ANNE AND SARAH
Larry the Cat,
The Queen dissolved Parliament
There had been no such victory since the great Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had triumphed at Lützen and Breitenfeld in the 1630s. It eclipsed even the victory by Condé over the Spaniards at Rocroi in 1643 which had established France as the foremost military power in Europe.
The French losses were immense: some 30,000 killed, wounded and missing. The spoils too were colossal: forty-seven guns, twenty-five standards and more than forty colours; generals' coaches; cases of silver; more than 3,000 tents; and, perhaps most immediately welcome to the allied rank-and-file, 'about a hundred fat oxen ready skinned'. Moreover, the extent of the disaster was not to be measured by numerical or material loss alone, but by the fact that, in the Duke's own words, Tallard's army was
'quite ruined'.
Marlborough and Eugène had saved the Habsburg Empire, and thereby preserved the grand alliance from collapse. They had wrenched out of Louis XIV's grasp the initiative he had enjoyed for forty years; snapped in pieces his hopes of an early and victorious peace. Moreover, they had destroyed the myth of French invincibility; destroyed it both in the eyes of an astounded Europe, and in the eyes of the French themselves. Blenheim indeed brought an era of European history to an end. There was still no rest for Marlborough, even when the firing had at last stopped that evening. As his chaplain narrates:
... His Grace gave orders about dressing the wounded men and putting them under cover. Then he made a separation of the French prisoners, which amounted to eleven or twelve thousand men.... These prisoners, with their generals, being divided and disarmed, were ordered to adjacent villages in the rear of our army...¹
Ahead of the wounded, there lay the tortures of eighteenth-century surgery: the knife through the unanaesthetized flesh, the saw grating on the live bone, the boiling tar to cauterize the stump; and afterwards perhaps eventual recovery, for the healthiest and luckiest, but more probably gangrene and death. And in any case, this being an era which trained more clergymen than surgeons, there were only seventeen doctors with the English contingent at Blenheim, roughly one to every six hundred men, and these lacking the support of any kind of nursing services.
On the night after the battle the Duke slept for three hours in a mill near Höchstädt while his army bivouacked on the battlefield. Next morning when the Duke rode back over the field, the bodies of the dead had already been stripped by the victors; good shoes or sound breeches were valuable commodities to soldiers on a shilling a day. From Blenheim to Lutzingen the naked corpses lay white and stiff as bone, scattered like the litter left behind by some departed fair.
When Marlborough and Eugène paid a visit to their most distinguished prisoner, Marshal Tallard, for whom the agony of the previous day had been rendered terribly complete by the death of his own son at his side, they found him wounded in one hand and 'very much dejected'. Triumph found the Duke magnanimous, understanding and courteous towards his unhappy foe: 'His Grace desired to know how far it was in his power to make him easy under his misfortune, offering him at the same time the convenience of his quarters, and to take him thither in his coach.²
Tallard declined the Duke's offer, preferring to stay where he was until he could have his own coach, so Marlborough dispatched a 'trumpet' to Marsin's army to ask for it to be sent over under a safe conduct.
Marlborough's triumph, portrayed on the roof of Blenheim Palace by Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721), showing the British lion savaging the French cock.
While other French general officers in the room crowded round to look at and to listen to the two commanders who had destroyed their army, Tallard turned the conversation to the battle itself, and remarked that 'if his grace had deferred his visit (meaning the attack) a day longer the Elector and he would have waited him upon his grace first'.³
The Duke's bearing towards his prisoners at this time was to do much to foster his legend among his French enemies. For while Eugène, who had his own reasons for hating the French, was harsh towards the officers in his hands, the Duke displayed 'all possible consideration, kindness, the most obliging civility, and a modesty perhaps superior to his victory'. He ordered the guard to turn out and pay Tallard the same honours as himself whenever the French commander called at his quarters. As a further kindness to the broken Tallard, the Duke enabled him promptly to write his own report on the battle, and provided a French officer with a safe conduct so that it could be dispatched straight to Louis XIV at Versailles.
