Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
other nicknames too: William of Orange, whom neither much liked, was ‘Mr Caliban’.
An unpublished account of this period written in the third person by Sarah much later tells us how:
she now began to employ all her wit and all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert, entertain and serve the Princess; and to fix that favour, which one might now easily observe to be increasing more towards her each day. This favour quickly became a passion; and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid. They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of tedious, lifeless state. To see the Duchess was a constant joy; and to part with her for never so short a time, a constant uneasiness; as the Princess’s own frequent expressions were. This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. She used to say that she desired to possess her wholly: and could hardly bear that she could escape, from this confinement, into other company.49
In another account, this time part of Sarah’s published campaign to defend her reputation, she maintains that all Anne’s friendships ‘were flames of extravagant passion, ending in indifference or aversion’. She ‘seemed to inherit a good deal of her father’s moroseness’, thought Sarah, ‘which naturally produced in her the same sort of stubborn positiveness in many cases, both ordinary and extraordinary, as well as the same sort of bigotry in religion’.50
In July 1683 the eighteen-year-old Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark. John Evelyn thought that ‘He had the Danish countenance, blonde, of few words, spoke French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy, but reported to be valiant, and indeed he had bravely rescued and brought off his brother the King of Denmark in a battle against the Swedes.’51 The arrangement suited Louis XIV, who hoped to see the two naval powers united against the Dutch, as well as James, who was trying to limit the influence of his other son-in-law, William of Orange. Negotiations were handled by Anne’s uncle Laurence, now Earl of Rochester, and secretary of state Sunderland. They drove a hard bargain: James gave the couple £40,000 in capital and £5,000 a year. Anything else had to come from Prince George’s personal estates, and he was expected to reside in England. The Danish ambassador suggested to his French colleague that it would suit them all if Anne and George could be given precedence in the succession over William and Mary, but the Frenchman replied that hereditary right could not be brushed aside like this.
Charles II deftly summed up George, saying: ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober and there is nothing in him.’ He was indolent and good-natured, devoutly Protestant (a Lutheran, and so, in English terms, a dissenter rather than an Anglican, which made him an ‘occasional conformist’ to the services of the established Church), wholly free from scandal, and as wholly devoted to Anne, who bore him child after stillborn child in an almost annual succession of perhaps as many as seventeen pregnancies, although Anne’s predisposition towards false pregnancies make it impossible to be sure. The best estimate is probably twelve miscarriages, one stillbirth and four children who died young. Only one of their children, William, Duke of Gloucester (1689–1700), survived early childhood. Notwithstanding Anne’s relationship with Sarah this was a happy marriage, and Anne always acknowledged that though she might be queen, George was head of the household. In 1708 she nursed him through his last illness, and his death
flung the queen into an unspeakable grief. She never left him till he was dead, but continued kissing him till the very moment the breath went out of his body, and ’twas with a very great deal of difficulty my Lady Marlborough prevailed upon her to leave him.52
Just as there is no reason to doubt Anne’s affection for her husband, so too we can see why Anne expected more emotional engagement than he was able to offer, and understand how Sarah fitted into this relationship. Ophelia Field’s suggestion that ‘the marriage contained many of the qualities of a friendship while Sarah’s relationship with Anne was developing into a fraught romance’ seems exactly right.53
It is an index of the Churchills’ position that John had been sent to Denmark to bring George to England for his wedding, and when it was decided that the prince’s prickly private secretary, Christian Siegfried von Plessen, should be sent back to Denmark, it was John who made the arrangements and Sarah’s brother-in-law Colonel Edward Griffith who replaced Plessen. Anne and her husband were given apartments known as the Cockpit in the Palace of Whitehall, across King Street from the Privy Garden, just to the west of Horse Guards. Adjacent parts of the palace were occupied by the secretaries of state, and it is no coincidence that Downing Street, so close to the Cockpit, has now assumed its importance. With King Street acting as a firebreak the Cockpit survived successive fires, and Anne remained there until ordered to quit by her sister.
A Cockpit circle was quickly scribed out. Near its centre were John and Sarah Churchill, with John’s brothers, Captain George Churchill of the Royal Navy and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Churchill (who had once served as a page to Prince George’s brother King Christian), Colonel John Berkeley, of Anne’s dragoon regiment, and his wife Barbara, daughter of Lady Villiers, who had been the princess’s governess. Sir Benjamin Bathurst, comptroller of the household, was now married to Frances Apsley. The Duke of Grafton, one of Charles’s bastards by Barbara Castlemaine, was a regular visitor, as were the Marquess of Ossory (who succeeded as Duke of Ormonde in 1688) and the Earl of Drumlanrig (Marquess of Queensberry in 1695). Robert and Anne Spencer, Earl and Countess of Sunderland, were on the outer edge of the circle. They were close to the Churchills, and Anne Churchill was to marry their eldest son Charles, but, because of Sunderland’s support for the Exclusion Bill, Anne never really trusted him.54 Sarah was promoted to first lady of the bedchamber when Lady Clarendon went off to Ireland with her husband, who had been made its lord lieutenant.
Because Sarah travelled with Anne, and John with the Duke of York, they were often separated, and some of their letters survive. In a note which seems to predate the birth of their daughter Anne on 27 February 1684 by perhaps six months, sent by an ‘express’ courier rather than a regular post, John wrote:
I had writ to you by the post, but that I was persuaded this would be with you sooner. You see I am very just in writing, and I hope that I shall find by the daily receiving of yours that you are so. I hope in God you are out of all danger of any miscarrying, for I swear to you I love you better than all the rest of the world put together, wherefore you ought to be so just as to make me a kind return, which will make me much happier than aught else in this world can do. If I can get a passage a Sunday I will come, but if I cannot I shall be with you a Monday morning by nine of the clock; for the Duke will leave this place by six. Pray [give] my most humble respects to your fair daughter, and believe me what I am with all my heart and soul,
Yours … 55
The Churchills’ settled world was rocked by the king’s unexpected death. In the winter of 1684–85 Charles had been troubled with the gout and could not take his usual exercise, but spent a good deal of time in his laboratory, trying to find a process for the fixing of mercury. He ate less than he once had and ‘drank only for his thirst’, but still took a turn to the Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartments after his supper. On the morning of 2 February 1685 he rose after a restless night, and sat down to the barber, ‘it being shaving day’ – even monarchs were shaved only two or three times a week. He had scarcely sat down when he had ‘an apoplectic fit’ and fell into Lord Ailesbury’s arms. Dr Edmund King, on hand to deal with a sore heel, bled him at once. Charles endured the ministrations of his doctors, which almost certainly accelerated his death, for five days.
On 5 February, when it was clear that his brother was dying, James asked him if he wished to be reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church, and Charles eagerly assented. Finding an English-speaking priest was not easy, for all Queen Catherine’s priests were Portuguese. Quite fortuitously, Father John Huddlestone, who had helped Charles escape after the