Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion - Anne Somerset

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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

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