On 17 August the whole allied army, which had now advanced to Steinheim, observed a day of thanksgiving for the victory; the hymns and prayers of a Te Deum followed by a triple discharge of all the artillery and small arms. But by now the Duke himself was overcome with the moral and physical prostration that followed the total exertion of conducting a battle; the spiritual hangover after so much violence and bloodshed. As he admitted to Godolphin in a letter on the day of the Te Deum, Ever sence the battaile I have been so employ'd about our own wounded men and the prisoners, that I have not one hour's quiet, which has so disorder'd mee, that were I in London I shou'd be in my bead (bed) in a hie feavour.⁵
To Sarah next day:
I have been soe very much out of order these four or five days, that I have been oblig'd this morning to lett blood, which I hope will sett me right, for I shou'd be very much troubled not to be able to follow the blow we have given... my dearest life, if we cou'd have another such a day as Wensday last, I shou'd then hope we might have such a Peace that I might injoye the remaining part of my life with you...⁶
But five days later he was still complaining to Godolphin:
'I am suffer'd to have so litle time to my self, that I have a continual feavour on my spirits, which makes me very weak, but when I go from hence I am resolved to keep in my coach til I come to the Rhine.⁷
He was now feeling not only the reaction from the battle itself, but also from the anxieties and efforts of the entire march to Blenheim. As he expressed it in the same letter:
.. nothing but my Zeal for Her majesty's service cou'd have enabled me to have gone chorow (through) the fatigues I have had for these last three months; and I am but to(o) sure when I shall have the happyness of seeing you, you will find me ten years older than when I left England.⁸
Meanwhile Colonel Parkes had been riding for the North Sea coast with the Duke's battlefield note to Sarah and the Queen; other couriers had been carrying official reports of Tallard's destruction to the courts of Europe; and all men began to measure the revolution which had taken place in the affairs of the Continent. From Frankfurt the English representative, Henry Davenant, gleefully wrote to
Stepney, the ambassador at Vienna:
Yesterday Colonel Parkes came here with the agreeable news of the victory we have gained over the enemies. This battle will in all appearance put an end to the war in the Empire, and give the means of assisting the Duke of Savoy who is very near his ruin. The Duke of Marlborough has beyond all dispute saved the Empire...⁹
At The Hague the splendid news brought by Parkes roused the English envoy from the glum and fearful mood into which earlier reports from Germany had cast him:
We cannot speak of anything else but these glorious advantages. There has not been in our age or scarce to be found in story so complete a victory as Prince Eugène and our Duke have gained...¹⁰
On 21 August, Parkes at last landed in England and headed for London and Windsor Castle, spreading the news as he went. As he clattered up to the Marlboroughs' town house, the guns of the Tower were saluting the victory and the city bells were ringing. At Windsor Castle Parkes, on bent knee, handed Marlborough's message to the Queen; his gift of a victory which had made her one of the greatest sovereigns in Europe wrote to Sarah for the second time that day: instead of queen of an offshore island. When Parkes had departed, Anne sat down and
Since I sent my letter away by the messenger, I have had the happiness of receiving my dear Mr Freeman's by Colonel Parkes, with the good news of this glorious victory, which, next to God Almighty, is wholly owing to dear Mr Freeman, on whose safety I congratulate you with all my soul. May the same Providence that has hitherto preserved, still watch over, and send him well home to you...¹¹
By evening, the broadsheet vendors in the streets of London were selling printed copies of Marlborough's note in thousands to eager passers-by. The news buzzed from shop to shop, from household to household, tavern to tavern, and Englishmen began to celebrate their first great victory on land against a European power since Agincourt nearly three hundred years before. According to an eyewitness, the coffee houses were packed with 'Loyal, honest Englishmen' with 'real satisfaction in every face'. But coffee and tea were soon found inadequate beverages for the occasion: 'Away they adjourned to the tavern, every bumper was crowned with the Queen's or the Duke of Marlborough's health and the loyal citizens emptied the cellars so fast I think two-thirds were foxed [drunk] next morning.¹²
When night fell, a city normally sunk in darkness except for the occasional torch's Bare or lantern's glimmer was gay with 'illuminations'-thousands of candles placed in windows; and high above the bells pealed on and on in rejoicing for the Duke's victory. It was not until 21 August that Louis XIV received news of the battle, and then only a bald message from Villeroi that Tallard's army had been all killed or taken prisoner. The message gave no word as to the fate of Marsin and the Elector.
