Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

Marlborough was absent when his little pupil fell ill, but hurried back to Windsor in time to see him die. It was etiquette in those days that in case of a death the survivors should instantly leave the place in which it had happened, leaving the dead in possession, to lie in state there and receive the homage of curious or interested spectators. But Anne would not be persuaded to leave the place where her child was, and, four or five days after, the little prince was carried solemnly by torchlight through the summer woods, through Windsor Park, and by the river, and under the trees of Richmond, to Westminster: a silent procession pouring slowly through the odorous August night. His little body lay in state in Westminster Hall—a noble chamber for such a tiny sleeper—for five days more, when it was laid with the kings in the great abbey which holds all the greatest of England. A more heartrending episode is not in history.

William did not take any notice of the announcement of the death for a considerable time, which embarrassed the ambassador at Paris greatly on the subject of mourning, and has given occasion for much denunciation of his hardness and heartlessness. When he answered at last, however—though this was not till more than two months after, in a letter to Marlborough—it was with much subdued feeling. “I do not think it

necessary to employ many words,” he writes, “in expressing my surprise and grief at the death of the Duke of Gloucester. It is so great a loss to me as well as to all England, that it pierces my heart with affliction.” It seems impossible that the loss of a child who had shown so touching an allegiance to himself should not have moved him; but perhaps there was in him, too, a touch of satisfaction that the rival pair who had been thorns in his flesh since ever he came to England, were not to have the satisfaction of founding a new line. At St.-Germain the satisfaction was more marked still, and it was supposed that the most dangerous obstacle in the way of the young James Stuart was removed by the death of his sister’s heir. We know now how futile that anticipation was; but at the time this was not so clear, and the anxiety of the English parliament to secure before William’s death a formal abjuration of the so-called Prince of Wales shows that the hope was not without foundation.

This and the new and exciting combination of European affairs produced by what is called the “Spanish Succession,” occupied all minds during the two years that remained of William’s suffering life. It was a moment of great excitement and uncertainty. Louis XIV., into whose hands, as seemed likely, a sort of universal power must fall if his grandson were permitted to succeed to the throne of Spain, had just vowed at the death-bed of James his determination to support the claims of the exile’s son, and, on James’s death, had proclaimed the boy King of England. Thus England had every reason of personal irritation and even alarm for joining in the alliance against the threatening supremacy of France, whose power—had she been allowed to place one of her princes peaceably on the Spanish throne, to which the rich Netherlands still belonged—would have been paramount in Europe. It was on the eve of the great struggle that William died. With a determination equal to that with which he had made head against failing fortune in many a battle-field, he fought for his life, which, at such a crisis, was doubly important to the countries of his birth and of his crown, and to the cause of the Protestant religion and all that we have been taught to consider as freedom throughout Europe. There is something pathetic in the struggle, in the statement of his case, under one name or another as a private individual, that there might be no doubt as to the frankness of the opinions which he caused to be made among the great physicians of Europe. His life in itself could not have been a very happy or desirable one. He had no longer his popular and beloved Mary to leave behind him in England as his representative when he set out for the wars, and there were few in England whom he trusted fully, or who trusted him. To die at the beginning of a great European struggle, leaving the dull people whom he disliked to take his place in England, and the soldier whom he had crushed and subdued and sternly held in the shade as long as he was able, to assume his baton, and win the victories it had never been William’s fortune to gain, must have been bitter indeed. It would appear even that he had entertained some idea of disturbing the natural order of events to prevent this, and that it had been suggested to the Electress Sophia, after poor little Gloucester’s death, that her family should at once be nominated as his immediate successors, to the exclusion of Anne, a proposal which the prudent electress evaded with great skill and ingenuity by representing that the Prince of Wales—who must surely have learned, he and his counselors, wisdom from the failure of his father—was the natural heir, and would, no doubt, do well enough on a trial. Bishop Burnet denies that such a design was ever entertained, but Lord Dartmouth, in his notes upon Burnet, gives the following very distinct evidence on the subject:

