Britain’s bisexual QUEEN
It’s the Royal scandal at the heart of a racy new play and film – the secret passion between Queen Anne and her right-hand woman that ended in fury and blackmail
THE letter brimmed with ill-disguised passion. ‘I hope I shall get a moment or two to be with my dear…’ wrote the smitten young woman. ‘That I may have one dear embrace, which I long for more than I can express.’
In another note, she begged: ‘Oh come to me as soon as you can that I may cleave myself to you.’ And in another: ‘I can’t go to bed without seeing you… If you knew in what condition you have made me, I am sure you would pity.’
The correspondence, written more than 300 years ago, is as intimate as any between lovers. The author of these breathless missives was no ordinary woman but a royal princess, Anne, who became Queen Anne in 1702. And what makes them even more intriguing – and controversial – is that the object of the young princess’s desire was another woman.
The woman she loved with an ardour that went far beyond friendship was Sarah Churchill, the beautiful, charismatic and scheming Duchess of Marlborough. Their bond was so intimate that it scandalised court. Anne loved her husband, Prince George – indeed she was almost constantly pregnant by him – but he came second to Sarah, with whom she was obsessed, travelling across the country just to snatch a few hours together, and once arranging a secret night-time tryst. It was an infatuation so all-consum- ing it turned Anne to fits of possessive ire. She displayed, Sarah complained, ‘the jealousy of a lover’, and was tormented by Sarah’s other female friendships.
But after more than 20 years of intimacy, the relationship turned sour and Anne appeared to transfer her love to a plain poor relation of Sarah’s named Abigail Masham. Abigail was also Anne’s dresser.
The duchess was cast out and, like so many courtiers, exacted a bitter vengeance for what she saw as her betrayal. First, she accused the Queen of having lesbian relations with Abigail, then wrote memoirs laying bare her infatuated love letters.
Possessive, passionate and vibrant, the letters raise intriguing questions about the nature of the relationship between the Queen and the duchess – and the Queen and her dresser. There was jealousy, passion, longing and love, but was it physical? Were
Infatuated Anne obeyed her every command
the people, as some believe, really ruled by a bisexual Queen?
That is the subject at the heart of two new productions.
A play, Queen Anne, which opens in London’s West End later this month, explores this most fascinating of Royal scandals. Romola Garai plays the charismatic Sarah Churchill, alongside Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne. ‘I definitely think Anne had a crush on Sarah,’ explains Helen Edmundson, the playwright. ‘And I’ve always felt that, as they got older, it’s possible they occasionally shared a bed or practised kissing. But I don’t think it was a full-on sexual relationship.
‘I think there was something erotic about the relationship in the most innocent way.’
A rather different view is taken in a new film, The Favourite, which has just finished shooting. Due out next year and described as bawdy tale of envy and betrayal, it has an unequivocally sexual take on the affair. Rachel Weisz portrays Sarah, while Oscar-winner Emma Stone stars as her love rival Abigail.
So where does the truth lie? History has long regarded Anne as one of history’s duller monarchs: fat, frumpy, charmless and of limited intelligence. But if Sarah is to be believed, the Queen was neither as virtuous nor as conservative as she appeared.
From an early age, Anne had a series of female friendships that raised eyebrows due to their obsessive, intimate nature.
When she and her sister Mary were young, they had a ‘crush’ on a court lady named Frances Apsley and both wrote her what can only be described as passionate love letters. Mary even referred to herself as Frances’s husband, while Anne also took on a male persona when writing to her.
Later, Anne had a Lady of the Bedchamber, Mary Cornwallis, to whom she wrote such ardent letters that Anne’s father – James, the Duke of York – became worried about the nature of the relationship and had Mary dismissed. According to Sarah, Anne’s uncle, Charles II, had noticed it too, commenting: ‘No man ever loved his Mistress as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis.’
Such lesbian relationships were not unheard of. Anne grew up surrounded by the debauchery of Charles II’s court, where there were few taboos. A French visitor reported on love affairs among the maids of honour and the mistresses.
Indeed, Charles II once found one of his mistresses in bed with another woman – and promptly joined them. Some years later, he was less amused when another of his lovers began an affair with his illegitimate daughter.
Brought up in this permissive atmosphere, Sarah and Anne were childhood friends, although Sarah was five years older. As a teenager, Sarah was already described as one of the great beauties of court. Blonde, vivacious and charismatic, she enthralled both men and women. She married an ambitious, handsome young Army officer, John Churchill, ten years her senior.
Churchill was passionately in love with his wife – his letters to her smoulder with desire – but he was often abroad, fighting in the war against France. Sarah was not content to play the dutiful, waiting wife. Instead, she set about making herself indispensable to Anne, captivating the shy, plump young princess. Anne duly appointed her Lady of the Bedchamber, though Anne’s father disapproved, clearly fearing Sarah would dominate his impressionable daughter. He was right: soon an infatuated Anne was obeying Sarah’s every command.
Anne’s letters reveal how besotted she was. ‘If I writ whole volumes I could never express how well I love you,’ she gushed. As Sarah later wrote, Anne ‘desired to possess [me] wholly’.
