Historical Characters in 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 lute
That 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.

And it cannot be said that there was anything petty in Anne’s

public acts while she remained under the influence of her first friend. The beginning of her reign showed no ignoble spirit. One of the first things the queen did was to abolish the old and obstinate practice of selling places, which had hitherto been accepted as the course of nature; so much so that when Marlborough fell into disgrace under King William, he had been bidden to “sell or dispose of” the places he held, and the princess had herself informed Sarah at least on one occasion of vacancies, in order that her friend should have the profit of filling them up. “Afterwards, I began to consider in my own mind this practice,” the lady says; but whether she took the initiative in so honorable a measure, it would be rash to pronounce upon the authority of her own word alone. It certainly, however, was one of the first acts of the queen, and the credit of such a departure from the use and wont of courts should at least be allowed to the new reign. Anne did various other things for which there was no precedent. As soon as her civil list was settled, she gave up voluntarily £100,000 a year to aid the public expenses, then greatly increased by the war, and, shortly after, she made a still more important and permanent sacrifice by giving up the ecclesiastical tribute of first-fruits and tithes; namely, the first year’s stipend of each cure to which a new incumbent was appointed, and the tenth of all livings—to which the crown, as succeeding the Pope in the headship of the church, had become entitled. Her object was the augmentation of small livings, and better provision for the necessities of the church, and there can be little doubt that this act at least was exclusively her own. The fund thus formed continues to this day under the name of Queen Anne’s Bounty, but unfortunately remained quite inefficacious during her reign, in consequence of various practical difficulties; and it has never been by any means the important agency she intended it to be. But the intention was munificent and the desire sincere. Throughout her life the church was the word which most moved Anne. She was willing to do anything to strengthen it, and to sacrifice any one, even as turned out her dear friend, in its cause.

The first subject which quickened a vague and suspicious disagreement into opposition was the bill against what was called occasional conformity, a bill which was aimed at the dissenters and abolished the expedient formerly taken advantage of in order to admit nonconformists to some share in public life—of periodical compliance with the ceremonies of the church. The new law not only did away with this important “easement,” but was weighted with penal enactments against those who, holding office under government, should be present at any conventicle or assembly for worship in any form but that of the Church of England. Upon this subject the queen writes as follows:

I must own to you that I never cared to mention anything on this subject to you because I knew you would not be of my mind, but since you have given me the occasion, I can’t forbear saying that I see nothing like persecution in the bill. You may think it is a notion Lord Nottingham has just put into my head, but upon my word it is my own thought. I promise my dear Mrs. Freeman faithfully I will read the book she sent me, and beg she will never let differences of opinion hinder us from living together as we used to do. Nothing shall ever alter your poor unfortunate faithful Morley, who will live and die with all truth and tenderness yours.

As the differences go on increasing, however, Queen Anne gradually changes her ground. At first she “hopes her not agreeing with anything you say will not be imputed to want of value, esteem, or tender kindness, for my dear, dear Mrs. Freeman”; but at last, as the argument goes on, plucks up a spirit and finds courage enough to declare roundly that whenever public affairs are in the hands of the Whigs, “I shall think the Church beginning to be in danger.” Thus the political situation became more and more difficult, and gradually embittered even the personal relations between the friends, and the duchess had not even the support of her husband in her political preferences. He had himself belonged to the moderate Tory party, and, even though they thwarted and discouraged him, showed no desire to throw himself into the arms of the Whigs, whither his wife would so fain have led him. He was almost as little encouraging to her in this point as the queen was. “I know,” he says, “they would be as unreasonable as the others in their expectations if I should seek their friendship,—for all parties are alike.” It was thus a hard part she had to play between the queen’s determination that the Whigs were the enemies of the church, and her husband’s conviction that all parties were alike. He, perhaps, was the more hard to manage of the two. He voted for the occasional conformity bill, against which she was so hot, and trusted in Harley, who indeed owed his first beginning to Marlborough’s favor, but whom the duchess saw through. In young St. John, too, the great general had perfect faith; “I am very confident he will never deceive you,” he wrote to Godolphin. Thus the husband warmed in his bosom the vipers that were to sting him and bring a hasty end to his career. He, too, remained obstinately indifferent, while she stormed and entreated and wrote a hundred letters and used every art both of war and peace in vain. It is easy to see how this perpetual letter-writing, her determination to prove that her correspondent was in error and she right, and her continual reiteration of the same charges and reproaches, must have exasperated the queen and troubled Marlborough, in the midst of the practical difficulties of his career. But yet there are many points on which Sarah has a just claim to our sympathy. For she foresaw what actually did happen, and perceived whither the current was tending, but was refused any credit for her prognostications or help in subduing the dangerous forces she dreaded. How irritating this position must have been to a fiery temper it is needless to point out, and the duchess would not permit herself to be silenced by either husband or queen. Lord Macaulay’s description of the astonishing state of affairs which compelled two of the ablest statesmen in Europe to have recourse for the conduct of the imperial business to the influence of one woman over another, was thus far less true even than it seems on the surface; for Sarah of Marlborough suspected the real state of the case when no one else did, fighting violently against her husband’s enemies before they had disclosed themselves, and her final overthrow was as much the result of a new tide in political affairs as of the straining of the personal relations between her and her queen.