I do not know how far the Whig party would trust a secret of that consequence to such a blab as the bishop was known to be: but the Dukes of Bolton and Newcastle both proposed it to me, and used the strongest arguments to induce me to come into it; which was that it would be making Lord Marlborough King at least for the time if the Princess succeeded; and that I had reason to expect nothing but ill-usage during such a reign. Lord Marlborough asked me afterward in the House of Lords if I had ever heard of such a design. I told him Yes, but did not think it very likely. He said it was very true: but by God if ever they attempted it we would walk over their bellies.

Thus until the last moment Anne’s position would seem to have been menaced; but a more impossible scheme was never suggested, for even the idea of Marlborough’s triumph was unable to raise the smallest party against the princess, and to the country in general she was the object of a kind of enthusiasm. The people loved everything in her, even the fact that she was not clever, which of itself is often highly ingratiating with the masses. William, it is said, with a magnanimity which was infinitely to his credit, named Marlborough as his most fit successor in the command of the allied armies before he died. The formal abjuration of the Prince of Wales was made by Parliament only just in time to have his assent, and then all obstacles were removed out of the princess’s way. It was thought by the populace that everything brightened for the new reign. There had been an unexampled continuance of gloomy weather, bad harvests, and clouds and storms. But to great Queen Anne the sun burst forth, the gloom dispelled, the country broke out into gaiety and rejoicing. A new reign full of new possibilities has always something exhilarating in it. William’s greatness was marred by externals and never heartily acknowledged by the mass of the people, but Anne had many claims upon the popular favor. She was a woman, and a kind and simple one. That desertion of her father which some historical writers have condemned so bitterly, had no great effect upon the contemporary imagination, nor, so far as can be judged, upon her own; and it was the only offense that could be alleged against her. She had been unkindly treated and threatened with wrong, which naturally made the multitude strenuous in her cause; and everything conspired to make her accession happy. She was only thirty-seven, and though somewhat unwieldy in person, still preserved her English comeliness, her abundant, beautiful hair, and, above all, the melodious voice by which even statesmen and politicians were impressed. “She pronounced this,” says Bishop Burnet, describing her address to the Privy Council when they first presented themselves before her, “as she did all her other speeches, with great weight and authority, and with a softness of voice and sweetness in the pronunciation that added much life to all she spoke.” The commentators who criticize so sorely the bishop’s chronicles are in entire agreement with him on this subject. “It was a real pleasure to hear her,” says Lord Dartmouth, “though she had a bashfulness that made it very uneasy to herself to say much in public.” Speaker Onslow unites in the same testimony: “I have heard the queen speak from the throne, and she had all the author says here. I never saw an audience more affected; it was a sort of charm. She received all that came to her in so gracious a manner that they went from her highly satisfied with her goodness and her obliging deportment; for she hearkened with attention to everything that was said to her.” Thus all smiled upon Anne in the morning of her reign. Her coronation was marked with unusual splendor and enthusiasm, and though the queen herself had to be carried in a chair to the Abbey, her state of health being such that she could not walk, this did not affect the splendid ceremonial in which even to the Jacobites themselves there was little to complain of, since their hopes that Anne’s influence might advance her father’s young son to the succession after her were still high, notwithstanding that the settlement of the crown upon Sophia of Brunswick and her heirs had already been made.

