The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (52 page)

However, while more peers from the former Whig Junto joined Marlborough’s government, and newer Whigs like an able young squire from Norfolk named Robert Walpole sifted documents in government ministries, the foundations of their power were being undermined both at home and abroad. The victory of Malplaquet in 1709, which cost the lives of 20,000 Englishmen, aroused no enthusiasm and the war became distinctly unpopular. Marlborough, the man commonly believed to have saved the nation, most unfairly acquired the nickname ‘the butcher’. Still more unfairly, the queen herself soon turned against the Marlboroughs.

Throughout her reign Anne had lavished titles, jewels and houses on her beloved Marlboroughs, including the special honour of a lodge at Windsor. Sarah Marlborough, given the very powerful positions of keeper of the privy purse and mistress of the robes, had in her arrogant way considered them only her due. And for about six or seven years this way of life continued much as before. The Marlboroughs in their secret code were known as Mr and Mrs Freeman, while Anne and her husband Prince George of Denmark were called the Morleys. But the Duchess of Marlborough evidently began to tire of having to be continually at the beck and call of the demanding queen, whose martyrdom to gout and dropsy meant she could scarcely perform the simplest task for herself.

Sarah was delighted when a cousin of hers, Mrs Abigail Masham, who had become one of the queen’s chief waiting women, did so well with Anne that she began to accompany her everywhere. The duchess encouraged Mrs Masham to take her place at court functions, and more importantly at the many tête-a-têtes the queen liked to enjoy with her ladies-in-waiting. Sarah, an impatient character, had had quite enough over the previous twenty years of comforting and being Anne’s best friend and counsellor. The queen would use any excuse to follow Sarah to Windsor–she had no pride where her favourite was concerned.

But Abigail Masham was not the innocent creature she appeared. Not only was she Sarah Marlborough’s cousin, she was also related to the Tory leader Robert Harley, with whom she was in cahoots. Quite soon Mrs Masham, who had specific instructions from Harley on how to poison the queen’s mind against the Whigs, began to oust the duchess from Anne’s affections. But when it was Mrs Masham to whom the queen turned for comfort over the death of her beloved husband Prince George, the duchess’s jealous rage knew no bounds. Although Prince George was the brother of the King of Denmark, he had been looked upon with amused contempt by his royal relations. His painstaking hobby of making model ships in little closets all over the royal palaces was seen as no occupation for a grown man. Charles II had set the tone for the way he was treated at court by remarking, ‘I have tried him drunk and tried him sober, and there is nothing in him.’ His wife, however, adored him.

Sarah now banned Abigail from the queen’s side just when she was prostrate with grief. Indeed she spent so much time and ink insulting the new favourite and quarrelling with Anne that the queen even wrote to Marlborough himself to beg him to ask Sarah to behave with a little more dignity and to see that her ‘tattling voice’ would soon make them both the ‘jest of the town’.

Incredible as it was to seasoned court observers, Marlborough’s own relationship with the queen, thanks to his wife’s uncontrolled behaviour, was waning fast. Outside the royal apartments the Whigs feared with good reason that Abigail’s whisperings were eating away at their government as well as at Marlborough’s position.

The government actually fell as a result of the Whigs’ ill-thought-out prosecution of a Dr Sacheverell, a High Tory preacher whose sermons had attacked Dissenters, the Whigs and the Revolution settlement as pernicious to the Anglican Church. The queen took the keenest possible interest in the trial. Most unusually she attended it in person and was extremely offended by the Whig prosecuting counsel’s speeches, which confirmed her view that the Whigs had little or no respect for the monarchy. Nor did the country at large care for the idea of Sacheverell being prosecuted in a country which prided itself on free speech–it smacked of the sort of tyranny the Whigs said they were battling in the war against Louis XIV.

