LITMIR.BIZ

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had experienced I would not be’ and therefore he and his wife ‘did all they could to hinder’ her appointment.¹⁴⁴

      When it appeared that she would not be able to give Sarah the position, Anne grew distraught. She sent Sarah a letter that was almost incoherent with emotion, imploring her not to blame her for the setback. ‘Oh dear Lady Churchill’, she wrote frantically, ‘let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it because I gave you my word so often that I would never give my consent to any, no more I have not, but have said all that was possible for one to say’. Anne explained that she had delayed telling Sarah how gloomy the outlook appeared because

      I was yet in hopes that I might prevail with the Duke, and I will try once more, be he never so angry; but oh, do not let this take away your kindness from me, for I assure you ’tis the greatest trouble in the world to me and I am sure you have not a faithfuller friend on earth nor that loves you better than I do; my eyes are full, I cannot say a word more.

      She became even more agitated when she heard that Sarah was about to go to Windsor, leaving her behind, and protested ‘this cruel disappointment is too much to be borne without the loss of your company’. Anne’s next letter, however, brought better news, for, as she had promised, she had raised the matter again with her father, and this time won him over. Jubilantly Anne reported, ‘The Duke came just as you were gone and made no difficulties but has promised me that I shall have you, which I assure you is a great joy to me’.¹⁴⁵

      As Anne’s Second Lady of the Bedchamber Sarah received a modest salary of £200 a year, but the real value of the position lay in Anne’s assurance to her that she would be ‘ready at any time to do you all the service that lies in my power’. Sarah admitted that she cultivated the relationship with great care, and ‘now began to employ all her wit, all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert and entertain and serve the Princess’. She succeeded triumphantly, for Anne’s liking for her ‘quickly became a passion, and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid’. Being with Sarah afforded her such intense delight that Anne begrudged letting her out of her sight. One account of their relationship based on Sarah’s own reminiscences described how ‘They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of a tedious, lifeless state … This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. [The Princess] used to say She desired to possess her wholly and could hardly bear that [Sarah] should ever escape … into any other company’.¹⁴⁶

      In retrospect Sarah claimed that the hours she spent closeted with Anne were ‘a confinement indeed for her’ and even stated that Anne’s ‘extremely tedious’ company ensured that she would ‘rather have been in a dungeon’ than with her mistress. Since Anne was not naturally talkative, Sarah had to work hard to keep the conversation flowing, but Sarah also complained that anything the Princess did have to say was characterised by ‘an insipid heaviness’. Sarah was nevertheless careful to hide from the Princess that she found her a bore. Anne was led to believe that even if her passion for Sarah was not reciprocated in full, neither was it completely unrequited. One of Anne’s earliest letters to her friend refers to ‘poor me (who you say you love)’. In 1706, four years after Anne’s accession to the throne, Sarah wrote to her, reminding her of the ‘passion and tenderness’ she had ‘once had’ for Anne.¹⁴⁷

      Anne once protested ‘’tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart’; on another occasion she declared ‘If I writ whole volumes I could never express how well I love you’. She insisted that ‘Nothing can ever alter me’, and that her ‘kindness’ for Sarah could ‘never end but with my life’. Years later, once it had emerged that Anne had overstated the immutability of her love, Sarah noted bitterly, ‘Such vows … strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards’.¹⁴⁸

      The Princess submitted to frequent separations to enable Sarah to spend time at her own house at St Albans and to be with her husband when he was waiting on the Duke of York. ‘This absence … though be it never so short, it will appear a great while to me’, Anne declared when Sarah was away. She consoled herself by keeping in touch by letter, saying it constituted her ‘greatest pleasure’. Sarah later complained that Anne’s letters were never interesting, even if ‘enlivened with a few passionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough’. At the time, however, Sarah was more appreciative, delighting Anne by being ‘so kind [as] to be satisfied with my dull letters’. Anne herself conceded ‘I am the worst in the world at invention’, but since Sarah encouraged her to write to her at length the Princess was able to convince herself that her letters were welcome.¹⁴⁹

      Anne admitted that there was something compulsive about the way she wrote so frequently to her friend, sometimes more than once a day. ‘You will think me mad, I believe, for troubling you so often’, she told Sarah apologetically, but despite acknowledging that her behaviour was slightly odd, she expected prompt replies to every letter, notwithstanding the burden it placed on her friend. The Princess explained, ‘If I could tell how to hinder myself from writing to you every day I would, that you need not be at the trouble of writing so often to me, because you say it does you hurt, but really I cannot … for when I am from you I cannot be at ease without enquiring after you’. She would declare petulantly that unless she received a letter the next morning ‘I shall conclude with reason that I am quite forgot and ne’er trouble you any more with my dull letters’.¹⁵⁰

      Anne asked Sarah to show her letters to nobody else, but Sarah insisted that hers to Anne were destroyed. As a result we do not know the tenor of her replies. Sarah later encouraged the assumption that they were more restrained in tone than Anne’s effusions, but this is open to question. Towards the end of her life Anne told a third party that Sarah ‘wrote to me as [I] used to do to her’.¹⁵¹

      The Princess accepted that Sarah’s strongest feelings were reserved for her husband, and she let it be understood that the same applied to her and George. When telling Sarah that she had ‘no greater satisfaction’ than being in her company she qualified this by saying that this was ‘next [to] being with the Prince’. However her love for George hardly had the same needy intensity that characterised her relationship with Sarah. Although she missed him when they were apart, she bore his absence with an equanimity that was lacking during separations from Sarah.¹⁵²

      If Anne did not contest that Churchill took priority over her in Sarah’s eyes, she nevertheless claimed ‘the little corner of your heart that my Lord Churchill has left empty’. Believing herself entitled to ‘possession of the second place’, she was reluctant to share it with other women, but to her distress found herself contending with ‘a great many rivals’ who vied with her for Sarah’s attention. Anne’s jealousy and resentment of these ladies who were ‘more entertaining than I can ever pretend to be’ made her ‘sometimes fear losing what I so much value’, and would cause tension in years to come.¹⁵³

      Sarah would later assert that Anne very early in their relationship sought to eliminate the awkwardness arising from the disparity in rank between them by proposing that they adopt pen names when corresponding with one another. In fact the arrangement whereby they referred to each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman only came into being about two or three years after the 1688 Revolution. Before that Anne invariably addressed Sarah as ‘my dear Lady Churchill’, and Sarah’s style towards her remained markedly deferential. By September 1684 Anne was uneasy enough about this to entreat Sarah ‘not to call me your Highness at every word, but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another’, but Sarah was very cautious about taking up her offer. The following July the Princess again protested at Sarah’s ‘calling me at every three words your Highness’. Yet even when Anne insisted, ‘Ceremony is a thing you know I hate with anybody and especially with you’, Sarah would not abandon the formal tone. She affected to believe that Anne had been joking when she had urged her to be less mindful of etiquette, and a few months later Anne felt impelled to tell her friend, ‘I hope you are not so unjust to me as to believe … that I did it to laugh at you, for I am sure … I never will be so base’.¹⁵⁴

      In view of Sarah’s

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