Villeroi himself knew nothing more, for his information came from a 'trumpet', or messenger under flag of truce, sent over by the troops which had been left on the Rhine by Eugène when he departed to join the Duke. For six days the King dwelt in agonizing suspense, with everything a mystery beyond the simple and terrible fact that all was lost in Bavaria. Gradually, letter by letter, the nature and dimension of the catastrophe became clearer.
Then, on 29 August, one of Tallard's officers, released on parole by Marlborough, arrived in Paris with Tallard's own report on the battle. At first Louis and his courtiers, the French public at large, found it hard to take in that a French army could have suffered so immense a defeat. As the Duc de Saint- Simon remarked, 'One was not accustomed to misfortunes.¹³
Then the shock wore off and the pain set in. It can be guessed (wrote Saint-Simon] what was the general consternation, when every illustrious family, without counting the others, had kinsmen dead, wounded or prisoner; what was the predicament of the ministry of finance and the ministry of war at having to make good the loss of an entire army; and what was the anguish of the King, who had held the Emperor's fate in his hands, and who, with this ignominy and loss, saw himself reduced to defending his own lands....¹⁴
Marlborough was desperately weary; longing for Sarah. But he recognized that France was too powerful to be forced to make peace by a single victory, however devastating. During the remainder of the current campaigning season, therefore, he meant to lay the foundations for an invasion of France itself in 1705, via the valley of the Moselle. So as the summer mellowed into autumn he drove himself and his army onwards - to the Rhine; to Landau, which the Margrave of Baden was left to besiege; and north-westwards to Trèves (Trier). It was October now; the terrain, in his own words, 'veryterible mountagnes. Had we had any rain, it wou'd have been impossible to have gote forward the Canon.¹⁵
And still there was no slackening in the daily drudgery of running a war: correspondence with princes, generals, diplomats, supply contractors. It was little wonder that he wrote to Sarah on 10 October:
For thousands of reasons, I wish myself with you. Besides, I think if I were with you quietly at the Lodge, I should have more health, for I am at this time so very lean, that it is extreame uneasy to mee, so that your care must nurse me this winter....¹⁶
Sarah was sufficiently worried by his evident exhaustion to urge him to give up his responsibilities at the end of the campaign, and retire to But the Duke answered:
What you say of St Albans is what from my Soull I wish, that there or somewhere else we might end our days in quietness together: and if I considered only my self, I agree with you, I can never quit the world in a better time, but I have too many obligation (sic) to the Queen to take any resolution, but such as Her Service must be first consider'd.¹⁷
So the Queen's Captain-General soldiered on. On 29 October he won a race with the French into Trèves, on the Moselle. Almost immediately he opened the siege of Trarbach, further down the river; then himself travelled all the way back over the barren hills of the Hunsrück in order to infuse the Margrave of Baden's siege of Landau with the dynamism it had so far lacked. On 8 November Landau fell; in the middle of December Trarbach.
Marlborough now had his base on the Moselle ready for an offensive next spring. Yet Marlborough himself had already departed on another exhausting mission, this time to Berlin, nearly four hundred miles distant in the heaths and forests of Prussia, in order to persuade the Prussian king not to withdraw his contingent from the war, but to hire out 8,000 more soldiers for service in Italy, where the allied cause was far from prospering. From Frankfurt he reported to Godolphin on 16 November that 'I have been on the road yesterday from 4 in the morning til dark night, and am now going into the coach
before daylight...¹⁸
It was a gruesome journey for a tired man, for, in the Duke's words, 'The ways have been so bad I have been oblig'd to be every day 14 or 15 hours on the road, which has made my sides very sore...¹⁹
By the beginning of December he was on his way back from Berlin, after tough and ticklish negotiations which had taken all his patience and skill to bring to a successful end. At Hanover he called on the Electress Sophia, who stood to inherit the English throne if Queen Anne should die, in order to arrange Hanover's military contribution in 1705 with her ministers. While there he wrote to Sarah that 'I long extremely to be with you and the children, so that you may be sure I shall lose no time when the wind is
fair.²⁰
Cumulative fatigue did not, however, impair the Duke's ability to charm. The Electress Sophia, a lively old lady, was delighted with him: 'Never have I become acquainted with a man who knows how to move so gracefully, so freely, and so courteously. He is skilled as a courtier as he is brave as a general.²¹
Even when he reached The Hague, there were still the customary end-of-campaign discussions with Heinsius and the other Dutch leaders. It was not until 22 December that he at last set sail from Rotterdam in one of the royal yachts, and accompanied by thirty-six captured French senior officers, including Marshal Tallard himself and sixteen generals. On 25 December 1704 [14 December by the Old Style calendar in use in England] he landed at Greenock, under the long colonnades
of Wren's new hospital.
of Wren's new hospital.