It is needless for us to attempt a history of the great war which was one of the most important features in Anne’s reign. No student of history can be ignorant of its general course, nor of the completeness with which Marlborough’s victories crushed the exorbitant power of France and raised the prestige of England. There is no lack of histories of the great general and his career of victory: how he out-fought, out-marched, and out-generaled all his rivals, and scarcely in his ten years of active warfare encountered one check; how, though he did not accomplish the direct object for which all the bloodshed and toil were undertaken, he yet secured such respect for the English name and valor as renewed our old reputation and made all interference with our natural settlement or intrusion into our private economy impossible forever. “What good came of it at last?” says the poet. But the inquiry, though so plausible, appealing at once to humanity and common sense, is not perhaps so hard to answer as it seems. Up to this time it has been impossible to procure in the intercourse of nations any other effectual arbiter but the sword: a terrible one, indeed, but apparently as yet the only means of keeping a check upon the rapacity of some, and protecting the weakness of others. At all events, whatever individual opinion may be on the point now, there was a unanimous conviction then, and no one doubted at the opening of the war that it was most necessary and just. And of its conduct there has been but one opinion. Contemporaries accused Marlborough of every conceivable wickedness,—of peculation, treachery, even personal cowardice; but no one ventured to say that he was not a great general. And as we have got further and further from the infuriated politics of his time, his gifts and graces, his wisdom and moderation, as well as his wonderful military genius, have been done more and more justice to. Coxe, his special biographer, may be supposed to look with partiality upon his hero; but this cannot be said of more recent writers,—of Lord Stanhope in his tolerant and sensible history, or of Dr. Hill Burton in his sagacious volumes on the reign of Queen Anne.

It is, however, with Marlborough’s wife and not with himself that we are chiefly concerned, and with the stormy course of Anne’s future intercourse with her friend rather than the battles that were fought in her name. It is said that by the time she came to the throne her faithful affection to her lifelong companion had begun to be impaired, but the date of the first beginning of their severance will probably never be determined, nor its immediate cause. Miss Strickland professes to have ascertained that certain impatient words used by Sarah of Marlborough, which were overheard by the queen, were the occasion of the breach; but as there is no very satisfactory foundation for the story, and it is added that Anne kept her feelings undisclosed for long after, we may dismiss the legend as possible enough, but no more.

All the great hopes which the pair must have formed seemed likely to be fulfilled in the early part of Queen Anne’s reign. A very short time after her accession, Marlborough, who had at once entered upon the conduct of foreign affairs and the preparations for war, according to William’s appointment, received the garter which Anne and her husband had vainly asked for him in the previous reign; and when he returned from his first campaign, a dukedom was bestowed upon him, with many pretty expressions on Anne’s part.

Indeed, the queen’s gift of “writing pretty, affectionate letters,” which was the only thing, according to the duchess’s opinion of her expressed in later days, that she could do well, is still abundantly proved by the correspondence. Anne was as anxious as ever to serve and please her friend and favorite. She prays God, in her little note of congratulation after the siege of Bonn in 1703, to send Marlborough “safe home to his and my dear adored Mrs. Freeman,” with all the grace of perfect sympathy; for the great duke was as abject in his adoration of that imperious, bewitching, and triumphant Sarah as the queen herself. With the tenderest recollection of her friend’s whims, the queen gave her the rangership of Windsor Park (strange office for a woman to hold!), in which was included “a lodge in the great park,” which the duchess describes as “a very agreeable place to live in,” … “remembering that when we used in former days to ride by it, I had often wished for such a place,” although it was necessary to turn out Portland, King William’s friend and favorite, in order to replace him by Lady Marlborough; no doubt, however, this summary displacement of the Dutchman added to the pleasure both of giving and receiving. Lady Marlborough had a multiplicity of other offices in addition to this,—such as those of mistress of the robes, groom of the stole, and keeper of the privy purse,—offices, however, which she had virtually held for years in the household of the princess. All these brought in a great deal of money, a matter to which she was never indifferent; and along with the dukedom, the queen bestowed upon Marlborough a pension of £5000 a year; so that the resources of the new ducal house were abundant. They would seem by their posts and perquisites alone to have had an income between them not far short of £60,000 a year, an enormous sum for those times, not to speak of less legitimate profits—presents from contractors, and percentages on the pay of the troops, which Marlborough took, as everybody did, as a matter of course, though it was afterward charged against him as if he had invented the custom. The queen also promised a little fortune to each of their daughters as they married—a promise certainly fulfilled in the case of Henrietta, who married the son of Godolphin, thus uniting the colleagues in the closest family bonds. Anne also offered a pension of £2000 a year to the duchess from the privy purse, a bounty declined at first, but of which afterward, in the final breaking up of their relations, Sarah was mean enough to demand the arrears, amounting to no less a sum than £18,000. Thus every kind of gift and favor was pressed upon the royal favorite in the early days of Anne’s reign.

