offered his services to the late King’s eldest son, now styled Charles II by his adherents. Hyde moved his family to Holland and in 1653 they took up residence at Breda at the invitation of the widowed Mary of Orange, who bore the title Princess Royal of England. Two years later the Princess suggested that Hyde’s eighteen-year-old daughter Anne should become one of her maids of honour. Hyde had been reluctant to accept her offer, partly because he feared angering the late King’s widow, Queen Henrietta Maria, who detested him. Finally he consented, whereupon the Queen Mother was duly incensed, little guessing that within a few years she would become more intimately connected to his daughter.

  After their initial encounter, James had other opportunities to see Anne when he visited his sister at Breda. He was soon passionately attracted to her, for though Anne was ‘not absolutely a beauty … there was nobody at the court of Holland capable of putting her in the shade’. At this stage she had a ‘pretty good’ figure, and was also universally agreed to be exceptionally witty and intelligent. ‘Always of an amorous disposition’, James tried to seduce her, but she did not prove an easy conquest. Even after he had ‘for many months solicited Anne … in the way of marriage’, it was only after he formally contracted himself to her at Breda on 24 November 1659 that she let him sleep with her.3

  In the spring of 1660 royalist fortunes were suddenly transformed. Oliver Cromwell had died in September 1658, and over the next fifteen months England descended into near anarchy. In late April 1660 the chaotic situation was resolved when the English Parliament invited Charles II to return to England and assume the crown. On 25 May Charles – now King in more than name only – landed at Dover. Four days later he made a triumphant entry into London, accompanied by James, Duke of York.

  Anne Hyde left the Princess Royal’s service and came back to England with her family. Her father was now the King’s chief minister, with the official position of Lord Chancellor. Unaware that Anne was pregnant by the Duke of York, he began making arrangements to wed her to a ‘well-bred hopeful young gentleman’, but before these came to fruition James went to the King and tearfully begged permission to marry Anne. ‘Much troubled’ by this development, Charles initially refused to authorise the union but ‘at last, after much importunity, consented’. On 3 September 1660 James and Anne Hyde were married at a private ceremony in the dead of night at Worcester House, the Lord Chancellor’s London residence. The only witnesses were James’s friend the Earl of Ossory and Anne Hyde’s maidservant, Ellen Stroud.4

  Anne was now in the advanced stages of pregnancy, but curiously her father had failed to notice this. He was therefore shocked and appalled when the King alerted him to the fact that his daughter was expecting the Duke of York’s child and had married without his knowledge. Hyde demanded that Anne should be ‘sent to the Tower … and then that an act of Parliament should be immediately passed for the cutting off her head’, and was surprised when the King demurred.5 However, although Charles told Hyde that he was sure the marriage could not be undone, the union was still not officially acknowledged. Anne continued to await her baby at her father’s house, where she was kept confined to her room.

  Towards the end of September the Princess Royal arrived in England, enraged by the prospect of having her former servant for a sister-in-law. Unnerved by this, James’s commitment to Anne began to waver. He now accepted that he had been imprudent to pledge himself so precipitately, and instead of the marriage being publicly proclaimed ‘there grew to be a great silence in that affair’. James’s doubts became more pronounced when members of his court started to suggest that Anne was a woman of bad character. His best friend Sir Charles Berkeley claimed ‘that he and others have lain with her often’, and another young man testified that once, when riding pillion behind him, ‘she rid with her hand on his ———’.

  An assortment of courtiers provided additional explicit details of alleged trysts with Anne during her time in Holland. Richard Talbot claimed to have had an assignation with her in her father’s study, recalling that as he was fondling her on the desk a bottle of ink had overturned, causing an appalling mess. Later the pair of them had artfully put the blame on the King’s pet monkey. After hearing such stories the French ambassador declared it ‘as clear as day that she has had other lovers’, and James too apparently became convinced of this. On 10 October the Duke informed Hyde ‘that he had learned things about his daughter which he could not say to him’, and that consequently he had decided never to see her again.6

  On 22 October Anne went into labour at Worcester House, and the King sent four high ranking court ladies and four bishops to witness the birth. The Bishop of Winchester interrogated the poor young woman, demanding to know who the father was, and whether Anne had slept with more than one man. Between contractions Anne gasped out that James was the father, that she had never had another lover, and that she and the Duke of York were lawfully married.7 After Anne gave birth to a son the ladies present declared they were sure she had spoken the truth, but James still declined to own the child.

  When the Queen Mother arrived in England in early November she encouraged courtiers to come forward with further stories to discredit Anne. Now James professed himself disgusted with the young woman’s ‘whoredom’, and having assured his mother that he ‘had now such evidence of her unworthiness that he should no more think of her’, he gave it out that it was untrue that he had already taken Anne as his wife.8

  Despite James’s public denial of the marriage, the King knew otherwise. The Venetian ambassador reported ‘he seems to have taken the lady’s side, telling his brother that having lacked caution at first he could not draw back … at this stage’. Charles had no
doubt that the stories sullying Anne’s reputation could be dismissed as ‘a wicked conspiracy set on foot by villains’, and he signified his support for his Lord Chancellor by creating him Baron Hyde on 3 November. Charles informed the Queen Mother that both ‘seemliness and conscience’ required him to uphold a marriage he had no doubt was valid, while to Hyde he declared, ‘the thing was remediless’. James was bluntly instructed to ‘drink as he brewed and lie with her whom he had made his wife’.9

  Shaken by his brother’s attitude, James’s resolve to disavow Anne faltered. It did not take much to persuade him that the stories about her had all been slanders for, as a French diplomat shrewdly observed, ‘this young prince is still in love with this girl’. By December, he was stealing out of court to spend nights with Anne at her father’s house. When Anne’s mother began referring to her as ‘Madam the Duchess of York’, it was clear that matters were on the verge of being settled, and the French ambassador noted that people were now resigned to the inevitable.10

  On 20 December James officially acknowledged Anne as his wife, and people came to court to kiss her hand. Four days later the Princess Royal was killed by an attack of smallpox, and died expressing remorse for the harsh things she had said of Anne. Even the Queen Mother relented. Before returning to France, she received Anne and James together on 1 January 1661 ‘with the same grace as if she had liked it [the marriage] from the beginning’. That afternoon the baby prince was christened Charles, and the King and Queen Mother stood as godparents.11

  Although Anne had now been absorbed into the royal family, inevitably memories lingered of the unpleasantness that had attended her entrance into it. As late as 1679 James’s cousin Sophia of Hanover made a sneering reference to Anne Hyde’s lack of chastity, and she also mocked her low birth. Years later, when a marriage was mooted between the Duke and Duchess of York’s daughter Anne and Sophia’s eldest son Prince George Ludwig of Hanover, Sophia was not very keen on the idea because ‘the Princess Anne on her mother’s side [was] born of a very mediocre family’. James’s Dutch nephew, Prince William of Orange, was also mindful of such matters. At one point he even flattered himself that the English would prefer him as their sovereign before either of James’s daughters by Anne Hyde, despite the fact the two girls were nearer in blood to the throne than he was. While William was soon disabused of this idea, he was not alone in thinking that Anne Hyde’s progeny were unfit to succeed to the crown. In 1669 the Venetian ambassador to England reported that the Lord Chancellor’s grandchildren were ‘universally denounced as unworthy of the office and of such honour’.12 These objections had no basis in law, but Anne Hyde’s daughters would always face prejudice because they were not pure-bred royalty.