An allegorical representation of Queen Anne presenting the grant of the royal manor of Woodstock to Marlborough for military merit. Painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
While all the colours and standards he had captured at Blenheim were lodged in the Tower, the
Duke himself went to St James's Palace to pay his duty to the Queen; and then he was
with Sarah at last. Next day he took his seat in the House of Lords, and heard the Lord Keeper, in the name of the Peers, offer a long and elaborate thanks for 'the Your Grace has done her Majesty this campaign' and for 'the immortal honour great and signal services have done the English nation....²²
The Duke's reply was brief, plain and modest:
I must beg, on this occasion, to do right to all the officers and soldiers I had the honour of having under my command; next to the blessing of God, the good success of this campaign is owing to their extraordinary courage....²³
In the first days of January 1705 the thirty-four captured French standards and the hundred and twenty-eight colours were borne in procession from the Tower to West minster Hall. The Queen herself was at a window in St James's Palace to see the procession pass by into St James's Park, where forty guns were fired twice in salute. Then it was the City of London's turn to honour the Duke's victory, with a banquet in Goldsmiths' Hall.
There was still more to come. In February 1705 the Queen, with the consent of Parliament, made the Duke a grant of the royal manor of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, with some 16,000 acres, so that he could build, as a further gift from a grateful crown, a palace majestic enough to commemorate a victory over the royal owner of Versailles.
All this sudden adulation was in It's way as much a test of character as the campaign itself. John Evelyn, the diarist, and an old acquaintance of the Duke's, met Marlborough by chance at this time in the Lord Treasurer's room. The Duke, he recorded, came to me and took me by the hand with extraordinary familiarity and civility, as formerlyhe used to do, without any alteration of his good nature. He had a most rich George in a sardonyx, set with diamonds of very great value; for the rest very plain. I had not seen him for some years, and believed he might have forgotten me.²⁴
Yet party politics fly-spotted the splendour of the hour, and soured the Duke's pleasure in the nation's gratitude. It was perceived by the Tories that the Battle of Blenheim, being fought in Central Europe, must be a Whig victory, and therefore to be diminished as much as possible. On the other hand a fumbling and indecisive action by Admiral Sir George Rooke off Malaga, being maritime warfare, must be a Tory victory, and therefore to be magnified at least into an equality with Blenheim.
Conversely, Marlborough became the unwilling object of Whig enthusiasm. The Duke's own opinion of both the parties, as expressed in a letter to Sarah in October 1704, was that 'I know them so well that if my quiet depended on either of them, I should be most miserable', and he added a sarcastic reference to leaving a good name behind him in 'countrys that have heardly any blessing but that of not knowing the detested nams of Wigg and Torry'.²⁵
As in the previous year strategy and religion were strangely intermixed as focuses of party rancour. A High Church pamphlet attacked both Godolphin and Marlborough as Whig sympathizers who were betraying the Church, which led Godolphin to remark that a discreet clergyman was almost as rare as a black swan. In March 1705 the Queen dissolved Parliament, and the spring saw the country deep in the pleasures of a general election: lies, bribery and beer.
However, the squires who paid the land tax had at last seen a victory for their money; Blenheim routed not only Tallard but also the High Tories. In place of the Tory majority in the last Parliament there were now, so Godolphin calculated, one hundred and ninety Tories of one kind or another, and one hundred and sixty Whigs, with one hundred 'Queen's servants', or members loyal to the court, holding the balance. The Queen, in her dread of party government, insisted to Godolphin that 'you will do all you can to keep me out of the power of the merciless men of both parties'.²⁶
The administration therefore was still to rest not on a reliable majority of its own, but on the goodwill of the moderates in both parties; to remain in office by a continual act of political levitation. In so precarious a parliamentary situation, Godolphin and Marlborough - who in any case regarded themselves as royal servants - were utterly dependent on the Queen's support; on 'Mrs Morley's' affection for and trust in 'Mr Montgomery', and 'Mr and Mrs Freeman'.