In letters, Sarah and Anne referred to each other by nicknames. Anne was Mrs Morley and Sarah was Mrs Freeman, to underline that the relationship was not one of Royal and servant, but of equals. In fact, it was anything but equal. As Helen Edmundson observes: ‘Sarah held all the cards.’ Sarah was everything that Anne was not: witty, confident, charming and glamorous.
Sarah, however, had other close female friends, of whom Anne was furiously jealous. Like Anne, she also had a husband with whom she enjoyed a passionate marriage – as evidenced by the quote attributed to her: ‘His Grace returned from the wars today and did pleasure me twice in his top boots.’
In 1688, Anne’s father, the Catholic
Servants spied on her and courtiers plotted
James II, was deposed and replaced by Anne’s sister Mary and her husband, Prince William of Orange, both Protestants. Anne sided with William and Mary but Sarah encouraged her to keep her distance (she and Anne privately called William the ‘Dutch abortion’). An infuriated Queen Mary demanded that Anne sack Sarah, blaming her for their estrangement. Ophelia Field, author of The Favourite, a biography of Sarah, suggests: ‘Perhaps Mary also understood the true strength of Anne’s feelings for Sarah.’
Anne refused to dismiss Sarah, choosing to leave court and, together with her husband George, live instead with Sarah and John. Neither husband objected to this arrangement. Here, Anne became ever more dependent on Sarah, enduring her frequent tantrums, criticism and bullying. Despite her happy marriage, Anne was desperately lonely. She was estranged from her father, her mother was dead, and she lost all 17 of her children to miscarriages, stillbirths or illness. Her servants spied on her and reported back to her sister; courtiers plotted and intrigued. Little wonder that she clung, throughout it all, to the politically astute Sarah.
When Anne became Queen in 1702, following the deaths of Mary and then William, Sarah became the most powerful woman at court. Among her posts was Keeper of the Privy Purse, controlling Anne’s finances, and Groom of the Stole, the most senior court position.
She also became a duchess when, as commander-in-chief of the English and Dutch armies, her husband was rewarded by Anne by being made the Duke of Marlborough.
The power and status was to prove her downfall. A skilful card-player, Sarah now overplayed her hand. She continued to treat Anne as a dimwitted child rather than the shrewd and increasingly independentminded monarch she had become.
Sarah ordered Anne to appoint her own allies to cabinet posts, lectured her about affairs of state, refused to answer her letters, and showed little sympathy when Anne’s husband died.
A hurt Anne increasingly turned to Abigail Masham, a poor relation of the duchess for whom she had secured a post as one of Anne’s Women of the Bedchamber. Abigail was plain – she was mocked for her red nose – and placid. But she was ready to listen rather to lecture, to comfort instead of scold. Anne, by now an obese invalid, was grateful.
When Sarah belatedly realised Abigail had replaced her in Anne’s affections, she reacted with bitter fury, calling Abigail a ‘viper’.
She furiously accused the Queen of having ‘so great a passion for such a woman’ and warned her that if the world knew of her ‘intimacy’ with Abigail and that the Queen had ‘no inclination for any but one’s own sex’, her reputation would be ruined. She was threatening to out her as a lesbian unless she got rid of Abigail. But Anne refused to be blackmailed, responding: ‘Sure I may love whom I please.’
Jealous, the duchess began spreading rumours about the Queen and her dresser, insinuating that the country was being ruled by a pair of lesbians.
One of her allies penned a scurrilous ballad about Anne’s unnatural infatuation with her ‘slut of state’, describing how she dearly loved the ‘dirty chambermaid’ – Abigail – who performed ’sweet service’ for her Queen and ‘dark deeds in the night’. She then showed this to the Queen, hoping to shame her into dropping Abigail, the ‘ungrateful bitch’, as the ballad described her. Another pamphlet – lurid even by today’s standards – asked whether Anne and Abigail indulged in ‘that female vice… most detestable in nature?’
The gossip began to spread. It was said that ‘the Queen was very fond of her [Abigail] at the bath’. Sarah even hinted that, while Anne’s husband was alive, Anne and Abigail had enjoyed amorous encounters during his afternoon naps. Eventually, infuriated by Sarah’s accusations, Anne snapped and banished Sarah from court.
She was replaced by Abigail as Keeper of the Privy Purse. Sarah’s allies in government were replaced by Abigail’s friends. Even the Duke
Sarah threatened to blackmail the Queen
of Marlborough himself was eventually dismissed.
A furious Sarah threatened to blackmail the Queen further by publishing the letters she had sent her over the years. Their contents, she hinted slyly, ‘if known… might lose a crown’. This time, the threats worked: she was given a generous payoff and the letters remained hidden until after Anne’s death.
By then, the duchess was the richest woman in England, with a fortune equivalent to £82 million today, and chatelaine of Blenheim Palace. But she still itched to have the last word, revealing Anne’s letters in her own self-justifying memoirs. Anne was portrayed as harbouring an unrequited love for Sarah, who secretly found her dull, witless and grumpy.
Whatever the truth about any sexual intimacies in the Royal bedchamber, the story of Anne, Abigail and Sarah remains a tantalising tale of obsession, betrayal and vengeance.
Queen Victoria famously did not believe lesbianism existed. Queen Anne, a successful but underrated monarch, was, it seems, a woman ahead of her time.