By the time of the October election in 1711 Mrs Masham and Harley had so prevailed upon the queen that she had already dismissed most of the Whigs from government, even her old friend Godolphin, and replaced them with Tories. Victory at the polls under the banner of ‘The Church in danger’ confirmed that the Tories were now in power. Duchess Sarah had already been removed from her offices, for the queen could bear her rages and ungovernable behaviour no longer. But Anne showed herself once again the weak character she was when that same year she sacked the greatest servant of her reign, the Duke of Marlborough, from all his posts pending investigation of Tory charges of peculation or embezzlement. Though the charges were easily rebutted, Marlborough had had enough. Scarcely on speaking terms with his wife, wounded by the way he had been betrayed by the queen, he no longer wished to remain in England. He went abroad, never having lived at the magnificent palace built by the nation to commemorate his great victory. His bitterness was completed by the queen’s refusal to grant him a last audience.

The game was at last in the hands of the Tories, led by Harley, a clever, dark, secretive little man. They were determined to end the war. The Jacobite second Duke of Ormonde was appointed commander-in-chief and in 1712 he obeyed the secret orders not to fight of the conniving Tory secretary of state Henry St John. This disgraceful campaign resulted in the defeat of Prince Eugene and the emperor Charles VI. All further help was withdrawn from both the Austrian and Dutch armies to force them to the peace table, while the essence of the English peace was separately and dishonourably obtained with France behind their backs.

Though Louis XIV remarked that ‘The affair of displacing the Duke of Marlborough will do all for us we desire,’ in fact with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the Tories concluded the negotiations for an extremely profitable peace. The Whigs made a great deal of the Tories’ shabby treatment of Britain’s former allies but there was nothing they could do. Harley had been wounded by a would-be assassin, so the negotiating team in Paris was led by Henry St John, who became Viscount Bolingbroke that year. Bolingbroke, the best orator in the Commons and a completely unprincipled politician, nevertheless laid the basis for the future British Empire in the agreement he wrung out of the French.

By obtaining Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay territories and the former French colony of Acadie (newly named Nova Scotia in honour of the Scottish Union), Britain challenged France for dominance in North America. As well as thereby gaining a very strong naval position in the New World, Britain got Gibraltar and Minorca, which made her a powerful new presence in the Mediterranean. These colonies and possessions doubled her maritime trade, so that, having completely taken over the Dutch carrying business during the past half-century of sporadic war, she was on her way to becoming the chief trading nation in Europe. In the southern hemisphere, she added the island of St Kitt’s to her West Indies possessions, and obtained a share in the shameful but lucrative slave trade with the Spanish colonies, known as the Asiento, as well as the right to send one ship a year of manufactured goods to South America.

The Treaty of Utrecht also tried to ensure that the crowns of France and Spain, so close in blood, could never be united. Austria under the emperor Charles VI received most of Spain’s former external European possessions–the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia–while the Dutch now had the right to garrison principal frontier towns such as Namur against the French. The dukedom of Savoy became a kingdom and acquired Sicily, while the principality of Brandenburg became the kingdom of Prussia–her rise to prominence in Germany as Austria’s rival would form one of the dominant themes of the next two centuries. The treaty thus to a very large extent dictated the balance of power in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless the era was to be dogged by international wars as Spain attempted to get back her former territories. For her part, France in her new race against Britain for colonies and trade would turn to what was known as the ‘family compact’ between the two Bourbon sovereigns.

The Treaty of Utrecht forced a by now very aged Louis XIV once more to recognize the Protestant Succession in England, which left the throne after Anne to the Electress of Hanover’s heirs. But despite having played such an important role in the negotiation of the treaty, the scheming Bolingbroke had already made up his mind that he preferred the pretender to a foreign king. It was well known that there was no future for the Tories under George of Hanover. As one of the emperor’s best generals, George remained extremely angry about the Tories’ betrayal of the allies and had become closely connected to the Whigs. And it would be the Elector George the Tories would be dealing with, because it was clear that, like Anne, his eighty-three-year-old mother the Electress Sophia was not long for this world. Knowing therefore that the minute Queen Anne died they would fall from power, many other Tories were now openly leaning towards the pretender. Even while Bolingbroke had been in Paris negotiating the peace, he had also been in contact with Jacobite agents.