One of the pivots round which the affairs of Europe turned was therefore a unique personal relationship between sovereign and three subjects. The relationship had originated in the passionate crush conceived by a plain, podgy and timid teenage princess for one of her stepmother's maids of honour, who was all that the princess was not. Princess Anne and Sarah Churchill had occasionally played together when Anne was still a child, being brought up in seclusion and the Church of England at Richmond. But it was the exile of the Duke and Duchess of York's household to the Netherlands in 1679-80, during the Popish Plot, which had really acted as the midwife of friendship.
For here in the intimacy of a small group in a foreign land, living in an atmosphere of danger and crisis, the fourteen-year-old Anne began to nourish for the nineteen-year-old Sarah the feelings of a dull and lumpy fourth-former towards a beautiful, brilliant and masterful head girl. When Princess Anne married Prince George of Denmark in 1683, an honest, faithful and kindly bore who was to make her very happy, it was Sarah's husband who had been entrusted with the mission of escorting the prince to England.
Now Anne was to have her own household, at the Cockpit, a residence across the street from the Palace of Whitehall. Who but Sarah could be her Lady of the Bedchamber? In the closeness of household life, the friendship between the two young women had thickened. Anne the homely and Sarah the glittering shared the experiences of almost annual pregnancy, all the horrors of seventeenth-century childbirth, septic and agonizing, the early deaths of the young so painfully produced, so hopefully christened.
Always there was Sarah's hard, incisive mind for the uncertain Anne to lean on for support and guidance; and Sarah's vitality for the sluggish Anne to milk. And Anne had been insistent that no
barrier of rank should stand between her and the affection and devotion for which she
hungered:
let me beg of you not to call me your highness at every word, but to be free with me as one friend ought to be with another; and you can never give me any greater proof of your friendship than in telling me your mind freely in all things, which I do beg you to do.... I am all impatient for Wednesday, till when farewell.²⁷
So after 1684 it had been no longer Princess Anne and Lady Churchill who talked of court affairs or of children and obstetrics over their tea or chocolate, but Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman, as if they were two City merchants' wives genteelly passing the time while their husbands were busy on 'Change'.
As to the names Morley and Freeman [wrote Sarah many years later] the Queen herself" was always uneasy if I said the word Highness or Majesty, and would say from the first how awkward it was to write every day in terms of Princess etc. And when she chose the name Morley for herself, for no reason that I remember, but that she liked it, or the sound of it, I am not sure that I did not choose the other with the same regard to my own humour [temperament], which it seems in some sort to express.²⁸
In 1684 Sidney Godolphin, the Churchills' closest friend, joined the Cockpit circle under the pseudonym of Mr Montgomery. John and Sarah Churchill, for their part, had grown genuinely and deeply fond of the gentle, kindly and artless Anne. They were happy to act as her guides and protectors in an unquiet time. John Churchill himself with his strong chivalrous streak, his almost religious reverence towards royalty, seems to have cast himself in the role of her knightly champion.
But it was the brief and catastrophic reign of Princess Anne's father, James II, which fused the Cockpit friendships into a tight little league against a world of hazard and intrigue, where even a letter from a royal daughter to her sister might carry the taint of treason. Anne was devoutly Anglican, and therefore James II's ever more rapid march towards the conversion of England to Roman Catholicism had forced her to decide between her duty to her father, as a daughter and a subject, and her religion.
Churchill and Godolphin too were Church of England men, but Churchill, like Anne herself,owed a special loyalty to James; in his case that of protégé to patron. By 1687 all three had nevertheless decided that their first allegiance must be to their religion. In the course of a long letter to her sister Mary, now married to William of Orange, Anne told her:
'The King has never said a word to me about religion since the time I told you of; but expect every minute, and am resolved to undergo anything rather than change my religion.²⁹
As the country moved towards revolution, and the disaffected looked to William of Orange for deliverance, Anne and her simple spouse Prince George had put their trust in the counsel of John Churchill, worldly, shrewd, subtle. When William of Orange's emissary, Dykvelt, visited England to sound out the extent and strength of opposition to King James, Anne, as she informed her sister in the same letter,
never ventured to speak to him [Dykvelt], because I am not used to speak to people aboutbusiness and this Lord [Sunderland, James's chief minister] is so much on the watch that Iam afraid of him. So I have desired Lord Churchill (who is one that I can trust, and I amsure is a very honest man and a good Protestant) to speak to Mr Dykevelt for me...³⁰
Churchill, after his discussions with Dykvelt, had later confirmed the princess's
resolve in a letter to William of Orange, in which he added on his own behalf that 'my
places and the King's favour I set at nought, in comparison of being true to my religion.