Meanwhile, Marlborough was going on in his career of conquest. It was a very costly luxury; but the pride of England had never been so fed with triumphs. Queen Anne was in her closet one day at Windsor, a little turret-chamber with windows on every side looking over the green and fertile valley of the Thames, with all the trees in full summer foliage and the harvest beginning to be gathered in from the fields, when there was brought to her a scrap of crumpled paper bearing upon it the few hurried lines which told of the “glorious victory” of the battle of Blenheim. It had been torn off in haste from a memorandum book on the field, and was scribbled over with an inn-reckoning on the other side. The commotion it caused was not one of unmixed joy; for though the queen wrote her thanks and congratulations, and there was a great thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s, which she attended in state, the party in power did all that in them lay to depreciate the importance of the victory. When, however, Marlborough appeared in England with his prisoners and trophies,—a marshal of France among the former,—and many standards taken in the field, the popular sentiment burst all bounds, and his reception was enthusiastic. The crown lands of Woodstock were bestowed upon him as a further reward, and the queen herself commanded that a palace should be built upon the estate at the expense of the crown, to be called Blenheim in commemoration of the extraordinary victory. A curious relic of ancient custom religiously carried out to the present day was involved in this noble gift. The quit-rent which every holder of a royal fief has to pay, was appointed to be a banner embroidered with three fleurs-de-lis, the arms then borne by France, to be presented on every anniversary of the battle. Not very long ago the present writer accompanied a French lady of distinction through some part of Windsor Castle under the guidance of an important member of the queen’s household. When the party came into the armory, on each side of which, a vivid spot of color, hung a little standard fresh in embroidery of gold, the kind cicerone smiled, and whispered aside, “We need not point out these to her.” One of them was the Blenheim, the other the Waterloo banner, both yearly acknowledgments, after the old feudal fashion, for fiefs held of the crown.

Among the honors done to Marlborough at this triumphant moment, when, an English duke, a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and, still more splendid title, the greatest soldier of his time, he came home in glory to England, were the verses with which Addison saluted him. There were plenty of odes piping to all the winds in his honor, but this alone worthy of record. Every reader will recollect the simile of the great angel who “drives the furious blast;”

 
And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.
 

The compliment might be supposed to be somewhat magnificent even for the greatest of commanders. And yet whatever Marlborough’s faults may have been, his attitude during this wonderful war is scarcely too splendidly described by the image of a calm and superior spirit beholding contemporary events from a higher altitude than that of common humanity, executing vengeance and causing destruction without either rage or fear, in serene fulfilment of a great command and in pursuance of a mighty purpose. His unbroken temper, his patience and courtesy in the midst of all contentions, the firm composure with which he supports all the burdens thrown upon him, appeals from home as well as necessities abroad, might well suggest a spirit apart, independent, not moved like lesser men. No man ever bore so many conflicting claims more calmly. Even the adjurations, the commands, the special pleadings of his “dearest soul” do not lead him a step farther than he thinks wise. “When I differ from you,” he says, “it is not that I think those are in the right whom you say are always in the wrong, but it is that I would be glad not to enter into the unreasonable reasoning of either party; for I have trouble enough for my little head in the business which of necessity I must do here.” There could not be a greater contrast than between the commotion and whirlwind that surrounds Duchess Sarah and the great general’s calm.