Before this the means of the pair had been but small. Marlborough had been long deprived of all preferment, and the duchess informs us that she had discharged in the princess’s household all the offices for which afterward she was so highly paid on an allowance of £400 a year. It was for this reason that the dukedom was unwelcome to her. “I do agree with you,” her husband writes to her, “that we ought not to wish for a greater title till we have a better estate,” and he assures her that “I shall have a mind to nothing but as it may be easy to you.” It was in this strain that the great conqueror always addressed his wife, and it would be difficult to say which of her two adorers, her husband or her queen, showed the deepest devotion. When Marlborough set out for his first campaign in the war which was to cover him with glory, and in which for the first time he had full scope, this is how he writes to the companion of his life (she had gone with him to Margate to see him embark):

It is impossible to express with what a heavy heart I parted from you when I was by the water’s side. I could have given my life to have come back though I knew my own weakness so much that I durst not, for I know I should have exposed myself to the company. I did for a great while with a perspective glass look out upon the cliffs in hopes I might have had one sight of you. We are now out of sight of Margate and I have neither soul nor spirits, but I do at this time suffer so much that nothing but being with you can recompense it.

These lover-like words were written by a man of fifty-two to his wife of forty-two, to whom he had been married for nearly a quarter of a century. In all the pauses of these wars, amid the

plans and combinations of armies, and all the hard thinking and hard fighting, the perpetual activity and movement of his life for the next ten years, the same voice of passionate attachment, love, and longing penetrates for us the tumults of the time. She was flattered to the top of her bent both by husband and mistress; and it is not much to be wondered at if she came to think herself indispensable and above all law.

In the midst, however, of this prosperity and quickly growing greatness, the same crushing calamity which had previously fallen upon Anne, overwhelmed these companions of her life. Their only son, a promising boy of seventeen, died at Cambridge, and both father and mother were bowed to the dust. The queen’s letter on this occasion expresses her sense of yet another melancholy bond between them. It is evident that she had offered to go to her friend in her affliction. “It would be a great satisfaction to your poor unfortunate faithful Morley if you would have given me leave to come to St. Alban’s,” she writes, “for the unfortunate ought to come to the unfortunate.” With a heavy heart Marlborough changed his will, leaving the succession of the titles and honors, so suddenly deprived of all value to him, to the family of his eldest daughter, and betook himself sadly to his fighting, deriving a gleam of satisfaction from the thought that other children might yet be granted to him, yet adjuring his wife to bear their joint calamity with patience, whatever might befall. She herself says nothing on this melancholy subject. Perhaps in her old age, as she sat surveying her life, that great but innocent sorrow no longer seemed to her of the first importance in a record crossed by so many tempests—or perhaps it was of so much importance that she would not trust herself to speak of it at all. The partizans of the exiled Stuarts were eager to point out how both she and her mistress had suffered the penalty of their sin against King James and his son, by being thus deprived of their respective heirs. It was a “judgment”—a thing dear to the popular imagination and most easily concluded upon at all times.

It would not seem, however, that this natural drawing of “the unfortunate to the unfortunate” had the effect it might have had in further cementing the union of the queen and the duchess. The

little rift within the luteThat by and by will make the music mute

began to be apparent shortly after, though not at first showing itself by any lessening of warmth or tenderness. The existence of a division of opinion is the first thing visible. “I cannot help being extremely concerned that you are so partial to the Whigs, because I would not have you and your poor unfortunate faithful Morley differ in the least thing. And, upon my word, my dear Mrs. Freeman,” adds Queen Anne, “you are mightily mistaken in your notion of a true Whig. For the character you give of them does not in the least belong to them.”