In all things but this, the King may command me...³¹
And when in November 1688 Churchill and Prince George of Denmark had ridden out with James's army to meet William of Orange's invading forces, with the intention of deserting the King in a day or so, when the opportunity best should serve, Churchill had left behind in Sarah's strong hands complete arrangements for securing Princess Anne's safety.
On the night of 24 November 1688, about midnight, Sarah and Mrs Berkeley, another old childhood friend, later Lady Fitzhardinge, had conducted the Princess from her closet down a new set of back stairs specially built for the occasion so that no servant should know she was not safe in bed. There in the dark street a coach was waiting, and within it the Earl of Dorset and Bishop Compton of London, the latter wearing, as a sign of the times, a sword in place of his accustomed episcopal lawn sleeves.
The garden front of St. James's Palace c. 1690
They conducted us that night [wrote Sarah] to the Bishop's house in the city, and the next day to my Lord Dorset's at Copt Hall. From thence we went to the Earl of Northampton's and from thence to Nottingham, where the country gathered about the Princess; nor did she think herself safe till she saw she was surrounded by the Prince of Orange's friends.³²
Such an adventure, even if more to Sarah's taste than to Mrs Morley's, could only wind tighter the bonds between protectors and protected. And the advent of a new reign had seen these bonds tightened even further, when the Marlboroughs (as they had now become) took Princess Anne's part in a dispute with King William and Queen Mary over money.
Anne wished to have her own Civil List income granted by Parliament, instead of being dependent, as hitherto, on a grant from the Sovereign's Privy Purse. King William - and even more so Queen Mary - had opposed the Princess's desire both in principle and because they thought the income named, £70,000 per annum, was excessive by £40,000. They tried to wheedle Anne into abandoning her wish. Anne, immovably obstinate, it was a portent - refused.
The Marlboroughs used their influence; Sarah canvassed among the politicians. William and Mary sought to bend Sarah into recommending her mistress to give way. Sarah, embattled and aggressive, refused. Parliament ranged itself on the side of Princess Anne and voted her £50,000 per annum. Defeated and mortified, the Queen asked Anne to choose between her and King William on the
one hand, and the Marlboroughs on the other.
From the day of her accession in 1702, at the age of thirty-eight, she carried the role of queen with superb dignity.' Queen Anne in her robes of state. Painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
But Anne, grateful for the staunchness of her friends - and for the final success they had helped to bring about on her behalf- had refused to give them up. When William finally dismissed Marlborough from all his offices in 1692, Queen Mary had demanded that Princess Anne should also dismiss Sarah from hers. It would be, after all, anomalous if Marlborough, dismissed the court, should continue to live with Sarah at the Cockpit, which being a royal residence
was really part of the precincts of the court.
Now it was Anne's turn to protect her protectors. She did so sturdily enough, by leaving the Cockpit herself rather than turn the Marlboroughs out, and taking her household (including the Marlboroughs) off to reside at Syon House, the Duke of Somerset's house by the Thames at Brentford. And when Marlborough found himself in the Tower as a result of a Jacobite plot (see p. 23), Anne had written to Sarah (who was in London to be near her husband) almost daily to comfort her. Her sympathy had been the warmer because
Sarah had just lost her
baby son
Charles.