So cautious and careful were the actions of the Tory ministers that it is very hard to establish what sort of plot was being hatched, who was in on it, indeed whether there really was a concrete plot at all. Nevertheless, what does seem to have happened is that messages were sent by the Tories to the pretender in France, suggesting some kind of uprising when the queen died. But, though the Whigs were out of power, they had not lost their political nous. They prompted the ambassador of Hanover to apply to the House of Lords for George, the electress’s son, to take up his seat in the House as Duke of Cambridge. Thus he would be in England in case of any attempts at a
coup d’état
. Anne, however, was so infuriated by discussion about the future heir, because of its painful associations with the death of her son, the Duke of Gloucester, that she sent a venomous letter to the Electress Sophia denying George permission to come over. This was said to have brought on the electress’s final illness. She collapsed and died in the Herrenhausen gardens just seven weeks before Queen Anne, leaving George in direct line of succession.

Matters were moving fast in favour of the Jacobites and the pretender, and Anne did nothing to stop this because she could not bring herself to come out against her half-brother. At the bottom of her heart she also believed in the hereditary principle. A split had developed between Harley (now the Earl of Oxford) and Bolingbroke over the Schism Bill, which sought to prevent Dissenters educating their children in their own schools, Oxford himself being a Nonconformist. But the underlying cause was that ultimately Oxford supported the Hanoverians while Bolingbroke was a Jacobite. Mrs Masham thought she sensed a sinking ship and deserted her cousin for Bolingbroke’s side. After a long, unseemly altercation between the two men in front of the dying queen, Anne dismissed Oxford and made Bolingbroke head of the government. The Jacobites felt that victory was practically within their grasp.

But just as Bolingbroke, now effectively prime minister, was perfecting his plans for revolution, they were ruined by the swollen, dropsical queen. Three days later, on 30 July, she had an apoplectic fit. It was clear that she could die at any moment. While Bolingbroke hesitated, for he needed a few more weeks to be utterly ready, the three Whig dukes of Somerset, Argyll and Shrewsbury seized the reins of government. As Bolingbroke’s supporter Jonathan Swift put it bitterly, ‘Fortune withered before she grew ripe.’ While Anne lay dying and only semi-conscious in her great carved bed, she was persuaded to gasp out the name of Shrewsbury as lord treasurer.

With that authority, the minute Anne had breathed her last on 1 August 1714, the Whig dukes were able to proclaim the Elector of Hanover as King George I, having already called out the militia in the City of London and sealed all the ports. Bolingbroke allowed himself one rueful comment: ‘In six weeks more we should have put things in such a condition that there would have been nothing to fear. But Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the queen died on Sunday! What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!’

Thanks to the Whigs’ presence of mind, the transfer of power from the government of Queen Anne to King George went perfectly smoothly. It was said that ‘not a mouse had stirred against him in England, Ireland or Scotland’. So quiet was the country that the new king, the first of the Hanoverian monarchs, did not appear in England until 18 September–almost two months after Anne’s death. With his arrival the Tories would go into the wilderness for half a century, and England would be governed by a Whig oligarchy under the nominal authority of German kings.

The bitter politics of the last Stuart’s reign had coincided with a new literary flowering. The fierce pamphleteering during the Civil War and the relaxation of censorship at the end of the seventeenth century had together honed a wonderfully sharp instrument in English prose. Some of the most striking invective and dazzling satire England has ever known was written in an eminently direct and natural fashion by writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. Geniuses like Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor thrust up the houses of the wealthy in a striking baroque, not least that of Castle Howard, but the most memorable architecture of Queen Anne’s reign, as befits its mild namesake, was a homely and restful doll’s-house style, much influenced by the use of red brick in Holland. Also notable in Anne’s time were the fifty new churches she commissioned.

Anne’s simplicity, her gentle nature, her piety and the sad history of her seventeen children dying without reaching adolescence encouraged people to take her to their hearts. Her Englishness, which she had stressed in her first speech to Parliament, was a blessed relief after thirteen years of a Dutch king. It would be looked back on nostalgically during the reigns of the German Georges who followed her.