We need not discuss here the difference between the meaning of the names Tory and Whig as understood then and now. Lord Mahon and Lord Macaulay both consider a complete transposition of terms to be the easiest way of making the matter clear, but in one particular at least this seems scarcely necessary; for the Tories, then as now, were emphatically the church party, which was to Anne the only party in which safety could be found. The queen had little understanding of history or politics in the wider sense of the words, but she was an excellent churchwoman, and in the sentiments of the Tory leaders she found, when brought into close contact with them, something more in accord with her own, the one sympathy in which her bosom friend had been lacking.

“These were men who had all a wonderful zeal for the Church, a sort of public merit that eclipsed all others in the eye of the Queen.... For my own part,” the duchess adds, “I had not the same prepossessions. The word Church had never any charm for me in the mouths of those who made the most noise with it, for I could not perceive that they gave any other proof of their regard for the thing than a frequent use of the word, like a spell to enchant weak minds, and a persecuting zeal against dissenters and against the real friends of the Church who would not admit that persecution was agreeable to its doctrine.”

This difference had not told for very much so long as neither the queen nor her friend had any share in public affairs, but it became strongly operative now. How much the queen had actually to do with the business of the nation, and how entirely it depended upon the influence brought to bear upon her limited mind who should be the guide of England at this critical moment, is abundantly evident from every detail of history. Queen Victoria, great as her experience is, and notwithstanding the respectful attention which all classes of politicians naturally give to her opinion, changes her ministry only when the majority in Parliament requires it, and has only the very limited choice which the known and acknowledged heads of the two parties permit when she transfers office and power from one side to the other. But Queen Anne had no compact body of statesmen, one replacing the other as occasion required, to deal with; but put in here one high official and there another, according as intrigue or impulse gained the upper hand.

There is something about a quarrel of women which excites the scorn of every chronicler, an insidious contempt for the weaker half of the creation which probably no one would own to, lying dormant in the minds of the race generally, even of women themselves. Had Anne been a king of moderate abilities, and Marlborough the friend and guide to whom he owed his prosperity and fame, the relationship would have been noble and honorable to both; and when the struggle began, the strenuous efforts of the great general to secure the coöperation of ministers with whom he could work, and whose support would have helped toward the carrying out of his great plans for the glory of his country and the destruction of her enemies, would, whether the historical critic approved of them or not, have at least secured his respect and a dignified treatment. But when it is Sarah of Marlborough, with all the defects of temper that we know in her, who, while her lord fights abroad, has to fight for him at home, to scheme his enemies out of, and his friends into, power, to keep her hold upon her mistress by every means that her imagination can devise, the idea that some nobler motive than mere self-aggrandizement may be in the effort occurs to no one, and the hatred of political enmity is mingled with all the ridicule that spiteful wit can discharge upon a feminine squabble. Lady Marlborough was far from being a perfect woman. She had a fiery temper and a stinging tongue. When she was thwarted at the very moment of apparent victory, and found herself impotent where she had been all-powerful, her fury was like a torrent against which there was no standing. But with these patent defects it ought to be allowed her that the object for which she struggled was not only a perfectly legitimate, but a noble one. What the great William had spent his life and innumerable campaigns in endeavoring to do, against all the discouragements of frequent failure, Marlborough was doing, with a matchless and almost unbroken success. It was no shame to either the general or the general’s wife to believe, as William did, that this was the greatest work of the time, and could alone secure the safety of England as well as of her allies. And the gallant stand of Lady Marlborough for the party and the statesmen who were likely to carry out this object, deserved some better interpretation from history than it has ever received.