My dear Mrs Freeman was in so dismal a way when she went from hence, that I cannot forbear asking how she does, and if she has yet any hopes of Lord Marlborough's being soon at liberty. For God's sake
have a care of your dear self,
and give as little way to melancholy thoughts as you can.³³
After a final stand-up quarrel with her sister (it was the last time they had written to Sarah: ever met), Anne if you should ever do so cruel a thing as to leave me, from that moment I shall never enjoy one quiet hour. And should you do it without asking my consent (which if I ever give you, may I never see the face of Heaven) I will shut myself up and never see the world more....³⁴
Friendship could hardly be closer or more intense than this. And eleven years later when she was Queen and when the prisoner in the Tower had become her Captain General, her feelings remained just as strong. When in the autumn of 1703 the Marlboroughs and Godolphin, under the weight of their foreign and domestic anxieties, spoke of retiring, Anne wrote to Sarah:
give me leave to say you should a little consider your faithful freinds (sic) and poor Country, wch must be ruined if ever you should putt your melencoly thoughts in execution, as for your poor unfortunate faithfull Morly she could not beare it, for if ever you should forsake me, I would have nothing more to do with ye world, but make another abdycation,for what is a Crown when ye support of it is gon: I never will forsake your Dear self, Mr Freeman nor Mr Montgomery, but allways be your constant faithfull servant & we four must never part, till death mows us down with his impartiall hand.³⁵
It was as if nothing had changed since they had all been living together in adversity at the Cockpit. Yet this was not really so. For Mrs Morley was Queen of England now. She was Mrs Freeman's sovereign lady. Moreover, although her father's doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings was dead under the Revolution settlement, Anne nevertheless remained true to its spirit. For her the sovereign stood in a special relationship to God; the responsibilities entrusted to her were religious as well as political; and kingship was tinged with the mystical.
All through her reign she performed the traditional ceremony of 'touching for the King's Evil' - effecting magical cures of the scrofulous by laying the royal hand on them. Anne's outlook was understood by Marlborough; indeed it chimed exactly with his own sense of reverence towards the office of sovereign. For this reason he was able to hold the delicate balance between the friendship and familiarity due to (and demanded by) Mrs Morley and the distance and respect due to (and desired by) the Queen of England.
Nor was Anne as a person any longer the dull and timid adolescent who had once worshipped Sarah. Her happy marriage to Prince George had fulfilled her as a woman. The broils and intrigues of two reigns had matured her judgment of people and situations, and her personal confidence. Despite the homely language of her letters on public affairs, they display much shrewdness and wisdom. There was a stolid strength in her, a stubborn will.
From the day of her accession in 1702, at the age of thirty-seven, she had carried the role of Queen with superb dignity. Upon the news of King William's death, she received the privy council with a 'well-considered speech', and, according to a contemporary account: she pronounced this, 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.³⁶
Because of Anne's natural sweetness of voice, Charles II had ordered the actress Mrs Barry to train her in elocution. The result justified Mrs Barry's fee: 'I have heard the queen speak from the throne," wrote Mr Speaker Onslow,... I never saw an audience more affected: it was a sort of charm.³⁷
Queen Anne's first appearance before Parliament in 1702 had offered a vision of majesty. She was wearing an ermine-lined robe of red velvet, edged with gold. Round her thick, strong neck was a heavy gold chain, whence was suspended a badge of St George on the matronly bosom. On her head - full-cheeked, firm-jawed- she wore a cap of red velvet surmounted by the crown of England. When she announced that she was giving up for the public service £100,000 of the tevenue voted to her by Parliament, the enthusiasm of that Parliament for their new sovereign was even more rapturous. A foreign diplomat reported: 'Since Queen Elizabeth there had been no instance of such graciousness.... The Queen had completely won the hearts of her subjects.³⁸
9But Sarah, less sensitive to nuances than her husband, Sarah, with her powerful, practical, literal mind, was incapable of perceiving the subtle distinctions between Mrs Morley and the Queen of England: would indeed have been impatient of them if she had perceived them. Reverence was not Sarah Marlborough's line. And her own will to dominate, together with long habit, prevented her from perceiving too that she was now dealing with a woman whose own strength of will was no less than hers because less flamboyantly evident.
Sarah was a Whig; the Queen, though of no party preference, broadly in sympathy with the outlook of the Tories. Sarah set out to convert the Queen to her own enlightened views: "I resolved therefore from the very beginning of the Queen's reign to try whether I could not by degrees make impressions in her mind more favourable to the Whigs....³⁹
Unfortunately, Sarah's only strategy in life was the frontal attack - in this case, of endlessly reiterated, and of course to her mind unanswerable, argument. She was a female politician before her time. With the Duke away campaigning for two-thirds of each year, and Godolphin, the Lord Treasurer and chief minister, an anxious, efficient bureaucrat more at home with racehorses than women, there was potential danger in Mrs Morley's consequent exposure to Mrs Freeman's over-free treatment of her. For the Marlboroughs' friendship with Anne was still, as it had been in 1688 and 1701, the source of their power - that, and the Duke's continued military success.⁴⁰
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