It is not necessary for our purpose to enter into those changes of ministry which first temporarily consolidated the Marlborough interest and afterward wrought its destruction, nor into the intrigues by which Harley and St. John gradually secured the reins of state. It is not to be supposed that these fluctuations were wholly owing to the influences brought to bear upon the queen; but that her prevailing disposition to uphold the party which to her represented the church kept the continuance of the war and the foreign policy of the country in constant danger, there can be no doubt. It is only in 1707, however, that we are made aware of the entry of a new actor upon the scene, in the person of a smooth and noiseless woman, always civil, always soft-spoken, apologetic, and plausible, whose sudden appearance in the vivid narrative of her great rival is in the highest degree dramatic and effective. This was the famous Abigail who has given her name, somewhat injuriously to her own position, to the class of waiting-women ever since. She was in reality bedchamber-woman to the queen—a post now very far removed from that of a waiting-maid, and even then by no means on a level, notwithstanding the duchess’s scornful phrases, with that of the class which ever since has been distinguished by Mrs. Hill’s remarkable name. Her introduction altogether, and the vigorous mise en scène of this new episode in history, are fine examples of the graphic power of Duchess Sarah. Her suspicions, she informs us, were roused by the information that Abigail Hill, a relation of her own, and placed by herself in the royal household, had been married without her knowledge to Mr. Masham, who was one of the queen’s pages; but there are allusions before this in her letters to the queen to “flatterers,” which point at least to some suspected influence undermining her own. She tells us first in a few succinct pages who this was whose private marriage excited so much wonder and indignation in her mind. Abigail and all her family owed their establishment in life to the active exertions of the duchess, who had taken them in their poverty upon her shoulders—or rather had succeeded in passing them on to the broader shoulders of the public, which was still more satisfactory. Thus she had been the making of the whole band, henceforward through other members besides Abigail to prove thorns in her flesh. Harley, who was at this time secretary of state, and aiming at higher place, was related in the same degree on the father’s side to Mrs. Abigail; so that, first cousin to the great duchess on one hand and to the leader of the House of Commons on the other, though it suits the narrator’s purpose to humble her, Mrs. Hill was no child of the people. It is curious to remark here that Harley too came to his first advancement by Marlborough’s patronage.

From the moment of this discovery, and of the further facts that the marriage had taken place under Anne’s auspices, and that Abigail had already taken advantage of her favor to bring Harley into close relations with the queen, the duchess gave her mistress little peace. Fiery letters were showered daily upon the queen. She let nothing pass without a hasty visit, or a long epistle. If it were not for the pertinacity with which she returns again and again to one subject, these letters have so much force of character in them that it would be impossible not to enter with sympathetic excitement into the fray. The reader is carried along by the passionate absorption of the writer’s mind as she pours forth page upon page, flying to her desk at every new incident, transmitting copies of every epistle to Godolphin to secure his coöperation, and to Marlborough, though so much farther off, to show him how she had confuted all his adversaries. And then there follows a record of stormy scenes, remonstrances, and appeals that lose their effect by repetition. The duchess would never accept defeat. Every new affront, every symptom of failure in the policy which she supported with so much zeal, made her rush, if possible, to the presence of the queen, with a storm of reproaches and invectives, with tears of fury and outcries of wrath,—or to the pen, with which she reiterated the same burning story of her wrongs. Anne is represented to us throughout in an attitude of stolid and passive resistance, which increases our sympathy with the weeping, raging, passionate woman, whose eloquence, whose arguments, whose appeals and entreaties all dash unheeded against the rock of tranquil obstinacy which is no more moved by them than the cliff is moved by the petulance of the rising tide; although, on the other hand, a similar sympathy is not

wanting for the dull and placid soul which could get no peace, and which longed above all things for tranquillity, for gentle attentions and soft voices, and the privilege of nominating bishops and playing basset in peace. Poor lady! on the whole it is Queen Anne who is most to be pitied. She was often ill, always unwieldly and uncomfortable. She had nobody but a soft, gliding, smooth-tongued Abigail to fall back upon, while the duchess had half the great men of the time fawning upon her, putting themselves at her feet: her husband prizing a word of kindness from her more than anything in the world; her daughters describing her as the dearest mother that ever was; money—which she loved—accumulating in her coffers; and great Blenheim still a-building, and all kinds of noble hangings, cut velvets and satins, pictures, and every fine thing that could be conceived, getting collected for the adornment of that great house.